“This is Halley Lewis,” a voice finally said. “What is this about?”
“Mr. Lewis, I am an investigator out in Los Angeles,” Bosch said. “Thank you for taking my call. I am working on an investigation involving the late Dominick Santanello. I—”
“I’ll say he’s late. Nick died almost fifty years ago.”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
“What could you possibly be investigating about him?”
Bosch dropped into his prepared response.
“It is a confidential investigation, but I can tell you it involves trying to determine if Dominick left behind an heir.”
There was a moment of silence before Lewis responded.
“An heir? He was about nineteen when he got killed in Vietnam.”
“Correct, sir. He was a month short of his twentieth birthday. It doesn’t mean he couldn’t have fathered a child.”
“And that’s what you are trying to find out?”
“Yes. I’m interested in the period he was in San Diego County for basic training through his training at Balboa and Pendleton. I’m working with NCIS on this and their investigator told me that you were in the same units with Nick until he received orders to Vietnam.”
“That’s true. Why is the NCIS involved in something like this?”
“I made contact to get Nick’s military records archive and we were able to determine that you were one of three men who was in all three training stops with Nick. You’re the only one still alive.”
“I know. You don’t have to tell me.”
Bosch had taken Victory Boulevard into North Hollywood and now turned north on the 170. The fortress of the San Gabriel Mountains crossed his entire windshield.
“So why would you think I might know anything about whether Nick had a kid or not?” Lewis asked.
“Because you two were tight,” Bosch said.
“How would you know that? Just because we were in the same training units doesn’t—”
“He took that swim test for you. He put on your shirt and got counted as you.”
There was a long silence before Lewis asked Bosch how he knew that story.
“I saw the photo,” Bosch said. “His sister told me the story.”
“I haven’t thought about that in a long time,” Lewis said. “But to answer your question, I don’t know if Nick had an heir. If he fathered a child he didn’t tell me.”
“If he fathered a child she would have been born after you all received orders at the end of Field Medical School. Nick would have been in Vietnam.”
“And I in Subic Bay. You said ‘she.’”
“I saw a photo he took. It showed a woman and a baby girl on the beach by the del Coronado. The mother was Latina. Do you remember him with a woman back then?”
“I remember a woman, yes. She was older and she put the hex on him.”
“The hex?”
“He fell under her spell. That was toward the end, when we were at Pendleton. He met her in a bar in Oceanside. They came up there looking for guys like him.”
“What do you mean, ‘like him’?”
“Hispanic, Mexican. There was all this Chicano Pride stuff going on down there at that time. It was like they recruited the Mexican guys off the base. Nick was brown but his parents were white. I knew that because I met them at the graduation. But he told me he was adopted and he knew that his real mother was Mexican. These people tapped into that, I guess. His true identity, you know?”
“And this woman you mentioned was part of that?”
“Yes. I remember we tried to talk sense into him, me and Stanley. But he said he was in love. It wasn’t the Mexican thing. It was her.”
“You remember her name?”
“No, not really. It was so long ago.”
Bosch tried to keep his disappointment out of his voice.
“What did she look like?”
“Dark hair, pretty. She was older but not too old. Twenty-five, maybe thirty. He said she was an artist.”
Bosch knew that if he kept Lewis thinking back to that time, more details might come to him.
“Where did they meet?”
“Must’ve been the Surfrider—we hung there a lot. Or one of those bars near the base.”
“And he’d go to see her on weekend leave?”
“Yeah. There was this place down in San Diego where he would go to see her when he got liberty. It was in the barrio and under a freeway or a bridge and they called it Chicano Way or something like that. It was so long ago it’s hard to remember. But he told me about it. They were trying to make it like a park and they painted graffiti on the freeway. He started calling those people his new familia. He used the Spanish and that was funny because he didn’t even speak Spanish. He had never learned.”
It was all interesting information and Bosch could see where it fit with other parts of the story he already had. He was thinking of what to ask next when the true payoff to the shot-in-the-dark call to Tallahassee came.
“Gabriela,” Lewis said. “It just came to me.”
“That was her name?” Bosch said.
He had failed to keep the excitement out of his voice.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure now,” Lewis said. “Gabriela.”
“Remember a last name?” Bosch tried.
Lewis laughed.
“Man, I can’t believe I pulled her first name up out of the muck.”
“It’s very helpful.”
Bosch started shutting the conversation down. He gave Lewis his phone number and asked him to call if he remembered anything else about Gabriela or Santanello’s time in San Diego.
“So you returned to Tallahassee after you served,” Bosch said, just to move the conversation toward a close.
“Yes, I came right back,” Lewis said. “Had enough of California, Vietnam, all of it. I’ve been here ever since.”
“What kind of law do you practice?”
“Oh, just about any kind of law you need. In a town like Tallahassee it pays to diversify. I like to say the one thing I won’t do is defend FSU football players. I’m a Gator and can’t cross that line.”
