City of Bones (9 page)

He shrugged his shoulders.

She turned over so her back was to him. He reached under her arm and cupped one of her breasts and pulled her back into him.

“Can you stay till the morning?” he asked.

“Well . . . my husband will probably wonder where I am, but I guess I could call him.”

Bosch froze. Then she started laughing.

“Don’t scare me like that.”

“Well, you never even asked me if I was involved with anyone.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“You were obvious. The lone detective type.” And then in a deep male voice: “Just the facts, ma’am. No time for dames. Murder is my business. I have a job to do and I am—”

He ran his thumb down her side, over the indentations of her ribs. She cut off her words with laughter.

“You lent me your flashlight,” he said. “I didn’t think an ‘involved’ woman would have done that.”

“And I’ve got news for you, tough guy. I saw the Mag in your trunk. In the box before you covered it up. You weren’t fooling anybody.”

Bosch rolled back on the other pillow, embarrassed. He could feel his face getting red. He brought his hands up to hide it.

“Oh, God . . . Mr. Obvious.”

She rolled over to him and peeled back his hands. She kissed him on the chin.

“I thought it was nice. Kinda made my day and gave me something to maybe look forward to.”

She turned his hands back and looked at the scarring across the knuckles. They were old marks and not very noticeable anymore.

“Hey, what is this?”

“Just scars.”

“I know that. From what?”

“I had tattoos. I took them off. It was a long time ago.”

“How come?”

“They made me take them off when I went into the army.”

She started to laugh.

“Why, what did it say, Fuck the army or something?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Then what? Come on, I want to know.”

“It said H-O-L-D on one hand and F-A-S-T on the other.”

“Hold fast? What does ‘hold fast’ mean?”

“Well, it’s kind of a long story . . .”

“I have time. My husband doesn’t mind.”

She smiled.

“Come on, I want to know.”

“It’s not a big deal. When I was a kid, one of the times I ran away I ended up down in San Pedro. Down around the fishing docks. And a lot of those guys down there, the fishermen, the tuna guys, I saw they had this on their hands. Hold fast. And I asked one of them about it and he told me it was like their motto, their philosophy. It’s like when they were out there in those boats, way out there for weeks, and the waves got huge and it got scary, you just had to grab on and hold fast.”

Bosch made two fists and held them up.

“Hold fast to life . . . to everything that you have.”

“So you had it done. How old were you?”

“I don’t know, sixteen, thereabouts.”

He nodded and then he smiled.

“What I didn’t know was that those tuna guys got it from some navy guys. So a year later I go waltzing into the army with ‘Hold Fast’ on my hands and the first thing my sergeant told me was to get rid of it. He wasn’t going to have any squid tattoo on one of his guys’ hands.”

She grabbed his hands and looked closely at the knuckles.

“This doesn’t look like laser work.”

Bosch shook his head.

“They didn’t have lasers back then.”

“So what did you do?”

“My sergeant, his name was Rosser, took me out of the barracks and over to the back of the administration building. There was a brick wall. He made me punch it. Until every one of my knuckles was cut up. Then after they were scabbed up in about a week he made me do it again.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, that’s barbaric.”

“No, that’s the army.”

He smiled at the memory. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. He looked down at his hands. The music stopped and he got up and walked through the house naked to change it. When he came back to the bedroom, she recognized the music.

“Clifford Brown?”

He nodded and came toward the bed. He didn’t think he had ever known a woman who could identify jazz music like that.

“Stand there.”

“What?”

“Let me look at you. Tell me about those other scars.”

The room was dimly lit by a light from the bathroom but Bosch became conscious of his nakedness. He was in good shape but he was more than fifteen years older than her. He wondered if she had ever been with a man so old.

“Harry, you look great. You totally turn me on, okay? What about the other scars?”

He touched the thick rope of skin above his left hip.

“This? This was a knife.”

“Where’d that happen?”

