Bosch ran his thumb along the crisp edge of the business card.
“I’ll get back to you soon,” he said.
“We have not discussed payment for your services,” Vance said.
“You’ve paid me enough to start. Let’s see how it goes.”
“That payment was only to get you to come here.”
“Well, it worked and it’s more than enough, Mr. Vance. All right if I find my way out? Or will that set off a security alarm?”
“As soon as you leave this room they’ll know it and come to meet you.”
Vance registered Bosch’s puzzled look.
“This is the only room in the house not under camera surveillance,” he explained. “There are cameras to watch over me even in my bedroom. But I insisted on privacy here. As soon as you leave, they will come.”
Bosch nodded.
“I understand,” he said. “Talk to you soon.”
He stepped through the door and started down the hallway. Soon enough Bosch was met by the man in the suit and escorted wordlessly through the house and out to his car.
4
Working cold cases had made Bosch proficient in time travel. He knew how to go back into the past to find people. Going back to 1951 would be the farthest and likely the most difficult trek he had ever made but he believed he was up to it and that made him excited about the challenge.
The starting point was finding the birth date of Vibiana Duarte and he believed he knew the best way to accomplish that. Rather than go home after his meeting with Vance, Bosch took the 210 freeway across the northern rim of the Valley and headed toward the city of San Fernando.
Barely bigger than two square miles in size, San Fernando was an island city within the megalopolis of Los Angeles. A hundred years earlier all of the small towns and cities that comprised the San Fernando Valley were annexed into Los Angeles for one reason: the newly built Los Angeles Aqueduct offered bountiful supplies of water that would keep their rich agricultural fields from drying up and blowing away. One by one they were added and Los Angeles grew and spread north, eventually taking in the area’s entire sprawl. All except for the 2.3 square miles of the Valley’s namesake, the city of San Fernando. The little town didn’t need L.A.’s water. Its ground supplies were more than adequate. Avoiding the overture of the big city that now surrounded it, it stayed independent.
A hundred years later it remained so. The Valley’s agriculture pedigree may have long ago given way to urban sprawl and urban blight, but the city of San Fernando remained a quaint throwback to small-town sensibilities. Of course, urban issues and crime were unavoidable but they were nothing the tiny town’s police department couldn’t routinely take care of.
That is, until the financial crash of 2008. When the banking crisis happened and economies constricted and spiraled downward around the world, it was only a few years before the tidal wave of financial pain hit San Fernando. Deep budget cuts occurred and then occurred again. Police Chief Anthony Valdez saw his department drop from forty sworn officers, including himself, in 2010 to thirty officers by 2016. He saw his detective squad of five investigators shrink to just two—one detective to handle property crimes and one to handle crimes against persons. Valdez saw cases start to pile up unsolved, some not even initially investigated fully and properly.
Valdez was born and raised in San Fernando but was seasoned as a cop with the LAPD, putting in twenty years and rising to the rank of captain before taking his pension and checking out, then landing the top spot at his hometown’s department. His connections to the bigger department that surrounded his own ran deep, and his solution to the budget crisis was to expand SFPD’s reserve program and bring in more officers who worked part-time hours but for free.
And it was this expansion that led Chief Valdez to Harry Bosch. One of Valdez’s early assignments when he was with the LAPD had been in a gang-suppression unit in the Hollywood Division. There he ran afoul of a lieutenant named Pounds, who filed an internal complaint and unsuccessfully attempted to have Valdez demoted or even fired.
Valdez avoided both and just a few months later heard about a detective named Bosch who himself got into an altercation with Pounds and ended up throwing him through a plate-glass window at Hollywood Station. Valdez always remembered that name, and years later when he read about a now-retired Harry Bosch suing the LAPD for forcing him out of his job on the cold case squad, he picked up the phone.
Valdez couldn’t offer Bosch a paycheck, but he could offer him something Bosch valued more: a detective’s badge and access to all of the tiny city’s unsolved cases. The SFPD’s reserve unit had only three requirements. Its officers had to maintain their state training standards as law enforcement officers, qualify once a month at the department’s shooting range, and work at least two shifts a month.
It was a no-brainer for Bosch. The LAPD didn’t want or need him anymore but the little town up in the Valley certainly did. And there was work to be done and victims waiting for justice. Bosch took the job the moment it was offered. He knew it would allow him to continue his life’s mission, and he needed no paycheck for that.
Bosch easily met and surpassed the reserve officer minimums. It was rare that he didn’t put in at least two shifts a week, let alone a month, in the detective bureau. He was there so often that he was permanently assigned one of the cubicles that had been left open when the squad was trimmed in the budget crunch.
Most days he was working in the cubicle or across First Street from the police station in the old city jail where the cells were repurposed as storage rooms. The former drunk tank now housed three rows of standing shelves stocked with open case files going back decades.
Because of the statute of limitations on all crimes but murder, the great majority of these cases would never be solved or even examined. The small city didn’t have a lot of murders, but Bosch was meticulously going through them, looking for ways to apply new technologies to old evidence. He also took on a review of all sexual assaults, nonfatal shootings, and attacks resulting in major injuries within the statute of limitations for those crimes.
