City of Bones

by Michael Connelly

“Yes, I did.”

  “Good. I wanted to let you know that I made the decision to bring you back to Robbery-Homicide Division.”

  “Why is that, Chief?”

  “Because I decided after our last conversation to hold out one last chance to you. This assignment is that chance. You will be in a position where I can watch your moves very closely.”

  “What position is that?”

  “You were not told?”

  “I was just told to report to RHD next pay period. That was it.”

  There was silence on the phone and Bosch thought now he would find the sand in the engine oil. He was going back to RHD, but as what? He tried to think, What was the worst assignment within the best assignment?

  Irving finally spoke.

  “You are getting your old job back. Homicide Special. An opening came up today when Detective Thornton turned in his badge.”

  “Thornton.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I’ll be working with Kiz Rider?”

  “That will be up to Lieutenant Henriques. But Detective Rider is currently without a partner and you have an established working relationship with her.”

  Bosch nodded. The kitchen was dark. He was elated but did not want to transmit his feelings over the phone to Irving.

  As if knowing these thoughts, Irving said, “Detective, you may feel as though you fell into the sewer but came out smelling like a rose. Do not think that. Do not make any assumptions. Do not make any mistakes. If you do, I will be there. Am I clear?”

  “Crystal clear.”

  Irving hung up without another word. Bosch stood there in the dark holding the phone to his ear until it started making a loud, annoying tone. He hung up and went back into the living room. He thought about calling Kiz and seeing what she knew but decided he would wait. When he sat back down on the recliner he felt something hard jab into his hip. He knew it wasn’t his gun because he had already unclipped it. He reached into his pocket and came up with his mini-cassette recorder.

  He turned it on and listened to his verbal exchange with Surtain, the TV reporter outside Trent’s house on the night he killed himself. Filtering it through the history of what would happen, Bosch felt guilty and thought that maybe he should have done or said more in an effort to stop the reporter.

  After he heard the car door slam on the tape he stopped it and hit the rewind button. He realized that he had not yet heard the whole interview with Trent because he had been out of earshot while searching some parts of the house. He decided he would listen to the interview now. It would be a starting point for the weekend’s investigation.

  As he listened, Bosch tried to analyze the words and sentences for new meanings, things that would reveal a killer. All the while he was warring with his own instincts. As he listened to Trent speak in almost desperate tones he still felt convinced the man was not the killer, that his protests of innocence had been true. And this of course contradicted what he now knew. The skateboard—found in Trent’s house—had the dead boy’s initials on it and the year he both got the skateboard and was killed. The skateboard now served as a tombstone of sorts. A marker for Bosch.

  He finished the Trent interview, but nothing in it, including the parts he had not previously heard, sparked any ideas in him. He rewound the tape and decided to play it again. And it was early in the second go-through that he picked up on something that made his face suddenly grow hot, almost with a feeling of being feverish. He quickly reversed the tape and replayed the exchange between Edgar and Trent that had drawn his attention. He remembered standing in the hallway in Trent’s house and listening to this part of the interview. But he had missed its significance until this moment.

  “Did you like watching the kids play up there in the woods, Mr. Trent?”

  “No, I couldn’t see them if they were up in the woods. On occasion I would be driving up or walking my dog—when he was alive—and I would see the kids climbing up there. The girl across the street. The Fosters next door. All the kids around here. It’s a city-owned right-of-way—the only undeveloped land in the neighborhood. So they went up there to play. Some of the neighbors thought the older ones went up there to smoke cigarettes, and the concern was they would set the whole hillside on fire.”

  He turned off the tape and went back to the kitchen and the phone. Edgar answered after one ring. Bosch could tell he had not been asleep. It was only nine o’clock.

  “You didn’t bring anything home with you, did you?”

  “Like what?”

  “The reverse directory lists?”

  “No, Harry, they’re at the office. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know. Do you remember when you were making that chart on the board today, was there anybody named Foster on Wonderland?”

  “Foster. You mean last name of Foster?”

  “Yeah, last name.”

  He waited. Edgar said nothing.

  “Jerry, you remember?”

  “Harry, take it easy. I’m thinking.”

  More silence.

  “Um,” Edgar finally said. “No Foster. None that I can remember.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Well, Harry, come on. I don’t have the board or the lists here. But I think I would’ve remembered that name. Why is it so important? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Bosch took the phone with him out to the dining room table where he had left his briefcase. He opened it and took out the murder book. He quickly turned to the page that listed the current residents of Wonderland Avenue

  with their addresses and phone numbers. There were no Fosters on the list. He picked up the phone and punched in a number. After four rings it was answered by a voice he recognized.

