The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (14 page)

Eventually, Bosch realized he had become a similar object of curiosity for the man across the street, who was now surreptitiously watching Bosch as Bosch was surreptitiously watching him.

They kept at this careful cross-surveillance until a siren split the air and a fire truck trundled down the road between them. Bosch tracked the truck in the side mirror, and when he looked back across the street he saw that the Jeep was empty. The man had either used the distraction of the passing fire truck to slip out, or he was lying down inside.

Bosch assumed it was the former. He sat up straight and checked the street and the sidewalk across from him. No sign of anyone on foot. He turned to check the sidewalk on his own side and there at the passenger window was the guy in the baseball hat. He’d turned the hat backward, the way gang squad guys often did when they were on the move. Bosch could see a silver chain descending from the sides of his neck into his graphic T, figured there was a badge hanging from it. Definitely a gun riding the back of the guy’s right hip, something boxy and bigger than a Glock. The man bent down to put himself at eye level with Bosch. He twirled his finger at Bosch, a request to roll the window down.

The guy with the Hertz NeverLost GPS jutting off his dashboard looked at Patrick for a long moment but then lowered his window. He looked like he was mid-fifties and in good shape. Wiry. Something about him said cop. The wariness in his eyes for one; cop’s eyes—you could never believe they truly closed. Then there was the way he kept one hand down in his lap so he could go inside the sport coat for the Glock or the Smith if it turned out Patrick was a bad guy. His left hand.

“Nice move,” he said.

“Yeah?” Patrick said.

The guy nodded over his shoulder. “Sending the fire truck down the street. Good distraction. You with District Thirteen?”

A true Bostonian always sounded like he was just getting over a cold. This guy’s voice was clean air; not light exactly but smooth. An out-of-towner. Not a trace of Beantown in that voice. Probably a fed. Minted in Kansas or somewhere, trained down in Quantico and then sent up here. Patrick decided to play along as long as he could. He tried to open the door but it was locked. The guy unlocked it, moved his briefcase to the back seat, and Patrick got in.

“You’re a bit away from Center Plaza, aren’t you?” Patrick said.

“Maybe,” he said. “Except I don’t know where or what Center Plaza is.”

“So you’re not with the Bureau. Who are you with?”

The man hesitated again, kept that left hand in his lap, then nodded like he’d decided to take a flier.

“LAPD,” he said. “I was going to check in with you guys later today.”

“And what brings the LAPD out to JP?”

“JP?”

“Jamaica Plain. Can I see some ID?”

He pulled a badge wallet out and flipped it open so Patrick could study the detective’s badge and the ID. His name was Hieronymus Bosch.

“Some name you’ve got. How do you say that?”

“Harry’s good.”

“Okay. What are you doing here, Harry?”

“How about you? That chain around your neck isn’t attached to a badge.”

“No?”

Bosch shook his head. “I’d have seen the outline of it through your shirt. Crucifix?”

Patrick stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “Wife likes me to wear it.” He held out his hand. “Patrick Kenzie. I’m not a cop. I’m an independent contractor.”

Bosch shook his hand. “You like baseball, Pat?”

“Patrick.”

“You like baseball, Patrick?”

“Big-time. Why?”

“You’re the first guy I’ve seen in this town not wearing a Sox hat.”

Patrick pulled off his hat and considered the front of it as he ran a hand through his hair. “Imagine that. I didn’t even look when I left the house.”

“Is that a rule around here? You’ve all got to represent Red Sox Nation or something?”

“It’s not a rule, per se, more like a guideline.”

Bosch looked at the hat again. “Who’s the crooked smiley-faced guy?”

“Toothface,” Patrick said. “He’s, like, the logo, I guess, of a record store I like.”

“You still buy records?”

“CDs. You?”

“Yeah. Jazz mostly. I hear it’s all going to go away. Records, CDs, the whole way we buy music. MP3s and iPods are the future.”

“Heard that too.” Patrick looked over his shoulder at the street. “We looking at the same guy here, Harry?”

“Don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m looking at a guy for a murder back in nineteen-ninety. I need to get some DNA.”

“What guy?”

