City of Bones

by Michael Connelly

  “Okay, we’re going to wrap things up here pretty quickly, Sheila. Just a few more questions. Did Arthur have some friends? Maybe a best friend, someone he might confide in?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not really. He mostly was by himself.”

  Bosch nodded and was about to close his notebook when she continued.

  “There was one boy he’d go boarding with. His name was Johnny Stokes. He was from somewhere down near Pico. He was bigger and a little bit older than Arthur but they were in the same class at The Brethren. My father was pretty sure he smoked pot. So we didn’t like Arthur being friends with him.”

  “By ‘we,’ you mean your dad and you?”

  “Yes, my father. He was upset about it.”

  “Did either of you talk to Johnny Stokes after Arthur went missing?”

  “Yes, that night when he didn’t come home my father called Johnny Stokes, but he said he hadn’t seen Artie. The next day when Dad went to the school to ask about him, he told me he talked to Johnny again about Artie.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “That he hadn’t seen him.”

  Bosch wrote down the friend’s name in his notebook and underlined it.

  “Any other friends you can think of?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What’s your father’s name?”

  “Samuel. Are you going to talk to him?”

  “Most likely.”

  Her eyes dropped to the hands clasped in her lap.

  “Is that a problem if we talk to him?”

  “Not really. He’s just not well. If those bones turn out to be Arthur . . . I was thinking it would be better if he didn’t ever know.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind when we talk to him. But we won’t do it until we have a positive identification.”

  “But if you talk to him, then he’ll know.”

  “It may be unavoidable, Sheila.”

  Edgar handed Bosch another photo. It showed Arthur standing next to a tall blond man who looked faintly familiar to Bosch. He showed the photo to Sheila.

  “Is this your father?”

  “Yes, it’s him.”

  “He looks familiar. Was he ever—”

  “He’s an actor. Was, actually. He was on some television shows in the sixties and a few things after that, some movie parts.”

  “Not enough to make a living?”

  “No, he always had to work other jobs. So we could live.”

  Bosch nodded and handed the photo back to Edgar but Sheila reached across the coffee table and intercepted it.

  “I don’t want that one to leave, please. I don’t have many photos of my father.”

  “Fine,” Bosch said. “Could we go look for the birth certificate now?”

  “I’ll go look. You can stay here.”

  She got up and left the room again, and Edgar took the opportunity to show Bosch some of the other photos he had taken to keep during the investigation.

  “It’s him, Harry,” he whispered. “I got no doubt.”

  He showed him a photo of Arthur Delacroix that had apparently been taken for school. His hair was combed neatly and he wore a blue blazer and tie. Bosch studied the boy’s eyes. They reminded him of the photo of the boy from Kosovo he had found in Nicholas Trent’s house. The boy with the thousand-yard stare.

  “I found it.”

  Sheila Delacroix came into the room carrying an envelope and unfolding a yellowed document. Bosch looked at it for a moment and then copied down the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of her parents.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You and Arthur had the same parents, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, Sheila, thank you. We’re going to go. We’ll call you as soon as we know something for sure.”

  He stood up and so did Edgar.

  “All right if we borrow these photos?” Edgar asked. “I will personally see that you get them back.”

  “Okay, if you need them.”

  They headed to the door and she opened it. While still on the threshold Bosch asked her one last question.

  “Sheila, have you always lived here?”

  She nodded.

  “All my life. I’ve stayed here in case he comes back, you know? In case he doesn’t know where to start and comes here.”

  She smiled but not in any way that imparted humor. Bosch nodded and stepped outside behind Edgar.

  25

  BOSCH walked up to the museum ticket window and told the woman sitting behind it his name and that he had an appointment with Dr. William Golliher in the anthropology lab. She picked up a phone and made a call. A few minutes later she rapped on the glass with her wedding band until it drew the attention of a nearby security guard. He came over and the woman instructed him to escort Bosch to the lab. He did not have to pay the admission.

  The guard said nothing as they walked through the dimly lit museum, past the mammoth display and the wall of wolf skulls. Bosch had never been inside the museum, though he had gone to the La Brea Tar Pits often on field trips when he was a child. The museum was built after that, to house and display all of the finds that bubbled up out of the earth in the tar pits.

  When Bosch had called Golliher’s cell phone after receiving the medical records on Arthur Delacroix, the anthropologist said he was already working on another case and couldn’t get downtown to the medical examiner’s office until the next day. Bosch had said he couldn’t wait. Golliher said he did have copies of the X-rays and photographs from the Wonderland case with him. If Bosch could come to him, he could make the comparisons and give an unofficial response.

