City of Bones

by Michael Connelly

  “Okay, Jennifer, turn that off,” she said. “Everybody, I need a few minutes. Frank, I am very sorry. You were doing great. Can you stay and wait a few minutes? I promise to take you first, as soon as I am done.”

  Frank stood up and smiled brilliantly.

  “No problem, Sheila. I’ll be right outside.”

  Everybody shuffled out of the room, leaving Bosch and Edgar alone with Sheila.

  “Well,” she said after the door closed. “With an entrance like that, you really should be actors.”

  She tried smiling but it didn’t work. Bosch came over to the desk. He remained standing. Edgar leaned his back against the door. They had decided on the way over that Bosch would handle her.

  She said, “The show I’m casting is about two detectives called ‘the closers’ because they have a perfect record of closing cases nobody else seems able to. I guess there’s no such thing in real life, is there?”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Bosch said. “Not even close.”

  “What is so important that you had to come bursting in here, embarrassing me like that?”

  “Couple things. I thought you might want to know that I found what you were looking for last night and—”

  “I told you, I wasn’t—”

  “—your father was released from custody about an hour ago.”

  “What do you mean released? You said last night he wouldn’t be able to make bail.”

  “He wouldn’t have been able to. But he’s not charged with the crime anymore.”

  “But he confessed. You said he—”

  “Well, he de-confessed this morning. That was after we told him we were going to put him on a polygraph machine and mentioned that it was you who called us up and gave us the tip that led to the ID of your brother.”

  She shook her head slightly.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do, Sheila. Your father thought you killed Arthur. You were the one who hit him all the time, who hurt him, who put him in the hospital that time after hitting him with the bat. When he disappeared your father thought maybe you’d finally gone all the way and killed him, then hidden the body. He even went into Arthur’s room and got rid of that little bat in case you had used that again.”

  Sheila put her elbows on the desk and hid her face in her hands.

  “So when we showed up he started confessing. He was willing to take the fall for you to make up for what he did to you. For this.”

  Bosch reached into his pocket and took out the envelope containing the photos. He dropped it onto the desk between her elbows. She slowly lowered her hands and picked it up. She didn’t open the envelope. She didn’t have to.

  “How’s that for a reading, Sheila?”

  “You people . . . is this what you do? Invade people’s lives like this? I mean, their secrets, everything?”

  “We’re the closers, Sheila. Sometimes we have to.”

  Bosch saw a case of water bottles on the floor next to her desk. He reached down and opened a bottle for her. He looked at Edgar, who shook his head. Bosch got another bottle for himself, pulled the chair Frank had used close to her desk and sat down.

  “Listen to me, Sheila. You were a victim. You were a kid. He was your father, he was strong and in control. There is no shame for you in being a victim.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Whatever baggage you carry with you, now is the time to lose it. To tell us what happened. Everything. I think there is more than what you told us before. We’re back at square one and we need your help. This is your brother we’re talking about.”

  He opened the bottle and took a long draw of water. For the first time he noticed how warm it was in the room. Sheila spoke while he took his second drink from the bottle.

  “I understand something now . . .”

  “What is that?”

  She was staring down at her hands. When she spoke it was like she was speaking to herself. Or to nobody.

  “After Arthur was gone, my father never touched me again. I never . . . I thought it was because I had become undesirable in some way. I was overweight, ugly. I think now maybe it was because . . . he was afraid of what he thought I had done or what I might be able to do.”

  She put the envelope back down on the desk. Bosch leaned forward again.

  “Sheila, is there anything else about that time, about that last day, that you didn’t tell us before? Anything that can help us?”

  She nodded very slightly and then bowed her head, hiding her face behind her raised fists.

  “I knew he was running away,” she said slowly. “And I didn’t do anything to stop him.”

  Bosch moved forward on the edge of the seat. He spoke gently to her.

  “How so, Sheila?”

  There was a long pause before she answered.

  “When I came home from school that day. He was there. In his room.”

  “So he did come home?”

  “Yes. For a little bit. His door was open a crack and I looked in. He didn’t see me. He was putting things into his book bag. Clothes, things like that. I knew what he was doing. He was packing and was going to run. I just . . . I went into my room and closed the door. I wanted him to go. I guess I hated him, I don’t know. But I wanted him gone. To me he was the cause of everything. I just wanted him to be gone. I stayed in my room until I heard the front door close.”

  She raised her face and looked at Bosch. Her eyes were wet but Bosch had often before seen that in a purging of guilt and truth came a strength. He saw it in her eyes now.

  “I could have stopped him but I didn’t. And that’s what I’ve had to live with. Now that I know what happened to him . . .”