Bosch guessed he was speaking to some sort of state rivalry but it was beyond him. His knowledge of sports had only recently stretched past the Dodgers to a cursory interest in the return of the L.A. Rams.
“Can I ask you something?” Lewis said. “Who wants to know if Nick left an heir?”
“You can ask, Mr. Lewis, but that’s the one question I can’t answer.”
“Nick had nothing and his family didn’t have much more. This has got to do with his adoption, right?”
Bosch was silent. Lewis had nailed it.
“I know, you can’t answer,” Lewis said. “I’m a lawyer. I guess I have to respect that.”
Bosch decided to get off the line before Lewis put anything else together and asked another question.
“Thank you, Mr. Lewis, and thank you for your help.”
Bosch disconnected and decided to continue to San Fernando even though he had already found Lewis. He would check in on matters relating to the Screen Cutter and do some Internet work to confirm the information Lewis had provided. But he knew without a doubt that he would eventually be heading south to San Diego on the case.
A few minutes later he turned onto First Street in San Fernando and saw the three television trucks parked in front of the police station.
19
Bosch entered the police station through the side door and headed down the back hall to the detective bureau. At the crossroads with the main hallway he looked right and saw a gathering of people outside the door to the roll-call room. Among them was Bella Lourdes, who caught Bosch in her peripheral vision and signaled him over. She was wearing jeans and a black golf shirt with the SFPD badge and unit designation on the left breast. Her gun and real badge were on her belt.
“What’s going on?” Bosch asked.
“We got lucky,” Lourdes said. “The Screen Cutter made an attempt to
day but the victim got away. The chief said that’s enough. He’s going public.”
Bosch just nodded. He still thought it was the wrong move but he understood the pressure on Valdez. Having sat on knowledge of the previous cases was going to look bad enough. Lourdes was right about that. They were lucky the chief wasn’t in the roll-call room telling the media about a fifth rape.
“Where’s the victim?” Bosch asked.
“In the War Room,” Lourdes said. “She’s still pretty shaky. I was giving her some time.”
“How come I wasn’t called?”
Lourdes looked surprised.
“The captain said he couldn’t reach you.”
Bosch just shook his head and let it go. It was a petty move on Trevino’s part, but there were more important things to worry about.
Bosch looked over the heads of Lourdes and the others in the hallway to try to get a glimpse of the press conference. He could see Valdez and Trevino at the front of the room. He could not tell how many members of the media had shown up, because the reporters would be sitting and the camera operators would be at the back. He knew it all depended on what else was going on in Los Angeles that day. A serial rapist on the loose in San Fernando, where the population largely ignored English-language media, was probably not a massive draw. He had seen that one of the media trucks outside was from Univision Noticias. That would get the word out locally.
“So did Trevino or Valdez talk about a control?” he asked.
“A control?” Lourdes asked.
“Holding something back that only we and the rapist would know. So we can kick out false confessions, confirm a true confession.”
“Uh…no, that didn’t come up.”
“Maybe Trevino should have actually tried to call me instead of trying to run a play on me.”
Bosch turned away from the group.
“You ready to go back and talk to her?” he asked. “How’s her English?”
“She understands English,” Lourdes said, “but likes to speak in Spanish.”
Bosch nodded. They started down the hall toward the detective bureau. The War Room was a large meeting room next to the bureau, with a long table and a whiteboard wall where raids, cases, and deployments could be D&Ded—diagrammed and discussed. It was usually used for operations like DUI task force sweeps and parade coverage.
“So what do we know?” Bosch asked.
“You probably know her or recognize her,” Lourdes said. “She’s a barista at the Starbucks. She works part-time on the morning shift. Six to eleven every day.”
“What’s her name?”
“Beatriz with a Z. Last name Sahagun.”
Bosch couldn’t connect the name with a face. There were three women who were usually working at Starbucks in the mornings when he came in. He assumed he would recognize her when he got to the War Room.
“She went right home after work?” Bosch said.
“Yes, and he’s waiting for her,” Lourdes said. “She lives on Seventh a block off of Maclay. Fits the profile: single family house, residential abutting commercial. She comes in and immediately knows something’s off.”
“She saw the screen?”
“No, she didn’t see anything. She smelled him.”
“Smelled him?”
“She just said she came in and the house didn’t smell right. And she remembered our fuckup with the mailman. She was working there at the Starbucks that day we took Maron down. Then the next time he came in for his coffee and breakfast sandwich, he told the girls behind the counter that the police had mistaken him for a rapist that was hitting in the neighborhoods. So she was immediately alarmed. She comes home, something isn’t right, and she grabs a broom in the kitchen.”
“Holy shit, brave girl. She should’ve gotten out of there.”
“Fucking A, I know. But she sneaks up on him. Comes into the bedroom and knows he’s behind the curtain. She can tell. So she takes a swing with the broom like Adrian Gonzalez and clocks the guy. Right in the face. He falls out, brings the curtain down with him. He’s dazed, doesn’t know what the fuck happened, and then just jumps through the window and books it. We’re talking right through the glass.”
