“What clothes did you put into it?”
“I don’t remember. Whatever I grabbed out of the drawer, you know?”
“All right. Can you describe this backpack?”
Delacroix shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t remember. It was just a normal backpack.”
“Okay, after you put clothes in it, what did you do?”
“I put it in the trunk. And I closed it.”
“What car was that?”
“That was my ’seventy-two Impala.”
“You still have it?”
“I wish; it’d be a classic. But I wrecked it. That was my first DUI.”
“What do you mean ‘wrecked’?”
“I totaled it. I wrapped it around a palm tree in Beverly Hills. It was taken to a junkyard somewhere.”
Bosch knew that tracing a thirty-year-old car would be difficult, but news that the vehicle had been totaled ended all hope of finding it and checking the trunk for physical evidence.
“Then let’s go back to your story. You had the body in the trunk. When did you dispose of it?”
“That night. Late. When he didn’t come home from school that day we started looking for him.”
“We?”
“Sheila and me. We drove around and we looked. We went to all the skateboard spots.”
“And all the time Arthur’s body was in the trunk of the car you were in?”
“That’s right. You see, I didn’t want her to know what I had done. I was protecting her.”
“I understand. Did you make a missing person report with the police?”
Delacroix shook his head.
“No. I went to the Wilshire station and talked to a cop. He was right there where you walk in. At the desk. He told me Arthur probably ran away and he’d be back. To give it a few days. So I didn’t make out the report.”
Bosch was trying to cover as many markers as he could, going over story facts that could be verified and therefore used to buttress the confession when Delacroix and his lawyer withdrew it and denied it. The best way to do this was with hard evidence or scientific fact. But cross-matching stories was also important. Sheila Delacroix had already told Bosch and Edgar that she and her father had driven to the police station on the night Arthur didn’t come home. Her father went in while she waited in the car. But Bosch found no record of a missing person report. It now seemed to fit. He had a marker that would help validate the confession.
“Mr. Delacroix, are you comfortable talking to me?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You are not feeling coerced or threatened in any way?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You are talking freely to me, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, when did you take your son’s body from the trunk?”
“I did that later. After Sheila went to sleep I went back out to the car and I took it to where I could hide the body.”
“And where was that?”
“Up in the hills. Laurel Canyon.”
“Can you remember more specifically where?”
“Not too much. I went up Lookout Mountain past the school. Up in around there. It was dark and I . . . you know, I was drinking because I felt so bad about the accident, you know.”
“Accident?”
“Hitting Arthur too hard like I did.”
“Oh. So up past the school, do you remember what road you were on?”
“Wonderland.”
“Wonderland? Are you sure?”
“No, but that’s what I think it was. I’ve spent all these years . . . I tried to forget as much about this as I could.”
“So you’re saying you were intoxicated when you hid the body?”
“I was drunk. Don’t you think I’d have to be?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
Bosch felt the first tremor of danger go through him. While Delacroix was offering a complete confession, Bosch had elicited information that might be damaging to the case as well. Delacroix being drunk could explain why the body had apparently been hurriedly dropped in the hillside woods and quickly covered with loose soil and pine needles. But Bosch recalled his own difficult climb up the hill and couldn’t imagine an intoxicated man doing it while carrying or dragging the body of his own son along with him.
Not to mention the backpack. Would it have been carried along with the body or did Delacroix climb back up the hill a second time with the bag, somehow finding the same spot in the dark where he had left the body?
Bosch studied Delacroix, trying to figure out which way to go. He had to be very careful. It would be case suicide to bring out a response that a defense attorney could later exploit for days in court.
“All I remember,” Delacroix suddenly said unbidden, “is that it took me a long time. I was gone almost all night. And I remember that I hugged him as tight as I could before I put him down in the hole. It was like I had a funeral for him.”
Delacroix nodded and searched Bosch’s eyes as if looking for an acknowledgment that he had done the right thing. Bosch returned nothing with his look.
“Let’s start with that,” he said. “The hole you put him into, how deep was it?”
“It wasn’t that deep, maybe a couple feet at the most.”
“How did you dig it? Did you have tools with you?”
“No, I didn’t think about that. So I had to dig with my hands. I didn’t get very far either.”
“What about the backpack?”
“Um, I put it there, too. In the hole. But I’m not sure.”
Bosch nodded.
“Okay. Do you remember anything else about this place? Was it steep or flat or muddy?”
Delacroix shook his head.
“I can’t remember.”
“Were there houses there?”
