Michael Connelly: City Of Bones

“You’re not on the clock, are you?”

“No, I work the three-to-eleven. I just thought you might need a volunteer. I heard about the academy call out.”

“You want to go up there and look for bones, huh?”

“I want to learn.”

Bosch nodded. They walked up the path to Guyot’s door. It opened before they got there and the doctor invited them in. Bosch asked if he could use the phone in his office again and Guyot showed him the way even though he didn’t have to. Bosch sat down behind the desk.

“How are the ribs?” the doctor asked.

“Fine.”

Brasher raised her eyebrows and Bosch picked up on it.

“Had a little accident when I was up there last night.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I was just sort of minding my own business when a tree trunk suddenly attacked me for no reason.”

She grimaced and somehow managed to smile at the same time.

Bosch dialed Media Relations from memory and told an officer about the case in very general terms. At one point he put his hand over the phone and asked Guyot if he wanted his name put in the press release. The doctor declined. A few minutes later Bosch was finished and hung up. He looked at Guyot.

“Once we clear the scene in a few days the reporters will probably stick around. They’ll be looking for the dog that found the bone, is my guess. So if you want to stay out of it, keep Calamity off the street or they’ll put two and two together.”

“Good advice,” Guyot said.

“And you might want to call your neighbor, Mr. Ulrich, and tell him not to mention it to any reporters, either.”

On the way out of the house Bosch asked Brasher if she wanted her flashlight and she said she didn’t want to bother carrying it while she was helping search the hillside.

“Get it to me whenever,” she said.

Bosch liked the answer. It meant he would get at least one more chance to see her.

Back at the circle Bosch found Edgar lecturing the academy cadets.

“The golden rule of the crime scene, people, is don’t touch anything until it has been studied, photographed and charted.”

Bosch walked into the circle.

“Okay, we ready?”

“They’re ready,” Edgar said. He nodded toward two of the cadets, who were holding metal detectors. “I borrowed those from SID.”

Bosch nodded and gave the cadets and Brasher the same safety speech he had given the forensic crew. They then headed up to the crime scene, Bosch introducing Brasher to Edgar and then letting his partner lead the way through the checkpoint. He took up the rear, walking behind Brasher.

“We’ll see if you want to be a homicide detective by the end of the day,” he said.

“Anything’s got to be better than chasing the radio and washing puke out of the back of your car at the end of every shift.”

“I remember those days.”

Bosch and Edgar spread the twelve cadets and Brasher out in the areas adjacent to the stand of acacia trees and had them begin conducting side-by-side searches. Bosch then went down and brought up the two K-9 teams to supplement the search.

Once things were under way he left Edgar with the cadets and went back to the acacias to see what progress had been made. He found Kohl sitting on an equipment crate and supervising the placement of wooden stakes into the ground so that strings could be used to set the excavation grid.

Bosch had worked one prior case with Kohl and knew she was very thorough and good at what she did. She was in her late thirties with a tennis player’s build and tan. Bosch had once run across her at a city park, where she was playing tennis with a twin sister. They had drawn a crowd. It looked like somebody hitting the ball off a mirrored wall.

Kohl’s straight blonde hair fell forward and hid her eyes as she looked down at the oversized clipboard on her lap. She was making notations on a piece of paper with a grid already printed on it. Bosch looked over her shoulder at the chart. Kohl was labeling the individual blocks with letters of the alphabet as the corresponding stakes were placed in the ground. At the top of the page she had written “City of Bones.”

Bosch reached down and tapped the chart where she had written the caption.

“Why do you call it that?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Because we’re setting out the streets and the blocks of what will become a city to us,” she said, running her fingers over some of the lines on the chart in illustration. “At least while we’re working here it will feel like it. Our little city.”

Bosch nodded.

“In every murder is the tale of a city,” he said.

Kohl looked up at him.

“Who said that?”

“I don’t know. Somebody did.”

He turned his attention to Corazon, who was squatting over the small bones on the surface of the soil, studying them while the lens of the video camera studied her. He was thinking of something to say about it when his rover was keyed and he took it off his belt.

“Bosch here.”

“Edgar. Better come on back over here, Harry. We already have something.”

“Right.”

Edgar was standing in an almost level spot in the brush about forty yards from the acacia trees. A half dozen of the cadets and Brasher had formed a circle and were looking down at something in the two-foot-high brush. The police chopper was circling in a tighter circle above.

Bosch got to the circle and looked down. It was a child’s skull partially submerged in the soil, its hollow eyes staring up at him.

“Nobody touched it,” Edgar said. “Brasher here found it.”

Bosch glanced at her and the humor she seemed to carry in her eyes and mouth were gone. He looked back at the skull and pulled the radio off his belt.

“Dr. Corazon?” he said into it.

It was a long moment before her voice came back.

“Yes, I’m here. What is it?”

“We are going to have to widen the crime scene.”

WITH Bosch acting as the general overseeing the small army that worked the expanded crime scene, the day progressed well. The bones came out of the ground and the hillside brush easily, as if they had been impatiently waiting a very long time. By noon, three blocks in the grid were being actively excavated by Kathy Kohl’s team, and dozens of bones emerged from the dark soil. Like their archeological counterparts who unearthed the artifacts of the ancients, the dig team used small tools and brushes to bring these bones gently to light. They also used metal detectors and vapor probes. The process was painstaking yet it was moving at an even faster pace than Bosch had hoped for.

The finding of the skull had set this pace and brought a sense of urgency to the entire operation. It was removed from its location first, and the field examination conducted on camera by Teresa Corazon found fracture lines and surgical scarring. The record of surgery assured them they were dealing with relatively contemporary bones. The fractures in and of themselves were not definitive in the indication of homicide, but when added to the evidence that the body had been buried they gave a clear sense that the tale of a murder was unfolding.

By two o’clock, when the hillside crews broke for lunch, almost half of the skeleton had already been recovered from the grid. A small scattering of other bones had been found in the nearby brush by the cadets. Additionally, Kohl’s crew had unearthed fragments of deteriorated clothing and a canvas backpack of a size most likely used by a child.

The bones came down the hillside in square wooden boxes with rope handles attached on the sides. By lunch, a forensic anthropologist was examining three boxes of bones in the medical examiner’s office. The clothing, most of it rotten and unrecognizable, and the backpack, which had been left unopened, were transported to LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division lab for the same scrutiny.