Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Short Stories (8 page)

As he finished his coffee, he thought about the palm print. There had been no analysis of it other than to measure its location on the wall and have it ready for comparison to suspects that might come up in the investigation. But Bosch knew that there was more to it than that. If the print was sixty-six inches up the wall, that meant it was likely that the man who had left it was over six feet tall. He came to this conclusion because he knew that if the suspect leaned forward to brace himself while urinating, he would probably put his hand on the wall at shoulder level or slightly above. Add a foot in height for his neck and head and you have a man ranging from six two to six six in total height. A tall, left-handed man.

“That narrows it down,” Bosch said to himself, noting his own sarcasm.

He got up, dumped his coffee cup and headed out of the cafeteria. On the elevator up to five he thought about the times he had leaned his hand on the wall over a toilet. He was either drunk, middle-of-the-night sleepy or burdened by something besides a heavy bladder. He wondered which of these conditions had fit the tall, left-handed man.

Most of the police department’s civilian offices were on the fifth floor along with the Open-Unsolved Unit. He passed the unit’s door and went down to the Personnel Department. He picked up contact information on Speigelman, Finster and his old partner, Eckersly. In years past such information would be jealously guarded. But under order from the Office of the Chief of Police, detectives with the Open-Unsolved Unit were given carte blanche because it was part of investigatory protocol to contact and interview the original investigators of a case that had been reopened.

Eckersly, of course, was not one of the original investigators. He was only there on the morning they had found the lady in the tub. But Bosch thought it might be worth a call to see if he remembered that day and had any thoughts on the reinvestigation of the case. Bosch had lost contact with Eckersly after he completed his street training and was transferred out of Wilshire Division. He assumed he was no longer on the job and was not mistaken. Eckersly had pulled the plug at twenty years, and his pension was sent to the town of Ten Thousand Palms, where he was the police chief.

Nice move, Bosch thought. Running a small-town police force in the desert and collecting an LAPD pension on the side. Every cop’s dream.

Bosch also noted the coincidence of Eckersly now living in a town called Ten Thousand Palms and the fact that Bosch was currently running an angle through a database of ten thousand palm prints.

Rider was not at her desk when Bosch got back to the unit. There was no note of explanation left on his desk and he figured she had simply taken a break. He sat at her desk and looked at her laptop. She had left it on but had cleared the screen before leavingchifore le the office. He pulled the list of names out of the murder book and connected to the National Crime Index Computer. He didn’t have his own computer and was not highly skilled in the use of the Internet and most law enforcement databases. But the NCIC had been around for years and he knew how to run names on it.

All thirty-six names on his list would have been run through existing databases in 1972 and cleared. What he was looking for now was whether any of the thirty-six people had been arrested for any kind of significant or similar crime in the years after the June Wilkins murder.

The first name he entered came back with multiple hits for drunk driving arrests. This didn’t get Bosch particularly excited but he circled the name on the list anyway and moved on. No hits came up on the next seven and he crossed them out. The next name after that scored a hit with an arrest for disturbing the peace. Bosch circled it but again was not feeling the tug of a hook yet.

The process continued with most of the names coming up clean. It wasn’t until he entered the twenty-ninth name that Bosch looked at the screen and felt a tightness grip in his chest.

The twenty-ninth name was Jonathan Gillespie. He had been described in the murder book as a dog breeder who sold miniature poodles in 1972. He had sold the dog Frenchy to June Wilkins two years before her death and was interviewed by Speigelman and Finster when they were trying to run down the dog show angle on the case. According to the NCIC records, Gillespie went to prison on a rape charge in 1981 and served six years in prison. He was now a registered sexual offender living in Huntington Beach. There had been no other arrests since 1981. He was sixty-eight years old.

Bosch underlined the name on the list and wrote down the case number. It had an LAPD prefix. Though he immediately wanted to go to work on Gillespie, he finished running the rest of the names through the NCIC database first. He got two more hits, one for a DUI and one for a hit-and-run accident with injuries. He circled the names to keep with his procedure but was not excited about them.

