Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

“What’s your time frame?” Claudy asked.

“Yesterday,” Bosch said.

Claudy smiled.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re Hurry-Up-Harry.”

Bosch smiled back and nodded. Nobody had called him that since Claudy had left the department.

“So give me an hour,” Claudy said. “You can go to our break room and make a Nespresso.”

“I hate those things,” Bosch replied.

“Okay, then go take a walk in the cemetery. More your style anyway. One hour.”

“One hour.”

Bosch stood up.

“Give my regards to Oliver Hardy,” Claudy said. “He’s in there.”

“Will do,” Bosch said.

Bosch left Flashpoint and walked down Valhalla Drive. It was only when he entered the cemetery by a huge memorial that he remembered that in his research of Whitney Vance he had read that Vance’s father was buried here. Close to Caltech and under the jet path of Bob Hope Airport, the cemetery was the final resting place for a variety of aviation pioneers, designers, pilots, and barnstormers. They were interred or memorialized in and around a tall domed structure called the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation. Bosch found Nelson Vance’s memorial plaque on the tiled floor of the shrine.

Bosch noticed that there was a space next to the memorial plaque for another interment and wondered if this was already on reserve as Whitney Vance’s final destination.

Bosch wandered out of the shrine and over to the memorial to the astronauts lost in two separate space shuttle disasters. He then looked across one of the green lawns and saw the start of a burial service near one of the big fountains. He decided not to venture further into the cemetery, a tourist amid the grief, and headed back to Flashpoint without searching for the grave of the heavier half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy.

Claudy was ready for him when Bosch returned. He was ushered into a drying room in the lab where nine 8 x 10 black-and-white prints were clipped to a plastic board. The photos were still wet with developing fluids, and a lab tech was just finishing using a squeegee to remove the excess. The exterior framing was seen on some of the prints, and some showed the fingerprints Claudy had warned about. Some of the shots were completely blown out by light exposure and others exhibited varying degrees of damage to the negative. But there were three shots that were at least 90 percent intact. And one of these was a shot of the woman and child.

The first thing Bosch realized was that he had been wrong about the woman standing in front of a mountain in Vietnam. It was no mountainside and it was not Vietnam. It was the recognizable roofline of the Hotel del Coronado down near San Diego. Once Bosch registered the location, he moved in close to study the woman and the baby. The woman was Latina and Bosch could see a ribbon in the baby’s hair. A girl, no more than a month or two old.

The woman’s mouth was open in a smile showing unbridled happiness. Bosch studied her eyes and the happy light that was in them. There was love in those eyes. For the baby. For the person behind the camera.

The other photos were full frames and fragments from a series of shots taken on the beach behind the del Coronado. Shots of the woman, shots of the baby, shots of the sparkling waves.

“Does it help?” Claudy asked.

He was standing behind Bosch, not getting in the way as Harry studied the prints.

“I think so,” Bosch said. “Yeah.”

He considered the totality of the circumstances. The photos and their subjects were important enough to Dominick Santanello for him to attempt to hide them as he sent his property home from Vietnam. The question was why. Was this his child? Did he have a secret family that his family in Oxnard knew nothing about? If so, why the secrecy? He looked closely at the woman in the photo. She seemed to be in her mid- to late twenties. Dominick would not yet have been twenty. Was the relationship with an older woman the reason he didn’t tell his parents and sister?

Another question was about the location. The photos were taken during a trip to the beach either at or near the Hotel del Coronado. When was this? And why was a strip of negatives from a photo shoot that very clearly took place in the States included in property sent home from Vietnam?

Bosch scanned the images again, looking for anything that would help place the shots in time. He saw nothing.

“For what it’s worth, the guy was good,” Claudy said. “Had a good eye.”

Bosch agreed.

“Is he dead?” Claudy asked.

“Yes,” Bosch said. “Never made it home from Vietnam.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. I saw some of his other work. From the bush. From his missions.”

“I’d love to see it. Maybe there’s something that could be done with it.”

Bosch nodded but was concentrating on the photos in front of him.

“You can’t tell when these photos were taken, can you?” he asked.

“No, there was no time stamp on the film,” Claudy said. “Not really done back then.”

Bosch expected that to be the case.

“But what I can tell you is when the film was made,” Claudy added. “Down to a three-month period. Fuji coded their film stock by production cycle.”

Bosch turned around and looked at Claudy.

“Show me.”

Claudy came forward and went to one of the prints made from a broken negative. The negative’s frame was part of the print. Claudy pointed to a series of letters and numbers in the frame.

“They marked the film by year and three-month manufacturing run. You see here? This is it.”

He pointed to a section of the coding: 70-AJ .

“This film was made between April and June of 1970,” he said.

Bosch considered the information.

“But it could have been used any time after that, right?” he asked.

“Right,” Claudy said. “It only marks when it was made, not when it was used in a camera.”

Something didn’t add up about that. The film was manufactured as early as April of 1970 and the photographer, Dominick Santanello, was killed in December 1970. He could have easily bought and used the film sometime in the eight intervening months, then sent it home with his belongings.

“You know where that is, right?” Claudy asked.

“Yeah, the del Coronado,” Bosch said.

“Sure hasn’t changed much.”

“Yeah.”

Bosch stared at the photo of mother and child again and then he got it. He understood.

Dominick Santanello trained down in the San Diego area in 1969 but he would have been shipped overseas before the end of the year. Bosch was looking at photos taken in San Diego in April 1970 at the very earliest and that was well after Santanello was in Vietnam.

“He came back,” Bosch said.

“What?” Claudy asked.

Bosch didn’t answer. He was riding the wave. Things were cascading, coming together. The civvies in the box, the long hair in the bristles of the brush, the photos removed from the inside of the footlocker, and the hidden photos of the baby on the beach. Santanello had made an unauthorized trip back to the States. He hid the photo negatives because they were proof of his crime. He had risked court-martial and the stockade to see his girlfriend.

And his newborn daughter.

Bosch now knew. There was an heir somewhere out there. Born in 1970. Whitney Vance had a granddaughter. Bosch was sure of it.

Claudy put all of the photos into a stiff cardboard folder to keep them from getting bent or damaged. In the car, Bosch opened the folder and looked at the photo of the woman and the baby one more time. He knew there were a lot of aspects of his theory to confirm and some that could never be confirmed. The film negatives that produced the photos in the folder were found secreted in Nick Santanello’s camera but that did not necessarily mean he had taken the photos himself. The photos could have been taken for him and then the negatives mailed to him in Vietnam. Harry knew it was a possibility that could not be completely dismissed but his gut told him that it was an unlikely scenario. The negatives had been found with his camera and other negatives of photos taken by him. It was clear to him Santanello had taken the shot of the woman and the baby.