“If you give me trouble, you will wind up in the gutter,” the General said. He raised his voice so angrily that he did not hear the familiar wheeze and grunt of the school bus stopping.
“Give me back my son,” said Manuel.
“You have no son.”
“He was ten years old, a mere boy, no bigger than Alejandro.”
“I know nothing of him.” But the General remembered the bodies in the plaza, men and women and other, smaller corpses — they had spared no living thing, not even the chickens and donkeys. And what did a few peasants more or less matter? The hills were full of bandits and rebels.
“I was gone on the day of the massacre,” said Manuel. “I came home to find them all dead.”
“It was war,” said the General. “It was an accident of war.”
Now Manuel gave a thin, ghastly smile. “You drink blood,” he said.
“That’s enough.” The General slipped his hand into his pocket for the stubby handgun that never left his side.
Manuel took a step toward him. He was so unsteady that he lurched against one of the ornamental planters beside the pool. “Give me back my son,” he cried in a voice fit to wake the dead. “Before I die, give me my son.”
He took another step, and it seemed to the General that the old man was covered in blood, that he had risen from the wet red ground of Santa Lucia de Piedras or from the filth of the interrogation room, that he was advancing irresistibly. The General raised his pistol, and, though he heard a cry at the very periphery of his awareness, he fired.
Manuel’s hat was flung off; his white shirt blossomed red, and he collapsed at the edge of the pool, his blood spoiling the pure aquamarine of the water. He looked past the General and struggled to say one last thing, his throat already rattling: “You see now what your father is.”
And the General knew, even before he turned around, that Manuel spoke to Alejandro.
A FINE MIST OF BLOOD
BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
The DNA hits came in the mail, in yellow envelopes from the regional crime lab’s genetics unit. Fingerprint matches were less formal; notification usually came by e-mail. Case-to-case data hits were rare birds and were handled in yet a different manner — direct contact between the synthesizer and the submitting investigator.
Harry Bosch had a day off and was in the waiting area outside the school principal’s office when he got the call. More like a half a day off. His plan was to head downtown to the PAB after dealing with the summons from the school’s high command.
The buzzing of his phone brought an immediate response from the woman behind the gateway desk.
“There’s no cell phones in here,” she said.
“I’m not a student,” Bosch said, stating the obvious as he pulled the offending instrument from his pocket.
“Doesn’t matter. There’s no cell phones in here.”
“I’ll take it outside.”
“I won’t come out to find you. If you miss your appointment then you’ll have to reschedule, and your daughter’s situation won’t be resolved.”
“I’ll risk it. I’ll just be in the hallway, okay?”
He pushed through the door into the hallway as he connected to the call. The hallway was quiet, as it was the middle of the fourth period. The ID on the screen had said simply
The call was from a tech named Malek Pran. Bosch had never dealt with him and had to ask him to repeat his name twice. Pran was from Data Evaluation and Theory — known internally as the DEATH squad — which was part of a new effort by the Open-Unsolved Unit to clear cases through what was called data synthesizing.
For the past three years the DEATH squad had been digitizing archived murder books — the hard-copy investigative records — of unsolved cases, creating a massive database of easily accessible and comparable information on unsolved crimes. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions — anything that an investigator thought important enough to note in an investigative record was now digitized and could be compared with other cases.
The project had actually been initiated simply to create space. The city’s records archives were bursting at the seams with acres of files and file boxes. Shifting it all to digital would make room in the cramped department.
Pran said he had a case-to-case hit. A witness listed in a cold case Bosch had submitted for synthesizing had come up in another case, also a homicide, as a witness once again. Her name was Diane Gables. Bosch’s case was from 1999 and the second case was from 2007, which was too recent to fall under the purview of the Open- Unsolved Unit.
“Who submitted the 2007 case?”
“Uh, it was out of Hollywood Division. Detective Jerry Edgar made the submission.”
Bosch almost smiled in the hallway. He went a distance back with Jerry Edgar.
“Have you talked to Edgar yet about the hit?” Bosch asked.
“No. I started with you. Do you want his contact info?”
“I already have it. What’s the vic’s name on that case?”
“Raymond Randolph, DOB six, six, sixty-one — that’s a lot of sixes. DOD July second, 2007.”
“Okay, I’ll get the rest from Edgar. You did good, Pran. This gives me something I can work with.”
Bosch disconnected and went back into the principal’s office. He had not missed his appointment. He checked his watch. He’d give it fifteen minutes, and then he’d have to start moving on the case. His daughter would have to go without her confiscated cell phone until he could get another appointment with the principal.
BEFORE CONTACTING JERRY Edgar at Hollywood Division, Bosch pulled up the files — both hard and digital — on his own case. It involved the murder of a precious-metals swindler named Roy Alan McIntyre. He had sold gold futures by phone and internet. It was the oldest story in the book: There was no gold, or not enough of it. It was a Ponzi scheme through and through and like all of them, it finally collapsed upon itself. The victims lost tens of millions. McIntyre was arrested as the mastermind, but the evidence was tenuous. A good lawyer came to his defense and was able to convince the media that McIntyre was a victim himself, a dupe for organized-crime elements that had pulled the strings on the scheme. The DA started floating a deal that would put McIntyre on probation — provided he cooperated and returned all the money he still had access to. But word leaked about the impending deal, and hundreds of the scam’s victims organized to oppose it. Before the whole thing went to court, McIntyre was murdered in the garage under the Westwood condominium tower where he lived. Shot once between the eyes, his body found on the concrete next to the open door of his car.
The crime scene was clean; not even a shell casing from the nine-millimeter bullet that had killed him was recovered. The investigators had no physical evidence and a list of possible suspects that numbered in the hundreds. The killing looked like a hit. It could have been McIntyre’s unsavory backers in the gold scam or it could have been any of the investors who’d gotten ripped off. The only bright spot was that there was a witness. She was Diane Gables, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker who happened to be driving by McIntyre’s condo on her way home from work. She’d reported seeing a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun at his side run from the garage and jump into the passenger seat of a black SUV waiting in front. Panicked by the sight of the gun, she didn’t get an exact make or model of the SUV or its license-plate number. She’d pulled to the side of the road rather than following the vehicle as it sped off.
Bosch had not interviewed Gables when he had reevaluated the case in the Open-Unsolved Unit. He had simply reviewed the file and submitted it to the DEATH squad. Now, of course, he would be talking to her.