  “Dr. Guyot, this is Detective Bosch. Am I calling too late?”

  “Hello, Detective. No, it’s not too late for me. I spent forty years getting phone calls at all hours of the night. Nine o’clock? Nine o’clock is for amateurs. How are your various injuries?”

  “They’re fine, Doctor. I’m in a bit of a hurry and I need to ask you a couple questions about the neighborhood.”

  “Well, go right ahead.”

  “Going way back, nineteen eighty or so, was there ever a family or a couple on the street named Foster?”

  There was silence as Guyot thought over the question.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he finally said. “I don’t remember anybody named Foster.”

  “Okay. Then can you tell me if there was anybody on the street that took in foster kids?”

  This time Guyot answered without hesitation.

  “Uh, yes, there was. That was the Blaylocks. Very nice people. They helped many children over the years, taking them in. I admired them greatly.”

  Bosch wrote the name down on a blank piece of paper at the front of the murder book. He then flipped to the report on the neighborhood canvas and saw there was no one named Blaylock currently living on the block.

  “Do you remember their first names?”

  “Don and Audrey.”

  “What about when they moved from the neighborhood? Do you remember when that was?”

  “Oh, that would have been at least ten years ago. After the last child was grown, they didn’t need that big house anymore. They sold it and moved.”

  “Any idea where they moved to? Are they still local?”

  Guyot said nothing. Bosch waited.

  “I’m trying to remember,” Guyot said. “I know I know this.”

  “Take your time, Doctor,” Bosch said, even though it was the last thing he wanted Guyot to do.

  “Oh, you know what, Detective?” Guyot said. “Christmas. I saved all the cards I received in a box. So I know who to send cards to next year. My wife always did that. Let me put the phone down and get the box. Audrey still sends me a card every year.”

  “Go get the box, Doctor. I’ll wait.”

  Bosch heard the phone being put down. He nodded to himself. He was
going to get it. He tried to think about what this new information could mean but then decided to wait. He would gather the information and then sift through it after.

  It took Guyot several minutes to come back to the phone. The whole time Bosch waited with his pen poised to write the address on the note page.

  “Okay, Detective Bosch, I’ve got it here.”

  Guyot gave him the address and Bosch almost sighed out loud. Don and Audrey Blaylock had not moved to Alaska or some other far reach of the world. They were still within a car drive. He thanked Guyot and hung up.

  49

  AT 8 A.M. Saturday morning Bosch was sitting in his slickback watching a small wood-frame house a block off the main drag in the town of Lone Pine three hours north of Los Angeles in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. He was sipping cold coffee from a plastic cup and had another one just like it ready to take over when he was finished. His bones ached from the cold and a night spent driving and then trying to sleep in the car. He had made it to the little mountain town too late to find a motel open. He also knew from experience that coming to Lone Pine without a reservation on a weekend was not advisable anyway.

  As dawn’s light came up he saw the blue-gray mountain rising in the mist behind the town and reducing it to what it was; insignificant in the face of time and the natural pace of things. Bosch looked up at Mt. Whitney, the highest point in California, and knew it had been there long before any human eyes had ever seen it and would be there long after the last set was gone. Somehow it made it easier to know all that he knew.

  Bosch was hungry and wanted to go over to one of the diners in town for steak and eggs. But he wouldn’t leave his post. If you moved from L.A. to Lone Pine it wasn’t just because you hated the crowds, the smog and the pace of the big city. It was because you also loved the mountain. And Bosch wasn’t going to risk missing Don and Audrey Blaylock to a morning mountain hike while he was eating breakfast. He settled for turning the car on and running the heater for five minutes. He had been parceling out the heat and the gas that way all night.

  Bosch watched the house and waited for a light to come on or someone to pick up the newspaper that had been dropped on the driveway from a passing pickup two hours earlier. It was a thin roll of newspaper. Bosch knew it wasn’t the L.A. Times. People in Lone Pine didn’t care about Los Angeles or its murders or its detectives.

  At nine Bosch saw smoke start to curl out of the house’s chimney. A few minutes later, a man of about sixty wearing a down vest came out and got the paper. After picking it up he looked a half block down the street to Bosch’s car. He then went back inside.

  Bosch knew his car stood out on the street. He hadn’t been trying to hide himself. He was just waiting. He started the car and drove down to the Blaylocks’ house and pulled into the driveway.

  When Bosch got to the door the man he had seen earlier opened it before he had to knock.