“A tunnel.”

“And your shoulder?”

“Bullet.”

“Where?”

He smiled.

“A tunnel.”

“Ouch, stay out of tunnels.”

“I try.”

He got into the bed and pulled the sheet up. She touched his shoulder, running her thumb over the thick skin of the scar.

“Right in the bone,” she said.

“Yeah, I got lucky. No permanent damage. It aches in the winter and when it rains, that’s about it.”

“What did it feel like? Being shot, I mean.”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders.

“It hurt like hell and then everything sort of went numb.”

“How long were you down?”

“About three months.”

“You didn’t get a disability out?”

“It was offered. I declined.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I like the job, I guess. And I thought that if I stuck with it, someday I’d meet this beautiful young cop who’d be impressed by all my scars.”

She jammed him in the ribs and the pain made him grimace.

“Oh, poor baby,” she said in a mocking voice.

“That hurt.”

She touched the tattoo on his shoulder.

“What’s that supposed to be, Mickey Mouse on acid?”

“Sort of. It’s a tunnel rat.”

Her face lost all trace of humor.

“What’s the matter?”

“You were in Vietnam,” she said, putting things together. “I’ve been in those tunnels.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I was on the road. I spent six weeks in Vietnam. The tunnels, they’re like a tourist thing now. You pay your money and you can go down into them. It must’ve been . . . what you had to do must’ve been so frightening.”

“It was more scary afterward. Thinking about it.”

“They have them roped off so they can sort of control where you go. But nobody really watches you. So I went under the rope and went further in. It got so dark in there, Harry.”

Bosch studied her eyes.

“And did you see it?” he asked quietly. “The lost light?”

She held his eyes for a moment and nodded.

“I saw it. My eyes adjusted and there was light. Almost like a whisper. But it was enough for me to find my way.”

“Lost light. We called it lost light. We never knew where it came from. But it was down there. Like smoke hanging in the dark. Some people said it wasn’t light, that it was the ghosts of everybody who died in those things. From both sides.”

They spoke no more after that. They held each other and soon she was asleep.

Bosch realized he had not thought about the case for more than three hours. At first this made him feel guilty but then he let it go and soon he too was asleep. He dreamed he was moving through a tunnel. But he wasn’t crawling. It was as if he were underwater and moving like an eel through the labyrinth. He came to a dead end and there was a boy sitting against the curve of the tunnel’s wall. He had his knees up and his face down, buried in his folded arms.

“Come with me,” Bosch said.

The boy peeked his eyes over one arm and looked up at Bosch. A single bubble of air rose from his mouth. He then looked past Bosch as if something was coming up behind him. Bosch turned around but there was only the darkness of the tunnel behind him.

When he looked back at the boy, he was gone.

12

L
ATE Sunday morning Bosch drove Brasher to the Hollywood station so she could get her car and he could resume work on the case. She was off duty Sundays and Mondays. They made plans to meet at her house in Venice that night for dinner. There were other officers in the parking lot when Bosch dropped her next to her car. Bosch knew that word would get around quickly that it appeared they had spent the night together.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have thought it out better last night.”

“I don’t really care, Harry. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Hey, look, you should care. Cops can be brutal.”

She made a face.

“Oh, police brutality, yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

“I’m serious. It’s also against regs. On my part. I’m a D-three. Supervisor level.”

She looked at him a moment.

“Well, that’s your call, then. I’ll see you tonight. I hope.”

She got out and closed the door. Bosch drove on to his assigned parking slot and went into the detective bureau, trying not to think of the complications he might have just invited into his life.

It was deserted in the squad room, which was what he was hoping for. He wanted time alone with the case. There was still a lot of office work to do but he also wanted to step back and think about all the evidence and information that had been accumulated since the discovery of the bones.

