City of Bones (23 page)

Before Bosch could get excited by the implications of a match between the board and the time frame of the case, he read the last paragraph of the report, which put any match in doubt.

The trucks (wheel assemblies) are of a design first implemented by Boneyard in May 1984. The graphite wheels also indicate a later manufacture. Graphite wheels did not become commonplace in the industry until the mid-80s. However, because trucks and wheels are interchangeable and often are traded out or replaced by boarders, it is impossible to determine the exact date of manufacture of the skateboard in evidence. Best estimate pending additional evidence is manufacture between February 1978 and June 1986.

Bosch slid the report back into the dispatch envelope and dropped it on the desk. The report was inconclusive but to Bosch the factors Jesper had outlined leaned toward the skateboard not having been Arthur Delacroix’s. In his mind the report tilted toward clearing rather than implicating Nicholas Trent in the boy’s death. In the morning he would type up a report with his conclusions and give it to Lt. Billets to send up the chain to Deputy Chief Irving’s office.

As if to punctuate the end of this line of investigation, the sound of the back door to the station banging open echoed down the hallway. Several loud male voices followed, all heading out into the night. Roll call was over and fresh troops were taking the field, their voices full of us-versus-them bravado.

The police chief’s wishes notwithstanding, Bosch flicked off the light and headed back down the hallway to the watch office. There were two sergeants in the small office. Lenkov was going off duty, while Renshaw was just starting her shift. They both registered surprise at Bosch’s appearance so late at night but then didn’t ask him what he was doing in the station.

“So,” Bosch said, “anything on my guy, Johnny Stokes?”

“Nothing yet,” Lenkov said. “But we’re looking. We’re putting it out at all roll calls and we’ve got the pictures in the cars now. So . . .”

“You’ll let me know.”

“We’ll let you know.”

Renshaw nodded her agreement.

Bosch thought about asking if Julia Brasher had come in to end her shift yet but thought better of it. He thanked them and stepped back into the hallway. The conversation had felt odd, like they couldn’t wait for him to get out of there. He sensed it was because of the word getting around about him and Julia. Maybe they knew she was coming off of shift and wanted to avoid seeing them together. As supervisors they would then be witnesses to what was an infraction of department policy. As minor and rarely enforced as the rule was, things would be better all the way around if they didn’t see the infraction and then have to look the other way.

Bosch walked out the back door and into the parking lot. He had no idea whether Julia was in the station locker room, still out on patrol or had come and gone already. Mid-shifts were fluid. You didn’t come in until the watch sergeant sent your replacement out.

He found her car in the parking lot and knew he hadn’t missed her. He walked back toward the station to sit down on the Code 7 bench. But when he got to it, Julia was already sitting there. Her hair was slightly wet from the locker room shower. She wore faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved pullover with a high neck.

“I heard you were in the house,” she said. “I checked and saw the light out and thought maybe I’d missed you.”

“Just don’t tell the chief about the lights.”

She smiled and Bosch sat down next to her. He wanted to touch her but didn’t.

“Or us,” he said.

She nodded.

“Yeah. A lot of people know, don’t they?”

“Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about that. Can you get a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s walk over to the Cat and Fiddle. I’m tired of driving today.”

Rather than walk through the station together and out the front door, they took the long way through the parking lot and around the station. They walked two blocks up to Sunset and then another two down to the pub. Along the way Bosch apologized for missing her in the squad room before her shift and explained he had driven to Palm Springs. She was very quiet as they walked, mostly just nodding her head at his explanations. They didn’t talk about the issue at hand until they reached the pub and slid into one of the booths by the fireplace.

They both ordered pints of Guinness and then Julia folded her arms on the table and fixed Bosch with a hard stare.

“Okay, Harry, I’ve got my drink coming. You can give it to me. But I have to warn you, if you are going to say you want to just be friends, well, I already have enough friends.”

Bosch couldn’t help but break into a broad smile. He loved her boldness, her directness. He started shaking his head.