  “Mr. Blaylock?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  Bosch showed his badge and ID.

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you and your wife for a few minutes. It’s about a case I’m working.”

  “You alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long’ve you been out there?”

  Bosch smiled.

  “Since about four. Got here too late to get a room.”

  “Come in. We have coffee on.”

  “If it’s hot, I’ll take it.”

  He led Bosch in and pointed him toward a seating arrangement of chairs and a couch near the fireplace.

  “I’ll get my wife and the coffee.”

  Bosch stepped over to the chair nearest the fireplace. He was about to sit down when he noticed all the framed photographs on the wall behind the couch. He stepped over to study them. They were all of children and young adults. They were of all races. Two had obvious physical or mental handicaps. The foster children. He turned and took the seat closest to the fire and waited.

  Soon Blaylock returned with a large mug of steaming coffee. A woman came into the room behind him. She looked a little bit older than her husband. She had eyes still creased by sleep but a kind face.

  “This is my wife, Audrey,” Blaylock said. “Do you take your coffee black? Every cop I ever knew took it black.”

  The husband and wife sat next to each other on the couch.

  “Black’s fine. Did you know a lot of cops?”

  “When I was in L.A. I did. I worked thirty years for the city fire department. Quit as a station commander after the ’ninety-two riots. That was enough for me. Came in right before Watts and left after ’ninety-two.”

  “What is it you want to talk to us about?” Audrey asked, seemingly impatient with her husband’s small talk.

  Bosch nodded. He had his coffee and the introductions were over.

  “I work homicide. Out of Hollywood Division. I’m on a—”

  “I worked six years out of fifty-eights,” Blaylock said, referring to the fire station that was behind the Hollywood Division station house.

  Bosch nodded again.

  “Don, let the man tell us why he came all the way up here,” Audrey said.

  “Sorry, go ahead.”

  “I’m on a case. A homicide up in Laurel Canyon. Your old neighborhood, actually, and we’re contacting people who lived on the street back in nineteen eighty.”

  “Why then?”

  “Because that is when the homicide took place.”

  They looked at him with puzzled faces.

  “Is this one of those cold cases?” Blaylock said. “Because I don’t remember anything like that happening in our neighborhood back then.”

  “In a way it’s a cold case. Only the body wasn’t discovered until a couple weeks ago. It had been buried up in the woods. In the hills.”

  Bosch studied their faces. No tells, just shock.

  “Oh, my God,” Audrey said. “You mean all that time we were living there, somebody was dead up there? Our kids used to play up there. Who was it who was killed?”

  “It was a child. A boy twelve years old. His name was Arthur Delacroix. Does that name mean anything to either of you?”

  The husband and wife first searched their own memory banks and then looked at each other and confirmed the results, each shaking their head.

  “No, not that name,” Don Blaylock said.

  “Where did he live?” Audrey Blaylock asked. “Not in the neighborhood, I don’t think.”

  “No, he lived down in the Miracle Mile area.”

  “It sounds awful,” Audrey said. “How was he killed?”

  “He was beaten to death. If you don’t mind—I mean, I know you’re curious about it, but I need to ask the questions starting out.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Audrey said. “Please go on. What else can we tell you?”

  “Well, we are trying to put together a profile of the street—Wonderland Avenue

  —at that time. You know, so we know who was who and who was where. It’s really routine.”

  Bosch smiled and knew right away it didn’t come off as sincere.

  “And it’s been pretty tough so far. The neighborhood has sort of turned over a lot since then. In fact, Dr. Guyot and a man down the street named Hutter are the only residents still there since nineteen eighty.”

  Audrey smiled warmly.

  “Oh, Paul, he is such a nice man. We still get Christmas cards from him, even since his wife passed away.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Of course, he was too expensive for us. We mostly took our kids to the clinics. But if there was ever an emergency on a weekend or when Paul was home, he never hesitated. Some doctors these days are afraid to do anything because they might get—I’m sorry, I’m going off like my husband, and that’s not what you came here to hear.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Blaylock. Um, you mentioned your kids. I heard from some of the neighbors that you two had a foster home, is that right?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Don and
I took in children for twenty-five years.”

  “That’s a tremendous, uh, thing you did. I admire that. How many children was it?”

  “It was hard to keep track of them. We had some for years, some for only weeks. A lot of it was at the whim of the juvenile courts. It used to break my heart when we were just getting started with a child, you know, making them feel comfortable and at home, and then the child would be ordered home or to the other parent or what have you. I always said that to do foster work you had to have a big heart with a big callus on it.”