City of Bones (12 page)

“No,” he said. “No breakthrough. We’re just following routine procedures.”

Surtain shoved the microphone she was carrying toward Bosch’s face.

“Why are you out here in the neighborhood again?”

“We’re just finishing the routine canvas of the residents here. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to the resident here before. We just finished up, that’s all.”

He was talking with a bored tone in his voice. He hoped she was buying it.

“Sorry,” he added. “No big story tonight.”

“Well, was this neighbor or any of the neighbors helpful to the investigation?”

“Well, everyone here has been very cooperative with us but as far as investigative leads go it has been difficult. Most of these people weren’t even living in the neighborhood when the bones were buried. That makes it tough.”

Bosch gestured toward Trent’s house.

“This gentleman, for example. We just found out that he didn’t buy his home here until nineteen eighty-seven and we’re pretty sure those bones were already up there by then.”

“So then it’s back to the drawing board?”

“Sort of. And that’s really all I can tell you. Good night.”

He pushed past her toward his car. A few moments later Surtain was on him at the car door. Without her cameraman.

“Detective, we need to get your name.”

Bosch opened his wallet and took out a business card. The one with the general station number printed on it. He gave it to her and said good night again.

“Look, if there is anything you can tell me, you know, off the record, I would protect you,” Surtain said. “You know, off camera like this, whatever you want to do.”

“No, there is nothing,” Bosch said as he opened the door. “Have a good night.”

Edgar cursed the moment the doors of the car were closed.

“How the hell did she know we were here?”

“Probably a neighbor,” Bosch said. “She was out here the whole two days of the dig. She’s a celebrity. She made nice with the residents. Made friends. Plus, we’re sitting in a goddamn Shamu. Might as well have called a press conference.”

Bosch thought of the inanity of trying to do detective work in a car painted black and white. Under a program designed to make cops more visible on the street, the department had assigned detectives in the divisions to black-and-whites that didn’t carry the emergency lights on top but were just as noticeable.

They watched as the reporter and her cameraman went to Trent’s door.

“She’s going to try to talk to him,” Edgar said.

Bosch quickly went into his briefcase and got out his cell phone. He was about to dial Trent’s number and tell him not to answer when he realized he couldn’t get a cell signal.

“Goddammit,” he said.

“Too late anyway,” Edgar said. “Let’s just hope he plays it smart.”

Bosch could see Trent at his front door, totally bathed in the white light from the camera. He said a few words and then made a waving gesture and closed the door.

“Good,” Edgar said.

Bosch started the car, turned it around and headed back through the canyon to the station.

“So what’s next?” Edgar asked.

“We have to pull the records on his conviction, see what it was about.”

“I’ll do that first thing.”

“No. First thing I want to deliver the search warrants to the hospitals. Whether Trent fits our picture or not, we need to ID the kid in order to connect him to Trent. Let’s meet at Van Nuys Courthouse at eight. We get them signed and then split ’em up.”

Bosch had picked Van Nuys court because Edgar lived nearby and they could separate and go from there in the morning after the warrants had been approved by a judge.

“What about a warrant on Trent’s place?” Edgar said. “You see anything while you were looking around?”

“Not much. He’s got a skateboard in a box in the garage. You know, with his work stuff. For putting on a set. I was thinking of our victim’s shirt when I saw that. And there were some work boots with dirt in the treads. It might match the samples from the hill. But I’m not counting on a search coming through for us. The guy has had twenty years to make sure he’s clear.
If
he’s the guy.”

“You don’t think so?”

Bosch shook his head.

“Timing’s wrong. ’Eighty-four is on the late side. The far edge of our window.”

“I thought we were looking at ’seventy-five to ’eighty-five.”

“We are. In general. But you heard Golliher—twenty to twenty-five years ago. That’s early eighties on the high side. I don’t know about ’eighty-four being early eighties.”

“Well, maybe he moved to that house
because
of the body. He buried the kid there before and wanted to be close by so he moves into the neighborhood. I mean, Harry, these are sick fucks, these guys.”

