The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (13 page)

Of course, the tunnel was much bigger and wider and was well lit in comparison to the tunnels of his past and those of his dreams. He was also not alone in his predicament. The passage was wall to wall with cars and trucks—a river of steel under the river of water, only one of them flowing at the moment. But a tunnel is a tunnel and soon the chest-tightening feeling of claustrophobia took hold. Bosch started to sweat and impatiently honked the horn of his rental in impotent protest. This apparently only served to identify him as an outsider. The locals didn’t honk, they did not rail against that which they could not change.

Eventually, traffic started moving and he finally emerged, lowering his window to let in the fresh air. He made a mental note to find a map and then chart a way back to the airport that did not include going through a tunnel. Too bad the car’s GPS didn’t have a No Tunnels setting. He would have to find his way back to the airport on his own.

The LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit’s travel protocol called for Bosch to check in with the local authorities immediately upon arrival in another city. In this case that would be the District E-13 offices of the Boston Police Department in Jamaica Plain. This was the district that included the address Bosch had for Edward Paisley, the man whose DNA Bosch had come to take—surreptitiously or not.

Bosch, however, often trampled on the official cold case protocol. He usually followed his own protocol, which involved getting the lay of the land first and maybe putting an eye on his quarry—then going in to meet and greet the local constabulary.

Bosch planned to check out Paisley’s address, maybe get a first look at him, and then check into the room at Courtyard by Marriott he had reserved on Expedia. He might even take a short nap after check-in, to make up for the lost sleep on the flight out. In the early afternoon he would go to District E-13 and tell the captain or major in charge that he was in from L.A. on a fifteen-year-old cold case murder. He would then most likely be paired with a divisional detective who had fallen from favor with command staff. Squiring around a visiting detective following a lead on a 1990 cold case was not a choice assignment.

Two nights before, at a bar on Warren Street in Roxbury, Dontelle Howe had asked Patrick Kenzie, “You got kids?”

Patrick half nodded, a bit confused on how to answer. “One on the way.”

“When?”

“Any day now.”

Dontelle Howe smiled. He was a trim black man in his early thirties, with close-cropped dreads and clothes so crisp you could smell the starch from two rooms away. “First?”

Patrick nodded.

“Ain’t you a little old?” Dontelle took another dainty sip from the one brandy he allowed himself every weeknight. Weekends, he’d assured Patrick, he could drink his weight in Henney, but weeknights and Sundays he kept his limit at one because every morning he drove a bus full of forty-five children from their homes all over the city to Dearborn Middle School in Roxbury, about two blocks from the bar where he’d agreed to meet Patrick after work.

“A little old?” Patrick checked himself in the bar mirror—a little grayer, okay, a little heavier, fine, a little less on top than he would have hoped, sure, but not bad for forty. Particularly forty years lived as hard as he’d lived his. Either that, or he was bullshitting himself, which was just as likely. “You don’t look like you’ll be auditioning for any boy bands yourself, Dontelle.”

“But I already got two in grade school. Time they’re in college and me and the woman are kicking it somewhere in Florida? I’ll
be
your age.”

Patrick chuckled and drank some beer.

Dontelle Howe’s voice grew deeper, more somber. “So no one’s looking for her?
Still?
”

Patrick made a mezza-mezza motion with his hand. “Police think it’s a custody thing. Father’s a real piece of shit, and no one can find him. No one can find her, either, so they think it’s a case of one plus one equals she’ll turn up.”

“But she’s twelve, man.”

“She” was Chiffon Henderson, a seventh-grader Dontelle Howe picked up every morning from the Bromley-Heath Housing projects in Jamaica Plain and dropped off nine hours later in the same spot. Three nights ago, Chiffon had left her bedroom in the back of the unit she shared with two sisters and her mother. The leaving wasn’t in dispute; the question of whether it had been voluntary was. She’d exited through a window. No signs of struggle or forced entry, though her mother had told police that Chiffon often left her window open on a mild night even though she’d been warned a thousand times not to. The police were focusing on Chiffon’s father, Lonnie Cullen, a deadbeat dad four times over to four different households, who hadn’t checked in with his parole officer this past weekend and couldn’t be found at his last known address. There was also some talk that Chiffon may have started seeing a boy who lived in one of the other buildings in the projects, though no one knew his name or much about him.

