“Except no badge and no gun.”
“I think code enforcement has a badge.”
“Not the same, Sisto. You ever heard the phrase ‘If you’re not cop, you’re little people’?”
“Uh, no.”
Bosch grew quiet as he studied the top of Dockweiler’s desk. Nothing he saw seemed suspicious. He heard the dinging of a text on Sisto’s phone.
Pinned to the privacy wall between Dockweiler’s and another desk was a map of the city, partitioned into four code enforcement zones that mirrored the police department’s patrol areas. There was also a list of tips for spotting illegal garage conversions with photo examples of each giveaway:
Extension cords, cables, and hoses running from house to garage
Tape over the seams of the garage door
Air-conditioning units on garage walls
Barbecue grills closer to the garage than the house
Boats, bikes, and other garaged property stored outside
Studying the list, Bosch pictured the houses where the Screen Cutter rapes had occurred. Just three days ago, he had driven the circuit that included all four places. He saw now what he didn’t see then. Each had a garage, each was in a neighborhood where illegal garage conversions were a problem and would draw the attention of code inspectors. Beatriz Sahagun’s house had a garage too.
“It was him,” Bosch said quietly.
Sisto didn’t hear him. Bosch kept grinding it down, putting things together. Dockweiler could roam the city as a code inspector. He could have knocked on doors to perform inspections and selected his victims when he saw them in the course of his work. It was the reason to wear the mask each time.
He realized also that it was Dockweiler who had the extra key to Bosch’s desk. He’d kept it when he left the department but snuck back to read the file on the investigation once Bosch had connected the cases. He knew what Bosch knew and what he was doing at every step of the investigation. And the horror of it all, Bosch knew, was that he had sent Lourdes right to him. The fear and guilt of that realization boiled up in him. He turned away from the desk and saw Sisto typing a text on his phone.
“Is that Dockweiler?” he demanded. “Are you texting Dockweiler?”
“No, man, it’s my girlfriend,” Sisto said. “She wants to know where I am. Why would I text—”
Bosch snatched the phone out of Sisto’s hand and looked at the screen.
“Hey, what the fuck!” Sisto exclaimed.
Bosch read the text and confirmed it was an innocuous Home soon missive. He then flipped the phone back at the young detective but the toss was too hard for such a close distance. It went right through Sisto’s hands, hit him square in the chest, and then clattered to the floor.
“You asshole!” Sisto yelled as he quickly dropped down to grab the phone off the floor. “It better not be—”
As he straightened up Bosch moved in, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and drove him back into the room’s door, banging his back and head hard against it. He then moved right up into his face.
“You lazy fuck, you should’ve gone with her today. Now she’s out there somewhere and we have to find her. Do you understand?”
Bosch racked him hard against the door again.
“Where does Dockweiler live?”
“I don’t know! Get the fuck off me!”
Sisto shoved Bosch off with such force that he was nearly driven into the opposite wall. He hit a counter with his hip and an empty glass coffeepot fell off its hot plate and shattered on the floor.
Drawn by the harsh voices and crashing glass, Valdez and Trevino came charging through the door. It swung right into Sisto, hitting him from behind and knocking him out of the way.
“What the hell’s going on?” Valdez demanded.
One hand holding the back of his head, Sisto pointed a finger at Bosch with the other.
“He’s crazy! Keep him the fuck away from me.”
Bosch pointed right back at him.
“You should’ve gone with her. But you gave her a bullshit line and she went up there on her own.”
“What about you, old man? It wasn’t my case. It was yours. You shoulda been there, not me.”
Bosch turned away from him and looked at Valdez.
“Dockweiler,” he said. “Where does he live?”
“Up in Santa Clarita, I think,” Valdez said. “At least he did when he worked for me. Why? What’s going on here?”
He put a hand on Bosch’s shoulder to keep Bosch from moving toward Sisto. Bosch shrugged it off and pointed at Dockweiler’s desk like it was incontrovertible evidence of something only he could see.
“It’s him,” Bosch said. “Dockweiler’s the Screen Cutter. And he’s got Bella.”
29
They took two cars and headed code 3 up the 5 freeway. Valdez and Bosch were in the lead car with Valdez behind the wheel. The police chief had wisely separated Bosch from Sisto, who drove the second car with Trevino riding shotgun and probably miffed that the tensions between Bosch and Sisto had resulted in his being separated from the chief.
Valdez was on the phone barking an order to someone in the communications center.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Call whoever you have to call. Just get me the goddamn address. I don’t care if you need to send cars to their houses to get a response.”
He disconnected and cursed. So far the com center had not been able to make contact with the director of Public Works or the city manager to get access to city payroll records and Dockweiler’s address. They had checked DMV records before leaving the station and found that Dockweiler had somehow managed himself or benefited from a bureaucratic glitch to keep a law enforcement officer block on his address nearly five years after leaving the police department.
So they were heading to the Santa Clarita Valley based solely on Valdez’s memory that Dockweiler lived somewhere up there five years ago.
“We might get up there and have no place to go,” Valdez said.
