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.
There were about three dozen more sheets since he had last looked through the pile on Friday. None contained enough information to be helpful or worth pursuing at the moment. Each was from a parent or sibling or friend of someone who had disappeared. All of them permanently forlorn and seeking some kind of closure to the most pressing mystery of their lives.
He thought of something and rolled his chair over to one of the old IBM Selectrics. He inserted a sheet of paper and typed out four questions.
Do you know if your missing loved one underwent any kind of surgical procedure in the months before his disappearance?
If so, what hospital was he treated at?
What was the injury?
What was the name of his physician?
He rolled the page out and took it to the watch office. He gave it to Mankiewicz to be used as a template of questions to be asked of all callers about the bones.
“That wily enough for you?” Bosch asked.
“No, but it’s a start.”
While he was there Bosch took a plastic cup and filled it with coffee and then came back to the bureau and dumped it into his cup. He made a note to ask Lt. Billets on Monday to procure some help in contacting all the callers of the last few days to ask the same medical questions. He then thought of Julia Brasher. He knew she was off on Mondays and would volunteer if needed. But he quickly dismissed it, knowing that by Monday the whole station would know about them and bringing her into the case would make matters worse.
He started the search warrants next. It was a matter of routine in homicide work to need medical records in the course of an investigation. Most often these records came from physicians and dentists. But hospitals were not unusual. Bosch kept a file with search warrant templates for hospitals as well as a listing of all twenty-nine hospitals in the Los Angeles area and the attorneys who handled legal filings at each location. Having all of this handy allowed him to draw up twenty-nine search warrants in a little over an hour. The warrants sought the records of all male patients under the age of sixteen who underwent brain surgery entailing the use of a trephine drill between 1975 and 1985.
After printing out the requests he put them in his briefcase. While normally it was proper on a weekend to fax a search warrant to a judge’s home for approval and signature, it would certainly not be acceptable to fax twenty- nine requests to a judge on a Sunday afternoon. Besides, the hospital lawyers would not be available on a Sunday anyway. Bosch’s plan was to take the warrants to a judge first thing Monday morning, then divide them with Edgar and hand-deliver them to the hospitals, thereby being able to push the urgency of the matter with the lawyers in person. Even if things went according to plan, Bosch didn’t expect to start receiving returns of records from the hospitals until mid-week or later.
Bosch next typed out a daily case summary as well as a recap of the anthropological information from Golliher. He put these in the murder book and then typed up an evidence report detailing the preliminary SID findings on the backpack.
When he was finished Bosch leaned back and thought about the unreadable letter that had been found in the backpack. He did not anticipate that the documents section would have any success with it. It would forever be the mystery shrouded in the mystery of the case. He gulped the last of his second cup of coffee and opened the murder book to the page containing a copy of the crime scene sketch and chart. He studied the chart and noted that the backpack had been found right next to the spot Kohl had marked as the probable original location of the body.
Bosch wasn’t sure what it all meant but instinctively he knew that the questions he now had about the case should be kept foremost in his mind as new evidence and details continued to be gathered. They would be the screen through which everything would be sifted.
He put the report into the murder book and then finished the updating of the paperwork by bringing the investigator’s log-an hour-by-hour time chart with small entry blocks-up to date. He then put the murder book in his briefcase.
Bosch took his coffee cup to the sink in the rest room and washed it out. He then returned it to its drawer, picked up his briefcase and headed out the back door to his car.
Chapter 13
THE basement of Parker Center, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, serves as the record archives for every case the department has taken a report on in the modern era. Until the mid-nineties records were kept on paper for a period of eight years and then transferred to microfiche for permanent storage. The department now used computers for permanent storage and was also moving backward, putting older files into digital storage banks. But the process was slow and had not gone further back than the late eighties.
Bosch arrived at the counter in archives at one o’clock. He had two containers of coffee with him and two roast beef sandwiches from Philippe’s in a paper bag. He looked at the clerk and smiled.
“Believe it or not I need to see the fiche on missing person reports, nineteen seventy-five to ’eighty-five.”
The clerk, an old guy with a basement pallor, whistled and said, “Look out, Christine, here they come.”
Bosch smiled and nodded and didn’t know what the man was talking about. There appeared to be no one else behind the counter.
“The good news is they break up,” the clerk said. “I mean, I think it’s good news. You looking for adult or juvy records?”
“Juveniles.”
“Then that cuts it up a bit.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
The clerk disappeared from the counter and Bosch waited. In four minutes the man came back with ten small envelopes containing microfiche sheets for the years Bosch requested. Altogether the stack was at least four inches thick.
Bosch went to a microfiche reader and copier, set out a sandwich and the two coffees and took the second sandwich back to the counter. The clerk refused the first offer but then took the sandwich when Bosch said it was from Philippe’s.
Bosch went back to the machine and started fiche-ing, wading first into the year 1985. He was looking for missing person and runaway reports of young males in the age range of the victim. Once he got proficient with the machine he was able to move quickly through the reports. He would scan first for the “closed” stamp that indicated the missing individual had returned home or been located. If there was no stamp his eyes would immediately go to the age and sex boxes on the form. If they fit the profile of his victim, he’d read the summary and then push the photocopy button on the machine to get a hard copy to take with him.
The microfiche also contained records of missing person reports forwarded to the LAPD by outside agencies seeking people believed to have gone to Los Angeles.
Despite his speed at the task, it took Bosch more than three hours to go through all the reports for the ten years he had requested. He had hard copies of more than three hundred reports in the tray to the side of the machine when he was finished. And he had no idea whether his effort had been worth the time or not.