  Her eyes went off past Bosch, somewhere over his shoulder, where she could see the wave of guilt coming toward her.

  “Thank you, Sheila,” Bosch said softly. “Is there anything else you know that could help us?”

  She shook her head.

  “We’ll leave you alone now.”

  He got up and moved the chair back to the spot in the middle of the room. He then came back to the desk and picked up the envelope containing the Polaroids. He headed toward the office door and Edgar opened it.

  “What will happen to him?” she asked.

  They turned around and looked back. Edgar closed the door. Bosch knew she was talking about her father.

  “Nothing,” he said. “What he did to you is long past any statute of limitation. He goes back to his trailer.”

  She nodded without looking up at Bosch.

  “Sheila, he may have been a destroyer at one time. But time has a way of changing things. It’s a circle. It takes power away and gives it to those who once had none. Right now your father is the one who is destroyed. Believe me. He can’t hurt you anymore. He’s nothing.”

  “What will you do with the photographs?”

  Bosch looked down at the envelope in his hand and then back up at her.

  “They have to go into the file. Nobody will see them.”

  “I want to burn them.”

  “Burn the memories.”

  She nodded. Bosch was turning to go when he heard her laugh and he looked back at her. She was shaking her head.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that I’ve got to sit here and listen to people trying to talk and sound like you all day. And I know right now nobody will come close. Nobody will get it right.”

  “That’s show business,” Bosch said.

  As they headed back down the hallway to the stairs Bosch and Edgar passed by all the actors again. In the stairwell the one named Frank was saying his lines out loud. He smiled at the true detectives as they passed.

  “Hey, guys, you guys are for real, right? How do you think I was doing in there?”

  Bosch didn’t answer.

  “You were great, Frank,” Edgar said. “You’re a closer, man. The proof is in the pudding.”

  46

  AT two o’clock Friday afternoon B
osch and Edgar made their way through the squad room to the homicide table. They had driven from the Westside to Hollywood in virtual silence. It was the tenth day of the case. They were no closer to the killer of Arthur Delacroix than they had been during all the years that Arthur Delacroix’s bones had lain silently on the hillside above Wonderland Avenue

  . All they had to show for their ten days was a dead cop and the suicide of an apparently reformed pedophile.

  As usual there was a stack of pink phone messages left for Bosch at his place. There was also an inter-office dispatch envelope. He picked up the envelope first, guessing he knew what was in it.

  “About time,” he said.

  He opened the envelope and slid his mini-cassette recorder out of it. He pushed the play button to check the battery. He immediately heard his own voice. He lowered the volume and turned off the device. He slipped it into his jacket pocket and dropped the envelope into the trash can by his feet.

  He shuffled through the phone messages. Almost all were from reporters. Live by the media, die by the media, he thought. He would leave it to the Media Relations Office to explain to the world how a man who confessed to and was charged with a murder one day was exonerated and released the next.

  “You know,” Bosch said to Edgar, “in Canada the cops don’t have to tell the media jack about a case until it’s over. It’s like a media blackout on every case.”

  “Plus, they’ve got that round bacon up there,” Edgar replied. “What’re we doing here, Harry?”

  There was a message from the family counselor at the medical examiner’s office telling Bosch that the remains of Arthur Delacroix had been released to his family for burial on Sunday. Bosch put it aside so he could call back to find out about the funeral arrangements and which member of the family had claimed the remains.

  He went back to the messages and came upon a pink slip that immediately gave him pause. He leaned back in his chair and studied it, a tightness coming over his scalp and going down the back of his neck. The message came in at ten-thirty-five and was from a Lieutenant Bollenbach in the Office of Operations—the O-3 as it was more popularly known by the rank and file. The O-3 was where all personnel assignments and transfers were issued. A decade before when Bosch was moved to the Hollywood Division he had gotten the word after a forthwith from the O-3. Same thing with Kiz Rider going to RHD the year before.

  Bosch thought about what Irving had said to him in the interview room three days earlier. He guessed that the O-3 was now about to begin an effort to achieve the deputy chief’s wish for Bosch’s retirement. He took the message as a sign he was being transferred out of Hollywood. His new assignment would likely involve some freeway therapy—a posting far from his home and requiring long drives each day to and from work. It was a frequently used management tool for convincing cops they might be better off turning in the badge and doing something else.

  Bosch looked at Edgar. His partner was going through his own collection of phone messages, none of which appeared to have stopped him the way the one in Bosch’s hand had. He decided not to return the call yet or to tell Edgar about it. He folded the message and put it in his pocket. He took a look around the squad room, at all the bustling activity of the detectives. He would miss it if the new assignment wasn’t a posting with the same kind of ebb and flow of adrenaline. He didn’t care about freeway therapy. He could take the best punch they could give and not care. What he did care about was the job, the mission. He knew that without it he was lost.

