Michael Connelly: The Wrong Side of Goodbye

A hundred years later it remained so. The Valley’s agriculture pedigree may have long ago given way to urban sprawl and urban blight, but the city of San Fernando remained a quaint throwback to small-town sensibilities. Of course, urban issues and crime were unavoidable but they were nothing the tiny town’s police department couldn’t routinely take care of.

That is, until the financial crash of 2008. When the banking crisis happened and economies constricted and spiraled downward around the world, it was only a few years before the tidal wave of financial pain hit San Fernando. Deep budget cuts occurred and then occurred again. Police Chief Anthony Valdez saw his department drop from forty sworn officers, including himself, in 2010 to thirty officers by 2016. He saw his detective squad of five investigators shrink to just two — one detective to handle property crimes and one to handle crimes against persons. Valdez saw cases start to pile up unsolved, some not even initially investigated fully and properly.

Valdez was born and raised in San Fernando but was seasoned as a cop with the LAPD, putting in twenty years and rising to the rank of captain before taking his pension and checking out, then landing the top spot at his hometown’s department. His connections to the bigger department that surrounded his own ran deep, and his solution to the budget crisis was to expand SFPD’s reserve program and bring in more officers who worked part-time hours but for free.

And it was this expansion that led Chief Valdez to Harry Bosch. One of Valdez’s early assignments when he was with the LAPD had been in a gang-suppression unit in the Hollywood Division. There he ran afoul of a lieutenant named Pounds, who filed an internal complaint and unsuccessfully attempted to have Valdez demoted or even fired.

Valdez avoided both and just a few months later heard about a detective named Bosch who himself got into an altercation with Pounds and ended up throwing him through a plate-glass window at Hollywood Station. Valdez always remembered that name, and years later when he read about a now-retired Harry Bosch suing the LAPD for forcing him out of his job on the cold case squad, he picked up the phone.

Valdez couldn’t offer Bosch a paycheck, but he could offer him something Bosch valued more: a detective’s badge and access to all of the tiny city’s unsolved cases. The SFPD’s reserve unit had only three requirements. Its officers had to maintain their state training standards as law enforcement officers, qualify once a month at the department’s shooting range, and work at least two shifts a month.

It was a no-brainer for Bosch. The LAPD didn’t want or need him anymore but the little town up in the Valley certainly did. And there was work to be done and victims waiting for justice. Bosch took the job the moment it was offered. He knew it would allow him to continue his life’s mission, and he needed no paycheck for that.

Bosch easily met and surpassed the reserve officer minimums. It was rare that he didn’t put in at least two shifts a week, let alone a month, in the detective bureau. He was there so often that he was permanently assigned one of the cubicles that had been left open when the squad was trimmed in the budget crunch.

Most days he was working in the cubicle or across First Street from the police station in the old city jail where the cells were repurposed as storage rooms. The former drunk tank now housed three rows of standing shelves stocked with open case files going back decades.

Because of the statute of limitations on all crimes but murder, the great majority of these cases would never be solved or even examined. The small city didn’t have a lot of murders, but Bosch was meticulously going through them, looking for ways to apply new technologies to old evidence. He also took on a review of all sexual assaults, nonfatal shootings, and attacks resulting in major injuries within the statute of limitations for those crimes.

The job had a lot of freedom to it. Bosch could set his own hours and could always take time away if a case came up for him in private investigation. Chief Valdez knew he was lucky to have a detective with Bosch’s experience working for him, and he never wanted to impinge on Bosch’s ability to take on a paying job. He just stressed to Bosch that the two could never mix. Harry could not use his badge and access as a San Fernando cop to facilitate or further any private investigation. That would be a firing offense.

Murder knows no bounds or city limits. Most of the cases Bosch reviewed and pursued took him into LAPD turf. It was only expected. Two of the big city’s police divisions shared borders with San Fernando: Mission Division to the west and Foothill Division to the east. In four months Bosch had cleared two unsolved gang murders — connecting them through ballistics to murders in L.A. for which the perpetrators were already in prison — and linked a third to a pair of suspects already being sought for murder by the larger department.

Additionally, Bosch had used MO — modus operandi — and then DNA to connect four sexual assault cases in San Fernando over a four-year period and was in the process of determining whether the attacker was responsible for any rapes in Los Angeles as well.

Driving the 210 away from Pasadena allowed Bosch to check for a tail. Midday traffic was light and by alternately driving five miles below the speed limit and then taking it up to fifteen above it, he could check the mirrors for vehicles following the same pattern. He wasn’t sure how seriously to take Whitney Vance’s concerns about the secrecy of his investigation but it didn’t hurt to be alert to a tail. He didn’t see anything on the road behind him. Of course, he knew that his car could have been tagged with a GPS tracker while he was in the mansion with Vance, or even the day before while he met with Creighton at the U.S. Bank Tower. He would need to check for that later.

In fifteen minutes he had crossed the top of the Valley and was back in L.A. He took the Maclay Street exit and dropped down into San Fernando, where he turned onto First Street. The SFPD was located in a single-story building with white stucco walls and a red barrel-tile roof. The population of the tiny town was 90 percent Latino and its municipal structures were all designed with a nod to Mexican culture.

Bosch parked in the employee lot and used an electronic key to enter the station through the side door. He nodded to a couple of uniform cops through the window of the report room and followed the back hallway past the chief’s office toward the detective bureau.

“Harry?”

Bosch turned and looked through the door to the chief’s office. Valdez was behind his desk, waving him in.

Harry stepped into the office. It wasn’t as big as the LAPD chief’s suite but it was comfortable and had a sitting area for informal discussions. Hanging from the ceiling was a black-and-white toy helicopter with SFPD painted on its body. The first time Bosch had been in the office Valdez had explained that this was the department’s helicopter — a joking reference to the fact that the department didn’t have its own bird and had to call in air support when needed from the LAPD.

“How’s it going?” Valdez asked.

“Can’t complain,” Bosch said.

“Well, we certainly appreciate what you’re doing around here. Anything happening on the Screen Cutter?”

It was a reference to the serial rapist case Bosch had identified.

“I’m about to go check on responses to our e-mail. After that I’ll get with Bella to talk about next moves.”

“I read the report from the profiler when I approved the payment. Interesting stuff. We gotta get this guy.”

“Working on it.”