“Who’s working that scene?”
“The A team, and the captain put Sisto on it to babysit. But Harry, guess what? We got the knife.”
“Wow.”
“He dropped it when she hit him and then it got tangled up in the curtain and he left it. Sisto just called me when they found it.”
“Does the chief know about it?”
“No.”
“That’s our control. We need to tell Sisto and the A team to keep it on the down-low.”
“Got it.”
“What mask was he wearing?”
“Didn’t get to that yet with her.”
“What about her menstrual cycle?”
“Didn’t ask about that either.”
They were now at the door to the War Room.
“Okay,” Bosch said. “You ready? You take lead.”
“Let’s do it.”
Bosch opened the door and held it as Lourdes went in first. He immediately recognized the woman sitting at the big table as someone who made his iced lattes at the Starbucks around the corner. She was always smiling and friendly and was usually making his drink before he had even ordered it.
Beatriz Sahagun was texting someone on her phone as they entered. She looked up solemnly and recognized Bosch. A small smile played on her face.
“Iced latte,” she said.
Bosch nodded and smiled back. He offered his hand and she shook it.
“Beatriz, I’m Harry Bosch. I’m glad you’re okay.”
Bosch and Lourdes took seats across the table from her and began asking her questions. With the general story already known, Lourdes was able to take a deeper dive, and new details emerged. On occasion Bosch would ask a question and Lourdes would repeat it in Spanish to make sure there was no misunderstanding. Beatriz answered the questions slowly and thoughtfully and that allowed Bosch to understand most of what was said without needing Lourdes to translate back to him.
Beatriz was twenty-four years old and fit the physical profile of the Screen Cutter’s prior victims. She had long brown hair, dark eyes, and a slight build. She had worked at Starbucks for two years and primarily as a barista because her English-language skills were not up to the level required for taking orders and payments. She reported to Bosch and Lourdes that she had had no troubling encounters with customers or fellow employees. She had no stalkers or issues with former boyfriends. She shared her house with another Starbucks barista who usually worked the day shift and was gone at the time of the intrusion.
In the course of the interview Beatriz revealed that the intruder in her house was wearing a Lucha Libre wrestling mask and she offered the same description of it as the previous Screen Cutter victim—black, green, and red.
She also revealed that she tracked her menstrual cycle on a calendar she kept on her bedside table. She explained that she was raised as a strict Catholic and had practiced the rhythm method of birth control with her former boyfriend.
The detectives paid particular attention to what had alerted Beatriz to the possibility that there was an intruder in her house. The smell. Under careful questioning she revealed that she believed it was not the smell of cigarettes but the smell exuded by someone who smokes. Bosch understood the distinction and thought it was a good get. The Screen Cutter was a smoker. He didn’t smoke while he was in her house but he had a scent trail that she picked up on.
Beatriz hugged her body during most of the interview. She had acted instinctively to find the intruder rather than to flee and now in the aftermath was realizing how risky a decision it had been. When they were finished with the interview the detectives suggested that they take her out the side door to avoid any reporters still in the vicinity. They also offered to take her home to gather clothes and belongings she would need for at least the next few days. It was reco
mmended that she and her roommate not stay in the home for a while, both because crime scene techs and investigators would want access and for security reasons. The detectives did not specifically suggest that the Screen Cutter might come back but it wasn’t far from their minds.
Lourdes called Sisto to give him the heads-up that they were coming and then they drove in Lourdes’s city car over to the victim’s house.
Sisto was waiting in front of the house. He was born and raised local and the SFPD was the only department he had ever worked for. Lourdes had outside experience with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department before coming over to San Fernando. Sisto was dressed similarly to Lourdes in jeans and black golf shirt. It seemed to be the casual detective uniform employed most often by the pair. Since coming to work at SFPD Bosch had been impressed with Lourdes’s skill and dedication and less so with Sisto’s. He appeared to Bosch to be marking time. He was always on his phone texting and was more likely to discuss the morning surf report when making small talk than to bring up cases or police matters. Some detectives put photos and other reminders of cases on their desks and bulletin boards, some put reminders of their interests outside the job. Sisto was one of the latter. His desk was festooned with surfing and Dodgers paraphernalia. Looking at it the first time, Bosch could not even tell it was a detective’s desk.
Lourdes stuck close to Beatriz as she went into the house and gathered clothes and toiletries into a suitcase and duffel bag. After she was packed Lourdes asked if she could tell her story once more and walk the investigators through it. Beatriz obliged and once again Bosch marveled at her choice to go through the house looking for the intruder rather than to run as fast as she could from the premises.
Lourdes volunteered to drive Beatriz to her mother’s home, also in San Fernando, and Bosch stayed behind with Sisto and the forensic team. He first inspected the rear window where the screen had been cut out and the initial entry made into the house. It was very similar to the other cases.
Bosch next asked Sisto to show him the knife that was recovered from the tangle of the fallen curtain. Sisto pulled a plastic evidence bag from a brown paper bag holding several collected items.