Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

“You lazy fuck, you should’ve gone with her today. Now she’s out there somewhere and we have to find her. Do you understand?”

Bosch racked him hard against the door again.

“Where does Dockweiler live?”

“I don’t know! Get the fuck off me!”

Sisto shoved Bosch off with such force that he was nearly driven into the opposite wall. He hit a counter with his hip and an empty glass coffeepot fell off its hot plate and shattered on the floor.

Drawn by the harsh voices and crashing glass, Valdez and Trevino came charging through the door. It swung right into Sisto, hitting him from behind and knocking him out of the way.

“What the hell’s going on?” Valdez demanded.

One hand holding the back of his head, Sisto pointed a finger at Bosch with the other.

“He’s crazy! Keep him the fuck away from me.”

Bosch pointed right back at him.

“You should’ve gone with her. But you gave her a bullshit line and she went up there on her own.”

“What about you, old man? It wasn’t my case. It was yours. You shoulda been there, not me.”

Bosch turned away from him and looked at Valdez.

“Dockweiler,” he said. “Where does he live?”

“Up in Santa Clarita, I think,” Valdez said. “At least he did when he worked for me. Why? What’s going on here?”

He put a hand on Bosch’s shoulder to keep Bosch from moving toward Sisto. Bosch shrugged it off and pointed at Dockweiler’s desk like it was incontrovertible evidence of something only he could see.

“It’s him,” Bosch said. “Dockweiler’s the Screen Cutter. And he’s got Bella.”

They took two cars and headed code 3 up the 5 freeway. Valdez and Bosch were in the lead car with Valdez behind the wheel. The police chief had wisely separated Bosch from Sisto, who drove the second car with Trevino riding shotgun and probably miffed that the tensions between Bosch and Sisto had resulted in his being separated from the chief.

Valdez was on the phone barking an order to someone in the communications center.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Call whoever you have to call. Just get me the goddamn address. I don’t care if you need to send cars to their houses to get a response.”

He disconnected and cursed. So far the com center had not been able to make contact with the director of Public Works or the city manager to get access to city payroll records and Dockweiler’s address. They had checked DMV records before leaving the station and found that Dockweiler had somehow managed himself or benefited from a bureaucratic glitch to keep a law enforcement officer block on his address nearly five years after leaving the police department.

So they were heading to the Santa Clarita Valley based solely on Valdez’s memory that Dockweiler lived somewhere up there five years ago.

“We might get up there and have no place to go,” Valdez said.

He banged the steering wheel with an open palm and changed the subject.

“What was that all about back there with Sisto, Harry?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you act like that.”

“I’m sorry, Chief,” Bosch said. “I lost it. If I could have thrown myself against the door, I would have. But I took it out on Sisto.”

“Took what out?”

“I should’ve been with Bella today. My case, I should’ve been there. Instead, I told her to take Sisto and I should’ve known she’d go alone if he wasn’t around.”

“Look, we don’t even know if this Dockweiler thing is legit. So hold off on beating yourself up. I need you focused here.”

Valdez pointed north through the windshield.

Bosch tried to think of another source for Dockweiler’s address. If he was still employing law enforcement protection measures they would be hard-pressed to find him. He thought about calling Wayside and seeing if any of the jail deputies remembered him and might know his address. It seemed like a long shot since Dockweiler had left the Sheriff’s Department so long ago.

“When did he first come to work for San Fernando?” Bosch asked.

“It was ’05 or ’06, I think,” Valdez said. “He was already here when I got here. Yeah, it would have been ’06. Because I remember he was just past five years and vested when I had to chop him.”

“Sisto told me about him saying he was part of a group of deputies at Wayside that manipulated custodies and staged fights.”

“I remember they weeded out a bunch of jail deputies back around then. The Wayside Whities, remember?”

It was coming back to Bosch. It was hard to remember specific groups or incidents because it seemed to him that the Sheriff’s Department had suffered one jail scandal after another in the last decade. The previous sheriff had resigned in disgrace during an FBI investigation of jail issues. He faced a corruption trial and several of his deputies had already gone to prison. These were some of the reasons Bella Lourdes had told Bosch she’d needed to get out, even if it meant moving to a much smaller department like San Fernando’s.

“So why did you chop him instead of Bella?” Bosch asked. “He had seniority, right?”

“He did but I had to do what was best for the department,” Valdez said.

“Nice political answer.”

“It’s the truth. You know Bella. She’s a go-getter. Loves the job, wants to give back. Dockweiler... he was a bit of a bully. So when Marvin told me I could offer one of my people the job in code enforcement, I kept Lourdes and transferred Dockweiler. I thought it suited him. You know, telling people to cut their lawns and trim their hedges.”

Marvin was Marvin Hodge, the city manager. Bosch shook his head as the chief’s answer reminded him of his failings on the Screen Cutter case.

“What?” Valdez asked. “I think I made the right choice.”

“No, it’s not that,” Bosch said. “You did make the right choice. But you probably didn’t with me. I missed a lot on this one. I guess the time off made me rusty.”

“What did you miss?”

“Well, last Friday I took a drive past the first four crime scenes — the ones we knew about. You know, all in one trip and in the order of occurrence. I’d never done that before and I was trying to see if anything would spark, if I would finally figure out what the link was. And I didn’t see it. It was right there and I didn’t see it. All of the houses had garages.”

“Yeah, but that’s so common. Practically every house built since World War Two has a garage. In this town, that’s just about everybody.”

“Doesn’t matter. I should have put it together. I’ll bet you my next paycheck that we’re going to find that Dockweiler inspected those houses and those garages for unpermitted conversion and habitation — he has the damn tip sheet pinned to the wall of his cubicle. That’s how he picked his victims. That’s why he wore the masks. Because the victims might remember him from the inspection.”

“You don’t get a paycheck, Harry.”

“And after this I don’t deserve one.”

“Look, as far as Dockweiler goes, this is all just theory right now. We don’t have a shred of evidence he’s the Screen Cutter. The theory looks good but theories don’t get convictions.”

“It’s him.”

“Just because you keep saying it doesn’t make it so.”

“Well, you better hope it is. Otherwise we’re looking for Bella in the wrong place.”

That was a thought that brought silence to the car for the next few miles. But after a while Bosch started asking questions so he didn’t have to dwell on thoughts about Bella.

“How did Dockweiler take getting shit-canned?” he asked.

“Well, when you put it like that it sounds pretty bad,” Valdez said. “But every time we had to make a cutback we did our best to place people or come up with a plan for them. So, like I said, Marvin gave me the slot at Public Works to use and I came to Dockweiler with that. He took it but he wasn’t too happy about it. He wanted us to move the position from Public Works to the Police Department, but it doesn’t work that way.”