On Monday morning, October 3, Lieutenant Gail Duvall stepped out of her office and into the squad room carrying only three yellow envelopes. Harry Bosch almost sighed when he saw this paltry return on the squad’s DNA submissions. He knew that with so few envelopes he would not be getting a new case to work.
Bosch had been back in the unit for almost a year, following a two-year reassignment to Homicide Special. Now on his second tour of duty in Open-Unsolved, he had quickly fallen back into the rhythm of the work. It wasn’t a fly squad. There was no dashing out the door to get to a crime scene. In fact, there were no crime scenes. There were only files and archive boxes. It was primarily an eight-to-four gig but with an asterisk, which meant that his job involved more travel than that of the other detective teams. People who got away with murder, or at least thought they had, tended not to stick around. They moved elsewhere and often the OU detectives had to travel to find them.
A big part of the rhythm was the monthly arrival of the yellow envelopes. Sometimes Bosch found it hard to sleep on the night before Christmas. He never took time off during the first week of the month and never came to work late on a day when the yellow envelopes might come in. Even his teenage daughter noticed his monthly cycle of anticipation and agitation and had likened it to a menstrual cycle. Bosch didn’t see the humor in this and was embarrassed when she brought it up.
Now his disappointment at the sight of so few envelopes in the lieutenant’s hand felt palpable in his throat. He wanted a new case. He needed a new case. He had to see the look on the killer’s face when Bosch knocked on the door and showed his badge, the embodiment of justice come calling unexpectedly after so many years. The experience was addictive and Bosch was craving it now.
The lieutenant handed the first envelope to Rick Jackson. He and his partner, Rich Bengtson, were solid investigators who had been with the unit since its inception. Bosch had no complaint there. The next envelope was placed on an empty desk belonging to Teddy Baker. She and her partner, Greg Kehoe, were on their way back from a pickup in Tampa, Florida—an airline pilot who had been connected through fingerprints to the 1991 strangulation of a flight attendant in Marina del Rey.
Bosch was about to suggest to the lieutenant that Baker and Kehoe might have their hands full with the marina case and that the envelope should be given to another team, namely his, when the lieutenant looked at him and used the last remaining envelope to beckon him to her office.
“Can you guys step in for a minute? You, too, Tim.”
Tim Marcia was the squad whip, the detective-3 who handled mostly supervisory and fill-in duties. He mentored the young detectives and made sure the old ones like Jackson and Bosch didn’t get lazy.
Bosch was out of his seat before the lieutenant had finished her question. He headed toward the lieutenant’s office with Chu and Marcia trailing behind.
“Close the door,” Duvall said. “Sit down.”
Duvall had a corner office with windows that looked across Spring Street at the Los Angeles Times Building. Paranoid that reporters were watching from the newsroom across the way, Duvall kept her shades permanently lowered. It made the office dim and cavelike. Bosch and Chu took the two seats positioned in front of the lieutenant’s desk. Marcia followed them in, moved to the side of Duvall’s desk and leaned against an old evidence safe.
“I want you two to handle this hit,” she said, sitting down and proffering the yellow envelope to Bosch. “There’s something wrong here and I want you to keep quiet about it until you find out what it is. Keep Tim in the loop but make sure it stays low-key.”
The envelope had already been opened. Chu leaned over to look as Bosch opened the flap and pulled out the hit sheet. It listed the case number of the DNA evidence, plus the name, age, last known address and criminal history of the person whose genetic profile matched it. Bosch first noticed that the case number had the prefix 89, meaning it was a case from 1989. There were no details about the crime, just the year. But Bosch knew that cases from that year belonged to the team of Ross Shuler and Adriana Dolan. He knew this because 1989 had been a busy year for him, working murders for the Homicide Special Team, and he had recently checked on one of his own unsolved cases, which was how he learned that jurisdiction over that year’s cases belonged to Shuler and Dolan. They were known in the unit as “the kids.” They were young, passionate and skillful investigators, but between them they had less than eight years’ experience working homicides. If there was something unusual about this cold hit, it was not surprising that the lieutenant would want Bosch on it. Bosch had worked more killings than everybody else in the unit combined. That is, if you left out Jackson. He had been around forever.
Bosch next studied the name on the hit sheet: Clayton S. Pell. It meant nothing to him. But Pell’s arrest record included numerous arrests and three separate convictions for indecent exposure, false imprisonment and forcible rape. He had spent six years in prison for the rape before being released eighteen months ago. He had a five-year probation tail and his last known address came from the state probation and parole board. He was assigned to a halfway house for sex offenders in Panorama City.
Based on Pell’s record, Bosch believed the 1989 case was likely a sex-related murder. He could feel his insides beginning to tighten. He was going to grab Clayton Pell and bring him to justice.
“Do you see it?” Duvall asked.
