City of Bones (11 page)

Edgar stopped and put a puzzled look on his face.

“Sir, we just have a few more questions we’d like to ask.”

“Yeah, and that’s bullshit!”

“Excuse me?”

“We all know what is going on here. I talked to my attorney already. Your act is just that, an act. A bad one.”

Bosch could see they were not going to get anywhere with the trick-or-treat strategy. He stepped up and pulled Edgar back by the arm. Once his partner had cleared the threshold he looked at Trent.

“Mr. Trent, if you knew we’d be back, then you knew we’d find out about your past. Why didn’t you tell Detective Edgar about it before? It could have saved us some time. Instead, it gives us suspicion. You can understand that, I’m sure.”

“Because the past is the past. I didn’t bring it up. I buried the past. Leave it that way.”

“Not when there are bones buried in it,” Edgar said in an accusatory tone.

Bosch looked back at Edgar and gave him a look that said use some finesse.

“See?” Trent said. “This is why I am saying, ‘Go away.’ I have nothing to tell you people. Nothing. I don’t know anything about it.”

“Mr. Trent, you molested a nine-year-old boy,” Bosch said.

“The year was nineteen sixty-six and I was punished for it. Severely. It’s the past. I’ve been a perfect citizen ever since. I had nothing to do with those bones up there.”

Bosch waited a moment and then spoke in a calm and quieter tone.

“If that is the truth, then let us come in and ask our questions. The sooner we clear you, the sooner we move on to other possibilities. But you have to understand something here. The bones of a young boy were found about a hundred yards from the home of a man who molested a young boy in nineteen sixty-six. I don’t care what kind of citizen he’s been since then, we need to ask him some questions. And we
will
ask those questions. We have no choice. Whether we do it in your home right now or with your lawyer at the station with all of the news cameras waiting outside, that’s going to be your choice.”

He paused. Trent looked at him with scared eyes.

“So you can understand our situation, Mr. Trent, and we can certainly understand yours. We are willing to move quickly and discreetly but we can’t without your cooperation.”

Trent shook his head as though he knew that no matter what he did now, his life as he knew it was in jeopardy and probably permanently altered. He finally stepped back and signaled Bosch and Edgar in.

Trent was barefoot and wearing baggy black shorts that showed off thin ivory legs with no hair on them. He wore a flowing silk shirt over his thin upper body. He had the same build as a ladder, all hard angles. He led them to a living room cluttered with antiques. He sat down in the center of a couch. Bosch and Edgar took the two leather club chairs opposite. Bosch decided to keep the lead. He didn’t like the way Edgar had handled the door.

“To be cautious and careful, I am going to read you your constitutional rights,” he said. “Then I’ll ask you to sign a waiver form. This protects you as well as us. I am also going to record our conversation so that nobody ends up putting words in anybody else’s mouth. If you want a copy of the tape I will make it available.”

Trent shrugged and Bosch took it as reluctant agreement. When Bosch had the form signed he slipped it into his briefcase and took out a small recorder. Once he started it and identified those present as well as the time and date, he nodded to Edgar to assume the lead again. This was because Bosch thought that observations of Trent and his surroundings were going to be more important than his answers now.

“Mr. Trent, how long have you lived in this house?”

“Since nineteen eighty-four.”

He then laughed.

“What is funny about that?” Edgar asked.

“Nineteen eighty-four. Don’t you get it? George Orwell? Big Brother?”

He gestured toward Bosch and Edgar as the front men of Big Brother. Edgar apparently didn’t follow the statement and continued with the interview.

“Rent or own?”

“Own. Uh, at first I rented, then I bought the house in ’eighty-seven from the landlord.”

“Okay, and you are a set designer in the entertainment industry?”

“Set decorator. There is a difference.”

“What is the difference?”

“The designer plans and supervises the construction of the set. The decorator then goes in and puts in the details. The little character strokes. The characters’ belongings or tools. Like that.”

“How long have you done this?”

“Twenty-six years.”

“Did you bury that boy up on the hillside?”

Trent stood up indignantly.

