Michael Connelly

by Harry Bosch 08 - City Of Bones (v5)

  He finally tied off his feelings on his own missteps and the uncontrollable movements of the case. He decided he could not celebrate or feel much like a prince of the city when the case had cost so much. Yes, they had the admitted killer of a child in the car with them and they were taking him to jail. But Nicholas Trent and Julia Brasher were dead. The house he had built of the case would always have rooms containing their ghosts. They would always haunt him.

  “Was that my daughter you were talking about? You’re going to talk to her?”

  Bosch looked up into the rearview mirror. Delacroix was hunched forward because his hands were cuffed behind his back. Bosch had to adjust the mirror and turn on the dome light to see his eyes.

  “Yeah. We’re going to give her the news.”

  “Do you have to? Do you have to bring her into this?”

  Bosch watched him in the mirror for a moment. Delacroix’s eyes were shifting back and forth.

  “We’ve got no choice,” Bosch said. “It’s her brother, her father.”

  Bosch put the car onto the Los Angeles Street exit. They would be at the booking entrance at the back of Parker Center in five minutes.

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “What you told us. That you killed Arthur. We want to tell her before the reporters get to her or she sees it on the news.”

  He checked the mirror. He saw Delacroix nod his approval. Then the man’s eyes came up and looked at Bosch’s in the mirror.

  “Will you tell her something for me?”

  “Tell her what?”

  Bosch reached inside his coat pocket for his recorder but then realized he didn’t have it with him. He silently cursed Bradley and his own decision to cooperate with IAD.

  Delacroix was quiet for a moment. He moved his head as he looked from side to side as if searching for the thing he wanted to say to his daughter. Then he looked back up at the mirror and spoke.

  “Just tell her that I’m sorry for everything. Just like that. Sorry for everything. Tell her that.”

  “You’re sorry for everything. I got it. Anything else?”

  “No, just that.”

  Edgar shifted in his seat so he could look back at Delacroix.

  “You’re sorry, huh?” he said. “Seems kind of late after twenty years, don’t you think?”

  Bosch turned right onto Los Angeles Street. He couldn’t check the mirror for Delacroix’s reaction.

  “You don’t know anything,” Delacroix angrily retorted. “I’ve been crying for twenty years.”

  “Yeah,” Edgar threw back. “Crying in your whiskey. But not enough to do anything about it until we showed up. Not enough to crawl out of your bottle and turn yourself in and get your boy out of the dirt while there was still enough of him for a proper burial. All we have is bones, you know. Bones.”

  Bosch now checked the mirror. Delacroix shook his head and leaned even further forward, until his head was against the back of the front seat.

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “I didn’t even—”

  He stopped himself and Bosch watched the mirror as Delacroix’s shoulders started to shake. He was crying.

  “Didn’t even what?” Bosch asked.

  Delacroix didn’t respond.

  “Didn’t even what?” Bosch asked louder.

  Then he heard Delacroix vomit onto the floor of the back compartment.

  “Ah, shit!” Edgar yelled. “I knew this was going to happen.”

  The car filled with the acrid smell of a drunk tank. Alcohol-based vomit. Bosch lowered his window all the way despite the brisk January air. Edgar did the same. Bosch turned the car into Parker Center.

  “It’s your turn, I think,” Bosch said. “I got the last one. That wit we pulled out of Bar Marmount.”

  “I know, I know,” Edgar said. “Just what I wanna be doing before dinner.”

  Bosch pulled into one of the spaces near the intake doors that were reserved for vehicles carrying prisoners. A booking officer standing by the door started heading toward the car.

  Bosch recalled Julia Brasher’s complaint about having to clean vomit out of the back of patrol cars. It was almost like she was jabbing him in the sore ribs again, making him smile despite the pain.

  39

  SHEILA Delacroix answered the door of the home where she and her brother had lived but only one of them had grown up. She was wearing black leggings and a long T-shirt that went almost to her knees. Her face was scrubbed of makeup and Bosch noticed for the first time that she had a pretty face when it was not hidden by paint and powder. Her eyes grew wide when she recognized Bosch and Edgar.

  “Detectives? I wasn’t expecting you.”

  She made no move to invite them in. Bosch spoke.

  “Sheila, we have been able to identify the remains from Laurel Canyon as those of your brother, Arthur. We are sorry to have to tell you this. Can we come in for a few minutes?”

