A Darkness More Than Night (15 page)
“I’m getting a bad vibe from all of this, Terry.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way I want it. I guess you have to take it or leave it.”
His ultimatum made her go silent even longer this time. He waited for her.
“All right, man,” she finally said. “It’s your show. I’ll take it.”
“Thanks, Jaye. I’ll see you then.”
They hung up. He looked at the old case file he had pulled and still held in his hand. He put the phone down on the coffee table and leaned back on the couch and opened the file.
14
At first they called it the Little Girl Lost case because the victim had no name. The victim was thought to be about fourteen or fifteen years old; a Latina — probably Mexican — whose body was found in the bushes and among the debris below one of the overlooks off Mulholland Drive. The case belonged to Bosch and his partner at the time, Frankie Sheehan. This was before Bosch worked homicide out of Hollywood Division. He and Sheehan were a Robbery-Homicide team and it had been Bosch who contacted McCaleb at the bureau. McCaleb was newly returned to Los Angeles from Quantico. He was setting up an outpost for the Behavioral Sciences Unit and Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. The Little Girl Lost case was one of the first submitted to him.
Bosch came to him, bringing the file and the crime scene photos to his tiny office on the thirteenth floor of the federal building in Westwood. He came without Sheehan because the partners had disagreed on whether to bring the bureau in on the case. Cross-agency jealousies at work. But Bosch didn’t care about all of that. He cared about the case. He had haunted eyes. The case was clearly working on him as much as he worked on it.
The body had been found nude and violated in many ways. The girl had been manually strangled by her killer’s gloved hands. No clothes or purse were found on the hillside. Fingerprints matched no computerized records. The girl matched no description on an active missing persons case anywhere in Los Angeles County or on national crime computer systems. An artist’s rendering of the victim’s face put on the TV news and in the papers brought no calls from a loved one. Sketches faxed to five hundred police agencies across the Southwest and to the State Judicial Police in Mexico drew no response. The victim remained unclaimed and unidentified, her body reposing in the refrigerator at the coroner’s office while Bosch and his partner worked the case.
There was no physical evidence found with the body. Aside from being left without her clothes or any identifying property, the victim had apparently been washed with an industrial-strength cleaner before being dumped late at night off Mulholland.
There was only one clue with the body. An impression in the skin of the left hip. Postmortem lividity indicated the blood in the body had settled on the left half, meaning the body had been lying on its left side in the time between the stilling of the heart and the dropping of the body down the hillside where it came to rest face down on a pile of empty beer cans and tequila bottles. The evidence indicated that during the time that the blood settled, the body had been lying on top of the object that left the impression on the hip.
The impression consisted of the number
1,
the letter
J
and part of a third letter that could have been the upper left stem of an
H,
a
K
or an
L.
It was a partial reading of a license plate.
1,
the letter
J
and part of a third letter that could have been the upper left stem of an
H,
a
K
or an
L.
It was a partial reading of a license plate.
Bosch formed the theory that whoever had killed the girl with no name had hidden the body in the trunk of a car until it was time to dump it. After carefully cleaning the body the killer had put it into the trunk of his car, mistakenly putting it down on part of a license plate that had been taken off the car and also placed in the trunk. Bosch’s theory was that the license plate had been removed and possibly replaced with a stolen plate as one more safety measure that would help the killer avoid detection if his car happened to be spotted by a suspicious passerby at the Mulholland overlook.
Though the skin impression gave no indication of what state issued the license plate, Bosch went with the percentages. From the state Department of Motor Vehicles he obtained a list of every car registered in Los Angeles County that carried a plate beginning 1JH, 1JK and 1JL. The list contained over three thousand names of car owners. He and his partner cut forty percent of it by discounting the female owners. The remaining names were slowly fed into the National Crime Index computer and the detectives came up with a list of forty-six men with criminal records ranging from minor to the extreme.
It was at this point that Bosch came to McCaleb. He wanted a profile of the killer. He wanted to know if he and Sheehan were on the right track in suspecting that the killer had a criminal history, and he wanted to know how to approach and evaluate the forty-six men on the list.
McCaleb considered the case for nearly a week. He looked at each of the crime scene photos twice a day — first thing in the morning and last thing before going to sleep — and studied the reports often. He finally told Bosch that he believed they were on the right course. Using data accumulated from hundreds of similar crimes and analyzed in the bureau’s VICAP program, he was able to provide a profile of a man in his late twenties with a history of having committed crimes of an escalating nature and likely including offenses of a sexual nature. The crime scene suggested the work of an exhibitionist — a killer who wanted his crime to be public and to instill horror and fear in the general population. Therefore, the location of the body dump site would have been chosen for these reasons as opposed to reasons of convenience.
In comparing the profile to the list of forty-six names, Bosch narrowed the possibilities to two suspects: a Woodland Hills office building custodian who had a record of arson and public indecency and a stage builder who worked for a studio in Burbank and had been arrested for the attempted rape of a neighbor when he was a teenager. Both men were in their late twenties.
Bosch and Sheehan leaned toward the custodian because of his access to industrial cleaners, like the one that had been used to wash the victim’s body. However, McCaleb liked the stage builder as a suspect because the attempted rape of the neighbor in his youth indicated an impulsive action that was more in tune with the profile of the current crime’s perpetrator.
Bosch and Sheehan decided to informally interview both men and invited McCaleb along. The FBI agent stressed that the men should be interviewed in their own homes so that he would have the opportunity to study them in their own environment as well as look for clues in their belongings.
The stage builder was first. His name was Victor Seguin. He seemed shell-shocked by seeing the three men at his door and the explanation Bosch gave for their visit. Nevertheless he invited them in. As Bosch and Sheehan calmly asked questions McCaleb sat on a couch and studied the clean and neat furnishings of the apartment. Within five minutes he knew they had the right man and nodded to Bosch — their prearranged signal.
