Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories

before it was his turn to speak for the dead.

“I just want to see what they did,” he tried to explain. “See how they worked it. Most of these cases, they coulda-shoulda been cleared back in the day.”

“Well, you have till I’m finished with this summary,” Rider cautioned. “After that we better get flying on something, Harry.”

Bosch blew out his breath in mock indignation and flipped a large section of summaries and other reports over in the binder until he got to the back. He then turned to the tab marked FORENSICS and looked at an evidence inventory report.

“Okay, we’ve got latents, you happy?”

Rider looked up from her computer for the first time.

“That could work,” she said. “Tied to the suspect?”

Bosch flipped back to the evidence report to look for the summary ascribed to the specific evidence logged in the inventory. He found a one-paragraph explanation that said a right palm print had been located on the wall of the bathroom where the body had been found. Its location was sixty-six inches from the floor and seven inches right of center above the toilet.

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“It’s a palm.”

She groaned.

It was not a good hook. Databases containing palm prints were relatively new in law enforcement. Only in the past decade had palm prints been seriously collected by the FBI and the California Department of Justice. In California there were approximately ten thousand palms on file compared with the millions of fingerprints. The Wilkins murder was thirty-three years old. What were the chances that the person who had left a palm print on the wall of the victim’s bathroom would be printed two decades or more later? Ride'ju later?r had answered that one with her groan.

“It’s still worth a shot,” Bosch said optimistically. “I’ll put in the SID request.”

“You do that. Meantime, as soon as I’m done here I’ll see if I can find a case with a real hook we can run with.”

“Hold your horses, Kiz. I still haven’t run any of the names out of the book. Give me today with this and then we’ll see.”

“Not good to get emotionally involved, Harry,” she responded. “The Laura syndrome, you know.”

“It’s not like that. I’m just curious. It was sort of my first case.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“You know what I mean. I remember thinking she was an old lady when the detectives gave me the rundown on it. But she was only forty-six. I was half her age, so I thought anybody forty-six was old and had had a good run of it. I didn’t feel too bad about it.”

“Now you do.”

“Forty-six was too young, Kiz.”

“Well, you’re not going to bring her back.”

Bosch nodded.

“I know that.”

“You ever seen that movie?”

“Laura? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Detective falls in love with the murder victim. You?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t hold up too well. Sort of a parlor room murder case. I liked the Burt Reynolds take on it in the eighties. Sharky’s Machine. With Rachel Ward. You seen it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Had Bernie Casey in it. When I was a youngster I always thought he was a fine-looking man.”

Bosch looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Before I switched teams,” she said. “Then I rented it a couple years ago and Bernie didn’t do it for me. I liked Rachel Ward.”

Her bringing up her sexuality seemed to put an uneasiness between them. She turned back to her computer. Bosch looked down at the evidence report.

“Well, we know one thing,” he said after a while. “We’re looking for a left-handed man.”

She turned back to look at him.

“How do you know that?”

“He put his right hand on the wall over the toilet.”

“And?”

“It’s just like a gun, Kiz. He aimed with his left hand because he’s left-handed.”

She shook her head dismissively.

“Men…”

She went back to work on her computer, and Bosch went back to the murder book. He wrote down the information he would need to give to the latent prints section of the Scientific Investigation Division in order for a tech to look up the palm print in their files. He then asked if Rider wanted him to pick her up a coffee or a soda from the cafeteria while he was floating around the building. She said no and he was off. He took the murder book with him.

Bosch filled out the comparison request forms and gave them to a print tech named Larkin. He was one of the older, more experienced techs. Bosch had gone to him before and knew that he would move quickly with the request.

“Let’s hope we hit the jackpot, Harry,” Larkin said as he took the forms.

It was true that there was always a sense of excitement when you put an old print into a computer and let it ride. It was like pulling the lever on a slot machine. The jackpot payoff was a match, a cold hit in police parlance.

After leaving SID Bosch went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to finish reading through the murder book. He decided he could handle the constant background noise of the cafeteria better than he could the intrusive questions from Kiz Rider.

He understood where his partner was coming from. She wanted to choose their cases dispassionately from the thousands that were open. Her concern was that if they went down a path in which Bosch was exorcizing ghosts or choosing cases with personal attachments, they would burn out sooner rather than later.

But Bosch was not as concerned. He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her.

The killing of June Wilkins was as horrible as it was cunning. The woman was bound hands and feet with a dog collar and a leash and then drowned in the tub. Her dog was treated to the same death. The autopsy showed no bruising or injuries on Wilkins suggestive of a struggle. But analysis of blood and tissue samples taken during autopsy indicated that she had been drugged with a veterinary paralytic. It meant that it was likely that Wilkins was conscious but unable to move her muscles to fight or defend herself when she was submerged in the water in the bathtub. Analysis of the dog’s blood found that the animal ith the anhad been drugged with the same substance.

A textbook investigation followed the murder but it ultimately led to no arrests or the identification of a suspect. June Wilkins had lived alone. She had been divorced and had one child, a college student who went to school in Philadelphia. June worked as an assistant to a casting director in an office in a building at Hollywood and Vine, but had been on a two-week vacation at the time of her death.

No evidence was found that she’d had an ongoing romantic relationship or that there were any hard feelings from a former relationship. It appeared to neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers and family members that the love of her life was her dog, a miniature poodle named Frenchy.

The dog was also the focus of her life. He was of pure breed, and the only travel Wilkins did in the year most