Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories

THEN

“This is all because of Manson,” Eckersly said.

Bosch looked across the seat at his training partner, unsure of what he meant.

“Charles Manson?”

“You know, Helter Skelter and all of that shit,” Eckersly explained. “They’re still scared.”

Bosch nodded, though he still didn’t get it. He looked out the windshield. They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Almost all of the neighborhoods in Wilshire were unfamiliar to him but that was okay. Eckersly had been working patrol in the division for four years. He knew the neighborhoods.

“Somebody doesn’t answer the phone, and back east they think Squeaky and the rest of Charlie’s girls have broken in and chopped them up or something,” Eckersly continued. “We get a lot of these ‘check the lady’ calls. Nearly four years now and people still think L.A.’s been turned over to the nuts.”

Bosch had been away from the world when Manson and his people had done their thing. So he didn’t have a proper read on what the murders had done to the city. When he had come back from Vietnam he had felt an edginess in L.A. that had not been there before he left. But he didn’t know whether that was because of the changes he had been through or the ones the city had been through.

South of Santa Monica they took a left on Fourth Street and Bosch started reading numbers off of mailboxes. In a few seconds Eckersly pulled the squad car to a stop in front of a small bungalow with a driveway down the side to a single garage in the back. They both got out, Bosch taking his nightstick out of the plastic pipe on the door and sliding it into the ring on his equipment belt.

“Oh, you won’t need that,” Eckersly said. “Unless you want to use it to knock on the door.”

Bosch turned back to the car to put the club back.

“Come on, come on,” Eckersly said. “I didn’t tell you to put it back. I just said you wouldn’t need it.”

Bosch hustled to catch up to him on the flagstone walkway leading to the front door. He walked with both hands on his belt. He was still getting used to the weight and the awkward bulk of it. When he was in Vietnam his job had been to go into the tunnels. He’d kept his body profile as trim as possible. No equipment belt. He carried all of his equipment-a flashlight and a forty-five-in his hands.

Eckersly had sat out the war in a patrol car. He was eight years older than Bosch and had that many years on the job. He was taller and heavier than Bosch and carried the weight and bulk of his equipment belt with a practiced ease. He signaled to Bosch to knock on the front door, as if that took training. Bosch knocked three times with his fist.

“Like this,” Eckersly corrected.

He rapped sharply on the door.

“Police, Mrs. Wilkins, can you come to the door, please?”

His fist and voice had a certain authority. A tone. That was what he was trying to teach his rookie partner.

Bosch nodded. He understood the lesson. He looked around and saw that the windows were all closed even though it was a nice cool morning. Nobody answered the door.

“You smell that?” he asked Eckersly.

“Smell what?”

The one area where Bosch didn’t need any training from Eckersly was in the smell of death. He had spent two tours in the dead zone. In the tunnels the enemy put their dead into the walls. Death was always in the air.

“Somebody’s dead,” Bosch said. “I’ll check around back.”

He stepped off the front porch and took the driveway to the rear of the property. The odor was stronger back here. To Bosch, at least. The dispatcher on the radio had said June Wilkins lived alone and hadn’t answered phone calls from her daughter in Philadelphia for seven days.

There was a small enclosed yard with a clothesline stretching from the corner of the garage to the corner of the house. There were a few things hanging on the line, two silk slips and other women’s undergarments. There were more clothing items on the ground, having fallen or been blown off the line. The winds came up at night. People didn’t leave their clothes on the line overnight.

Bosch went to the garage first and stood on his toes to look through one of two windows set high in the wooden door. He saw the distinctive curving roofline of a Volkswagen Beetle inside. The car and the clothing left out on the line seemed to confirm what the odor already told him. June Wilkins had not left on a trip, simply forgetting to tell her daughter back east. She was inside the house waiting for them.

