Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Short Stories (7 page)

The stick had found leverage below the dead person’s chin. But it quickly slipped off and the face submerged again. Dark water lapped over the side of the tub and both of the police officers stepped back again.

“Let’s get out of here,” Eckersly said. “Or we’ll never get it out of our noses.”

He handed the nightstick back to Bosch and pushed past him to the door.

“Wait a second,” Bosch said.

But Eckersly didn’t wait. Bosch turned his attention back to the body and dipped the stick into the dark water again. He pulled it through the water until it hooked something and he raised it up. The dead person’s hands came out of the water. They were bound at the wrists with a dog collar. He slowly let them back down into the water again.

On his way out of the house, Bosch carried the stick at arm’s length from his body. In the backyard he founth=yard hed Eckersly standing by the garage door, gulping down fresh air. Bosch threw the slip he had used to breathe through over the clothesline and came over.

“Congratulations, boot,” Eckersly said, using the department slang for rookie. “You got your first DB. Stick with the job and it will be one of many.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He tossed his nightstick onto the grass—he planned to get a new one now—and took out his cigarettes.

“What do you think?” Eckersly asked. “Suicide? She took the pooch with her?”

“Her hands were tied with the dog’s collar,” Bosch said.

Eckersly’s mouth opened a little but then he recovered and became the training officer again.

“You shouldn’t have gone fishing in there,” he said sternly. “Suicide or homicide, it’s not our concern anymore. Let the detectives handle it from here.”

Bosch nodded his contrition and agreement.

“What I don’t get,” his partner said, “is how the hell did you smell that at the front door?”

Bosch shrugged.

“Used to it, I guess.”

He nodded toward the west, as if the war had been just down the street.

“I guess that also explains why you’re not puking your guts out,” Eckersly said. “Like most rookies would be doing right now.”

“I guess so.”

“You know what, Bosch. Maybe you’ve got a nose for this stuff.”

“Maybe I do.”

NOW

Harry Bosch and his partner, Kiz Rider, shared an alcove in the back corner of the Open-Unsolved Unit in Parker Center. Their desks were pushed together so they could face each other and discuss case matters without having to talk loudly and bother the six other detectives in the squad. Rider was writing on her laptop, entering the completion and summary reports on the Verloren case. Bosch was reading through the dusty pages of a blue binder known as a murder book.

“Anything?” Rider asked without looking up from her screen.

Bosch was reviewing the murder book since it was the next case they would work together. He hadn’t chosen it at random. It involved the 1972 slaying of June Wilkins. Bosch had been a patrolman then and had been on the job only two days when he and his partner at the time had discovered the body of the murdered woman in her bathtub. Along with the body of her dog. Both had been held underwater and drowned.

There were thousands of unsolved murders in the files of the Los Angeles Police Department. To justify the time and cost of mounting a new investigation, there had to be a hook. Something that could be sent through the forensic databases in search of a match: fingerprints, ballistics, DNA. That was what Rider was asking. Had he found a hook?

“Not yet,” he answered.

“Then why don’t you quit fooling with it and skip to the back?”

She wanted him to skip to the evidence report in the back of the binder and see if there was anything that could fit the bill. But Bosch wanted to take his time. He wanted to know all the details of the case. It had been his first DB. One of many that would come to him in the department. But he’d had no part in the investigation. He had been a rookie patrolman at the time. He had to watch the detectives work it. It would be years in the department before it was his turn to speak for the dead.

“I just want to see what they did,” he tried to explain. “See how they worked it. Most of these cases, they coulda-shoulda been cleared back in the day.”

“Well, you have till I’m finished with this summary,” Rider cautioned. “After that we better get flying on something, Harry.”

Bosch blew out his breath in mock indignation and flipped a large section of summaries and other reports over in the binder until he got to the back. He then turned to the tab marked
FORENSICS
and looked at an evidence inventory report.

“Okay, we’ve got latents, you happy?”

Rider looked up from her computer for the first time.

“That could work,” she said. “Tied to the suspect?”

Bosch flipped back to the evidence report to look for the summary ascribed to the specific evidence logged in the inventory. He found a one-paragraph explanation that said a right palm print had been located on the wall of the bathroom where the body had been found. Its location was sixty-six inches from the floor and seven inches right of center above the toilet.

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“It’s a palm.”

She groaned.

It was not a good hook. Databases containing palm prints were relatively new in law enforcement. Only in the past decade had palm prints been seriously collected by the FBI and the California Department of Justice. In California there were approximately ten thousand palms on file compared with the millions of fingerprints. The Wilkins murder was thirty-three years old. What were the chances that the person who had left a palm print on the wall of the victim’s bathroom would be printed two decades or more later? Ride"ju later?r had answered that one with her groan.

“It’s still worth a shot,” Bosch said optimistically. “I’ll put in the SID request.”

“You do that. Meantime, as soon as I’m done here I’ll see if I can find a case with a real hook we can run with.”

“Hold your horses, Kiz. I still haven’t run any of the names out of the book. Give me today with this and then we’ll see.”

“Not good to get emotionally involved, Harry,” she responded. “The
Laura
syndrome, you know.”

“It’s not like that. I’m just curious. It was sort of my first case.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“You know what I mean. I remember thinking she was an old lady when the detectives gave me the rundown on it. But she was only forty-six. I was half her age, so I thought anybody forty-six was old and had had a good run of it. I didn’t feel too bad about it.”

“Now you do.”

“Forty-six was too young, Kiz.”

“Well, you’re not going to bring her back.”