He banged the steering wheel with an open palm and changed the subject.
“What was that all about back there with Sisto, Harry?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you act like that.”
“I’m sorry, Chief,” Bosch said. “I lost it. If I could have thrown myself against the door, I would have. But I took it out on Sisto.”
“Took what out?”
“I should’ve been with Bella today. My case, I should’ve been there. Instead, I told her to take Sisto and I should’ve known she’d go alone if he wasn’t around.”
“Look, we don’t even know if this Dockweiler thing is legit. So hold off on beating yourself up. I need you focused here.”
Valdez pointed north through the windshield.
Bosch tried to think of another source for Dockweiler’s address. If he was still employing law enforcement protection measures they would be hard-pressed to find him. He thought about calling Wayside and seeing if any of the jail deputies remembered him and might know his address. It seemed like a long shot since Dockweiler had left the Sheriff’s Department so long ago.
“When did he first come to work for San Fernando?” Bosch asked.
“It was ’05 or ’06, I think,” Valdez said. “He was already here when I got here. Yeah, it would have been ’06. Because I remember he was just past five years and vested when I had to chop him.”
“Sisto told me about him saying he was part of a group of deputies at Wayside that manipulated custodies and staged fights.”
“I remember they weeded out a bunch of jail deputies back around then. The Wayside Whities, remember?”
It was coming back to Bosch. It was hard to remember specific groups or incidents because it seemed to him that the Sheriff’s Department had suffered one jail scandal after another in the last decade. The previous sheriff had resigned in disgrace during an FBI investigation of jail issues. He faced a corruption trial and several of his deputies had already gone to prison. These were some of the reasons Be
lla Lourdes had told Bosch she’d needed to get out, even if it meant moving to a much smaller department like San Fernando’s.
“So why did you chop him instead of Bella?” Bosch asked. “He had seniority, right?”
“He did but I had to do what was best for the department,” Valdez said.
“Nice political answer.”
“It’s the truth. You know Bella. She’s a go-getter. Loves the job, wants to give back. Dockweiler…he was a bit of a bully. So when Marvin told me I could offer one of my people the job in code enforcement, I kept Lourdes and transferred Dockweiler. I thought it suited him. You know, telling people to cut their lawns and trim their hedges.”
Marvin was Marvin Hodge, the city manager. Bosch shook his head as the chief’s answer reminded him of his failings on the Screen Cutter case.
“What?” Valdez asked. “I think I made the right choice.”
“No, it’s not that,” Bosch said. “You did make the right choice. But you probably didn’t with me. I missed a lot on this one. I guess the time off made me rusty.”
“What did you miss?”
“Well, last Friday I took a drive past the first four crime scenes— the ones we knew about. You know, all in one trip and in the order of occurrence. I’d never done that before and I was trying to see if anything would spark, if I would finally figure out what the link was. And I didn’t see it. It was right there and I didn’t see it. All of the houses had garages.”
“Yeah, but that’s so common. Practically every house built since World War Two has a garage. In this town, that’s just about everybody.”
“Doesn’t matter. I should have put it together. I’ll bet you my next paycheck that we’re going to find that Dockweiler inspected those houses and those garages for unpermitted conversion and habitation—he has the damn tip sheet pinned to the wall of his cubicle. That’s how he picked his victims. That’s why he wore the masks. Because the victims might remember him from the inspection.”
“You don’t get a paycheck, Harry.”
“And after this I don’t deserve one.”
“Look, as far as Dockweiler goes, this is all just theory right now. We don’t have a shred of evidence he’s the Screen Cutter. The theory looks good but theories don’t get convictions.”
“It’s him.”
“Just because you keep saying it doesn’t make it so.”
“Well, you better hope it is. Otherwise we’re looking for Bella in the wrong place.”
That was a thought that brought silence to the car for the next few miles. But after a while Bosch started asking questions so he didn’t have to dwell on thoughts about Bella.
“How did Dockweiler take getting shit-canned?” he asked.
“Well, when you put it like that it sounds pretty bad,” Valdez said. “But every time we had to make a cutback we did our best to place people or come up with a plan for them. So, like I said, Marvin gave me the slot at Public Works to use and I came to Dockweiler with that. He took it but he wasn’t too happy about it. He wanted us to move the position from Public Works to the Police Department, but it doesn’t work that way.”
“Did he resent that Lourdes and Sisto weren’t cut first?”
“Well, I don’t know if you know this but Sisto is the son of a longtime city council member. So he wasn’t going anywhere and Dockweiler knew that. So, yes, he mostly focused his upset on Bella, said she was staying and he was going because she was a twofer. Then he asked me if her being a lesbian made her a three-fer.”
The chief’s phone rang and he immediately took it.
“Go,” he said.
He listened and then repeated an address on Stonington Drive, Saugus, for Bosch to memorize. Bosch recognized the address and immediately felt a charge as one more confirmation on Dockweiler clicked.
“Interesting,” Valdez said into the phone. “Shoot me a map link on a text for that second place. And you better start the callouts on SRT. Depending on what we get up here, I’ll make the call on that. Send me another text when you’ve got everybody ready to roll.”
