“What are you doing here? Where is Nicholas?”
They looked at the doorway from the kitchen to the living room. A short man in a suit who Bosch guessed was a lawyer and had to be Morton stood there. Bosch stood up.
“He’s dead. It looks like a suicide.”
“Where?”
“Master bath, but I wouldn’t-”
Morton was already gone, heading to the bathroom. Bosch called after him.
“Don’t touch anything.”
He nodded to Edgar to follow and make sure. Bosch sat back down and looked at the pages again. He wondered how long it took Trent to decide that killing himself was all that he had left and then to labor over the three-page note. It was the longest suicide note he had ever encountered.
Morton came back into the living room, Edgar just behind him. His face was ashen and his eyes held on the floor.
“I tried to tell you not to go back there,” Bosch said.
The lawyer’s eyes came up and fixed on Bosch. They filled with anger, which seemed to restore some color to Morton’s face.
“Are you people happy now? You completely destroyed him. Give a man’s secret to the vultures, they put it on the air and this is what you get.”
He gestured with a hand in the direction of the bathroom.
“Mr. Morton, you’ve got your facts wrong, but essentially it looks like that’s what happened. In fact, you’d probably be surprised by how much I agree with you.”
“Now that he’s dead, that must be very easy for you to say. Is that a note? Did he leave a note?”
Bosch got up and gestured for him to take his spot on the couch in front of the three pages.
“Just don’t touch the pages.”
Morton sat down, unfolded a pair of reading glasses and started studying the pages.
Bosch walked over to Edgar and said in a low voice, “I’m going to use the phone in the kitchen to make the calls.”
Edgar nodded.
“Better get Media Relations on it. The shit is going to hit that fan.”
“Yeah.”
Bosch picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and saw it had a redial button. He pushed it and waited. He recognized the voice that answered as Morton’s. It was an answering machine. Morton said he wasn’t home and to leave a message.
Bosch called Lt. Billets’s direct line. She answered right away and Bosch could tell she was eating.
“Well, I hate to break this to you while you’re eating, but we’re up here at Trent’s place. It looks like he killed himself.”
There was silence for a long moment and then she asked Bosch if he was sure.
“I’m sure he’s dead and I’m pretty sure he did it himself. Hung himself with a couple of wire hangers in the shower. There’s a three-page note here. He denies anything to do with the bones. He blames his death on Channel Four and the police mostly-me and Edgar in particular. You’re the first one I’ve called.”
“Well, we all know it wasn’t you who-”
“That’s okay, Lieutenant, I don’t need the absolution. What do you want me to do here?”
“You handle the routine call outs. I’ll call Chief Irving’s office and tell him what has transpired. This is going to get hot.”
“Yes. What about Media Relations? There’s already a gang of reporters out on the street.”
“I’ll call them.”
“Did you do anything about Thornton yet?”
“Already in the pipeline. The woman from IAD, Bradley, is running with it. With this latest thing, I’d bet Thornton not only leaked his way out of a job, but they might want to go after him with a charge of some kind.”
Bosch nodded. Thornton deserved it. He still had no second thoughts about the scam he had devised.
“All right, well, we’ll be here. For a while, at least.”
“Let me know if you find anything there that connects him to the bones.”
Bosch thought of the boots with the dirt in the treads and the skateboard.
“You got it,” he said.
Bosch clicked off the call and then immediately made calls to the coroner’s office and SID.
In the living room Morton had finished reading the note.
“Mr. Morton, when was the last time you talked to Mr. Trent?” Bosch asked.
“Last night. He called me at home after the news on Channel Four. His boss had seen it and called him.”
Bosch nodded. That accounted for the last call.
“You know his boss’s name?”
Morton pointed to the middle page on the table.
“Right here on the list. Alicia Felzer. She told him she was going to seek his termination. The studio makes movies for children. She couldn’t have him on a set with a child. You see? The leaking of his record to the media destroyed this man. You recklessly took a man’s existence and-”
“Let me ask the questions, Mr. Morton. You can save your outrage for when you go outside and talk to the reporters yourself, which I know you’ll do. What about that last page? He mentions the children. His children. What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. He obviously was emotionally distraught when he wrote this. It may mean nothing.”
Bosch remained standing, studying the attorney.
“Why did he call you last night?”
“Why do you think? To tell me you had been here, that it was all over the news, that his boss had seen it and wanted to fire him.”
“Did he say whether he buried that boy up there on the hill?”
Morton put on the best indignant look he could muster.
“He certainly said that he did not have a thing to do with it. He believed he was being persecuted for a past mistake, a very distant mistake, and I’d say he was correct about that.”
Bosch nodded.
“Okay, Mr. Morton, you can leave now.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not going to-”
“This house is now a crime scene. We are investigating your client’s death to confirm or deny it was by his own hand. You are no longer welcome here. Jerry?”
Edgar stepped over to the couch and waved Morton up.
“Come on. Time to go out there and get your face on TV. It’ll be good for business, right?”
Morton stood up and left in a huff. Bosch walked over to the front windows and pulled the curtain back a few inches. When Morton came down the side of the house to the driveway, he immediately walked to the center of the knot of reporters and started talking angrily. Bosch couldn’t hear what was said. He didn’t need to.
When Edgar came back into the room, Bosch told him to call the watch office and get a patrol car up to Wonderland for crowd control. He had a feeling that the media mob, like a virus replicating itself, was going to start growing bigger and hungrier by the minute.
Chapter 19
THEY found Nicholas Trent’s children when they searched his home following the removal of his body. Filling the entire two drawers of a small desk in the living room, a desk Bosch had not searched the night before, were files, photographs and financial records, including several thick bank envelopes containing canceled checks. Trent had been sending small amounts of money on a monthly basis to a number of charitable organizations that fed and