Chiffon’s mother, Ella Henderson, worked two jobs. By day she checked in patients for four ob-gyn partners at Beth Israel; nights she cleaned offices. She was a poster child for the burdens of the working poor—so much time spent trying to feed your kids and keep the lights on that you never spent any time with them until the day they told you it was too late to start trying.

Two days ago, she’d checked in Patrick’s wife, Angie, for her final appointment before their child, expected to enter the world a week from today, would be delivered. As Ella Henderson double-checked the insurance info and verified the parents’ dates of birth, she began to weep. It was weeping without drama or noise, just a steady stream even as her polite smile remained in place and her eyes remained fixed on her computer screen.

Half an hour later, Patrick had agreed to ask around about her daughter. The lead cop on the case, Detective Emily Zebrowski, had a current caseload of twelve open investigations. She told Patrick she welcomed his help, but she saw no evidence of an abduction. She admitted if it were an abduction, Chiffon’s bedroom was the place to do one, though—a tall elm towered over her window and those above her; her building was at the rear of the Heath Street complex and the city was five months behind replacing bulbs in the lamps back there that had been shot out by drunken persons unknown on New Year’s. Emily Zebrowski told Patrick, however, that no one heard a peep that night from Chiffon Henderson’s bedroom. People rarely vanished involuntarily, the detective said; that was more something you saw on TV than encountered in the real world.

“So your operating theory?” he’d asked.

“Her father,” Detective Zebrowski said. “Guy’s got priors the way other guys have nose hair.”

“To what end?”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s a scumbag,” Patrick said, “I get it. But his scumbaggedness makes sense usually, right? There’s motive behind it. He steals one of his kids, he wants to get paid or get the mother off his back for something. But here the mother’s got no money, she’s never sued him for child support or alimony, and what guy with his psychological makeup wants to bring his twelve-year-old daughter back to his spot, have her ragging on him from dawn to dusk?”

Detective Zebrowski shrugged. “You think d-bags like Lonnie Cullen think things through before they do them? If they did, they wouldn’t know the number on their orange jumpsuits better than their own birthdays. He did it because he’s a criminal and he’s an idiot and he has less impulse control than a flea at a livestock auction.”

“And the boyfriend angle?”

“Looking into it.”

Two nights ago Dontelle said to Patrick, “But you don’t believe it?”

Patrick shrugged. “Deadbeat dads dodge their kids, they don’t kidnap ’em, not the ones who’ve been out of the picture as long as Lonnie has. As for the boyfriend theory, she’s, what, shacked up with him for three days, they never go out to grab a bite, call a friend?”

“All I know,” Dontelle said, “is she seemed like a sweet kid. Not one of them typical project girls who’s always frontin’, talkin’ shit. She was quiet but . . . considerate, you know?”

Patrick took another drink of beer. “No. Tell me.”

“Well, you get a job like mine, you got to do a probation period—ninety days during which they can shitcan you without cause. After that, you with the city, man, gotta fuck up huge
and
be named Bin Laden for the city be able to get rid of your ass. I hit my ninety a couple weeks ago and not only did Chiffon congratulate me, she gave me a cupcake.”

“No shit?” Patrick smiled.

“Store-bought,” Dontelle said, “but still. How sweet is that?”

“Pretty sweet.” Patrick nodded.

“You’ll see in about twelve years with your kid, they ain’t too into thinking about others at that age. It’s all about what’s going on up here”—he tapped his head—“and down there”—he pointed at his groin.

They drank in silence for a minute.

“Nothing else you remember about that day? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

He shook his head. “Just a day like any other—‘See you tomorrow, Chiffon,’ and she say, ‘See you tomorrow, Dontelle.’ And off she walk.”

Patrick thanked him and paid for the drinks. He was scooping his change off the bar when he said, “You had a probationary period?”

Dontelle nodded. “Yeah, it’s standard.”

“No, I know, but I guess I was wondering why you started so late in the school year. I mean, it’s May. Means you started in, what, February?”