Bosch knew that the Special Response Team was the SFPD’s version of SWAT. The officers on the team came from all over the Department and all had critical incident and high-level weapons training.
Valdez disconnected.
“Did you plot that address on GPS?” he asked.
“No,” Bosch said. “I already know how to get there. It’s up in Haskell Canyon, and Bella and I were up in that neighborhood Saturday tracing the Screen Cutter’s knife.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Dockweiler’s gotta be the guy. The original owner of the knife reported it stolen out of his car in his driveway. He told us a Sheriff’s deputy was living across the street from him at the time. Dockweiler probably knew that deputy, had been in that part of the neighborhood. Maybe he saw the original owner with the knife. I don’t know how exactly but I do know it’s too close to be a coincidence. There are no coincidences. Dockweiler stole the knife.”
Valdez nodded. He was becoming a believer.
“It’s coming together, Harry,” he said.
“Let’s just hope it’s not too late for Bella,” Bosch said.
30
Bosch directed Valdez into Saugus and into a neighborhood on the other side of the Haskell Canyon Wash from where the Screen Cutter’s knife had been stolen from its original owner.
Along the way the police chief filled Bosch in on the second part of the phone call he had received from the com center. He explained that the city had a policy that required all employees to seek approval if they worked second jobs. This allowed the city to guard against employees getting involved in conflicts of interest or second jobs that might be embarrassing. The policy was enacted a decade earlier when the Los Angeles Times reported that an assistant city manager was also producing and performing in porno videos under the name Torrid Tori.
“So two years ago Dockweiler applied for and got clearance to work a part-time night security job at the Harris Movie Ranch over in Canyon Country,” Valdez said. “Gives us a secondary location. You ever been up there?”
“Never have,” Bosch said.
“Pretty cool place. I went up there a couple times with my brother-in-law who’s a screenwriter. It’s huge, like a couple hundred acres where they film all kinds of things. Westerns, detective shit, even sci-fi. There’s all kinds of structures in the woods that they use for shoot-outs and that kind of stuff. If Dockweiler has access, then I hate to say it but we could be searching up there for Bella till dawn. So I put SRT on standby. We’ll know if we need them after we get to Dockweiler’s house and see what’s there.”
Bosch nodded. It was a good plan.
“How do you want to do his house?” he asked. “Go straight at it or skee it first?”
“Or do what first?” Valdez asked.
“Skee it. You don’t remember that from LAPD? Short for schematic. You know, check the place out on the sly, then draw up a plan. As opposed to just knocking on the door.”
“Okay, then, I think we should skee it. You?”
“Agreed.”
Valdez called Trevino and filled him in on everything, including the movie ranch angle that might come into play later. He gave them the confirmed address of Dockweiler’s house and they worked out a plan in which the cars would enter the block from opposite ends, park, and then the four men would proceed on foot, checking out the house and meeting in the backyard if it was accessible.
“Remember,” Valdez said. “This guy was a cop. We need to count on him having weapons.”
By the time the call was finished they were in the neighborhood and it was time to split off. Valdez killed the lights. He entered the block from the north side and parked three houses short of the Dockweiler address. Before getting out of the car both Bosch and Valdez drew their weapons and pulled back the slides to make sure there was a round in the chamber. They then reholstered.
Bosch assumed that he had
more tactical experience than the police chief so he took the lead without talking about it first. Valdez fell in behind as they moved up the street. It was not an urban environment. There were no cars parked on the street and very few in driveways. It afforded little cover and Bosch easily zeroed in on Sisto and Trevino working their way down the opposite end of the block.
Bosch cut in toward the front of the house that was next door to Dockweiler’s. He held by the corner of the garage. Valdez came up next to him and they studied Dockweiler’s home. It was a ranch-style house of modest size. There were no fences preventing access to the rear yard. That most likely meant no dogs. The light over the front door was on but there appeared to be no lights on inside the house.
Bosch nodded to Valdez and they moved across the side yard and then toward the rear of Dockweiler’s house. Bosch tried to get a view inside through every window they passed but curtains were pulled or it was too dark in the house to see inside.
When Bosch and Valdez got to the backyard Trevino and Sisto were already there, standing by an outdoor barbecue. There was also a light on over the back door but the wattage was low and it didn’t reach very far.
The four men convened by the barbecue. Bosch looked around. The backyard sloped down into the wash, where it was pitch-black. He checked the back of the house once more and noticed a build-out from the right side, a small room with mostly glass walls. It looked like a mismatched addition to the house and he wondered if Dockweiler, a code enforcement officer, had added on the room without permit.
“Looks like nobody’s home,” Sisto said.
“We need to be sure,” Bosch said. “How about you two stay on the back door and the chief and I go knock on the door up front?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Valdez said before either of the other two could object to their backup duties.
Bosch headed back down the side of the house and Valdez followed, after instructing the backyard team to stay alert. They were almost to the front corner when headlights swept across the lawn as a vehicle turned into the driveway.