“Nah, I don’t want to be your friend, Julia. Not at all.”

He reached across the table and squeezed her forearm. Instinctively, he glanced around the pub to make sure no one from the cop shop had wandered over for an after-shift drink. He didn’t recognize anyone and looked back at Julia.

“What I want is to be with you. Just like we’ve been.”

“Good. So do I.”

“But we have to be careful. You haven’t been around the department long enough. I have and I know how things get around, and so it’s my fault. We should’ve never left your car in the station lot that first night.”

“Oh, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

“No, it’s—”

He waited while the barmaid put their beers down on little paper coasters with the Guinness seal on them.

“It’s not like that, Julia,” he said when they were alone again. “If we’re going to keep going, we need to be more careful. We have to go underground. No more meeting at the bench, no more notes, no more anything like that. We can’t even go here anymore because cops come here. We have to be totally underground. We meet outside the division, we talk outside the division.”

“You make it sound like we’re a couple of spies or something.”

Bosch picked up his glass, clicked it off hers and drank deeply from it. It tasted so good after such a long day. He immediately had to stifle a yawn, which Julia caught and repeated.

“Spies? That’s not too far off. You forget, I’ve been in this department more than twenty-five years. You’re just a boot, a baby. I’ve got more enemies inside the wire than you’ve got arrests under your belt. Some of these people would take any opportunity to put me down if they could. It sounds like I’m just worrying about myself here, but the thing is if they need to go after a rookie to get to me, they’ll do it in a heartbeat. I mean that. A heartbeat.”

She turtled her head down and looked both ways.

“Okay, Harry—I mean, Secret Agent double-oh-forty-five.”

Bosch smiled and shook his head.

“Yeah, yeah, you think it’s all a joke. Wait until you get your first IAD jacket. Then you’ll see the light.”

“Come on, I don’t think it’s a joke. I’m just having fun.”

They both drank from their beers, and Bosch leaned back and tried to relax. The heat from the fireplace felt good. The walk over had been brisk. He looked at Julia and she was smiling like she knew a secret about him.

“What?”

“Nothing. You just get so worked up.”

“I’m trying to protect you, that’s all. I’m plus-twenty-five, so it doesn’t matter as much to me.”

“What does that mean? I’ve heard people say that—‘plus-twenty-five’—like they’re untouchable or something.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Nobody’s untouchable. But after you hit twenty-five years in, you top out on the pension scale. So it doesn’t matter if you quit at twenty-five years or thirty-five years, you get the same pension. So ‘plus-twenty-five’ means you have some fuck-you room. You don’t like what they’re doing to you, you can always pull the pin and say have a nice day. Because you’re not in it for the check and the bennies anymore.”

The waitress came back to the table and put down a basket of popcorn. Julia let some time go by and then leaned across the table, her chin almost over the mouth of her pint.

“Then what are you in it for?”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his glass.

“The job, I guess. . . . Nothing big, nothing heroic. Just the chance to maybe make things right every now and then in a fucked-up world.”

He used his thumb to draw patterns on the frosted glass. He continued speaking without taking his eyes off the glass.

“This case, for example . . .”

“What about it?”

“If we can just figure it out and put it together . . . we can maybe make up a little bit for what happened to that kid. I don’t know, I think it might mean something, something really small, to the world.”

He thought about the skull Golliher had held up to him that morning. A murder victim buried in tar for 9,000 years. A city of bones, and all of them waiting to come up out of the ground. For what? Maybe nobody cares anymore.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything in the long run. Suicide terrorists hit New York and three thousand people are dead before they’ve finished their first cup of coffee. What does one little set of bones buried in the past matter?”

She smiled sweetly and shook her head.

“Don’t go existential on me, Harry. The important thing is that it means something to you. And if it means something to you, then it is important to do what you can. No matter what happens in the world, there will always be the need for heroes. I hope someday I get a chance to be one.”

“Maybe.”