The first thing to do was put together a list of what needed to be done. The murder book—the blue binder containing all written reports pertaining to the case—had to be completed. He had to draw up search warrants seeking medical records of brain surgeries at local hospitals. He had to run routine computer checks on all the residents living in the vicinity of the crime scene on Wonderland. He also had to read through all the call-in tips spawned by the media coverage of the bones on the hill and start gathering missing person and runaway reports that might match the victim.

He knew it was more than a day’s work if he labored by himself but decided to keep with his decision to allow Edgar the day off. His partner, the father of a thirteen-year-old boy, had been greatly upset by Golliher’s report the day before and Bosch wanted him to take a break. The days ahead would likely be long and just as emotionally upsetting.

Once Bosch had his list together he took his cup out of a drawer and went back to the watch office to get coffee. The smallest he had on him was a five-dollar bill but he put it in the coffee fund basket without taking any change. He figured he’d be drinking more than his share through the day.

“You know what they say?” someone said behind him as he was filling the cup.

Bosch turned. It was Mankiewicz, the watch sergeant.

“About what?”

“Fishing off the company dock.”

“I don’t know. What do they say?”

“I don’t know either. That’s why I was asking you.”

Mankiewicz smiled and moved toward the machine to warm up his cup.

So already it was starting to get around, Bosch thought. Gossip and innuendo—especially anything with a sexual tone—moved through a police station like a fire racing up a hill in August.

“Well, let me know when you find out,” Bosch said as he started for the door of the watch office. “Could be useful to know.”

“Will do. Oh, and one other thing, Harry.”

Bosch turned, ready for another shot from Mankiewicz.

“What?”

“Just stop fooling around and wrap up your case. I’m tired of my guys having to take all the calls.”

There was a facetious tone in his voice. In his humor and sarcasm was a legitimate complaint about his officers on the desk being tied up by the tip calls.

“Yeah, I know. Any good ones today?”

“Not that I could tell, but you’ll get to slog through the reports and use your investigative wiles to decide that.”

“Wiles?”

“Yes, wiles. Like Wile E. Coyote. Oh, and CNN must’ve had a slow morning and picked up the story—good video, all you brave guys on the hill with your makeshift stairs and little boxes of bones. So now we’re getting the long-distance calls. Topeka and Providence so far this morning. It’s not going to end until you clear it, Harry. We’re all counting on you back here.”

Again there was a smile—and a message—behind what he was saying.

“All right, I’ll use all my wiles. I promise, Mank.”

“That’s what we’re counting on.”

Back at the table Bosch sipped his coffee and let the details of the case move through his mind. There were anomalies, contradictions. There were the conflicts between location choice and method of burial noticed by Kathy Kohl. But the conclusions made by Golliher added even more to the list of questions. Golliher saw it as a child abuse case. But the backpack full of clothes was an indication that the victim, the boy, was possibly a runaway.

Bosch had spoken to Edgar about it the day before when they returned to the station from the SID lab. His partner was not as sure of the conflict as Bosch but offered a theory that perhaps the boy was the victim of child abuse both at the hands of his parents and then an unrelated killer. He rightfully pointed out that many victims of abuse run away only to be drawn into another form of abusive relationship. Bosch knew the theory was legitimate but tried not to let himself go down that road because he knew it was even more depressing than the scenario Golliher had spun.

His direct line rang and Bosch answered, expecting it to be Edgar or Lt. Billets checking in. It was a reporter from the
L.A. Times
named Josh Meyer. Bosch barely knew him and was sure he’d never given him the direct line. He didn’t let on that he was annoyed, however. Though tempted to tell the reporter that the police were running down leads extending as far as Topeka and Providence, he simply said there was no further update on the investigation since Friday’s briefing from the Media Relations office.

After he hung up he finished his first cup of coffee and got down to work. The part of an investigation Bosch enjoyed the least was the computer work. Whenever possible he gave it to his partners to handle. So he decided to put the computer runs at the end of his list and started with a quick look through the accumulated tip sheets from the watch office.