The job had a lot of freedom to it. Bosch could set his own hours and could always take time away if a case came up for him in private investigation. Chief Valdez knew he was lucky to have a detective with Bosch’s experience working for him, and he never wanted to impinge on Bosch’s ability to take on a paying job. He just stressed to Bosch that the two could never mix. Harry could not use his badge and access as a San Fernando cop to facilitate or further any private investigation. That would be a firing offense.
5
Murder knows no bounds or city limits. Most of the cases Bosch reviewed and pursued took him into LAPD turf. It was only expected. Two of the big city’s police divisions shared borders with San Fernando: Mission Division to the west and Foothill Division to the east. In four months Bosch had cleared two unsolved gang murders—connecting them through ballistics to murders in L.A. for which the perpetrators were already in prison—and linked a third to a pair of suspects already being sought for murder by the larger department.
Additionally, Bosch had used MO—modus operandi—and then DNA to connect four sexual assault cases in San Fernando over a four-year period and was in the process of determining whether the attacker was responsible for any rapes in Los Angeles as well.
Driving the 210 away from Pasadena allowed Bosch to check for a tail. Midday traffic was light and by alternately driving five miles below the speed limit and then taking it up to fifteen above it, he could check the mirrors for vehicles following the same pattern. He wasn’t sure how seriously to take Whitney Vance’s concerns about the secrecy of his investigation but it didn’t hurt to be alert to a tail. He didn’t see anything on the road behind him. Of course, he knew that his car could have been tagged with a GPS tracker while he was in the mansion with Vance, or even the day before while he met with Creighton at the U.S. Bank Tower. He would need to check for that later.
In fifteen
minutes he had crossed the top of the Valley and was back in L.A. He took the Maclay Street exit and dropped down into San Fernando, where he turned onto First Street. The SFPD was located in a single-story building with white stucco walls and a red barrel-tile roof. The population of the tiny town was 90 percent Latino and its municipal structures were all designed with a nod to Mexican culture.
Bosch parked in the employee lot and used an electronic key to enter the station through the side door. He nodded to a couple of uniform cops through the window of the report room and followed the back hallway past the chief’s office toward the detective bureau.
“Harry?”
Bosch turned and looked through the door to the chief’s office. Valdez was behind his desk, waving him in.
Harry stepped into the office. It wasn’t as big as the LAPD chief’s suite but it was comfortable and had a sitting area for informal discussions. Hanging from the ceiling was a black-and-white toy helicopter with SFPD painted on its body. The first time Bosch had been in the office Valdez had explained that this was the department’s helicopter—a joking reference to the fact that the department didn’t have its own bird and had to call in air support when needed from the LAPD.
“How’s it going?” Valdez asked.
“Can’t complain,” Bosch said.
“Well, we certainly appreciate what you’re doing around here. Anything happening on the Screen Cutter?”
It was a reference to the serial rapist case Bosch had identified.
“I’m about to go check on responses to our e-mail. After that I’ll get with Bella to talk about next moves.”
“I read the report from the profiler when I approved the payment. Interesting stuff. We gotta get this guy.”
“Working on it.”
“Okay, well, I won’t hold you up.”
“Okay, Chief.”
Bosch glanced at the helicopter for a moment and then left the office. The detective bureau was just a few paces down the hall. By LAPD or any standards, it was quite small. It had once consisted of two rooms, but one room had been subleased to the County Coroner’s Office as a satellite office for two of its investigators. Now there were three detective cubicles crammed into one room with a closet-size supervisor’s office adjoining.
Bosch’s cubicle had five-foot walls that allowed him privacy from three sides. But the fourth side was open to the office door of the squad’s supervisor. That post was supposed to be a full-time lieutenant’s slot, but it had been vacant since the budget crunch and the supervisor was currently the department’s only captain. His name was Trevino and he had so far not been convinced that having Bosch on the premises and handling cases was a good thing. He seemed suspicious of Bosch’s motives for working so many hours for no pay and kept a careful watch over him. For Bosch, the only thing that alleviated this unwanted attention was that Trevino wore multiple hats in the department, as is often the case with small agencies. He was running the detective bureau and was also in charge of interior operations in the station, including the dispatch center, the indoor firing range, and the sixteen-bed jail built to replace the aging facility across the street. These responsibilities often drew Trevino out of the detective bureau and off Bosch’s back.
Bosch checked his mail slot upon entering and found a reminder notice that he was overdue qualifying this month on the range. He moved into his cubicle and sat down at his desk.
Along the way he saw that Trevino’s door was closed and the glass transom above it was dark. The captain was most likely in another part of the building carrying out one of his other duties. Bosch thought he understood Trevino’s suspicion and lack of welcome. Any success he had in clearing cases could be seen as a failing on Trevino’s part. After all, the detective bureau was currently his domain. And it didn’t help when word got around that Bosch had once thrown his LAPD supervisor through a plate-glass window.
