Michael Connelly: The Wrong Side of Goodbye

“Okay, well, I won’t hold you up.”

“Okay, Chief.”

Bosch glanced at the helicopter for a moment and then left the office. The detective bureau was just a few paces down the hall. By LAPD or any standards, it was quite small. It had once consisted of two rooms, but one room had been subleased to the County Coroner’s Office as a satellite office for two of its investigators. Now there were three detective cubicles crammed into one room with a closet-size supervisor’s office adjoining.

Bosch’s cubicle had five-foot walls that allowed him privacy from three sides. But the fourth side was open to the office door of the squad’s supervisor. That post was supposed to be a full-time lieutenant’s slot, but it had been vacant since the budget crunch and the supervisor was currently the department’s only captain. His name was Trevino and he had so far not been convinced that having Bosch on the premises and handling cases was a good thing. He seemed suspicious of Bosch’s motives for working so many hours for no pay and kept a careful watch over him. For Bosch, the only thing that alleviated this unwanted attention was that Trevino wore multiple hats in the department, as is often the case with small agencies. He was running the detective bureau and was also in charge of interior operations in the station, including the dispatch center, the indoor firing range, and the sixteen-bed jail built to replace the aging facility across the street. These responsibilities often drew Trevino out of the detective bureau and off Bosch’s back.

Bosch checked his mail slot upon entering and found a reminder notice that he was overdue qualifying this month on the range. He moved into his cubicle and sat down at his desk.

Along the way he saw that Trevino’s door was closed and the glass transom above it was dark. The captain was most likely in another part of the building carrying out one of his other duties. Bosch thought he understood Trevino’s suspicion and lack of welcome. Any success he had in clearing cases could be seen as a failing on Trevino’s part. After all, the detective bureau was currently his domain. And it didn’t help when word got around that Bosch had once thrown his LAPD supervisor through a plate-glass window.

Still, there was nothing Trevino could do about Bosch’s placement in the office, because he was part of the police chief’s effort to overcome personnel cuts.

Bosch turned on his computer terminal and waited for it to boot up. It had been four days since he was last in the office. A flyer for a department bowling night had been left on his desk and he immediately transferred this to the recycle bin beneath it. He liked the people he worked with in the new department, but he wasn’t much of a bowler.

Using a key to open a locked file cabinet in his desk, he pulled out a few folders pertaining to open cases he was working and spread them on his desk so it would appear he was engaged in SFPD business. He noticed when he reached for his Screen Cutter folder that it wasn’t there. He found it in the wrong spot in the drawer. It had been misfiled under the first victim’s name rather than under the unknown suspect’s moniker: Screen Cutter. This immediately alarmed and annoyed Bosch. He didn’t believe he could have mis-filed the case. All of his career he had carefully managed his case files. The file — whether it was a murder book or a manila folder — was the heart of the case and it always needed to be neatly and thoroughly put together and safely stored.

He put the folder on his desk and considered that someone with a duplicate key might be reading his files and checking his work. And he knew exactly who that might be. He reversed himself and returned all his files to the drawer, then closed and locked it with his key. He had a plan for smoking out the intruder.

He sat up straight to look over the partitions and saw that both of the other detective cubicles were empty. Bella Lourdes, the CAPs investigator, and Danny Sisto, who handled property crimes, were probably out in the field following up on crime reports. They often went out to handle much of their fieldwork together.

Once he was logged into the department’s computer system, Bosch opened up the law enforcement databases. He got out his notebook and began the search for Vibiana Duarte, knowing he was breaking the one rule the police chief had given him: using his SFPD access to supplement a private investigation. Not only was it a firing offense at SFPD but it was a crime in California to access a law enforcement database for information not pertaining to a police investigation. If Trevino ever decided to audit Bosch’s use of the computer, there would be a problem. But Bosch figured that would not happen. Trevino would know that if he made a move against Bosch, he was making a move against the police chief, and that was most likely career suicide.

The search for Vibiana Duarte was short. There was no listing of her ever having a driver’s license in California, no record of her ever committing a crime or even getting a parking ticket. Of course, the digital databases were less complete the farther back the search went but Bosch knew from experience that it was rare not to find any reference to an entered name. It supported the possibility that Duarte had been an illegal and possibly returned to Mexico in 1950 after becoming pregnant. Abortion in California was against the law back then. She might have crossed the border to have her baby or to have the pregnancy terminated in one of the backroom clinics in Tijuana.

Bosch knew the law on abortion back then because he had been born in 1950 to an unmarried woman and, soon after becoming a cop, he had looked up the laws so that he would better understand the choices his mother had faced and made.

What he was not familiar with was the California penal code in 1950. He accessed it next and checked the laws about sexual assault. He pretty quickly learned that in 1950 under penal code section 261, sexual intercourse with a female under age eighteen was considered a chargeable offense of rape. Consensual relations were not listed as an exclusion to prosecution. The only exclusion offered was if the woman was the wife of the offender.

Bosch thought about Vance’s father believing the pregnancy was a trap set by Duarte to force a marriage that would bring her citizenship and money. If that was the case, the penal code gave her a solid piece of leverage. But the lack of any record of Duarte in California seemed to belie that angle. Rather than use her leverage, Duarte had disappeared, possibly back to Mexico.

Bosch switched the screen, went back to the DMV interface, and typed in “James Franklin Aldridge,” the cover name Vance had given him.

Before the results came up, he saw Captain Trevino enter the squad room, carrying a cup of coffee from Starbucks. Bosch knew there was a store located a few blocks away on Truman. He often took a break from computer work in the bureau and walked over himself. This was not only to give his eyes a rest but to indulge in a recent addiction to iced lattes that had developed since he began routinely meeting with his daughter at various coffee shops near her school campus.

“Harry, what brings you in today?” Trevino said.

The captain always greeted him cordially and by his first name.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d check e-mail and send out a few more alerts on the Screen Cutter.”

As he spoke, he killed the DMV screen and pulled up the e-mail account he had been given by the department. He didn’t turn around as Trevino went to the door of his office and unlocked it.

Bosch heard the door open but then felt Trevino’s presence behind him in the cubicle.

“In the neighborhood?” Trevino said. “All the way up here? And all dressed up in a suit!”