Bosch nodded.

“I know that.”

“You ever seen that movie?”

“
Laura
? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Detective falls in love with the murder victim. You?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t hold up too well. Sort of a parlor room murder case. I liked the Burt Reynolds take on it in the eighties.
Sharky’s Machine
. With Rachel Ward. You seen it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Had Bernie Casey in it. When I was a youngster I always thought he was a fine-looking man.”

Bosch looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Before I switched teams,” she said. “Then I rented it a couple years ago and Bernie didn’t do it for me. I liked Rachel Ward.”

Her bringing up her sexuality seemed to put an uneasiness between them. She turned back to her computer. Bosch looked down at the evidence report.

“Well, we know one thing,” he said after a while. “We’re looking for a left-handed man.”

She turned back to look at him.

“How do you know that?”

“He put his right hand on the wall over the toilet.”

“And?”

“It’s just like a gun, Kiz. He aimed with his left hand because he’s left-handed.”

She shook her head dismissively.

“Men…”

She went back to work on her computer, and Bosch went back to the murder book. He wrote down the information he would need to give to the latent prints section of the Scientific Investigation Division in order for a tech to look up the palm print in their files. He then asked if Rider wanted him to pick her up a coffee or a soda from the cafeteria while he was floating around the building. She said no and he was off. He took the murder book with him.

Bosch filled out the comparison request forms and gave them to a print tech named Larkin. He was one of the older, more experienced techs. Bosch had gone to him before and knew that he would move quickly with the request.

“Let’s hope we hit the jackpot, Harry,” Larkin said as he took the forms.

It was true that there was always a sense of excitement when you put an old print into a computer and let it ride. It was like pulling the lever on a slot machine. The jackpot payoff was a match, a
cold hit
in police parlance.

After leaving SID Bosch went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to finish reading through the murder book. He decided he could handle the constant background noise of the cafeteria better than he could the intrusive questions from Kiz Rider.

He understood where his partner was coming from. She wanted to choose their cases dispassionately from the thousands that were open. Her concern was that if they went down a path in which Bosch was exorcizing ghosts or choosing cases with personal attachments, they would burn out sooner rather than later.

But Bosch was not as concerned. He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the
Laura
syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her.

The killing of June Wilkins was as horrible as it was cunning. The woman was bound hands and feet with a dog collar and a leash and then drowned in the tub. Her dog was treated to the same death. The autopsy showed no bruising or injuries on Wilkins suggestive of a struggle. But analysis of blood and tissue samples taken during autopsy indicated that she had been drugged with a veterinary paralytic. It meant that it was likely that Wilkins was conscious but unable to move her muscles to fight or defend herself when she was submerged in the water in the bathtub. Analysis of the dog’s blood found that the animal ith the anhad been drugged with the same substance.

A textbook investigation followed the murder but it ultimately led to no arrests or the identification of a suspect. June Wilkins had lived alone. She had been divorced and had one child, a college student who went to school in Philadelphia. June worked as an assistant to a casting director in an office in a building at Hollywood and Vine, but had been on a two-week vacation at the time of her death.

No evidence was found that she’d had an ongoing romantic relationship or that there were any hard feelings from a former relationship. It appeared to neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers and family members that the love of her life was her dog, a miniature poodle named Frenchy.

The dog was also the focus of her life. He was of pure breed, and the only travel Wilkins did in the year most recent to her death had been to attend dog shows in San Diego and Las Vegas, where Frenchy competed. The second bedroom of her bungalow had been converted into a grooming salon, where ribbons from previous dog shows lined the mirrors.

The original investigation was conducted by partners Joel Speigelman and Dan Finster of Wilshire Division. They began with a wide focus on Wilkins’s life and then narrowed in on the dog. The use of the veterinary drug by the killer and the killing of the dog suggested some connection to that aspect of the victim’s life. But that avenue soon hit a dead end when the detectives found no indication of a dispute or difficulty involving Wilkins in the competitive world of dog shows. They learned that Wilkins was considered a harmless novice in that world and was neither taken seriously by her competitors nor competitive in nature herself. The detectives also learned that Frenchy, though a purebred animal, was not a champion-caliber dog and the ribbons he took home were more often than not awarded for simply competing, not winning.

The detectives changed their theory and began to consider the possibility that the killer had purposely misdirected the investigation toward the dog show angle. But what the correct angle of investigation should have been was never determined. The investigation stalled. The detectives never linked the palm print on the bathroom wall to anyone and lacking any other solid leads the case was pushed into the wait-and-see pile. That meant it was still on the desk but the investigators were waiting for something to break—an anonymous tip, a confession or even another murder of similar method. But nothing came up and after a year it was moved off the table and into the archives to gather dust.

While reading through the binder Bosch had written down a list of names of people who had come up in the investigation. These included family members, neighbors and coworkers of the victim as well as acquaintances she encountered through veterinary services and the dog shows she attended.

In most cases Speigelman and Finster had asked for birth dates, addresses and even Social Security numbers while conducting their interviews. It was standard operating procedure. Their thoroughness back then would now help Bosch when he ran every name from the list through the crime computer.

When finished reading, Bosch closed the murder book and looked at his list. He had collected thirty-six names to run through the computer. He knew he had theen w he ha names and the palm print and that was about it. He could also run ketamine hydrochloride through the computer to see if it had come up in any other investigations since 1972.

He decided that if nothing came out of the three angles of investigation he would drop the case, admit defeat to his partner and press on to the next case that had a valid hook.