Before signing out of the NCIC system, he switched over to the crime-tracking database and entered
ketamine hydrochloride
into the search window. He got several hits back, all within the last fifteen years, and learned that the substance was being used increasingly as a date rape drug. He scrolled through the cases listed and didn’t see anything that linked them to June Wilkins. He logged off the database to begin his pursuit of Jonathan Gillespie.

Closed cases from 1981 had gone to microfiche archives and the department was slowly moving backward and entering case information into the department’s computerized database. But 1981 was too far back. The only way Bosch would be able to look at the sexual assault case that had sent Gillespie to prison would be to go to the records archives, which were housed over at Piper Tech, the storage facility and air squadron base at the edge of downtown.

Bosch went to his side of the desk and wrote a note to Rider telling her he had come up with a hot angle and was chasing it through Piper Tech. The phone on his desk started to ring. He finished the note and grabbed the phone while standing up to reach the note over to Rider’s desk.

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“Open-Unsolved, this is Bosch.”

“Harry, it’s Larkin.”

“I was just going to call you.”

“Really? Why?”

“I have a name for you.”

“Funny, I have a name for you. I matched your palm and you’re not going to like it.”

“Jonathan Gillespie.”

“What?”

“Jonathan Gillespie.”

“Who is that?”

“That’s not your match?”

“Not quite.”

Bosch sat back down at his desk. He pulled a pad over in front of him and got ready to write.

“Who did you come up with?”

“The palm print belonged to one of ours. Guy must have left it while at the crime scene. Sorry about that.”

“Who is it?”

“The name is Ronald Eckersly. He worked for us ’sixty-five to ’eighty-five, then he pulled the pin.”

Bosch almost didn’t hear anything else Larkin said.

“… shows that he was a patrol lieutenant upon retirement. You could go to personnel and get a current location if you need to talk to him. But it looks like he might have just screwed up and put his hand on the wall while he was at the scene. Back then they didn’t know anything about crime scene protocol and some of these guys would—hell, about twenty years ago I was dusting a homicide scene and one of the detectives who had been there all night started frying an egg in the dead guy’s kitchen. He said, ‘He ain’t gonna miss it and I’m goddamn starved.’ You believe that? So no matter how hard you drill into them not to touch—”

“Thanks, Larkin,” Bosch said. “I’ve got to go.”

Bosch hung up, grabbed the note off Rider’s desk and crumpled it in his hand. He took his cell phone off his belt and called Rider’s cell number. She answered right away.

“Where are you?” Bosch asked.

“Having a coffee.”

“You want to take a ride?”

“I’ve got the case"0egot the summary to finish. A ride where?”

“Ten Thousand Palms.”

“Harry, that’s not a ride. That’s a journey. That’s at least ninety minutes each way.”

“Get me a coffee for the road. I’ll be right down.”

He hung up before she could protest.

On the drive out Bosch told Rider about the moves he had made with the case and how the print had come back to his old partner. He then recounted the morning he and Eckersly had found the lady in the tub. Rider listened without interrupting, then she had only one question at the end.

“This is important, Harry,” she said. “You are dealing with your own memory and you know from case experience how faulty memories can be. We’re talking thirty-three years ago. Are you sure there wasn’t a moment when Eckersly could have put his hand on the wall?”

“Yeah, like he might’ve leaned against the wall and taken a leak while I didn’t notice.”

“I’m not talking about taking a leak. Could he have leaned against the wall when you found the body, like he got grossed out or sick and leaned against the wall for support?”

“No, Kiz. I was in that room the whole time he was. He said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and
he
was the first one out. He did not go back in. We called in the detectives and then stood outside keeping the neighbors away when everybody showed up.”

“Thirty-three years is a long time, Harry.”

Bosch waited a moment before responding.

“I know this sounds sad and sick but your first DB is like your first love. You remember the details. Plus…”

He didn’t finish.

“Plus what?”