“Tell you what, why don’t I go over to District Thirteen and check in with the captain and make this all legit? I’ll identify myself, you identify yourself. A cop and a private eye working together to ease the burden of the Boston PD. Because I don’t want
my
captain back in L.A. catching a call from—”

“Is it Paisley? Are you watching Edward Paisley?”

He looked at Patrick for a long moment. “Who is Edward Paisley?”

“Bullshit. Tell me about the case from nineteen-ninety.”

“Look, you’re a private dick with no ‘need to know’ that I can see and I’m a cop—”

“Who didn’t follow protocol and check in with the local PD.” He craned his head around the car. “Unless there’s a D-13 liaison on this street who’s really fucking good at keeping his head down. I got a girl missing right now and Edward Paisley’s name popped up in connection to her. Girl’s twelve, Bosch, and she’s been out there three days. So I’d love to hear what happened back in nineteen-ninety. You tell me, I’ll be your best friend and everything.”

“Why is no one looking for your missing girl?”

“Who’s to say they’re not?”

“Because you’re looking and you’re private.”

Patrick got a whiff of something sad coming off the L.A. cop. Not the kind of sad that came from bad news yesterday but from bad news most days. Still, his eyes weren’t dead; they pulsed instead with appetite—maybe even addiction—for the hunt. This wasn’t a house cat who’d checked out, who kept his head down, took his paycheck, and counted the days till his twenty. This was a cop who kicked in doors if he had to, whether he knew what was on the other side or not, and had stayed on after twenty.

Patrick said, “She’s the wrong color, wrong caste, and there’s enough plausible anecdotal shit swirling around her situation to make anyone question whether she was abducted or just walked off.”

“But you think Paisley could be involved.”

Patrick nodded.

“Why?”

“He’s got two priors for sexual abuse of minors.”

Bosch shook his head. “No. I checked.”

“You checked domestic. You didn’t know to check Costa Rica and Cuba. Both places where he was arrested, charged, had the shit beat out of him, and ultimately bought his way out. But the arrests are on record over there.”

“How’d you find them?”

“I didn’t. Principal of Dearborn Middle School was getting a bad feeling about Paisley when he drove a bus for them. One girl said this, one boy said that, another girl said such and such. Nothing you could build a case on, but enough for the principal to call Paisley into her office a couple times to discuss it.” Patrick pulled a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket, flipped it open. “Principal told me Paisley would have passed both interviews with flying colors but he mentioned milk one time too many.”

“Milk?”

“Milk.” Patrick looked up from his notes and nodded. “He told the principal during their first meeting—he’d already been working there a year; the principal doesn’t have shit to do with hiring bus drivers, that’s HR downtown—that she should smile more because it made him think of milk. He told her in the second meeting that the sun in Cuba was whiter than milk, which is why he liked Cuba, the white lording over everything and all. It stuck with her.”

“Clearly.”

“But so did the Cuba reference. It takes work to get to Cuba. You gotta fly to Canada or the Caribbean, pretend you banged around there when in fact you hopped a flight to Havana. So when her least favorite bus driver got a DUI while driving her students, she eighty-sixed his ass straightaway, but then started wondering about Cuba. She pulled his résumé and found gaps—six-month unexplained absence in eighty-nine, ten-month absence in ninety-six. Our friendly principal—and remember, Bosch, your principal
is
your pal—kept digging. Didn’t take long to find out that the six months in eighty-nine were spent in a Costa Rican jail, the ten months in ninety-six were spent in a cell in Havana. Plus, he moved around a lot in general—Phoenix, L.A., Chicago, Philly, and finally Boston. Always drives a bus, and only has one known relative—a sister, Tasha. Both times he was released from foreign jails, he was released into her custody. And I’m willing to bet she walked a bag of cash onto her flight that she didn’t have with her on the flight back home. So now, now he’s here and Chiffon Henderson is not. And you know everything I know, Detective Bosch, but I bet you can’t say the same.”

Bosch leaned back against his seat hard enough to make the leather crackle. He looked over at Patrick Kenzie and told the story of Letitia Williams. She was fourteen years old and stolen from her bedroom in the night. No leads, few clues. The abductor had cut out the screen on her bedroom window. Didn’t remove the screen, frame and all. Cut the screen out of the frame with a razor and then climbed in.