  Bosch took the compromise and headed to the tar pits while Edgar remained at Hollywood Division working the computer to see if he could locate Arthur and Sheila Delacroix’s mother as well as run down Arthur’s friend Johnny Stokes.

  Now Bosch was curious as to what the new case was that Golliher was working. The tar pits were an ancient black hole where animals had gone to their death for centuries. In a grim chain reaction, animals caught in the miasma became prey for other animals, who in turn were mired and slowly pulled down. In some form of natural equilibrium the bones now came back up out of the blackness and were collected for study by modern man. All of this took place right next to one of the busiest streets in Los Angeles, a constant reminder of the crushing passage of time.

  Bosch was led through two doors and into the crowded lab where the bones were identified, classified, dated and cleaned. There appeared to be boxes of bones everywhere on every flat surface. A half dozen people in white lab coats worked at stations, cleaning and examining the bones.

  Golliher was the only one not in a lab coat. He had on another Hawaiian shirt, this one with parrots on it, and was working at a table in the far corner. As Bosch approached, he saw there were two wooden bone boxes on the worktable in front of him. In one of the boxes was a skull.

  “Detective Bosch, how are you?”

  “Doing okay. What’s this?”

  “This, as I’m sure you can tell, is a human skull. It and some other human bones were collected two days ago from asphalt that was actually excavated thirty years ago to make room for this museum. They’ve asked me to take a look before they make the announcement.”

  “I don’t understand. Is it . . . old or . . . from thirty years ago?”

  “Oh, it’s quite old. It was carbon-dated to nine thousand years ago, actually.”

  Bosch nodded. The skull and the bones in the other box looked like mahogany.

  “Take a look,” Golliher said and he lifted the skull out of the box.

  He turned it so that the rear of the skull faced Bosch. He moved his finger in a circle around a star fracture near the top of the skull.

  “Look familiar?”

  “Blunt-force fracture?”

  “Exactly. Much like your case. Just goes to show you.”

  He gently replaced the skull in the wooden box.

  “Show m
e what?”

  “Things don’t change that much. This woman—at least we think it was a woman—was murdered nine thousand years ago, her body probably thrown into the tar pit as a means of covering the crime. Human nature, it doesn’t change.”

  Bosch stared at the skull.

  “She’s not the first.”

  Bosch looked up at Golliher.

  “In nineteen fourteen the bones—a more complete skeleton, actually—of another woman were found in the tar. She had the same star fracture in the same spot on her skull. Her bones were carbon-dated as nine thousand years old. Same time frame as her.”

  He nodded to the skull in the box.

  “So, what are you saying, Doc, that there was a serial killer here nine thousand years ago?”

  “It’s impossible to know that, Detective Bosch. All we have are the bones.”

  Bosch looked down at the skull again. He thought about what Julia Brasher had said about his job, about his taking evil out of the world. What she didn’t know was a truth he had known for too long. That true evil could never be taken out of the world. At best he was wading into the dark waters of the abyss with two leaking buckets in his hands.

  “But you have other things on your mind, don’t you?” Golliher said, interrupting Bosch’s thoughts. “Do you have the hospital records?”

  Bosch brought his briefcase up onto the worktable and opened it. He handed Golliher a file. Then, from his pocket he pulled the stack of photos he and Edgar had borrowed from Sheila Delacroix.

  “I don’t know if these help,” he said. “But this is the kid.”

  Golliher picked up the photos. He went through them quickly, stopping at the posed close-up of Arthur Delacroix in a jacket and tie. He went over to a chair where a backpack was slung over the armrest. He pulled out his own file and came back to the worktable. He opened the file and took out an 8 × 10 photo of the skull from Wonderland Avenue

  . For a long moment he held the photos of Arthur Delacroix and the skull side by side and studied them.

  Finally, he said, “The malar and superciliary ridge formation look similar.”

  “I’m not an anthropologist, Doc.”

  Golliher put the photos down on the table. He then explained by running his finger across the left eyebrow of the boy and then down around the outside of his eye.

  “The brow ridge and the exterior orbit,” he said. “It’s wider than usual on the recovered specimen. Looking at this photo of the boy, we see his facial structure is in line with what we see here.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Let’s look at the X-rays,” Golliher said. “There’s a box back here.”

  Golliher gathered the files and led Bosch to another worktable, where there was a light box built into the surface. He opened the hospital file, picked up the X-rays and began reading the patient history report.