“See what?” Bosch asked. “Was this a sex killing? It looks like this guy has the classic pred—”
“The birth date,” Duvall said.
Bosch looked back down at the hit sheet as Chu leaned closer.
“Yeah, right here,” Bosch said. “November nine, nineteen eighty-one. What’s that got—”
“He’s too young,” Chu said.
Bosch glanced at him and then back down at the sheet. He suddenly got it. Clayton Pell was born in 1981. He was only eight years old at the time of the murder.
“Exactly,” Duvall said. “So I want you to get the book and box from Shuler and Dolan and very quietly figure out what we have here. I’m hoping to God they didn’t get two cases mixed up and send genetic material from a more recent case labeled as if it came from this old one. Like you were about to say, this guy on the hit sheet is no doubt a predator, but I don’t think he got away with a killing when he was only eight years old. So something doesn’t fit. Find it and come back to me before you do anything. If they screwed up and we can correct it, then we won’t need to worry about IAD or anybody else. We’ll just keep it right here.”
She may have appeared to be trying to protect Shuler and Dolan from Internal Affairs, but she was also shielding herself and Bosch knew it. There would not be much vertical movement in the department for a lieutenant who had presided over an evidence-handling scandal in her own unit.
“What other years are assigned to Shuler and Dolan?” Bosch asked.
“On the recent side, they’ve got ’ninety-seven and two thousand,” Marcia said. “This evidence could have come from a case they were working from one of those two years.”
Bosch nodded. He could see the scenario. Due to reckless handling, genetic evidence from one case cross-pollinates with another. The end result would be two tainted cases and a scandal that would smear anybody near it.
“What do we say to Shuler and Dolan?” Chu asked. “What’s the reason we’re taking the case from them?”
Duvall looked up at Marcia.
“They’ve got a trial coming up,” he offered in answer to her unspoken question. “Jury selection starts Thursday.”
Duvall nodded.
“I’ll tell them I want them clear for that.”
“And what if they say they still want the case?” Chu asked. “What if they say they can handle it?”
“I’ll put them straight,” Duvall said. “Anything else, Detectives?”
Bosch looked up at her.
“We’ll work the case, Lieutenant, and see what’s what. But I don’t investigate other cops.”<
br />
“That’s fine. I’m not asking you to. Work the case and tell me how the DNA came back to an eight-year-old kid, okay?”
Bosch nodded and started to stand up.
“Just remember,” Duvall added, “you talk to me before you do anything with what you learn.”
“You got it,” Bosch said.
He, Chu and Marcia prepared to leave the room.
“Harry,” the lieutenant said, “hang back a second.”
Bosch looked at Chu and raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know what this was about. The lieutenant came around from behind her desk and closed the door after Chu and Marcia had left. She remained standing, looking businesslike.
“I just wanted you to know that your application for an extension on your drop came through. They gave you four years retroactive.”
Bosch looked at her, doing the math. He nodded. He had asked for the maximum—five years nonretroactive—but he’d take what they gave. It wouldn’t keep him much past high school but it was better than nothing.
“Well, I’m glad,” Duvall said. “It gives you thirty-nine more months with us.”
Her tone indicated that she had read the disappointment on his face.
“No,” he said quickly. “I’m glad. I was just thinking about where that would put me with my daughter. All the way through high school. So that’s good.”
“Good then.”
That was her way of saying the meeting was over. Bosch thanked her and left the office. As he stepped back into the squad room he looked across the vast expanse of desks and dividers and file cabinets. He knew it was home and that he would get to stay—for now.
Two
The Open-Unsolved Unit shared access to the two fifth-floor conference rooms with all other units in the Robbery-Homicide Division. Usually detectives had to reserve time in one of the rooms, signing up on the clipboard hooked on the door. But this early on a Monday, both were open, and Bosch, Chu, Shuler and Dolan commandeered the smaller of the two without making a reservation.
They brought with them the murder book and the small archival evidence box from the 1989 case.
“Okay,” Bosch said, when everyone was seated. “So you are cool with us running with this case? If you’re not, we can go back to the lieutenant and say you really want to work it.”
“No, it’s okay,” Shuler said. “We both are involved in the trial so it’s better this way. It’s our first case in the unit and we want to see it through to that guilty verdict.”
Bosch nodded as he casually opened the murder book.
“You want to give us the rundown on this one then?”
Shuler gave Dolan a nod and she began to summarize the 1989 case as Bosch flipped through the pages of the binder.
“We have a nineteen-year-old victim named Lilly Price. She was snatched off the street while walking home from the beach in Venice on a Sunday afternoon. At the time, they narrowed the grab point down to the vicinity of Speedway and Voyage. Price lived on Voyage with three roommates. One was with her on the beach and two were in the apartment. She disappeared between those two points. She said she was going back to use the bathroom and she never made it.”
“She left her towel and a Walkman on the beach,” Shuler said. “Sunscreen. So it was clear she was intending to come back. She never did.”