Bosch nodded.

“There’s that. But I just wasn’t getting the vibe from the guy. I believed him.”

“Harry, your mojo’s been wrong before.”

“Oh, yeah . . .”

“I think it’s him. He’s the guy. Hear how he said, ‘just because I touched a boy.’ Probably to him, sodomizing a nine-year-old is reaching out and touching somebody.”

Edgar was being reactionary but Bosch didn’t call him on it. He was a father; Bosch wasn’t.

“We’ll get the records and we’ll see. We also have to go to the Hall to check the reverses, see who was on that street back then.”

The reverses were phone books that listed residents by address instead of by name. A collection of the books for every year was kept in the Hall of Records. They would allow the detectives to determine who was living on the street during the 1975 to 1985 range they were looking at as the boy’s time of death.

“That’s going to be a lot of fun,” Edgar said.

“Oh, yeah,” Bosch said. “I can’t wait.”

They drove in silence the rest of the way. Bosch became depressed. He was disappointed with himself for how he had run the investigation so far. The bones were discovered Wednesday, and the full investigation took off on Thursday. He knew he should have run the names—a basic part of the investigation—sooner than Sunday. By delaying it he had given Trent the advantage. He’d had three days to expect and prepare for their questions. He had even been briefed by an attorney. He could have even been practicing his responses and looks in a mirror. Bosch knew what his internal lie detector said. But he also knew that a good actor could beat it.

15

B
OSCH drank a beer on the back porch with the sliding door open so he could hear Clifford Brown on the stereo. Almost fifty years before, the trumpet player made a handful of recordings and then checked out in a car crash. Bosch thought about all the music that had been lost. He thought about young bones in the ground and what had been lost. And then he thought about himself and what he had lost. Somehow the jazz and the beer and the grayness he was feeling about the case had all mixed together in his mind. He felt on edge, like he was missing something that was right in front of him. For a detective it was just about the worst feeling in the world.

At 11 P.M. he came inside and turned the music down so he could watch the news on Channel 4. Judy Surtain’s report was the third story after the first break. The anchor said, “New developments in the Laurel Canyon bone case. We go to Judy Surtain at the scene.”

“Ah, shit,” Bosch said, not liking the sound of the introduction.

The program cut to a live shot of Surtain on Wonderland Avenue, standing on the street in front of a house Bosch recognized as Trent’s.

“I’m here on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, where four days ago a dog brought home a bone that authorities say was human. The dog’s find led to the discovery of more bones belonging to a young boy who investigators believe was murdered and then buried more than twenty years ago.”

Bosch’s phone started ringing. He picked it up off the arm of the TV chair and answered it.

“Hold on,” he said and then held the phone down by his side while he watched the news report.

Surtain said, “Tonight the lead investigators on the case returned to the neighborhood to speak to one resident who lives less than one hundred yards from the place where the boy was buried. That resident is Nicholas Trent, a fifty-seven-year-old Hollywood set decorator.”

The program cut to tape of Bosch being questioned by Surtain that night. But it was used as visual filler while Surtain continued her report in a voice-over dub.

“Investigators declined to comment on their questioning of Trent, but Channel Four news has learned—”

Bosch sat down heavily on the chair and braced himself.

“—that Trent was once convicted of molesting a young boy.”

The sound was then brought up on the street interview just as Bosch said, “That’s really all I can tell you.”

The next jump was to video of Trent standing in his doorway and waving the camera off and closing the door.

“Trent declined comment on his status in the case. But neighbors in the normally quiet hillside neighborhood expressed shock upon learning of Trent’s background.”

As the report shifted to a taped interview of a resident Bosch recognized as Victor Ulrich, Bosch hit the mute button on the TV remote and brought the phone up. It was Edgar.

“You watching this shit?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“We look like shit. We look like we told her. They used your quote out of context, Harry. We’re going to be fucked by this.”

“Well, you didn’t tell her, right?”