Another nod. “End of January, yeah.”

“What’d you do before that?”

“Drove a tour bus. Drove from here to Florida, here to Montreal, here to P-Town, all depended on the season. Hours were killing me. Shit, the
road
was killing me. This job opened up, I jumped.”

“Why’d it open up?”

“Paisley got a duey.”

“Paisley?”

“Guy I replaced. Other drivers told me he was a piece of work, man. Show up with forty kids in his charge, eyes all glassy. Even the union wouldn’t protect him after the last time. Drove the bus off the side of the Legion Highway, right?” Dontelle was laughing in disbelief. “Damn near tipped it. Gets out to take a piss. This is at six-thirty in the ante meridiem, feel me? He gets back in, tries to pull back off the shoulder, but now the bus
does
tip. That’s Lawsuit City there, man. Forty times over.”

“Paisley,” Patrick said.

“Edward Paisley,” Dontelle said, “like the ties.”

Paisley lived on Wyman Street in a gray row house with fading white trim. There was a front porch with an old couch on it. Bosch drove by the place and then circled the block and went by again before finding a parking space at the curb a half block away. By adjusting his side-view mirror he had a bead on the front door and porch. He liked doing one-man surveillances this way. If somebody was looking for a watcher they usually checked windshields. Parking with his back to his target made him harder to see. Edward Paisley may have had nothing to do with the murder of Letitia Williams all those years ago. But if he did, he hadn’t survived the last fifteen years without checking windshields and being cautious.

All Bosch was hoping for, and that he’d be happy with, was to see some activity at the home to confirm that Paisley was at the address. If he got lucky, Paisley would go out and grab a cup of coffee or a bite to eat at lunch. Bosch would be able to get all the DNA he’d need off a discarded cup or a pizza crust. Maybe Paisley was a smoker. A cigarette butt would do the trick as well.

Harry pulled a file out of the locking briefcase he took on trips and opened it to look at the enlargement of the photo he’d pulled the day before from the Massachusetts RMV. It was taken three years earlier. Paisley was white, balding, and then fifty-three years old. He no longer had the driver’s license, thanks to the suspension that followed the DUI arrest six months ago. Paisley tipped a school bus and then blew a point-oh-two on the machine and with it blew his job with the school district and possibly his freedom. The arrest put his fingerprints into the system, where they were waiting for Bosch. Sometimes Harry got lucky that way. If he had pulled the Williams case eleven months earlier and submitted the prints collected at the crime scene for electronic comparison, there would have been no resulting match. But Bosch pulled the case four months ago and here he was in Boston.

Two hours into his surveillance Bosch had seen no sign of Paisley and was growing restless. Perhaps Paisley had left the house for the day before Bosch could set up on the street. Bosch could be wasting his time, watching an empty house. He decided to get out and do a walk-by. He’d seen a convenience store a block past the target address. He could walk by Paisley’s address, eyeball the place up close, then go down and pick up a newspaper and a gallon of milk. Back at the car he would pour the milk into the gutter and keep the jug handy if he had to urinate. It could be a long day watching the house.

The paper would come in handy as well. He’d be able to check the late baseball scores. The Dodgers had gone into extra innings the night before against the hated Giants and Bosch had gotten on the plane not knowing the game’s outcome.

But at the last moment Bosch decided to stay put. He watched a dinged-up Jeep Cherokee pull into a curbside slot directly across the street from his own position. There was a lone man in the car and what made Bosch curious was that he never got out. He stayed slumped a bit in his seat and appeared to be keeping an eye on the same address as Bosch.

Bosch could see he was on a cell phone when he first arrived, but then for the next hour the man remained behind the wheel of his Jeep, simply watching the goings-on on the street. He was too young to be Paisley. Late thirties or early forties, wearing a baseball cap and a thin gray hoodie over a dark blue graphic T. Something about the cap gave Bosch pause until he realized it was the first one he’d seen in a city filled with them that didn’t have a
B
on it. Instead it had what appeared to be a crooked smiley face on it, though Bosch couldn’t be positive from the other side of the street. It looked to Bosch like the guy was waiting for somebody, possibly the same somebody Bosch was waiting for.