  Bosch had already read the document. The hospital reported that the boy was brought into the emergency room at 5:40 P.M. on February 11, 1980, by his father, who said he was found in a dazed and unresponsive state following a fall from a skateboard in which he struck his head. Neurosurgery was performed in order to relieve pressure inside the skull caused by swelling of the brain. The boy remained in the hospital under observation for ten days and was then released to his father. Two weeks later he was readmitted for follow-up surgery to remove the clips that had been used to hold his skull together following the neurosurgery.

  There was no report anywhere in the file of the boy complaining about being mistreated by his father or anyone else. While recovering from the initial surgery he was routinely interviewed by an on-site social worker. Her report was less than half a page. It reported that the boy said he had hurt himself while skateboarding. There was no follow-up questioning or referral to juvenile authorities or the police.

  Golliher shook his head while he finished his scan of the document.

  “What is it?” Bosch asked.

  “It’s nothing. And that’s the problem. No investigation. They took the boy at his word. His father was probably sitting right there in the room with him when he was interviewed. You know how hard it would have been for him to tell the truth? So they just patched him up and sent him right back to the person who was hurting him.”

  “Hey, Doc, you’re getting a little bit ahead of us. Let’s get the ID, if it’s there, and then we’ll figure out who was hurting the kid.”

  “Fine. It’s your case. It’s just that I’ve seen this a hundred times.”

  Golliher dropped the reports and picked up the X-rays. Bosch watched him with a bemused smile on his face. It seemed that Golliher was annoyed because Bosch had not jumped to the same conclusions he had with the same speed he had.

  Golliher put two X-rays down on the light box. He then went to his own file and brought out X-rays he had taken of the Wonderland skull. He flipped the box’s light on and three X-rays glowed before them. Golliher pointed to the X-ray he had taken from his own file.

  “This is a radiological X-ray I took to look inside the bone of the skull. But we can use it here for comparison purposes. Tomorrow when I get back to the medical examiner’s office I will use the skull itself.”

  Golliher leaned over the light box and reached for a small glass eyepiece that was stored on a nearby shelf. He held one end to his eye and pressed the other against one of the X-rays. After a few moments he moved to one of the hospital X-rays and pressed the eyepiece to the same location on the skull. He went back and forth numerous times, making comparison after comparison.

  When he was finished, Golliher straightened up, leaned back against the next worktable and folded his arms.

  “Queen of Angels was a government-subsidized hospital. Money was always tight. They should have taken more than two pictures of this kid’s head. If they had, they might have seen some of his other injuries.”

  “Okay. But they didn’t.”

  “Yeah, they didn’t. But based on what they did do and what we’ve got here, I was able to make several comparison points on the roundel, the fracture pattern and along the squamous suture. There is no doubt in my mind.”

  He gestured toward the X-rays still glowing on the light box.

  “Meet Arthur Delacroix.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Okay.”

  Golliher stepped over to the light box and started collecting the X-rays.

  “How sure are you?”

  “Like I said, there’s no doubt. I’ll look at the skull tomorrow when I’m downtown, but I can tell you now, it’s him. It’s a match.”

  “So, if we get somebody and go into court with it, there aren’t going to be any surprises, right?”

  Golliher looked at Bosch.

  “No surprises. These findings can’t be challenged. As you know, the challenge lies in the interpretation of the injuries. I look at this boy and see something horribly, horribly wrong. And I will testify to that. Gladly. But then you have these official records.”

  He gestured dismissively to the open file of hospital records.

  “They say skateboard. That’s where the fight will be.”

  Bosch nodded. Golliher put the two X-rays back into the file and closed it. Bosch put it back in his briefcase.

  “Well, Doctor, thanks for taking the time to see me here. I think—”

  “Detective Bosch?”

  “Yes?”

  “The other day you seemed very uncomfortable when I mentioned the necessity of faith in what we do. Basically, you changed the subject.”

  “Not really a subject I feel comfortable talking about.”

  “I would think that in your line of work it would be paramount to have a healthy spirituality.”

  “I don’t know. My partner likes blaming aliens from outer space for everything that’s wrong. I guess that’s healthy, too.”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  Bosch grew annoyed and the feeling quickly slipped toward anger.

  “What is the question, Doc? Wh
y do you care so much about me and what I believe or don’t believe?”

  “Because it is important to me. I study bones. The framework of life. And I have come to believe that there is something more than blood and tissue and bone. There is something else that holds us together. I have something inside, that you’ll never see on any X-ray, that holds me together and keeps me going. And so, when I meet someone who carries a void in the place where I carry my faith, I get scared for him.”