Edgar handed Bosch another photo. It showed Arthur standing next to a tall blond man who looked faintly familiar to Bosch. He showed the photo to Sheila.
“Is this your father?”
“Yes, it’s him.”
“He looks familiar. Was he ever-”
“He’s an actor. Was, actually. He was on some television shows in the sixties and a few things after that, some movie parts.”
“Not enough to make a living?”
“No, he always had to work other jobs. So we could live.”
Bosch nodded and handed the photo back to Edgar but Sheila reached across the coffee table and intercepted it.
“I don’t want that one to leave, please. I don’t have many photos of my father.”
“Fine,” Bosch said. “Could we go look for the birth certificate now?”
“I’ll go look. You can stay here.”
She got up and left the room again, and Edgar took the opportunity to show Bosch some of the other photos he had taken to keep during the investigation.
“It’s him, Harry,” he whispered. “I got no doubt.”
He showed him a photo of Arthur Delacroix that had apparently been taken for school. His hair was combed neatly and he wore a blue blazer and tie. Bosch studied the boy’s eyes. They reminded him of the photo of the boy from Kosovo he had found in Nicholas Trent’s house. The boy with the thousand-yard stare.
“I found it.”
Sheila Delacroix came into the room carrying an envelope and unfolding a yellowed document. Bosch looked at it for a moment and then copied down the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of her parents.
“Thanks,” he said. “You and Arthur had the same parents, right?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, Sheila, thank you. We’re going to go. We’ll call you as soon as we know something for sure.”
He stood up and so did Edgar.
“All right if we borrow these photos?” Edgar asked. “I will personally see that you get them back.”
“Okay, if you need them.”
They headed to the door and she opened it. While still on the threshold Bosch asked her one last question.
“Sheila, have you always lived here?”
She nodded.
“All my life. I’ve stayed here in case he comes back, you know? In case he doesn’t know where to start and comes here.”
She smiled but not in any way that imparted humor. Bosch nodded and stepped outside behind Edgar.
Chapter 25
BOSCH walked up to the museum ticket window and told the woman sitting behind it his name and that he had an appointment with Dr. William Golliher in the anthropology lab. She picked up a phone and made a call. A few minutes later she rapped on the glass with her wedding band until it drew the attention of a nearby security guard. He came over and the woman instructed him to escort Bosch to the lab. He did not have to pay the admission.
The guard said nothing as they walked through the dimly lit museum, past the mammoth display and the wall of wolf skulls. Bosch had never been inside the museum, though he had gone to the La Brea Tar Pits often on field trips when he was a child. The museum was built after that, to house and display all of the finds that bubbled up out of the earth in the tar pits.
When Bosch had called Golliher’s cell phone after receiving the medical records on Arthur Delacroix, the anthropologist said he was already working on another case and couldn’t get downtown to the medical examiner’s office until the next day. Bosch had said he couldn’t wait. Golliher said he did have copies of the X-rays and photographs from the Wonderland case with him. If Bosch could come to him, he could make the comparisons and give an unofficial response.
Bosch took the compromise and headed to the tar pits while Edgar remained at Hollywood Division working the computer to see if he could locate Arthur and Sheila Delacroix’s mother as well as run down Arthur’s friend Johnny Stokes.
Now Bosch was curious as to what the new case was that Golliher was working. The tar pits were an ancient black hole where animals had gone to their death for centuries. In a grim chain reaction, animals caught in the miasma became prey for other animals, who in turn were mired and slowly pulled down. In some form of natural equilibrium the bones now came back up out of the blackness and were collected for study by modern man. All of this took place right next to one of the busiest streets in Los Angeles, a constant reminder of the crushing passage of time.
Bosch was led through two doors and into the crowded lab where the bones were identified, classified, dated and cleaned. There appeared to be boxes of bones everywhere on every flat surface. A half dozen people in white lab coats worked at stations, cleaning and examining the bones.
Golliher was the only one not in a lab coat. He had on another Hawaiian shirt, this one with parrots on it, and was working at a table in the far corner. As Bosch approached, he saw there were two wooden bone boxes on the worktable in front of him. In one of the boxes was a skull.
“Detective Bosch, how are you?”
“Doing okay. What’s this?”
“This, as I’m sure you can tell, is a human skull. It and some other human bones were collected two days ago from asphalt that was actually excavated thirty years ago to make room for this museum. They’ve asked me to take a look before they make the announcement.”
“I don’t understand. Is it… old or… from thirty years ago?”
“Oh, it’s quite old. It was carbon-dated to nine thousand years ago, actually.”
Bosch nodded. The skull and the bones in the other box looked like mahogany.
“Take a look,” Golliher said and he lifted the skull out of the box.
He turned it so that the rear of the skull faced Bosch. He moved his finger in a circle around a star fracture near the top of the skull.
“Look familiar?”
“Blunt-force fracture?”
“Exactly. Much like your case. Just goes to show you.”
He gently replaced the skull in the wooden box.
“Show me what?”
“Things don’t change that much. This woman-at least we think it was a woman-was murdered nine thousand years ago, her body probably thrown into the tar pit as a means of covering the crime. Human nature, it doesn’t change.”
Bosch stared at the skull.
“She’s not the first.”
Bosch looked up at Golliher.
“In nineteen fourteen the bones-a more complete skeleton, actually-of another woman were found in the tar. She had the same star fracture in the same spot on her skull. Her bones were carbon-dated as nine thousand years old. Same time frame as her.”
He nodded to the skull in the box.
“So, what are you saying, Doc, that there was a serial killer here nine thousand years ago?”
“It’s impossible to know that, Detective Bosch. All we have are the bones.”
Bosch looked down at the skull again. He thought about what Julia Brasher had said about his job, about his taking evil out of the world. What she didn’t know was a truth he had known for too long. That true evil could never