  He went back to the messages. The last one in the stack, meaning it was the first one received, was from Antoine Jesper in SID. He had called at ten that morning.

  “Shit,” Bosch said.

  “What?” Edgar said.

  “I’m going to have to go downtown. I still have the dummy I borrowed last night in my trunk. I think Jesper needs it back.”

  He picked up the phone and was about to call SID when he heard his and Edgar’s names called from the far end of the squad room. It was Lieutenant Billets. She signaled them to her office.

  “Here we go,” Edgar said as he got up. “Harry, you can have the honors. You tell her where we’re at on this thing. More like where we aren’t at.”

  Bosch did. In five minutes he brought Billets completely up to date on the case and its latest reversal and lack of progress.

  “So where do we go from here?” she asked when he was finished.

  “We start over, look at everything we’ve got, see what we missed. We go to the kid’s school, see what records they have, look at yearbooks, try to contact classmates. Things like that.”

  Billets nodded. If she knew anything about the call from the O-3, she wasn’t letting on.

  “I think the most important thing is that spot up there on the hill,” Bosch added.

  “How so?”

  “I think the kid was alive when he got up there. That’s where he was killed. We have to figure out what or who brought him up there. We’re going to have to go back in time on that whole street. Profile the whole neighborhood. It’s going to take time.”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, we don’t have time to work it full-time,” she said. “You guys just sat out of the rotation for ten days. This isn’t RHD. That’s the longest I’ve been able to hold a team out since I got here.”

  “So we’re back in?”

  She nodded.

  “And right now it’s your up—the next case is yours.”

  Bosch nodded. He had assumed that was coming. In the ten days they’d been working the case, the two other Hollywood homicide teams had both caught cases. It was now their turn. It was rare to get such a long ride on a divisional case anyway. It had been a luxury. Too bad they hadn’t turned the case, he thought.

  Bosch also knew that by putting them back on the rotation Billets was making a tacit acknowledgment that she wasn’t expecting the case to clear. With each day that a case stayed open, the chances of clearing it dropped markedly. It was a given in homicide and it happened to everybody. There were no closers.

  “Okay,” Billets said. “Anything else anybody wants to talk about?”

  She looked at Bosch with a raised eyebrow. He suddenly thought maybe she did know something about the call from the O-3. He hesitated, then shook his head along with Edgar.

  “Okay, guys. Thanks.”

  They went back to the table and Bosch called Jesper.

  “The dummy’s safe,” he said when the criminalist picked up the phone. “I’ll bring it down later today.”

  “Cool, man. But that wasn’t why I called. I just wanted to tell you I can make a little refinement on that report I sent you on the skateboard. That is, if it still matters.”

  Bosch hesitated for a moment.

  “Not really, but what do you want to refine, Antoine?”

  Bosch opened the murder book in front of him and leafed through it until he found the SID report. He looked at it as Jesper spoke.

  “Well, in there I said we could put manufacture of the board between February of ’seventy-eight and June of ’eighty-six, right?”

  “Right. I’m looking at it.”

  “Okay, well, I can now cut more than half of that time period. This particular board was made between ’seventy-eight and ’eighty. Two years. I don’t know if that means anything to the case or not.”

  Bosch scanned the report. Jesper’s amendment to the report didn’t really matter, since they had dropped Trent as a suspect and the skateboard had never been linked to Arthur Delacroix. But Bosch was curious about it, anyway.

  “How’d you cut it down? Says here the same design was manufactured until ’eighty-six.”

  “It was. But this particular board has a date on it. Nineteen eighty.”

  Bosch was puzzled.

  “Wait a minute. Where? I didn’t see any—”

  “I took the trucks off—you know, the wheels. I had some time here between things and I wanted to see if there were any manufacture markings on the ha
rdware. You know, patent or trademark coding. There weren’t. But then I saw that somebody had scratched the date in the wood. Like carved it in on the underside of the board and then it was covered up by the truck assembly.”

  “You mean like when the board was made?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s not a professional job. In fact it was hard to read. I had to put it under glass and angled light. I just think it was the original owner’s way of marking his board in a secret way in case there was ever a dispute or something over ownership. Like if somebody stole it from him. Like I said in the report, Boney boards were the choice board for a while there. They were hard to get—might’ve been easier to steal one than find one in a store. So the kid who had this one took off the back truck—this would have been the original truck, not the current wheels—and carved in the date. Nineteen eighty A.D.”