He nodded and kept his eyes from hers. He played some more with his glass.

“Do you remember that commercial that used to be on TV, where there’s this old lady who’s on the ground or something and she says, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’ and everybody used to make fun of it?”

“I remember. They sell T-shirts that say that on Venice Beach.”

“Yeah, well . . . sometimes I feel like that. I mean, plus twenty-five. You can’t go the distance without screwing up from time to time. You fall down, Julia, and sometimes you feel like you can’t get up.”

He nodded to himself.

“But then you get lucky and a case comes along and you say to yourself, this is the one. You just feel it. This is the one I can get back up with.”

“It’s called redemption, Harry. What’s that song say, ‘Everybody wants a shot at it’?”

“Something like that. Yeah.”

“And maybe this case is your shot?”

“Yeah, I think it is. I hope so.”

“Then here’s to redemption.”

She picked up her glass for a toast.

“Hold fast,” he said.

She banged it off of his. Some of her beer sloshed into his almost empty glass.

“Sorry. I need to practice that.”

“It’s okay. I needed a refill.”

He raised his glass and drained it. He put it back down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“So are you coming home with me tonight?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“No, not with you.”

He frowned and started to wonder if his directness had offended her.

“I’m
following
you home tonight,” she said. “Remember? Can’t leave the car at the division. Everything’s got to be top secret, hush-hush, eyes only from now on.”

He smiled. The beer and her smile were like magic on him.

“You got me there.”

“I hope in more ways than one.”

29

B
OSCH came in late to the meeting in Lt. Billets’s office. Edgar was already there, a rarity, as well as Medina from Media Relations. Billets pointed him to a seat with a pencil she was holding, then picked up her phone and punched in a number.

“This is Lieutenant Billets,” she said when her call was answered. “You can tell Chief Irving that we are all here now and ready to begin.”

Bosch looked at Edgar and raised his eyebrows. The deputy chief was still keeping his hand directly in the case.

Billets hung up and said, “He’s going to call back and I’ll put him on the speaker.”

“To listen or to tell?” Bosch asked.

“Who knows?”

“While we’re waiting,” Medina said, “I’ve started getting a few calls about a BOLO you guys put out. A man named John Stokes? How do you want me to handle that? Is he a new suspect?”

Bosch was annoyed. He knew the Be on the Lookout flier distributed at roll calls would eventually leak to the media. He didn’t anticipate it happening so quickly.

“No, he’s not a suspect at all,” he said to Medina. “And if the reporters screw that up like they did Trent, we’ll never find him. He’s just somebody we want to talk to. He was an acquaintance of the victim. Many years ago.”

“Then you have the victim’s ID?”

Before Bosch could answer, the phone buzzed. Billets answered and put Deputy Chief Irving on the speaker.

“Chief, we have Detectives Bosch and Edgar here, along with Officer Medina from Media Relations.”

“Very good,” Irving’s voice boomed from the phone’s speaker. “Where are we at?”

Billets started tapping a button on the phone to turn down the volume.

“Uh, Harry, why don’t you take that?” she said.

Bosch reached into his inside coat pocket and took out his notebook. He took his time about it. He liked the idea of Irving sitting behind his spotless glass desk in his office at Parker Center, waiting for voices over the phone. He opened the notebook to a page full of jottings he had made that morning while eating breakfast with Julia.

“Detective, are you there?” Irving said.

“Uh, yes, sir, I’m right here. I was just going through some notes here. Um, the main thing is we have made a positive identification of the victim. His name is Arthur Delacroix. He disappeared from his home in the Miracle Mile area on May fourth, nineteen eighty. He was twelve years old.”

He stopped there, anticipating questions. He noticed that Medina was writing the name down.

“I’m not sure we want to put that out yet,” Bosch said.

“Why is that?” Irving asked. “Are you saying the identification is not positive?”

“No, we’re positive on it, Chief. It’s just that if we put the name out, we might be telegraphing which way we’re moving here.”