“There was some right nearby, yeah, but nobody saw me, if that’s what you mean.”
Bosch finally concluded that he was going too far down a path of legal peril. He had to stop and go back and clean up a few details.
“What about your son’s skateboard?”
“What about it?”
“What did you do with it?”
Delacroix leaned forward to consider this.
“You know, I don’t really remember.”
“Did you bury it with him?”
“I can’t . . . I don’t remember.”
Bosch waited a long moment to see if something would come out. Delacroix said nothing.
“Okay, Mr. Delacroix, we’re going to take a break here while I go talk to my partner. I want you to think about what we were just talking about. About the place where you took your son. I need you to remember more about it. And about the skateboard, too.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
“I’ll bring you back some more coffee.”
“That would be good.”
Bosch got up and took the empties from the room. He immediately went to the viewing room and opened the door. Edgar and another man were in there. The man, whom Bosch didn’t know, was looking at Delacroix through the one-way glass. Edgar was reaching to the video to turn it off.
“Don’t turn it off,” Bosch said quickly.
Edgar held back.
“Let it run. If he starts remembering more stuff I don’t want anybody to try to say we gave it to him.”
Edgar nodded. The other man turned from the window and put out his hand. He looked like he was no more than thirty. He had dark hair that was slicked back and very white skin. He had a broad smile on his face.
“Hi, George Portugal, deputy district attorney.”
Bosch put the empty cups down on a table and shook his hand.
“Looks like you’ve got an interesting case here,” Portugal said.
“And getting more so all the time,” Bosch said.
“Well, from what I’ve seen in the last ten minutes, you don’t have a worry in the world. This is a slam dunk.”
Bosch nodded b
ut didn’t return the smile. What he wanted to do was laugh at the inanity of Portugal’s statement. He knew better than to trust the instincts of young prosecutors. He thought of all that had happened before they had gotten Delacroix into the room on the other side of the glass. And he knew there was no such thing as a slam dunk.
38
AT 7 P.M. Bosch and Edgar drove Samuel Delacroix downtown to be booked at Parker Center on charges of murdering his son. With Portugal in the interview room taking part in the questioning, they had interrogated Delacroix for almost another hour, gleaning only a few new details about the killing. The father’s memory of his son’s death and his part in it had been eroded by twenty years of guilt and whiskey.
Portugal left the room still believing the case was a slam dunk. Bosch, on the other hand, was not so sure. He was never as welcoming of voluntary confessions as other detectives and prosecutors were. He believed true remorse was rare in the world. He treated the unanticipated confession with extreme caution, always looking for the play behind the words. To him, every case was like a house under construction. When a confession came into play, it became the concrete slab the house was built upon. If it was mixed wrong or poured wrong, the house might not withstand the jolt of the first earthquake. As he drove Delacroix toward Parker Center, Bosch couldn’t help but think there were unseen cracks in this house’s foundation. And that the earthquake was coming.
Bosch’s thoughts were interrupted by his cell phone chirping. It was Lt. Billets.
“You guys slipped out of here before we had a chance to talk.”
“We’re taking him down to booking.”
“You sound happy about it.”
“Well . . . I can’t really talk.”
“You’re in the car with him?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it serious or are you just playing mother hen?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’ve got Irving and Media Relations calling me. I guess word is already out through the DA’s press office that charges are coming. How do you want me to handle it?”
Bosch looked at his watch. He figured that after booking Delacroix they could get to Sheila Delacroix’s house by eight. The trouble was that an announcement to the media might mean that reporters would get to her before that.
“Tell you what, we want to get to the daughter first. Can you get to the DA’s office and see if they can hold it till nine? Same with Media Relations.”
“No problem. And look, after you dump the guy, call me when you can talk. At home. If there’s a problem, I want to know about it.”
“You got it.”
He closed the phone and looked over at Edgar.
“First thing Portugal must’ve done was call his press office.”
“Figures. Probably his first big case. He’s going to milk it for all he can.”
“Yeah.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes. Bosch thought about what he had insinuated to Billets. He couldn’t quite place his reason for discomfort. The case was now moving from the realm of the police investigation to the realm of the court system. There was still a lot of investigative work to be done, but all cases changed once a suspect was charged and in custody and the prosecution began. Most times Bosch felt a sense of relief and fulfillment at the moment he was taking a killer to be booked. He felt as though he was a prince of the city, that he had made a difference in some way. But not this time and he wasn’t sure why.
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 th
e 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.”