Still, there was nothing Trevino could do about Bosch’s placement in the office, because he was part of the police chief’s effort to overcome personnel cuts.
Bosch turned on his computer terminal and waited for it to boot up. It had been four days since he was last in the office. A flyer for a department bowling night had been left on his desk and he immediately transferred this to the recycle bin beneath it. He liked the people he worked with in the new department, but he wasn’t much of a bowler.
Using a key to open a locked file cabinet in his desk, he pulled out a few folders pertaining to open cases he was working and spread them on his desk so it would appear he was engaged in SFPD business. He noticed when he reached for his Screen Cutter folder that it wasn’t there. He found it in the wrong spot in the drawer. It had been misfiled under the first victim’s name rather than under the unknown suspect’s moniker: Screen Cutter. This immediately alarmed and annoyed Bosch. He didn’t believe he could have mis-filed the case. All of his career he had carefully managed his case files. The file—whether it was a murder book or a manila folder—was the heart of the case and it always needed to be neatly and thoroughly put together and safely stored.
He put the folder on his desk and considered that someone with a duplicate key might be reading his files and checking his work. And he knew exactly who that might be. He reversed himself and returned all his files to the drawer, then closed and locked it with his key. He had a plan for smoking out the intruder.
He sat up straight to look over the partitions and saw that both of the other detective cubicles were empty. Bella Lourdes, the CAPs investigator, and Danny Sisto, who handled property crimes, were probably out in the field following up on crime reports. They often went out to handle much of their fieldwork together.
Once he was logged into the department’s computer system, Bosch opened up the law enforcement databases. He got out his notebook and began the search for Vibiana Duarte, knowing he was breaking the one rule the police chief had given him: using his SFPD access to supplement a private investigation. Not only was it a firing offense at SFPD but it was a crime in California to access a law enforcement database for information not pertaining to a police investigation. If Trevino ever decided to audit Bosch’s use of the computer, there would be a problem. But Bosch figured that would not happen. Trevino would know that if he made a move against Bosch, he was making a move against the police chief, and that was most likely career suicide.
The search for Vibiana Duarte was short. There was no listing of her ever having a driver’s license in California, no record of her ever committing a crime or even getting a parking ticket. Of course, the digital databases were less complete the farther back the search went but Bosch knew from experience that it was rare not to find any reference to an entered name. It supported the possibility that Duarte had been an illegal and possibly returned to Mexico in 1950 after becoming pregnant. Abortion in California was against the law back then. She might have crossed the border to have her baby or to have the pregnancy terminated in one of the backroom clinics in Tijuana.
Bosch knew the law on abortion back then because he had been born in 1950 to an unmarried woman and, soon after becoming a cop, he had looked up the laws so that he would better understand the choices his mother had faced and made.
What he was not familiar with was the California penal code in 1950. He accessed it next and checked the laws about sexual assault. He pretty quickly learned that in 1950 under penal code section 261, sexual intercourse with a female under age eighteen was considered a chargeable offense of rape. Consensual relations were not listed as an exclusion to prosecution. The only exclusion offered was if the woman was the wife of the offender.
Bosch thought about Vance’s father believing the pregnancy was a trap set by Duarte to force a marriage that would bring her citizenship and money. If that was the case, the penal code gave her a solid piece of leverage. But the lack of any record of Duarte in California seemed to belie that angle. Rather than use her leverage, Duarte had disappeared, possibly back to Mexico.
Bosch switched the sc
reen, went back to the DMV interface, and typed in “James Franklin Aldridge,” the cover name Vance had given him.
Before the results came up, he saw Captain Trevino enter the squad room, carrying a cup of coffee from Starbucks. Bosch knew there was a store located a few blocks away on Truman. He often took a break from computer work in the bureau and walked over himself. This was not only to give his eyes a rest but to indulge in a recent addiction to iced lattes that had developed since he began routinely meeting with his daughter at various coffee shops near her school campus.
“Harry, what brings you in today?” Trevino said.
The captain always greeted him cordially and by his first name.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d check e-mail and send out a few more alerts on the Screen Cutter.”
As he spoke, he killed the DMV screen and pulled up the e-mail account he had been given by the department. He didn’t turn around as Trevino went to the door of his office and unlocked it.
Bosch heard the door open but then felt Trevino’s presence behind him in the cubicle.
“In the neighborhood?” Trevino said. “All the way up here? And all dressed up in a suit!”
“Well, actually, I was in Pasadena seeing somebody and then I just took the Foothill across,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d just send out a few e-mails, then get out of here.”
“Your name’s not on the board, Harry. You have to sign in to get credit for your hours.”
“Sorry, I was only going to be here a few minutes. And I don’t have to worry about making my hours. I put in twenty-four last week alone.”
There was an attendance board by the entrance to the detective bureau on which Bosch had been instructed to sign in and out so Trevino could chart his hours and make sure he hit the reserve officer minimum.
“I still want you signing in and out,” Trevino said.
“You got it, Cap,” Bosch said.