Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

The unforeseen problem was that Maron had left his cell phone on his table and realized it just as he was about to back out of his parking spot. He jumped back out of his van and went to retrieve the phone. Coming across Bosch and Lourdes collecting his discarded debris, he said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

At that point, knowing that Maron could flee, the detectives had to treat him as a suspect. They asked him to come to the station to answer questions and he angrily agreed. During the ensuing interview he denied any knowledge of the rapes. He acknowledged knowing three of the victims by name but said that was because he delivered their mail.

While Bosch handled the interview, Lourdes was able to round up the four known victims and get them to come in for audiovisual lineups. Because the rapist had worn a mask during each assault, the detectives were hoping an identification might be made by one of the victims recognizing his voice, hands, or eyes.

Four hours after the incident at the coffee shop Maron voluntarily but sullenly stood in a lineup that was viewed separately by all four women. He held his hands out and read sentences said by the rapist during the assaults. None of them identified him as their assailant.

Maron was released that day and his innocence confirmed a week later when DNA from the napkin he wiped his mouth with was deemed no match to the DNA of the rapist. The chief of police sent him a letter apologizing for the incident and thanking him for his cooperation.

Now, after pushing the mail through the slot, Maron walked back toward his van and then made a sudden turn toward Bosch’s car. Harry lowered the window to accept the verbal confrontation.

“Hey, I want you to know, I hired a lawyer,” Maron said. “I’m going to sue all your asses for false arrest.”

Bosch nodded like the threat was just par for the course.

“I hope it’s a contingency deal,” he said.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Maron said.

“I hope you’re not paying your lawyer. Put it on contingency; that means he gets paid only if he wins. Because you aren’t going to win, Mitchell. If he’s telling you anything else, he’s lying.”

“Bullshit.”

“You agreed to come in. There was no arrest. We even let you drive the mail van in so nothing would get stolen. You don’t have a case and the only one who will make book are the lawyers. Think about that.”

Maron leaned down and put his hand on the Jeep’s windowsill.

“So I’m just supposed to let it go, then,” he said. “I felt like I’m the one who got raped and it’s just ‘never mind.’”

“Not even close, Mitchell,” Bosch said. “You say that to one of the real victims and they’d put you in your place. What you went through was a shitty couple of hours. There’s no end to what they’re going through.”

Maron slapped the sill and stood up straight.

“Fuck you!”

He stalked back to his van and took off, the wheels screeching. The effect was undercut when sixty feet later he had to hit the brakes to make the delivery to the next house down.

Bosch’s phone rang and he saw it was Lourdes.

“Bella.”

“Harry, where are you?”

“Out and about. How’d it go at Foothill?”

“A nonstarter. The cases didn’t match.”

Bosch nodded.

“Oh, well. I just ran into your boy Mitch Maron. He’s still pissed at us.”

“At Starbucks?”

“No, I’m in front of Frida Lopez’s old house. He just came by to deliver the mail and tell me what a shit I am. Says he’s going to hire a lawyer.”

“Yeah, good luck with that. What are you doing there?”

“Nothing. Just thinking. I guess hoping something would shake loose. I think our guy — something tells me it won’t be long before there’s another.”

“I know what you mean. That’s why I was so hyped about this Foothill thing. Damn it! Why are there no other cases out there?”

“That’s the question.”

Bosch heard the call-waiting click on his phone. He checked the screen and saw that it was the number Whitney Vance had given him.

“Hey, I got a call,” he said. “Let’s talk tomorrow about next moves.”

“You got it, Harry,” Lourdes said.

Bosch switched over to the other call.

“Mr. Vance?”

There was no answer, only silence.

“Mr. Vance, are you there?”

Silence.

Bosch pushed the phone hard against his ear and put the window back up. He thought he might be able to hear breathing. He wondered if it was Vance and if he was unable to talk because of the health issue Sloan had mentioned.

“Mr. Vance, is that you?”

Bosch waited but heard nothing and then the call was disconnected.

Bosch made his way over to the 405 freeway and headed south through the Valley and over the Sepulveda Pass. It took him an hour to get down to LAX, where he slowly followed the loop on the departures level and parked in the last garage. He grabbed a flashlight from the glove box and then got out and quickly moved around the car, crouching down to point the light into the wheel wells and under the bumpers and the gas tank. But he knew that if his car had been tagged with a GPS tracker, the likelihood of him finding it would be very low. Advances in tracking technology had made the devices smaller and easier to hide.

His plan was to go online and buy a GPS jammer but it would take a few days to get it. Meantime, he went into the car to return the flashlight to the glove box and gather the birth certificates into a backpack he kept on the floor. He then locked the car and took the pedestrian overpass to the United Airlines terminal where he rode an escalator down to the arrivals level. Circling around a baggage carousel that was surrounded by travelers fresh off a flight, he moved in and out of the crowd and went out the double doors to the pickup zone. He crossed the pickup lanes to the rental-car island and jumped on the first shuttle he saw, a yellow bus destined for the Hertz rental counters on Airport Boulevard. He asked the driver if they had cars available and the driver gave him the thumbs-up.

The Cherokee that Bosch left in the parking garage was twenty-two years old. At the Hertz counter he was offered the option of trying out a brand-new Cherokee, and he took it despite the surcharge. Ninety minutes after leaving San Fernando he was back on the 405, heading north in a car that could not have been tagged by anyone hoping to follow him or keep GPS tabs on where he was going. Just the same, he checked the mirrors repeatedly to be sure.

When he got up to Westwood he exited the freeway on Wilshire Boulevard and made his way into the Los Angeles National Cemetery. It was 114 acres of graves containing soldiers from every war, every campaign, from the Civil War to Afghanistan. Thousands of white marble stones in perfect rows standing as a testament to the military precision and waste of war.

Bosch had to use the Find a Grave screen in the Bob Hope Memorial Chapel to locate the spot where Dominick Santanello was buried on the North Campus. But soon he stood in front of it, looking down at the perfect green grass and listening to the constant hiss of the nearby freeway as the sun turned the sky in the west pink. Somehow, in little more than twenty-four hours, he had built a feeling of kinship with this soldier he had never met or known. They had both been on that boat in the South China Sea. And there was the fact that Bosch alone knew the secret history and tragedy heaped upon tragedy of the dead man’s short life.

After a while he pulled out his phone and took a photo of the marker. It would be part of the report he would eventually give Whitney Vance — if the old man was able to receive it.