The cut screen put immediate suspicion on the disappearance. The case was not shunted aside as a presumed runaway situation the way Chiffon Henderson’s would be fifteen years later. Detectives from the major crimes unit rolled that morning after the girl was discovered gone. But the abduction scene was clean. No trace evidence of any kind recovered from the girl’s bedroom. The presumption was the abductor or abductors had worn gloves, entered and quickly incapacitated the girl, and just as quickly removed her through the window.

However, there was one piece of presumed evidence gathered outside the house on the morning of the initial investigation. In the alley that ran behind the home where Letitia Williams lived investigators found a flashlight. The first guess was that it had belonged to the abductor and it had inadvertently been dropped while the victim was carried to a waiting vehicle. There were no fingerprints on the flashlight, as it was assumed the perpetrator had worn gloves. But an examination of the inside of the flashlight found two viable latent fingerprints on one of the batteries.

It was thought to be the one mistake that would prove the abductor’s undoing. But the thumb and forefinger prints were compared to those on file with the city and state and no match was found. The prints were then sent on to the FBI for comparison with prints in the Bureau’s vast data banks, but again there was no hit and the lead died on the vine.

In the meantime, the body of Letitia Williams was found exactly one week after her abduction on a hillside in Griffith Park, right below the observatory. It appeared as though the killer had specifically chosen the location because the body would be spotted quickly in daylight hours by someone looking down from the observatory.

The autopsy on the victim determined that she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and then strangled. The case drew heavy attention from the media and the major crimes unit, but eventually it was shelved. No clues, no evidence, no leads. In 1992 Los Angeles was ripped apart by race riots, and cases like the murder of Letitia Williams dropped off the public radar. The file went to archives until the Open-Unsolved Unit was formed after the start of the new century, and eventually Bosch came to the archived case files and the fingerprints that were matched to Edward Paisley in Boston.

“That’s why I’m here,” Bosch said.

“Did you come with a warrant?”

Bosch shook his head. “No, no warrant. The prints match is not enough. The flashlight was found in the alley, not in Letitia’s bedroom. There is no direct tie to the crime. I came to get DNA. I was going to follow him and collect it. Wait for him to toss a cup of coffee or a pizza crust or something. I’d take it back with me and see if it matches semen collected from the body. Then I’d be in business. Then I’d come back with a warrant and take him down.”

They sat in the car and stared out at the street and Bosch could feel Kenzie stewing on something. He wasn’t a big man and he had a friendly, boyish face; he dressed in the street clothes of a neighborhood guy, kind of guy would pour your beer or fix your car. On first glance and even on a second, he seemed harmless and sweet, kind of guy you’d be happy for your sister to bring home. But Bosch had spent enough time in his company now to feel a hot wire running in the guy’s blood. Most people probably never tripped it. But God help the ones who did.

Kenzie’s right knee started to jackhammer up and down in such a way that Bosch doubted he was aware of it. He turned on the seat, looked at Harry. “You said in your case the girl’s body was found a week after the abduction.”

“That’s right.”

“But she was dumped there because she would be found almost right away by the people at the observatory.”

“Yeah, the body was left at night and noticed the next morning after daylight.”

“How long had she been dead?”

Bosch reached to the back seat and opened the briefcase. He brought back a thick blue binder full of records from the case. He spoke as he looked through the pages. He had the answers in his head already. He was just looking at the autopsy report for confirmation.

“She had been dead seventy-two hours when found.”

“That’s three days. That meant the guy kept her alive for four days.”

“Right. The indications were that she was repeatedly—”

“This is the fourth day. If this asshole follows any sort of pattern, well, shit, Chiffon Henderson was taken Monday afternoon.” He pointed back down the sidewalk at the gray row house. “We need to get in that house.”

Patrick took the front door while Bosch went around back. Patrick had told the L.A. cop he was reasonably proficient picking a lock, but Paisley’s front door sported a lock Patrick had never seen before. New, too. And expensive by the looks of it—a $500 lock on a $40 door. Patrick tried a series of picks, but none of them could get to first base with the cylinders. It was like trying to pass a plastic stirrer through a rock.