  She nodded as she received the information and leaned for just a moment on the door frame. Bosch wondered if she would leave the place now that there was no chance of Arthur ever coming back.

  She stepped aside and waved them in.

  “Please,” she said, signaling them to sit down as they moved to the living room.

  Everybody took the same seats as they had before. Bosch noticed the box of photos she had retrieved the other day was still on the coffee table. The photos were neatly stacked in rows in the box now. Sheila noticed his glance.

  “I kind of put them in order. I had been meaning to get around to it for a long time.”

  Bosch nodded. He waited until she took her seat before sitting down last and continuing. He and Edgar had worked out how the visit should go on the way over. Sheila Delacroix was going to be an important component of the case. They had her father’s confession and the evidence of the bones. But what would pull it all together would be her story. They needed her to tell what it was like growing up in the Delacroix house.

  “Uh, there’s more, Sheila. We wanted to talk to you before you saw it on the news. Late today your father was charged with Arthur’s murder.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  She leaned forward and brought her elbows down to her knees. She clasped her hands into fists and held them tight against her mouth. She closed her eyes and her hair fell forward, helping to hide her face.

  “He’s being held down at Parker Center pending his arraignment tomorrow and a bail hearing. I would say that from the looks of things—his lifestyle, I mean—I don’t think he’ll be able to make the kind of bail they’re going to be talking about.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “There must be some kind of mistake. What about the man, the man across the street? He killed himself, he must be the one.”

  “We don’t think so, Sheila.”

  “My father couldn’t have done this.”

  “Actually,” Edgar said softly, “he confessed to it.”

  She straightened herself, and Bosch saw the true surprise on her face. And this surprised him. He thought she would have always harbored the idea, the suspicion about her father.

  “He told us that he hit him with a baseball bat because he skipped school,” Bosch said. “Your father said he was drinking at the time and that he just lost it and he hit him too hard. An accident, according to him.”

  Sheila stared back at him as she tried to process this information.

  “He then put your brother’s body in the trunk of the car. He told us that when you two drove around looking for him that night, he was in the trunk all along.”

  She closed her eyes again.

  “Then, later that night,” Edgar continued, “while you were sleeping, he snuck out and drove up into the hills and dumped the body.”

  Sheila started shaking her head like she was trying to fend off the words.

  “No, no, he . . .”

  “Did you ever see your father strike Arthur?” Bosch asked.

  Sheila looked at him, seemingly coming out of
her daze.

  “No, never.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  She shook her head.

  “Nothing more than a swat on the behind when he was small and being a brat. That’s all.”

  Bosch looked over at Edgar and then back at the woman, who was leaning forward again, looking down at the floor by her feet.

  “Sheila, I know we’re talking about your father here. But we’re also talking about your brother. He didn’t get much of a chance at life, did he?”

  He waited and after a long moment she shook her head without looking up.

  “We have your father’s confession and we have evidence. Arthur’s bones tell us a story, Sheila. There are injuries. A lot of them. From his whole life.”

  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.”

  40

  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 withou
t 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.

  “Dr. Guyot. How are you?”

  “Better than you, I’m afraid. You’ve hurt yourself again. That looks like a nasty laceration.”

  Bosch touched his cheek. It still stung.

  “It’s all right. Just a scratch. You better keep Calamity on the leash. I just saw a coyote up there.”

  “Yes, I never take her off the leash at night. The hills are full of roaming coyotes. We hear them at night. You better come with me to the house. I can butterfly that. If you don’t do it right it will scar.”

  A memory of Julia Brasher asking about his scars suddenly came into Bosch’s mind. He looked at Guyot.

  “Okay.”

  They left the car on the circle and walked down to Guyot’s house. In the back office Bosch sat on the desk while the doctor cleaned the cut on his cheek and then used two butterfly bandages to close it.

  “I think you’ll recover,” Guyot said as he closed his first-aid kit. “I don’t know if your shirt will, though.”

  Bosch looked down at his T-shirt. It was stained with his blood at the bottom.

  “Thanks for fixing me up, Doc. How long do I have to leave these things on?”

  “Few days. If you can stand it.”

  Bosch gently touched his cheek. It was swelling slightly but the wound was no longer stinging. Guyot turned from his first-aid kit and looked at him and Bosch knew he wanted to say something. He guessed he was going to ask about the dummy.