“Absolutely not. I’ve never even set foot on that hill. And you people are making a big mistake if you waste your time on me when the true killer of that poor soul is still out there somewhere.”

Bosch leaned forward in his chair.

“Sit down, Mr. Trent,” he said.

The fervent way in which Trent delivered the denial made Bosch instinctively think he was either innocent or one of the better actors he had come across on the job. Trent slowly sat down on the couch again.

“You’re a smart guy,” Bosch said, deciding to jump in. “You know exactly what we’re doing here. We have to bag you or clear you. It’s that simple. So why don’t you help us out? Instead of dancing around with us, why don’t you tell us how to clear you?”

Trent raised his hands wide.

“I don’t know how! I don’t know anything about the case! How can I help you when I don’t know the first thing about it?”

“Well, right off the bat, you can let us take a look around here. If I can start to get comfortable with you, Mr. Trent, then maybe I can start seeing it from your side of things. But right now . . . like I said, I’ve got you with your record and I’ve got bones across the street.”

Bosch held up his two hands as if he was holding those two things in them.

“It doesn’t look that good from where I’m looking at things.”

Trent stood up and threw one hand out in a gesture toward the interior of the house.

“Fine! Be my guest. Look around to your heart’s content. You won’t find a thing because I had nothing to do with it. Nothing!”

Bosch looked at Edgar and nodded, the signal being that he should keep Trent occupied while Bosch took a look around.

“Thank you, Mr. Trent,” Bosch said as he stood up.

As he headed into a hallway that led to the rear of the house, he heard Edgar asking if Trent had ever seen any unusual activity on the hillside where the bones had been found.

“I just remember kids used to play up—”

He stopped, apparently when he realized that any mention he made of kids would only further suspicion about him. Bosch glanced back to make sure the red light of the recorder was still on.

“Did you like watching the kids play up there in the woods, Mr. Trent?” Edgar asked.

Bosch stayed in the hallway, out of sight but listening to Trent’s answer.

“No, I couldn’t see them if they were up in the woods. On occasion I would be driving up or walking my dog—when he was alive—and I would see the kids climbing up there. The girl across the street. The Fosters next door. All the kids around here. It’s a city-owned right-of-way—the only undeveloped land in the neighborhood. So they went up there to play. Some of the neighbors thought the older ones went up there to smoke cigarettes, and the concern was they would set the whole hillside on fire.”

“How long ago are you talking about?”

“Like when I first moved here. I didn’t get involved. The neighbors who had been here took care of it.”

Bosch moved down the hall. It was a small house, not much bigger than his own. The hallway ended at a conjunction of three doors. Bedrooms on the right and left and a linen closet in the middle. He checked the closet first, found nothing unusual, and then moved into the bedroom on the right. It was Trent’s bedroom. It was neatly kept but the tops of the twin bureaus and bed tables were cluttered with knickknacks that Bosch assumed Trent used on the job in helping to turn sets into real places for the camera.

He looked in the closet. There were several shoe boxes on the upper shelf. Bosch started opening them and found they contained old, worn-out shoes. It was apparently Trent’s habit of buying new shoes and putting his old ones in the box, then shelving them. Bosch guessed that these, too, became part of his work inventory. He opened one box and found a pair of work boots. He noticed that dirt had dried hard in some of the treads. He thought about the dark soil where the bones had been found. Samples of it had been collected.

He put the boots back and made a mental note of it for the search warrant. His current search was just a cursory look around. If they moved to the next step with Trent and he became a full-fledged suspect, then they would come back with a search warrant and literally tear the place apart looking for evidence tying him to the bones. The work boots might be a good place to start. He was already on tape saying he had never been up on that hillside. If the dirt in the treads matched the soil samples from the excavation, then they’d have Trent caught in a lie. Most of what sparring with suspects was about was the locking in of a story. It was then that the investigator looked for the lies.

There was nothing else in the closet that warranted Bosch’s attention. Same with the bedroom or the attached bathroom. Bosch, of course, knew that if Trent was the killer, he’d had many years to cover his tracks. He would also have had the last three days—since Edgar first questioned him during the canvas—to double-check his trail and be ready.