“Her body was found the next morning on the rocks down at the cut,” Dolan said. “She was naked and had been raped and strangled. Her clothes were never found. The ligature used to strangle her was removed.”
Bosch flipped through several plastic-covered pages containing faded Polaroid shots of the crime scene. Looking at the victim, he couldn’t help but think of his own daughter, who at fifteen had a full life in front of her. There had been a time when looking at photos like this fueled him, gave him the fire he needed to be relentless. But since Maddie had come to live with him, it was becoming more difficult for him to look at victims.
It didn’t stop him from building the fire, however.
“Where did the DNA come from?” he asked. “Semen?”
“No, the killer used a condom or didn’t ejaculate,” Dolan said. “No semen.”
“It came from a little smear of blood,” Shuler said. “It was found on her neck, right below the right ear. She had no wounds in that area. It was assumed that it had come from the killer, that he had been cut or maybe was already bleeding. If she was strangled from behind then his hand could have been against her neck there. If there was a cut on his hand…”
“Transfer deposit,” Chu said.
“Exactly.”
Bosch found the Polaroid that showed the victim’s neck and the smear. The color had been washed out by time and he could barely see the blood. A ruler had been placed on the girl’s neck to give the measure of the blood smear. It was less than an inch long.
“So this blood was collected and stored,” he said, a statement meant to draw further explanation.
“Yes,” Shuler said. “Because it was a smear it was swabbed. Back then, they typed it. O-positive. The swab was stored in a tube and we found it still in Property when we pulled the case. The blood had turned to powder.”
Shuler tapped the top of the archive box with a pen.
Bosch’s phone started to vibrate in his pocket. Normally, he would let the call go to message, but his daughter was home sick from school and alone. He needed to make sure the call wasn’t from her. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. It wasn’t his daughter. It was a former partner, Kizmin Rider, now a lieutenant assigned to the OCP—office of the chief of police. He decided he would return her call after the meeting. They had lunch together about once a month and he assumed she must be free today or was calling because she’d heard about his getting approved for another four years on the drop. He shoved the phone back into his pocket.
“Did you open the tube?” he asked.
“Of course not,” Shuler said.
“Okay, so four months ago you sent the tube containing the swab and what was left of the blood out to the regional lab, right?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Shuler said.
Bosch flipped through the murder book to the autopsy report. He was acting like he was more interested in what he was seeing than in what he was saying.
“And at that time, did you submit anything else to the lab?”
“From the Price case?” Dolan asked. “No, that was the only biological evidence they came up with back at the time.”
Bosch nodded, hoping she would keep talking.
“But back then it didn’t lead to anything,” she said. “They never came up with a suspect. Who’d they come up with on the cold hit?”
“We’ll get to that in a second,” Bosch said. “What I meant was, did you submit to the lab from any other cases you were working? Or was this all you had going?”
“No, that was it,” Shuler said, squinting. “What’s going on here, Harry?”
Bosch reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out the hit sheet. He slid it across the table to Shuler.
“The hit comes back to a sexual predator who would look real good for this except for one thing.”
Shuler unfolded the sheet and he and Dolan leaned together to read it, just as Bosch and Chu had earlier.
“What’s that?” Dolan said, not picking up on the birth date yet. “This guy looks perfect.”
“He’s perfect now,” Bosch said. “But back then he was only eight years old.”
“You’re kidding,” Dolan said.
“What the fuck?” Shuler added.
Dolan pulled the sheet away from her partner as if to see it clearer and to double-check the birth date. Shuler leaned back and looked at Bosch with those suspicious eyes.
“So you think we fucked up and mixed up some cases,” he said.
“Nope,” Bosch said. “The lieutenant asked us to check out the possibility but I don’t see any fuckup on this end.”
“So it happened at the la
b,” Shuler said. “Do you realize that if they screwed things up at regional, every defense lawyer in the county is going to be able to raise doubts about DNA matches that come out of there?”
“Yeah, I kind of figure that,” Bosch said. “Which is why you should keep this under your hat until we know what happened. There are other possibilities.”
Dolan held up the hit sheet.
“Yeah, what if there is no fuckup anywhere? What if it’s really this kid’s blood on that dead girl?”
“An eight-year-old boy snatches a nineteen-year-old girl off the street, rapes and strangles her and dumps the body four blocks away?” Chu asked. “Never happened.”
“Well, maybe he was there,” Dolan said. “Maybe this was how he got his start as a predator. You see his record. This guy fits—except for his age.”
Bosch nodded.
“Maybe,” he said. “Like I said, there are other possibilities. No reason to panic yet.”
His phone started to vibrate again. He pulled it and saw it was Kiz Rider again. Two calls in five minutes—he decided he’d better take it. This couldn’t be about lunch.
The Fifth Witness: A Novel Page 44