Michael Connelly - City Of Bones

She nodded.

“What we need is another voice. Someone who can tell us what it was like for Arthur to grow up in this house.”

“To try to grow up,” Edgar added.

Sheila straightened herself and used her palms to smear tears across her cheeks.

“All I can tell you is that I never saw him hit my brother. Never once.”

She wiped more tears away. Her face was becoming shiny and distorted.

“This is unbelievable,” she said. “All I did… all I wanted was to see if that was Arthur up there. And now… I should have never called you people. I should’ve…”

She didn’t finish. She pinched the bridge of her nose in an effort to stop the tears.

“Sheila,” Edgar said. “If your father didn’t do it, why would he tell us he did?”

She sharply shook her head and seemed to grow agitated.

“Why would he tell us to tell you he said he was sorry?”

“I don’t know. He’s sick. He drinks. Maybe he wants the attention, I don’t know. He was an actor, you know.”

Bosch pulled the box of photos across the coffee table and used his finger to go through one of the rows. He saw a photo of Arthur as maybe a five-year-old. He pulled it out and studied it. There was no hint in the picture that the boy was doomed, that the bones beneath the flesh were already damaged.

He slid the photo back into its place and looked up at the woman. Their eyes held.

“Sheila, will you help us?”

She looked away from him.

“I can’t.”

BOSCH pulled the car to a stop in front of the drainage culvert and quickly cut the engine. He didn’t want to draw any attention from the residents on Wonderland Avenue. Being in a slickback exposed him. But he hoped it was late enough that all the curtains would be drawn across all the windows.

Bosch was alone in the car, his partner having gone home for the night. He reached down and pushed the trunk release button. He leaned to the side window and looked up into the darkness of the hillside. He could tell that the Special Services unit had already been out and removed the network of ramps and staircases that led to the crime scene. This was the way Bosch wanted it. He wanted it to be as close as possible to the way it was when Samuel Delacroix had dragged his son’s body up the hillside in the dead of night.

The flashlight came on and momentarily startled Bosch. He hadn’t realized he had his thumb on the button. He turned it off and looked out at the quiet houses on the circle. Bosch was following his instincts, returning to the place where it had all begun. He had a guy in lockup for a murder more than twenty years old but it didn’t feel good to him. Something wasn’t right and he was going to start here.

He reached up and switched the dome light off. He quietly opened the door and got out with the flashlight.

At the back of the car he looked around once more and raised the lid. Lying in the trunk was a test dummy he had borrowed from Jesper at the SID lab. Dummies were used on occasion in the restaging of crimes, particularly suspicious suicide jumps and hit-and-runs. The SID had an assortment ranging in size from infant to adult. The weight of each dummy could be manipulated by adding or removing one-pound sandbags from zippered pockets on the torso and limbs.

The dummy in Bosch’s trunk had SID stenciled across the chest. It had no face. In the lab Bosch and Jesper had used sandbags to make it weigh seventy pounds, the estimated weight Golliher had given to Arthur Delacroix based on bone size and the photos of the boy. The dummy wore a store-bought backpack similar to the one recovered during the excavation. It was stuffed with old rags from the trunk of the slickback in an approximation of the clothing found buried with the bones.

Bosch put the flashlight down and grabbed the dummy by its upper arms and pulled it out of the trunk. He hefted it up and over his left shoulder. He stepped back to get his balance and then reached back into the trunk for the flashlight. It was a cheap drugstore light, the kind Samuel Delacroix told them he had used the night he buried his son. Bosch turned it on, stepped over the curb and headed for the hillside.

Bosch started to climb but immediately realized he needed both his hands to grab tree limbs to help pull him up the incline. He shoved the flashlight into one of his front pockets and its beam largely illuminated the upper reaches of the trees and was useless to him.

He fell twice in the first five minutes and quickly exhausted himself before getting thirty feet up the steep slope. Without the flashlight illuminating his path he didn’t see a small leafless branch he was passing and it raked across his cheek, cutting it open. Bosch cursed but kept going.

At fifty feet up Bosch took his first break, dropping the dummy next to the trunk of a Monterey pine and then sitting down on its chest. He pulled his T-shirt up out of his pants and used the cloth to help stanch the flow of blood on his cheek. The wound stung from the sweat that was dripping down his face.

“Okay, Sid, let’s go,” he said when he had caught his breath.

For the next twenty feet he pulled the dummy up the slope. The progress was slower but it was easier than carrying the full weight and it was also the way Delacroix told them he remembered doing it.

After one more break Bosch made it the last thirty feet to the level spot and dragged the dummy into the clearing beneath the acacia trees. He dropped to his knees and sat back on his heels.

“Bullshit,” he said while gulping breath. “This is bullshit.”

He couldn’t see Delacroix doing it. He was maybe ten years older than Delacroix had been when he had supposedly accomplished the same feat but Bosch was in good shape for a man his age. He was also sober, something Delacroix claimed he had not been.

Even though Bosch had been able to get the body to the burial spot, his gut instinct told him Delacroix had lied to them. He had not done it the way he claimed. He either didn’t take the body up the hill or he’d had help. And there was a third possibility, that Arthur Delacroix had been alive and climbed up the hill by himself.

His breathing finally returned to normal. Bosch leaned his head back and looked up through the opening in the canopy of the trees. He could see the night sky and a partial piece of the moon behind a cloud. He realized he could smell burning wood from a fireplace in one of the houses on the circle below.

He pulled the flashlight from his pocket and reached down to a strap sewn onto the back of the dummy. Since taking the dummy down the hill was not part of the test, he intended to pull it by the carrying strap. He was about to get up when he heard movement in the ground cover about thirty feet to his left.

Bosch immediately extended the flashlight in the direction of the noise and caught a fleeting glimpse of a coyote moving in the brush. The animal quickly moved out of the light beam and disappeared. Bosch swept the light back and forth but couldn’t find it. He got up and started dragging the dummy toward the slope.

The law of gravity made going down easier but just as treacherous. As he carefully and slowly chose his steps, Bosch wondered about the coyote. He wondered how long coyotes lived and if the one he had seen tonight could have watched another man twenty years before as he buried a body in the same spot.

Bosch made it down the hill without falling. When he carried the dummy out to the curb he saw Dr. Guyot and his dog standing next to the slickback. The dog was on a leash. Bosch quickly went to the trunk, dumped in the dummy and then slammed it closed. Guyot came around to the back of his car.

“Detective Bosch.”

He seemed to know better than to ask what Bosch was doing.