“Plus my mother was murdered when I was a kid. I think it’s why I became a cop. So finding that woman—my second day on the job—was sort of like finding my mother. I can’t explain it. But what I can tell you is that I remember being in that house like it was yesterday. And Eckersly never touched a thing in there, let alone put his hand on the wall over the toilet.”

Now she was silent for a long moment before responding.

“Okay, Harry.”

Ten Thousand Palms was on the outskirts of Joshua Tree. They made good time and pulled into the visitor parking space in front of the tiny police station shortly before one. They had worked out how they would handle Eckersly in the last half hour of the drive.

They went in and I rwent inasked a woman who was sitting behind a front counter if they could speak with Eckersly. They flashed the gold and told her they were from the Open-Unsolved Unit. The woman picked up a phone and communicated the information to someone on the other end. Before she hung up, a door behind her opened and there stood Ron Eckersly. He was thicker and his skin a dark and worn brown from the desert. He still had a full head of hair, which was cut short and silver. Bosch had no trouble recognizing him. But it didn’t appear that he recognized Bosch.

“Detectives, come on back,” he said.

He held the door and they walked into his office. He was wearing a blue blazer with a maroon tie over a white shirt. It did not appear to Bosch that he had a gun on his belt. Maybe in a little desert town a gun wasn’t needed.

The office was a small space with LAPD memorabilia and photographs on the wall behind the desk. Rider introduced herself and shook Eckersly’s hand and then Bosch did the same. There was a hesitation in Eckersly’s shake and then Bosch knew. Instinctively, he knew. He was holding the hand of June Wilkins’s killer.

“Harry Bosch,” Eckersly said. “You were one of my boots, right?”

“That’s right. I came on the job in ’seventy-two. We rode Wilshire patrol for nine months.”

“Imagine that, one of my boots coming back to see me.”

“Actually, we want to talk to you about a case from ’seventy-two,” Rider said.

As planned, she took the lead. They took seats and Bosch once again tried to determine if Eckersly was armed. There was no telltale bulge beneath the blazer.

Rider explained the case to Eckersly and reminded him that he and Bosch had been the patrol officers who discovered the body. She asked if he remembered the case at all.

Eckersly leaned back in his desk chair, his jacket falling to his sides and revealing no holster or weapon on his belt. He looked for an answer on the ceiling. Finding nothing, he leaned forward and shook his head.

“I’m drawing a blank, Detectives,” he said. “And I’m not sure why you would come all the way out here to ask an old patrol dog about a DB. My guess is we were in and out, and we cleared the way for the dicks. Isn’t that right, partner?”

He looked at Bosch, his last word a reminder that they had once protected each other’s back.

“Yes, we were in and out.”

“But we have information—newly discovered information—that you apparently had a relationship with the victim,” Rider said matter-of-factly. “And that this relationship was not brought to light during the initial investigation.”

Eckersly looked closely at her, wondering how to read the situation. Bosch knew this wase wnew thi the pivotal moment. If Eckersly were to make a mistake, it would be now.

“What information?” Eckersly asked.

“We’re not at liberty to discuss it, Chief,” Rider responded. “But if you have something to tell us, tell us now. It would be best for you to clear this up before we go down the road with it.”

Eckersly’s face cracked into a smile and he looked at Bosch.

“This is a joke, right? Bosch, you’re putting her up to this, right?”

Bosch shook his head.

“No joke,” Bosch said. “You’re in a spot here, Chief.”

Eckersly shook his head as if not comprehending the situation.

“You said Open-Unsolved, right? That’s cold case stuff. DNA. This a DNA case?”

Bosch felt things tumbling into place. Eckersly had made the mistake. He had taken the bait and was fishing for information. It wasn’t what an innocent man would do. Rider felt it, too. She leaned toward his desk.

“Chief, do you mind if I give you a rights warning before we go further with this?”

“Oh, come on,” Eckersly protested. “You can’t be serious. What relationship?”

Rider read Eckersly the standard Miranda rights warning from a card she pulled out of a pocket in her blazer.

“Chief Eckersly, do you understand your rights as I have read them?”