AT two o’clock Friday afternoon Bosch and Edgar made their way through the squad room to the homicide table. They had driven from the Westside to Hollywood in virtual silence. It was the tenth day of the case. They were no closer to the killer of Arthur Delacroix than they had been during all the years that Arthur Delacroix’s bones had lain silently on the hillside above Wonderland Avenue. All they had to show for their ten days was a dead cop and the suicide of an apparently reformed pedophile.
As usual there was a stack of pink phone messages left for Bosch at his place. There was also an inter-office dispatch envelope. He picked up the envelope first, guessing he knew what was in it.
“About time,” he said.
He opened the envelope and slid his mini-cassette recorder out of it. He pushed the play button to check the battery. He immediately heard his own voice. He lowered the volume and turned off the device. He slipped it into his jacket pocket and dropped the envelope into the trash can by his feet.
He shuffled through the phone messages. Almost all were from reporters. Live by the media, die by the media, he thought. He would leave it to the Media Relations Office to explain to the world how a man who confessed to and was charged with a murder one day was exonerated and released the next.
“You know,” Bosch said to Edgar, “in Canada the cops don’t have to tell the media jack about a case until it’s over. It’s like a media blackout on every case.”
“Plus, they’ve got that round bacon up there,” Edgar replied. “What’re we doing here, Harry?”
There was a message from the family counselor at the medical examiner’s office telling Bosch that the remains of Arthur Delacroix had been released to his family for burial on Sunday. Bosch put it aside so he could call back to find out about the funeral arrangements and which member of the family had claimed the remains.
He went back to the messages and came upon a pink slip that immediately gave him pause. He leaned back in his chair and studied it, a tightness coming over his scalp and going down the back of his neck. The message came in at ten-thirty-five and was from a Lieutenant Bollenbach in the Office of Operations-the O-3 as it was more popularly known by the rank and file. The O-3 was where all personnel assignments and transfers were issued. A decade before when Bosch was moved to the Hollywood Division he had gotten the word after a forthwith from the O-3. Same thing with Kiz Rider going to RHD the year before.
Bosch thought about what Irving had said to him in the interview room three days earlier. He guessed that the O-3 was now about to begin an effort to achieve the deputy chief’s wish for Bosch’s retirement. He took the message as a sign he was being transferred out of Hollywood. His new assignment would likely involve some freeway therapy-a posting far from his home and requiring long drives each day to and from work. It was a frequently used management tool for convincing cops they might be better off turning in the badge and doing something else.
Bosch looked at Edgar. His partner was going through his own collection of phone messages, none of which appeared to have stopped him the way the one in Bosch’s hand had. He decided not to return the call yet or to tell Edgar about it. He folded the message and put it in his pocket. He took a look around the squad room, at all the bustling activity of the detectives. He would miss it if the new assignment wasn’t a posting with the same kind of ebb and flow of adrenaline. He didn’t care about freeway therapy. He could take the best punch they could give and not care. What he did care about was the job, the mission. He knew that without it he was lost.
He went back to the messages. The last one in the stack, meaning it was the first one received, was from Antoine Jesper in SID. He had called at ten that morning.
“Shit,” Bosch said.
“What?” Edgar said.
“I’m going to have to go downtown. I still have the dummy I borrowed last night in my trunk. I think Jesper needs it back.”
He picked up the phone and was about to call SID when he heard his and Edgar’s names called from the far end of the squad room. It was Lieutenant Billets. She signaled them to her office.
“Here we go,” Edgar said as he got up. “Harry, you can have the honors. You tell her where we’re at on this thing. More like where we aren’t at.”
Bosch did. In five minutes he brought Billets completely up to date on the case and its latest reversal and lack of progress.
“So where do we go from here?” she asked when he was finished.
“We start over, look at everything we’ve got, see what we missed. We go to the kid’s school, see what records they have, look at yearbooks, try to contact classmates. Things like that.”
Billets nodded. If she knew anything about the call from the O-3, she wasn’t letting on.
“I think the most important thing is that spot up there on the hill,” Bosch added.
“How so?”
“I think the kid was alive when he got up there. That’s where he was killed. We have to figure out what or who brought him up there. We’re going to have to go back in time on that whole street. Profile the whole neighborhood. It’s going to take time.”
She shook her head.
“Well, we don’t have time to work it full-time,” she said. “You guys just sat out of the rotation for ten days. This isn’t RHD. That’s the longest I’ve been able to hold a team out since I got here.”
“So we’re back in?”
She nodded.
“And right now it’s your up-the next case is yours.”
Bosch nodded. He had assumed that was coming. In the ten days they’d been working the case, the two other Hollywood homicide teams had both caught cases. It was now their turn. It was rare to get such a long ride on a divisional case anyway. It had been a luxury. Too bad they hadn’t turned the case, he thought.
Bosch also knew that by putting them back on the rotation Billets was making a tacit acknowledgment that she wasn’t expecting the case to clear. With each day that a case stayed open, the chances of clearing it dropped markedly. It was a given in homicide and it happened to everybody. There were no closers.
“Okay,” Billets said. “Anything else anybody wants to talk about?”
She looked at Bosch with a raised eyebrow. He suddenly thought maybe she did know something about the call from the O-3. He hesitated, then shook his head along with Edgar.
“Okay, guys. Thanks.”
They went back to the table and Bosch called Jesper.
“The dummy’s safe,” he said when the criminalist picked up the phone. “I’ll bring it down later today.”
“Cool, man. But that wasn’t why I called. I just wanted to tell you I can make a little refinement on that report I sent you on the skateboard. That is, if it still matters.”
Bosch hesitated for a moment.
“Not really, but what do you want to refine, Antoine?”
Bosch opened the murder book in front of him and leafed through it until he found the SID report. He looked at it as Jesper spoke.
“Well, in there I said we could put manufacture of the board between February of ’seventy-eight and June of ’eighty-six, right?”
“Right. I’m looking at it.”
“Okay, well, I can now cut more than half of that time period. This particular board was made between ’seventy-eight and ’eighty. Two years. I don’t know if that means anything to the case or not.”
Bosch scanned the report. Jesper’s amendment to the report didn’t really matter, since they had dropped Trent as a suspect and the skateboard had never been linked to Arthur Delacroix. But Bosch was curious about it, anyway.
“How’d you cut it down? Says here the same design was manufactured until ’eighty-six.”
“It was. But this particular board has a date on it. Nineteen eighty.”
Bosch was puzzled.
“Wait a minute. Where? I didn’t see any-”
“I took the trucks off-you know, the wheels. I had some time here between things and I wanted to see if there were any manufacture markings on the hardware. You know, patent or trademark coding. There weren’t. But then I saw that somebody had scratched the date in the wood. Like carved it in on the underside of the board and then it