“Harry, you think I’d tell some—”

“No, I don’t. I was confirming. You didn’t tell her, right?”

“Right.”

“And neither did I. So, yeah, we’re going to take some shit but we’re clear on it.”

“Well, who else knew? I doubt Trent was the one who told her. About a million people now know he’s a child molester.”

Bosch realized the only people who knew were Kiz, who had gotten the records flag while doing the computer work, and Julia Brasher, whom Bosch told while he was making his excuse for missing dinner. Suddenly a vision of Surtain standing at the roadblock on Wonderland came to him. Brasher had volunteered her help during both days of the hillside search and excavation. It was entirely possible that she had connected with Surtain in some way. Was she the reporter’s source, the leak?

“There didn’t have to be a leak,” Bosch said to Edgar. “All she needed was Trent’s name. She could have gotten any cop she knew to run it on the box for her. Or she could have looked it up on the sexual offenders CD. It’s public record. Hold on.”

He had gotten a call-waiting beep on the phone. He switched over and learned it was Lt. Billets calling. He told her to hold while he got off the other line. He clicked over.

“Jerry, it’s Bullets. I gotta call you back.”

“It’s still me,” Billets said.

“Oh, sorry. Hold on.”

He tried again and this time made the switch back. He told Edgar he’d call him back if Billets said anything he needed to know right away.

“Otherwise, go with the plan,” he added. “See you at Van Nuys at eight.”

He switched back over to Billets.

“Bullets?” she said. “Is that what you guys call me?”

“What?”

“You said ‘Bullets.’ When you thought I was Edgar you called me ‘Bullets.’ ”

“You mean just now?”

“Yes, just now.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean when I was switching over to—”

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I assume you saw Channel Four?”

“Yeah, I saw it. And all I can tell you is that it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Edgar. That woman got a tip that we were out there and we ‘no comment’-ed our way out of there. How she came up with his—”

“Harry, you didn’t ‘no comment’ your way out of there. They have you on tape, your mouth moving, and then I hear you say, ‘that’s all I can say.’ If you say ‘that’s all,’ that means you gave her something.”

Bosch shook his head, even though he was on the phone.

“I didn’t give her shit. I just bullshitted my way by. I told her we were just finishing up the routine canvas of the neighborhood and I hadn’t talked to Trent before.”

“Was that true?”

“Not really, but I wasn’t going to say we were there because the guy’s a child molester. Look, she didn’t know about Trent when we were there. If she did, she would have asked me. She found out later, and how I don’t know. That’s what Jerry and I were just talking about.”

There was silence for a moment before Billets continued.

“Well, you better have your shit together on this tomorrow because I want a written explanation from you that I can send up the line. Before that report on Four was even over I got a call from Captain LeValley and she said she had already gotten a call from Deputy Chief Irving.”

“Yeah, yeah, typical. Right on down the food chain.”

“Look, you know that leaking the criminal record of a citizen is against departmental policy, whether that citizen is the target of an investigation or not. I just hope you have your story straight on this. I don’t need to tell you that there are people in the department just waiting for you to make a mistake they can sink their teeth into.”

“Look, I’m not trying to downplay the leak. It was wrong and it was bad. But I’m trying to solve a murder here, Lieutenant, and now I’ve got a whole new obstacle to overcome. And that’s what’s typical. There is always something thrown in the way.”

“Then you should be more careful next time.”

“Careful of what? What did I do wrong? I’m following leads where they go.”

Bosch immediately regretted the explosion of frustration and anger. Of those people in the department waiting for his self-destruction, Billets certainly wasn’t on the list. She was only the messenger here. In the same moment, he realized his anger was also self-directed because he knew Billets was right. He should have handled Surtain differently.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said in a low, even tone. “It’s just the case. It’s got its hooks, you know?”

“I think I do,” Billets answered just as quietly. “And speaking of the case, what exactly is going on? This whole thing with Trent came out of left field for me. I thought you were going to keep me up to date.”