Michael Connelly - City Of Bones

Bosch looked at Edgar. His partner was going through his own collection of phone messages, none of which appeared to have stopped him the way the one in Bosch’s hand had. He decided not to return the call yet or to tell Edgar about it. He folded the message and put it in his pocket. He took a look around the squad room, at all the bustling activity of the detectives. He would miss it if the new assignment wasn’t a posting with the same kind of ebb and flow of adrenaline. He didn’t care about freeway therapy. He could take the best punch they could give and not care. What he did care about was the job, the mission. He knew that without it he was lost.

He went back to the messages. The last one in the stack, meaning it was the first one received, was from Antoine Jesper in SID. He had called at ten that morning.

“Shit,” Bosch said.

“What?” Edgar said.

“I’m going to have to go downtown. I still have the dummy I borrowed last night in my trunk. I think Jesper needs it back.”

He picked up the phone and was about to call SID when he heard his and Edgar’s names called from the far end of the squad room. It was Lieutenant Billets. She signaled them to her office.

“Here we go,” Edgar said as he got up. “Harry, you can have the honors. You tell her where we’re at on this thing. More like where we aren’t at.”

Bosch did. In five minutes he brought Billets completely up to date on the case and its latest reversal and lack of progress.

“So where do we go from here?” she asked when he was finished.

“We start over, look at everything we’ve got, see what we missed. We go to the kid’s school, see what records they have, look at yearbooks, try to contact classmates. Things like that.”

Billets nodded. If she knew anything about the call from the O-3, she wasn’t letting on.

“I think the most important thing is that spot up there on the hill,” Bosch added.

“How so?”

“I think the kid was alive when he got up there. That’s where he was killed. We have to figure out what or who brought him up there. We’re going to have to go back in time on that whole street. Profile the whole neighborhood. It’s going to take time.”

She shook her head.

“Well, we don’t have time to work it full-time,” she said. “You guys just sat out of the rotation for ten days. This isn’t RHD. That’s the longest I’ve been able to hold a team out since I got here.”

“So we’re back in?”

She nodded.

“And right now it’s your up-the next case is yours.”

Bosch nodded. He had assumed that was coming. In the ten days they’d been working the case, the two other Hollywood homicide teams had both caught cases. It was now their turn. It was rare to get such a long ride on a divisional case anyway. It had been a luxury. Too bad they hadn’t turned the case, he thought.

Bosch also knew that by putting them back on the rotation Billets was making a tacit acknowledgment that she wasn’t expecting the case to clear. With each day that a case stayed open, the chances of clearing it dropped markedly. It was a given in homicide and it happened to everybody. There were no closers.

“Okay,” Billets said. “Anything else anybody wants to talk about?”

She looked at Bosch with a raised eyebrow. He suddenly thought maybe she did know something about the call from the O-3. He hesitated, then shook his head along with Edgar.

“Okay, guys. Thanks.”

They went back to the table and Bosch called Jesper.

“The dummy’s safe,” he said when the criminalist picked up the phone. “I’ll bring it down later today.”

“Cool, man. But that wasn’t why I called. I just wanted to tell you I can make a little refinement on that report I sent you on the skateboard. That is, if it still matters.”

Bosch hesitated for a moment.

“Not really, but what do you want to refine, Antoine?”

Bosch opened the murder book in front of him and leafed through it until he found the SID report. He looked at it as Jesper spoke.

“Well, in there I said we could put manufacture of the board between February of ’seventy-eight and June of ’eighty-six, right?”

“Right. I’m looking at it.”

“Okay, well, I can now cut more than half of that time period. This particular board was made between ’seventy-eight and ’eighty. Two years. I don’t know if that means anything to the case or not.”

Bosch scanned the report. Jesper’s amendment to the report didn’t really matter, since they had dropped Trent as a suspect and the skateboard had never been linked to Arthur Delacroix. But Bosch was curious about it, anyway.

“How’d you cut it down? Says here the same design was manufactured until ’eighty-six.”

“It was. But this particular board has a date on it. Nineteen eighty.”

Bosch was puzzled.

“Wait a minute. Where? I didn’t see any-”

“I took the trucks off-you know, the wheels. I had some time here between things and I wanted to see if there were any manufacture markings on the hardware. You know, patent or trademark coding. There weren’t. But then I saw that somebody had scratched the date in the wood. Like carved it in on the underside of the board and then it was covered up by the truck assembly.”

“You mean like when the board was made?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s not a professional job. In fact it was hard to read. I had to put it under glass and angled light. I just think it was the original owner’s way of marking his board in a secret way in case there was ever a dispute or something over ownership. Like if somebody stole it from him. Like I said in the report, Boney boards were the choice board for a while there. They were hard to get-might’ve been easier to steal one than find one in a store. So the kid who had this one took off the back truck-this would have been the original truck, not the current wheels-and carved in the date. Nineteen eighty A.D.”

Bosch looked over at Edgar. He was on the phone speaking with his hand cupped over the mouthpiece. A personal call.

“You said A.D.?”

“Yeah, you know, as in anno Domini or however you say it. It’s Latin. Means the year of our Lord. I looked it up.”

“No, it means Arthur Delacroix.”

“What? Who’s that?”

“That’s the vic, Antoine. Arthur Delacroix. As in A.D.”

“Damn! I didn’t have the vic’s name here, Bosch. You filed all of this evidence while he was still a John Doe and never amended it, man. I didn’t even know you had an ID.”

Bosch wasn’t listening to him. A surge of adrenaline was moving through his body. He knew his pulse was quickening.

“Antoine, don’t move. I’m coming down there.”

“I’ll be here.”

THE freeway was crowded with people getting an early start on the weekend. Bosch couldn’t keep his speed as he headed downtown. He had a feeling of pulsing urgency. He knew it was because of Jesper’s discovery and the message from the O-3.

He turned his wrist on the wheel so he could see his watch and check the date. He knew that transfers usually took place at the end of a pay period. There were two pay periods a month-beginning the first and the fifteenth. If the transfer they were going to put on him was immediate, he knew that gave him only three or four days to wrap up the case. He didn’t want to be taken off it, to leave it in Edgar’s or anybody else’s hands. He wanted to finish it.

Bosch reached into his pocket and brought out the phone slip. He unfolded it, driving with the heels of his palms on the wheel. He studied it for a moment and then got out his phone. He punched in the number from the message and waited.

“Office of Operations, Lieutenant Bollenbach speaking.”