Michael Connelly - The Drop

“I might need to go out,” he said to her. “You’ll be okay?”

“Going back to see Hannah?”

“No, I might go back to the hotel. You’ll be okay?”

“Sure. I’ve got the Glock.”

“Right.”

The summer before, she had trained on a range and Bosch considered her proficient in weapon safety and marksmanship — in fact, she was scheduled to compete for the first time the following weekend. More important than her skills with the gun was her understanding of the responsibility of the weapon. He hoped she would never use the weapon outside of a range. But if the time came, she’d be ready.

He stayed on the bed next to her and continued to watch the video. He saw nothing on it that intrigued him or that he felt he had to follow up on. He decided not to leave the house.

Finished with the disc, he got up quietly, turned out the light and went out to the dining room. He was going to jump from the Irving case back to the Lily Price investigation. He opened his briefcase and spread out the files he had pulled that afternoon from the state’s Department of Probation and Parole.

Clayton Pell had three convictions on his record as an adult. They were sexually motivated crimes that escalated over the ten years of his continued interaction with the justice system. He started at age twenty with indecent exposure, moved up to false imprisonment and indecent exposure at age twenty-one, and then three years later hit the big time with the abduction and forcible rape of a minor below the age of twelve. He got probation and county jail time for the first two convictions but served six years out of a ten-year sentence at Corcoran State Prison for the third fall. It was there that a barbaric justice was carried out by his fellow inmates.

Bosch read through the details of the crimes. In each case the victim was a boy aged eight to ten years old. The first victim was a neighbor’s child. The second was a boy Pell had taken by the hand on a playground and led into a nearby restroom. The third crime involved lying in wait and more strategic planning. The victim was a boy who had gotten off a school bus and was walking home — a stretch of only three blocks — when Pell pulled up in his van and stopped. He told the boy he was with school security and showed him a badge. He said he needed to take the boy home because there had been an incident at school he had to inform his parents about. The boy complied and got in the van. Pell drove to a clearing and committed several sex acts upon the child in the van before releasing him and driving away.

He did not leave DNA on the victim and was caught only because he blew through a red light after pulling out of the neighborhood. A camera took a picture of his van’s license plate in the intersection just minutes before the boy was found wandering in a daze a few blocks away. Because of his past record he became a suspect. The victim made an identification at a lineup and the case was filed. But the ID — as with any made by a nine-year-old — was shaky and Pell was offered a deal. He pleaded guilty and got a ten-year sentence. He probably felt he had gotten the better side of things until the day he was cornered in the laundry at Corcoran, held down and castrated with a shank.

With each conviction Pell was psychologically evaluated as part of the PSI, or pre-sentence investigation. Bosch knew from experience that these tended to piggyback on each other. The evaluators were busy with a crushing caseload and often relied on the evaluation performed the first time. So Bosch paid careful attention to the PSI report from the first conviction for indecent exposure.

The evaluation detailed a truly horrible and traumatic childhood. Pell was the son of a heroin-addicted mother who dragged the boy with her to dealer dens and shooting galleries, often paying for her drugs by performing sex acts on drug dealers right in front of her son. The child did not attend school with any regularity and had no real home that he could remember. He and his mother moved about constantly, living in hotels and motels and with men who put up with them for short periods of time.

Bosch keyed in on a long paragraph that described one particular stretch of time when Pell was eight years old. He described for the evaluator an apartment where he lived for what he believed was the longest period of time he’d ever spent under one roof. His mother had hooked up with a man named Johnny who used her for sex and to buy drugs for him. Often, the boy was left in Johnny’s care while his mother went out to sell sex in order to buy drugs. Sometimes she was gone for days and Johnny became angry and frustrated. He alternately left the boy locked in a closet for long periods of time or beat him brutally, often whipping him with a belt. The report noted that Pell still had the scars on his back and buttocks that supported the story. The beatings were horrible enough but the man also took to sexually abusing the boy, forcing him to perform oral sex and threatening him with harsher beatings if he dared tell his mother or anyone else.

Soon after, that situation ended when his mother moved on from Johnny. But the horrors of Pell’s childhood veered in a new direction when he was thirteen years old and his mother overdosed on a motel bed while he was sleeping right next to her. He was taken into the custody of the Department of Children and Family Services and placed in a series of foster homes. But he never stayed in one place for long, choosing to run away whenever the opportunity presented itself. He told the evaluator that he had been living on his own since he was seventeen. When asked if he had ever held a job, he said the only thing he had ever been paid for was sex with older men.

It was a gruesome story and Bosch knew that a version of it was shared by many of the denizens of the streets and the prisons, the traumas and depravities of childhood manifesting themselves in adulthood, often in repetitive behavior. It was the mystery Hannah Stone said she investigated on a regular basis.

Bosch checked the two other PSI reports and found variations of the same story, though some of Pell’s recollections of the dates and ages shifted slightly. Still, it was largely the same story and its repeated nature was either a testament to the laziness of the evaluators or to Pell’s telling the truth. Bosch guessed that it was somewhere in the middle. The evaluators only reported what they had been told or they copied it off a prior report. No effort had been made to confirm Pell’s story or even to find the people who had abused him.

Bosch took out his notebook and wrote down a summary of the story about the man named Johnny. He was now sure that there had been no screwup in the handling of evidence. In the morning, he and Chu had an appointment at the regional lab and Chu at least would keep it — if only to eventually be able to testify that they had exhaustively investigated all possibilities.

But Bosch had no doubt that the lab was in the clear. He could feel the trickle of adrenaline dripping into his bloodstream. He knew it would soon become a relentless torrent and he would move with its flow. He believed he now knew who had killed Lily Price.

In the morning Bosch called Chu from his car and told him to handle the visit to the crime lab without him.

“But what are you doing?” his partner asked.

“I have to go back to Panorama City. I’m checking out a lead.”

“What lead, Harry?”

“It involves Pell. I read his file last night and came up with something. I need to check it. I don’t think there’s a problem at the lab but we have to check it out in case it ever came up at trial — if there ever is a trial. One of us has to be able to testify that we checked out the lab.”