push him over.
“You didn’t forget that William was in the car, did you, Stephen?”
Helton didn’t answer. He buried his face in his hands again. Bosch leaned forward so that he only had to whisper.
“You left him there and you knew what was going to happen. You planned it. That’s why you didn’t bother running ads for a new nanny. You knew you weren’t going to need one.”
Helton remained silent and unmoving. Bosch kept working him, changing tacks and offering sympathy now.
“It’s understandable,” he said. “I mean, what kind of life would that kid have had anyway? Some might even call this a mercy killing. The kid falls asleep and never wakes up. I’ve worked these kinds of cases before, Stephen. It’s actually not a bad way to go. It sounds bad but it isn’t. You just get tired and you go to sleep.”
Helton kept his face in his hands but he shook his head. Bosch didn’t know if he was denying it still or shaking off something else. He waited and the delay paid off.
“It was her idea,” Helton said in a quiet voice. “She’s the one who couldn’t take it anymore.”
In that moment Bosch knew he had him but he showed nothing. He kept working it.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “She said she had nothing to do with it, that this was your idea and your plan and that when she called you it was to talk you out of it.”
Helton dropped his hands with a slap on the table.
“That’s a lie! It was her! She was embarrassed that we had a kid like that! She couldn’t take him anywhere and we couldn’t go anywhere! He was ruining our lives and she told me I had to do something about it! She told me ho e told w to do something about it! She said I would be saving two lives while sacrificing only one.”
Bosch pulled back across the table. It was done. It was over.
“Okay, Stephen, I think I understand. And I want to hear all about it. But at this point I need to inform you of your rights. After that, if you want to talk, we’ll talk and I’ll listen.”
When Bosch came out of the interview room Ignacio Ferras was there waiting for him in the hallway. His partner raised his fist and Bosch tapped his knuckles with his own fist.
“That was beautiful,” Ferras said. “You walked him right down the road.”
“Thanks,” Bosch said. “Let’s hope the DA is impressed, too.”
“I don’t think we’ll have to worry.”
“Well, there will be no worries if you go into the other room and turn the wife now.”
Ferras looked surprised.
“You still want me to take the wife?”
“She’s yours. Let’s walk them into the DA as bookends.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Good. Go check the equipment and make sure we’re still recording in there. I’ve got to go make a quick call.”
“You got it, Harry.”
Bosch walked into the squad room and sat down at his desk. He checked his watch and knew it would be early in Hong Kong. He pulled out his cell phone anyway, and sent a call across the Pacific.
His daughter answered with a cheerful hello. Bosch knew he wouldn’t even have to say anything and he would feel fulfilled by just the sound of her voice saying the one word.
“Hey, baby, it’s me,” he said.
“Daddy!” she exclaimed. “Happy Father’s Day!”
And Bosch realized in that moment that he was indeed a happy man.
Angle of Investigation
THEN
“This is all because of Manson,” Eckersly said.
Bosch looked across the seat at his training partner, unsure of what he meant.
“Charles Manson?”
“You know,
Bosch nodded, though he still didn’t get it. He looked out the windshield. They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Almost all of the neighborhoods in Wilshire were unfamiliar to him but that was okay. Eckersly had been working patrol in the division for four years. He knew the neighborhoods.
“Somebody doesn’t answer the phone, and back east they think Squeaky and the rest of Charlie’s girls have broken in and chopped them up or something,” Eckersly continued. “We get a lot of these ‘check the lady’ calls. Nearly four years now and people still think L.A.’s been turned over to the nuts.”
Bosch had been away from the world when Manson and his people had done their thing. So he didn’t have a proper read on what the murders had done to the city. When he had come back from Vietnam he had felt an edginess in L.A. that had not been there before he left. But he didn’t know whether that was because of the changes he had been through or the ones the city had been through.
South of Santa Monica they took a left on Fourth Street and Bosch started reading numbers off of mailboxes. In a few seconds Eckersly pulled the squad car to a stop in front of a small bungalow with a driveway down the side to a single garage in the back. They both got out, Bosch taking his nightstick out of the plastic pipe on the door and sliding it into the ring on his equipment belt.
“Oh, you won’t need that,” Eckersly said. “Unless you want to use it to knock on the door.”
Bosch turned back to the car to put the club back.
“Come on, come on,” Eckersly said. “I didn’t tell you to put it back. I just said you wouldn’t need it.”
Bosch hustled to catch up to him on the flagstone walkway leading to the front door. He walked with both hands on his belt. He was still getting used to the weight and the awkward bulk of it. When he was in Vietnam his job had been to go into the tunnels. He’d kept his body profile as trim as possible. No equipment belt. He carried all of his equipment-a flashlight and a forty-five-in his hands.
Eckersly had sat out the war in a patrol car. He was eight years older than Bosch and had that many years on the job. He was taller and heavier than Bosch and carried the weight and bulk of his equipment belt with a practiced ease. He signaled to Bosch to knock on the front door, as if that took training. Bosch knocked three times with his fist.
“Like this,” Eckersly corrected.
He rapped sharply on the door.
“Police, Mrs. Wilkins, can you come to the door, please?”
His fist and voice had a certain authority. A tone. That was what he was trying to teach his rookie partner.
Bosch nodded. He understood the lesson. He looked around and saw that the windows were all closed even though it was a nice cool morning. Nobody answered the door.
“You smell that?” he asked Eckersly.
“Smell what?”
The one area where Bosch didn’t need any training from Eckersly was in the smell of death. He had spent two tours in the dead zone. In the tunnels the enemy put their dead into the walls. Death was always in the air.
“Somebody’s dead,” Bosch said. “I’ll check around back.”
He stepped off the front porch and took the driveway to the rear of the property. The odor was stronger back here. To Bosch, at least. The dispatcher on the radio had said June Wilkins lived alone and hadn’t answered phone calls from her daughter in Philadelphia for seven days.
