Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

She hesitated for a moment, then stepped back and allowed him in.

Bosch initially explained his presence by telling Gabriela that he had been hired by someone in Dominick Santanello’s family to see if he had fathered a child before he passed. She accepted that, and over the course of the next hour they sat in her small living room and Bosch heard the story of the short-lived love affair between Gabriela and Dominick.

It was a different angle on the story that Halley Lewis from Tallahassee had told Bosch. Gabriela had met Dominick in a bar in Oceanside with the express purpose of awakening him to his cultural roots and pride. But those motives soon took a backseat to the passion that bloomed between them and they became a couple.

“We made plans for after he came back and was discharged,” Gabriela said. “He wanted to be a photographer. We were going to do a project together, on the border. He was going to shoot it; I was going to paint it.”

She said that she found out she was pregnant when he was near the end of his training at Pendleton and was waiting to receive orders to Vietnam. It was a heart-wrenching time and he repeatedly offered to desert the Navy to stay with her. Each time she talked him out of it, an effort that later brought a crushing guilt down on her after she learned he was killed overseas.

She confirmed that Dominick had snuck back into the country twice while on leaves from Vietnam. The first time he attended the dedication of Chicano Park and the second time it was to see his newborn daughter. The family spent the only four days they’d ever have together at the del Coronado. She said the photograph that Bosch showed her was taken after an impromptu “marriage” on the beach officiated by an artist friend who was ordained in a cult-like Mexican religion called brujeria .

“It was in fun,” she said. “We thought we would get the chance to get married for real when he came back at the end of the year.”

Bosch asked why Gabriela never reached out to Dominick’s family after his death and she explained that she had feared his parents might try to take the baby from her.

“I lived in a barrio,” she said. “I had no money. I was worried that they could win in court and take Vibiana from me. That would have killed me.”

Bosch did not mention how closely Gabriela’s feelings mirrored the plight of her daughter’s grandmother and namesake. But her answer served as a segue to questions about Vibiana and where she was. Gabriela revealed that she lived in Los Angeles and was an artist as well. She was a sculptress living and working in the Arts District downtown. She had been married once but now was not. The kicker was that she was raising a nine-year-old boy from that marriage. His name was Gilberto Veracruz.

Bosch realized he had found another heir. Whitney Vance had a great-grandson he never knew about.

The San Diego County Bureau of Vital Records and Statistics was open until 5 p.m. Bosch walked hurriedly through the door at 4:35 and luckily found no one in line at the window marked Birth Certificates, Death Certificates, Changes of Name . He had only a single document to request and getting it now would save him from having to stay in San Diego overnight.

Bosch left the Mercado Apartments convinced that Vibiana and Gilberto Veracruz were direct descendants of Whitney Vance. If that could be proved, they were in line to inherit the Vance fortune. Genetic analysis would of course be the key but Bosch also wanted to gather legal documentation that would go hand in hand with the science and be part of a judge-convincing package. Gabriela had told him that she put Dominick’s name down on her daughter’s birth certificate. Details like that would make the package complete.

At the window Bosch provided the name Vibiana Santanello and the date she was born, and requested a certified copy of her birth certificate. While he waited for the clerk to find and print it, he considered some of the other revelations and confirmations that came out of his conversation with Gabriela.

Bosch had asked her how she had learned of Santanello’s death in Vietnam and she said she knew in her heart that he had been killed when a week went by and she did not receive a letter from him. He had never gone that long without writing her. Her intuition was sadly confirmed when later she saw a story in the newspaper about how the shooting down of a single helicopter in Vietnam had hit Southern California particularly hard. All the Marines on the chopper had California hometowns and had previously been stationed at El Toro Marine Air Base in Orange County. The lone corpsman who was killed had trained at Camp Pendleton in San Diego after being raised in Oxnard.

Gabriela also told Bosch that Dominick’s face was on one of the murals at the park. She had put it there many years before. It was on the mural called the Face of Heroes — several depictions of men and women forming one face. Bosch remembered seeing the mural as he had walked through the park earlier that day.

“Here you are, sir,” the clerk said to Bosch. “You pay at the window to your left.”

Bosch took the document from the clerk and proceeded to the cash window. He studied it as he walked and saw the name Dominick Santanello listed as father. He realized how close he was to finishing the journey Whitney Vance had sent him on. He was disappointed that the old man would not be on hand at the finish line.

He was soon back on the 5 and heading north. He had told Gabriela that it was in her best interests to reveal nothing about her conversation with Bosch to anyone else. They had not immediately reached out to Vibiana because Gabriela said her daughter led a life devoid of the trappings of digital technology. She had no cell phone and rarely answered the phone in the studio-loft where she lived and worked.

Bosch planned to be at Vibiana’s studio the next morning. Meanwhile, on the brutal rush-hour drive back up to L.A. he spoke at length on his cell to Mickey Haller, who said he had made some subtle inquiries of his own.

“Pasadena did sign off on it as a natural but there will be an autopsy,” he said. “I think Kapoor wants the headlines so he’s going to milk cause of death for all it’s worth.”

Bhavin Kapoor was the embattled chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County. In recent months he had come under fire for mismanagement and delays in processing autopsies at the office that handled more than eight thousand of them a year. Law enforcement agencies and loved ones of murder and accident victims complained that some autopsies were taking months to complete, delaying investigations, funerals, and closure. The media piled on further when it was revealed that some bodies got mixed up in the Big Crypt, a giant refrigerated storage center that held over a hundred cadavers. Toe tags blown off by the giant turbine fans that kept things cold had been reattached to the wrong toes.

Looking for headlines that didn’t involve scandal, Kapoor had evidently decided to proceed with an autopsy on Whitney Vance’s body so that he could hold a press conference that was about something other than his handling of his duties and department.

“You watch, though,” Haller said. “Some smart reporter will turn this against him by pointing out that the billionaire didn’t have to wait in line for an autopsy while every other body does. Even in death the rich get treated special — that’ll be the headline.”

Bosch knew the observation was dead-on accurate and was surprised that Kapoor’s advisers, if he had any, had not warned him.

Haller asked what Bosch had found in San Diego and Harry reported that there might be two blood descendants in play. He recounted his conversation with Gabriela and told Haller that it might soon be time for DNA analysis. He outlined what he had: A sealed sample from Vance, though he did not witness the old man being swabbed. Several items that belonged to Dominick Santanello, including a razor that might have his blood on it. A swab sample he had taken from Gabriela Lida in case it was needed. And he planned to swab Vibiana when he met her the following day. For the moment he planned to leave Vibiana’s son — Vance’s presumed great-grandson — out of it.