Victor Seguin was informed of his rights and arrested. He was placed in the detectives’ car and his small home under the landing zone of Burbank Airport was sealed until a search warrant could be obtained. Two hours later, when they reentered with the search warrant, they found a sixteen-year-old girl bound and gagged but alive in a soundproof coffin-like crawl space constructed by the stage builder beneath a trap door hidden under his bed.
Only after the excitement and adrenaline high of having broken a case and saved a life began to subside did Bosch finally ask McCaleb how he knew they had their man. McCaleb walked the detective over to the living room bookcase, where he pointed out a well-worn copy of a book called
The Collector,
a novel about a man who abducts several women.
The Collector,
a novel about a man who abducts several women.
Seguin was charged with the unidentified girl’s murder and the kidnapping and rape of the young woman the investigators rescued. He denied any guilt in the murder and pressed for a deal by which he would plead guilty to the kidnapping and rape of the survivor only. The DA’s office declined any deal and proceeded to trial with what they had — the survivor’s gut-wrenching testimony and the license plate impression on the dead girl’s hip.
The jury convicted on all counts after less than four hours’ deliberation. The DA’s office then floated a possible deal to Seguin; a promise not to go for the death penalty during the second phase of the trial if the killer agreed to tell investigators who his first victim was and from where he had abducted her. To take the deal Seguin would have to drop his pose of innocence. He passed. The DA went for the death penalty and got it. Bosch never learned who the dead girl was and McCaleb knew it haunted him that no one apparently cared enough to come forward.
It haunted McCaleb, too. On the day he came to the penalty phase of the trial to testify, he had lunch with Bosch and noticed that a name had been written on the tabs of his files on the case.
“What’s that?” McCaleb asked excitedly. “You ID’d her?”
Bosch looked down and saw the name on the tabs and turned the files over.
“No, no ID yet.”
“Well, what’s that?”
“Just a name. I sort of gave her a name, I guess.”
Bosch looked embarrassed. McCaleb reached over and turned the files back over to read the name.
“Cielo Azul?”
“Yeah, she was Spanish, I gave her a Spanish name.”
“It means blue sky, right?”
“Yeah, blue sky. I, uh . . .”
McCaleb waited. Nothing.
“What?”
“Well . . . , I’m not that religious, you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“But I sort of figured if nobody down here wanted to claim her, then hopefully . . . maybe there’s somebody up there that will.”
Bosch shrugged his shoulders and looked away. McCaleb could see his face turning red in the upper cheeks.
“It’s hard to find God’s hand in what we do. What we see.”
Bosch just nodded and they didn’t speak about the name again.
• • •
McCaleb lifted the last page of the file marked Cielo Azul and looked at the inside rear flap of the manila folder. It had become his habit over time at the bureau to jot notes on the back flap, where they would not readily be seen because of the attached file pages. These were notes he made about the investigators who submitted the cases for profiling. McCaleb had come to realize that insights about the investigator were sometimes as important as the information in the case file. For it was through the investigator’s eyes that McCaleb first viewed many aspects of the crime.
His case with Bosch had come up more than ten years earlier, before he began his more extensive profiling of the investigators as well as the cases. On this file he had written Bosch’s name and just four words beneath it.
Thorough — Smart — M. M. — A. A.
He looked at the last two notations now. It had been part of his routine to use abbreviations and shorthand when making notes that needed to be kept confidential. The last two notations were his reading on what motivated Bosch. He had come to believe that homicide detectives, a breed of cop unto themselves, called upon deep inner emotions and motivations to accept and carry out the always difficult task of their job. They were usually of two kinds, those who saw their jobs as a skill or a craft, and those who saw it as a mission in life. Ten years ago he had put Bosch into the latter class. He was a man on a mission.
This motivation in detectives could then be broken down even further as to what gave them this sense of purpose or mission. To some the job was seen as almost a game; they had some inner deficit that caused them to need to prove they were better, smarter and more cunning than their quarry. Their lives were a constant cycle of validating themselves by, in effect, invalidating the killers they sought by putting them behind bars. Others, while carrying a degree of that same inner deficit, also saw themselves with the additional dimension of being speakers for the dead. There was a sacred bond cast between victim and cop that formed at the crime scene and could not be severed. It was what ultimately pushed them into the chase and enabled them to overcome all obstacles in their path. McCaleb classified these cops as avenging angels. It had been his experience that these cop/angels were the best investigators he ever worked with. He also came to believe that they traveled closest to that unseen edge beneath which lies the abyss.
Ten years before, he had classified Harry Bosch as an avenging angel. He now had to consider whether the detective had stepped too close to that edge. He had to consider that Bosch might have gone over.
He closed the file and pulled the two art books out of his bag. Both were simply titled
Bosch.
The larger one, with full-color reproductions of the paintings, was by R. H. Marijnissen and P. Ruyffelaere. The second book, which appeared to carry more analysis of the paintings than the other, was written by Erik Larsen.
Bosch.
The larger one, with full-color reproductions of the paintings, was by R. H. Marijnissen and P. Ruyffelaere. The second book, which appeared to carry more analysis of the paintings than the other, was written by Erik Larsen.
McCaleb started with the smaller book and began scanning through the pages of analysis. He quickly learned that, as Penelope Fitzgerald had said, there were many different and even competing views of Hieronymus Bosch. The Larsen book cited scholars who called Bosch a humanist and even one who believed him to be part of a heretical group that believed the earth was a literal hell ruled over by Satan. There were disputes among the scholars about the intended meanings of some of the paintings, about whether some paintings could actually be attributed to Bosch, about whether the painter had ever traveled to Italy and viewed the work of his Renaissance contemporaries.
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