Michael Connelly: Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories

The note said: “No ad on Craigslist.”

The printout was of a story that ran in the L.A. Times ten months earlier. It was about the heatstroke death of a child who had been left in a car in Lancaster while his mother ran into a store to buy milk. She ran into the middle of a robbery. She was tied up along with the store clerk and placed in a back room. The robbers ransacked the stotoucked thre and escaped. It was an hour before the victims were discovered and freed but by then the child in the car had already succumbed to heatstroke. Bosch scanned the story quickly then dropped the file closed. He looked at Helton without speaking.

“What?” Helton asked.

“Just some additional information and lab reports,” he lied. “Do you get the L.A. Times, by the way?”

“Yes, why?”

“Just curious, that’s all. Now, how many nannies do you think you’ve employed in the fifteen months that William was alive?”

Helton shook his head.

“I don’t know. At least ten. They don’t stay long. They can’t take it.”

“And then you go to Craigslist to place an ad?”

“Yes.”

“And you just lost a nanny on Friday?”

“Yes, I told you.”

“She just walked out on you?”

“No, she got another job and told us she was leaving. She made up a lie about it being closer to home and with gas prices and all of that. But we knew why she was leaving. She could not handle Willy.”

“She told you this Friday?”

“No, when she gave notice.”

“When was that?”

“She gave two weeks’ notice, so it was two weeks back from Friday.”

“And do you have a new nanny lined up?”

“No, not yet. We were still looking.”

“But you put the feelers out and ran the ad again, that sort of thing?”

“Right, but listen, what does this have to-”

“Let me ask the questions, Stephen. Your wife told us that she worried about leaving William with you, that you couldn’t handle the strain of it.”

Helton looked shocked. The statement came from left field, as Bosch had wanted it.

“What? Why would she say that?”

“I don’t know. Is it true?”

“No, it’s not true.”

“She told us she was worried that this wasn’t an accident.”

“That’s absolutely crazy and I doubt she said it. You are lying.”

He turned in his seat so that the front of his body faced the corner of the room and he would have to turn his face to look directly at Bosch. Another tell. Bosch knew he was zeroing in. He decided it was the right time to gamble.

“She mentioned a story you found in the L.A. Times that was about a kid left in a car up in Lancaster. The kid died of heatstroke. She was worried that it gave you the idea.”

Helton swiveled in his seat and leaned forward to put his elbows on the table and run his hands through his hair.

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe she…”

He didn’t finish. Bosch knew his gamble had paid off. Helton’s mind was racing along the edge. It was time to push him over.

“You didn’t forget that William was in the car, did you, Stephen?”

Helton didn’t answer. He buried his face in his hands again. Bosch leaned forward so that he only had to whisper.

“You left him there and you knew what was going to happen. You planned it. That’s why you didn’t bother running ads for a new nanny. You knew you weren’t going to need one.”

Helton remained silent and unmoving. Bosch kept working him, changing tacks and offering sympathy now.

“It’s understandable,” he said. “I mean, what kind of life would that kid have had anyway? Some might even call this a mercy killing. The kid falls asleep and never wakes up. I’ve worked these kinds of cases before, Stephen. It’s actually not a bad way to go. It sounds bad but it isn’t. You just get tired and you go to sleep.”

Helton kept his face in his hands but he shook his head. Bosch didn’t know if he was denying it still or shaking off something else. He waited and the delay paid off.

“It was her idea,” Helton said in a quiet voice. “She’s the one who couldn’t take it anymore.”

In that moment Bosch knew he had him but he showed nothing. He kept working it.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “She said she had nothing to do with it, that this was your idea and your plan and that when she called you it was to talk you out of it.”

Helton dropped his hands with a slap on the table.

“That’s a lie! It was her! She was embarrassed that we had a kid like that! She couldn’t take him anywhere and we couldn’t go anywhere! He was ruining our lives and she told me I had to do something about it! She told me ho e told w to do something about it! She said I would be saving two lives while sacrificing only one.”

Bosch pulled back across the table. It was done. It was over.

“Okay, Stephen, I think I understand. And I want to hear all about it. But at this point I need to inform you of your rights. After that, if you want to talk, we’ll talk and I’ll listen.”

When Bosch came out of the interview room Ignacio Ferras was there waiting for him in the hallway. His partner raised his fist and Bosch tapped his knuckles with his own fist.

“That was beautiful,” Ferras said. “You walked him right down the road.”

“Thanks,” Bosch said. “Let’s hope the DA is impressed, too.”

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry.”

“Well, there will be no worries if you go into the other room and turn the wife now.”

Ferras looked surprised.

“You still want me to take the wife?”

“She’s yours. Let’s walk them into the DA as bookends.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Good. Go check the equipment and make sure we’re still recording in there. I’ve got to go make a quick call.”

“You got it, Harry.”

Bosch walked into the squad room and sat down at his desk. He checked his watch and knew it would be early in Hong Kong. He pulled out his cell phone anyway, and sent a call across the Pacific.

His daughter answered with a cheerful hello. Bosch knew he wouldn’t even have to say anything and he would feel fulfilled by just the sound of her voice saying the one word.

“Hey, baby, it’s me,” he said.

“Daddy!” she exclaimed. “Happy Father’s Day!”

And Bosch realized in that moment that he was indeed a happy man.

“This is all because of Manson,” Eckersly said.

Bosch looked across the seat at his training partner, unsure of what he meant.

“Charles Manson?”

“You know, Helter Skelter and all of that shit,” Eckersly explained. “They’re still scared.”

Bosch nodded, though he still didn’t get it. He looked out the windshield. They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Almost all of the neighborhoods in Wilshire were unfamiliar to him but that was okay. Eckersly had been working patrol in the division for four years. He knew the neighborhoods.

“Somebody doesn’t answer the phone, and back east they think Squeaky and the rest of Charlie’s girls have broken in and chopped them up or something,” Eckersly continued. “We get a lot of these ‘check the lady’ calls. Nearly four years now and people still think L.A.’s been turned over to the nuts.”

Bosch had been away from the world when Manson and his people had done their thing. So he didn’t have a proper read on what the murders had done to the city. When he had come back from Vietnam he had felt an edginess in L.A. that had not been there before he left. But he didn’t know whether that was because of the changes he had been through or the ones the city had been through.