Michael Connelly: The Drop

Based on Pell’s record, Bosch believed the 1989 case was likely a sex-related murder. He could feel his insides beginning to tighten. He was going to go out and grab Clayton Pell and bring him to justice.

“Do you see it?” Duvall asked.

“See what?” Bosch asked. “Was this a sex killing? This guy has the classic pred—”

“The birth date,” Duvall said.

Bosch looked back down at the hit sheet as Chu leaned over farther.

“Yeah, right here,” Bosch said. “November nine, nineteen eighty-one. What’s that got—”

“He’s too young,” Chu said.

Bosch glanced at him and then back at the sheet. He suddenly got it. Clayton Pell was born in 1981. He was only eight years old at the time of the murder on the hit sheet.

“Exactly,” Duvall said. “So I want you to get the book and box from Shuler and Dolan and very quietly figure out what we have here. I’m hoping to God they didn’t get two cases mixed up.”

Bosch knew that if Shuler and Dolan had somehow sent in genetic material from the old case labeled under a more recent case, then both cases would be tainted beyond any hope of eventual prosecution.

“Like you were about to say,” Duvall continued, “this guy on the hit sheet is no doubt a predator, but I don’t think he got away with a killing when he was only eight years old. So something doesn’t fit. Find it and come back to me before you do anything. If they screwed up and we can correct it, then we won’t need to worry about IAD or anybody else. We’ll just keep it right here.”

She may have appeared to be trying to protect Shuler and Dolan from Internal Affairs, but she was also protecting herself, and Bosch knew it. There would not be much vertical movement in the department for a lieutenant who had presided over an evidence-handling scandal in her own unit.

“What other years are assigned to Shuler and Dolan?” Bosch asked.

“On the recent side, they’ve got ’ninety-seven and two thousand,” Marcia said. “This could have come from a case they were working from one of those two years.”

Bosch nodded. He could see the scenario. The reckless handling of genetic evidence from one case cross-pollinates with another. The end result would be two tainted cases and scandal that would taint anybody near it.

“What do we say to Shuler and Dolan?” Chu asked. “What’s the reason we’re taking the case off them?”

Duvall looked up at Marcia for an answer.

“They’ve got a trial coming up,” he offered. “Jury selection starts Thursday.”

Duvall nodded.

“I’ll tell them I want them clear for that.”

“And what if they say they still want the case?” Chu asked. “What if they say they can handle it?”

“I’ll put them straight,” Duvall said. “Anything else, Detectives?”

Bosch looked up at her.

“We’ll work the case, Lieutenant, and see what’s what. But I don’t investigate other cops.”

“That’s fine. I’m not asking you to. Work the case and tell me how the DNA came back to an eight-year-old kid, okay?”

Bosch nodded and started to stand up.

“Just remember,” Duvall added, “you talk to me before you do anything with what you learn.”

“You got it,” Bosch said.

They were about to leave the room.

“Harry,” the lieutenant said. “Hang back a second.”

Bosch looked at Chu and raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know what this was about. The lieutenant came around from behind her desk and closed the door after Chu and Marcia had left. She stayed standing and businesslike.

“I just wanted you to know that your application for an extension on your DROP came through. They gave you four years retroactive.”

Bosch looked at her, doing the math. He nodded. He had asked for the maximum — five years nonretroactive — but he’d take what they gave. It wouldn’t keep him much past high school but it was better than nothing.

“Well, I’m glad,” Duvall said. “It gives you thirty-nine more months with us.”

Her tone indicated that she had read disappointment in his face.

“No,” he said quickly. “I’m glad. I was just thinking about where that would put me with my daughter. It’s good. I’m happy.”

“Good, then.”

That was her way of saying the meeting was over. Bosch thanked her and left the office. As he stepped back into the squad room, he looked across the vast expanse of desks and dividers and file cabinets. He knew it was home and that he would get to stay — for now.

The Open-Unsolved Unit shared access to the two fifth-floor conference rooms with all other units in the Robbery-Homicide Division. Usually detectives had to reserve time in one of the rooms, signing on the clipboard hooked on the door. But this early on a Monday, they both were open and Bosch, Chu, Shuler and Dolan commandeered the smaller of the two rooms without making a reservation.

They brought with them the murder book and the small archival evidence box from the 1989 case.

“Okay,” Bosch said when everyone was seated. “So you are cool with us running with this case? If you’re not, we can go back to the lieutenant and say you really want to work it.”

“No, it’s okay,” Shuler said. “We both are involved in the trial, so it’s better this way. It’s our first case in the unit and we want to see it through to that guilty verdict.”

Bosch nodded as he casually opened the murder book.

“You want to give us the rundown on this one, then?”

Shuler gave Dolan a nod and she began to summarize the 1989 case as Bosch flipped through the pages of the binder.

“We have a nineteen-year-old victim named Lily Price. She was snatched off the street while walking home from the beach in Venice on a Sunday afternoon. At the time, they narrowed the grab point down to the vicinity of Speedway and Voyage. Price lived on Voyage with three roommates. One was with her on the beach and two were in the apartment. She disappeared between those two points. She said she was going back to use the bathroom and she never made it.”

“She left her towel and a Walkman on the beach,” Shuler said. “Sunscreen. So it was clear she was intending to come back. She never did.”

“Her body was found the next morning on the rocks down at the cut,” Dolan said. “She was naked and had been raped and strangled. Her clothes were never found. The ligature was removed.”

Bosch flipped through several plastic pages containing faded Polaroid shots of the crime scene. Looking at the victim, he couldn’t help but think of his own daughter, who at fifteen had a full life in front of her. There had been a time when looking at photos like this fueled him, gave him the fire he needed to be relentless. But since Maddie had come to live with him, it was increasingly more difficult for him to look at victims.

It didn’t stop him from building the fire, however.

“Where did the DNA come from?” he asked. “Semen?”

“No, the killer used a condom or didn’t ejaculate,” Dolan said. “No semen.”

“It came from a small smear of blood,” Shuler said. “It was found on her neck, right below the right ear. She had no wounds in that area. It was assumed that it had come from the killer, that he had been cut in the struggle or maybe was already bleeding. It was just a drop. A smear, really. She was strangled with a ligature. If she was strangled from behind, then his hand could have been against her neck there. If there was a cut on his hand. .”

“Transfer deposit,” Chu said.

“Exactly.”

Bosch found the Polaroid that showed the victim’s neck and the smear of blood. The photo was washed out by time and he could barely see the blood. A ruler had been placed on the young woman’s neck so that the blood smear could be measured in the photo. It was less than an inch long.