The other bedroom was used as an office and a storage room for his work. On the walls hung framed one sheets advertising the films Bosch assumed Trent had worked on. Bosch had seen some of them on television but rarely went to theaters to see movies. He noticed that one of the frames held the one sheet for a film called
The Art of the Cape.
Years before, Bosch had investigated the murder of that film’s producer. He had heard that after that, the one sheets from the movie had become collector items in underground Hollywood.

When he was finished looking around the rear of the house, Bosch went through a kitchen door into the garage. There were two bays, one containing Trent’s minivan. The other was stacked with boxes with markings on them corresponding to rooms in a house. At first Bosch was shocked at the thought that Trent had still not completely unpacked after moving in nearly twenty years before. Then he realized the boxes were work related and used in the process of set decoration.

When he turned around he was looking at an entire wall hung with the heads of wild game, their black marble eyes staring at him. Bosch felt a nerve tickle run down his spine. All of his life he had hated seeing things like that. He wasn’t sure why.

He spent another few minutes in the garage, mostly going through a box in the stack that was marked “boy’s room 9–12.” It contained toys, airplane models, a skateboard, and a football. He took the skateboard out for a few moments and studied it, all the while thinking about the shirt from the backpack with “Solid Surf” printed on it. After a while he put the skateboard back in the box and closed it.

There was a side door to the garage that led to a path that went to the backyard. A pool took up most of the level ground before the yard rose into the steep, wooded hillside. It was too dark to see much and Bosch decided he would have to do the exterior look during daylight hours.

Twenty minutes after he left to begin the search Bosch returned to the living room empty-handed. Trent looked up at him expectantly.

“Satisfied?”

“I’m satisfied for now, Mr. Trent. I appreciate your—”

“You see? It never ends. ‘Satisfied for now.’ You people will never let it go, will you? I mean, if I was a drug dealer or a bank robber, my debt would be cleared and you people would leave me alone. But because I touched a boy almost forty years ago I am guilty for life.”

“I think you did more than touch him,” Edgar said. “But we’ll get the records. Don’t worry.”

Trent put his face in his hands and mumbled something about it being a mistake to have cooperated. Bosch looked at Edgar, who nodded that he was finished and ready to go. Bosch stepped over and picked up his recorder. He slid it into the breast pocket of his jacket but didn’t turn it off. He’d learned a valuable lesson on a case the year before—sometimes the most important and telling things are said after an interview is supposedly over.

“Mr. Trent, thank you for your cooperation. We’re going to go. But we might need to talk to you tomorrow. Are you working tomorrow?”

“God, no, don’t call me at work! I need this job and you’ll ruin it. You’ll ruin everything.”

He gave Bosch his pager number. Bosch wrote it down and headed toward the front door. He looked back at Edgar.

“Did you ask him about trips? He’s not planning to go anywhere, is he?”

Edgar looked at Trent.

“Mr. Trent, you work on movies, you know how the dialogue goes. You call us if you plan to go out of town. If you don’t and we have to find you . . . you’re not going to like it very much.”

Trent spoke in a flat-line monotone, his eyes focused forward, somewhere far away.

“I’m not going anywhere at all. Now please leave. Just leave me alone.”

They walked out the door and Trent closed it hard behind them. At the bottom of the driveway was a large bougainvillea bush in full bloom. It blocked Bosch’s view of the left side of the street until he got there.

A bright light suddenly flashed on and in Bosch’s face. A reporter with a cameraman in tow moved in on the two detectives. Bosch was blinded for a few moments until his eyes started to adjust.

“Hi, detectives. Judy Surtain, Channel Four news. Is there a break in the bones case?”

“No comment,” Edgar barked. “No comment and turn that damn light off.”

Bosch finally saw her in the glare of the light. He recognized her from TV and from the gathering at the roadblock earlier in the week. He also recognized that a “no comment” was not the way to leave this situation. He needed to diffuse it and keep the media away from Trent.