He turned to the house and went up the three concrete steps to the back door stoop. There was a glass panel in the door that allowed him to see into the kitchen and partway down a hallway that led to the front rooms of the house. Nothing seemed amiss. No rotting food on the table. No blood on the floor.

He then saw on the floor next to a trash can a dog food bowl with flies buzzing around the rotting mound inside it.

Bosch felt a quickening of his pulse. He took his stick out and used it to rap on the glass. He waited but there was no response. He heard his partner knock on the front door again and announce once more that it was the police.

Bosch tried the knob on the back door and found it unlocked. He slowly opened the door and the odor came out with an intensity that made him drop back off the stoop.

“Ron!” he called out. “Open door in the back.”

After a moment he could hear his partner’s equipment belt jangling as he hustled to the back, his footfalls heavy. He came around the corner to the stoop.

“Did you-oh, shit! That is rank! I mean, that is bad! We’ve got a DB in there.” Bo mothere.sch nodded. He assumed DB meant dead body.

“Should we go in?” he asked.

“Yeah, we better check it out,” Eckersly said. “But wait a second.”

He went over to the clothesline and yanked the two slips off the line. He threw one to Bosch.

“Use that,” he said.

Eckersly bunched the silk slip up against his mouth and nose and went first through the door. Bosch did the same and followed him in.

“Let’s do this quick,” Eckersly said in a muffled voice.

They moved with speed through the house and found the DB in the bathroom off the hallway. There was a clawfoot bathtub filled to the brim with still dark water. Breaking the surface were two rounded shapes, one at either end, with hair splayed out on the water. Flies had collected on each as if they were lifeboats on the sea.

“Let me see your stick,” Eckersly said.

Not comprehending, Bosch pulled it out of his belt ring and handed it to his partner. Eckersly dipped one end of the stick into the tub’s dark water and prodded the round shape near the foot of the tub. The flies dispersed and Bosch waved them away from his face. The object in the water shifted its delicate balance and turned over. Bosch saw the jagged teeth and snout of a dog break the surface. He involuntarily took a step back.

Eckersly moved to the next shape. He probed it with the stick and the flies angrily took flight, but the object in the water did not move so readily. It was not free-floating like the dog. It went down deep like an iceberg. He dipped the stick down farther and then raised it. The misshapen and decaying face of a human being came up out of the water. The small features and long hair suggested a woman but that could not be determined for sure by what Bosch saw.

The stick had found leverage below the dead person’s chin. But it quickly slipped off and the face submerged again. Dark water lapped over the side of the tub and both of the police officers stepped back again.

“Let’s get out of here,” Eckersly said. “Or we’ll never get it out of our noses.”

He handed the nightstick back to Bosch and pushed past him to the door.

“Wait a second,” Bosch said.

But Eckersly didn’t wait. Bosch turned his attention back to the body and dipped the stick into the dark water again. He pulled it through the water until it hooked something and he raised it up. The dead person’s hands came out of the water. They were bound at the wrists with a dog collar. He slowly let them back down into the water again.

On his way out of the house, Bosch carried the stick at arm’s length from his body. In the backyard he founth=yard hed Eckersly standing by the garage door, gulping down fresh air. Bosch threw the slip he had used to breathe through over the clothesline and came over.

“Congratulations, boot,” Eckersly said, using the department slang for rookie. “You got your first DB. Stick with the job and it will be one of many.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He tossed his nightstick onto the grass-he planned to get a new one now-and took out his cigarettes.

“What do you think?” Eckersly asked. “Suicide? She took the pooch with her?”

“Her hands were tied with the dog’s collar,” Bosch said.

Eckersly’s mouth opened a little but then he recovered and became the training officer again.

“You shouldn’t have gone fishing in there,” he said sternly. “Suicide or homicide, it’s not our concern anymore. Let the detectives handle it from here.”

Bosch nodded his contrition and agreement.

“What I don’t get,” his partner said, “is how the hell did you smell that at the front door?”

Bosch shrugged.

“Used to it, I guess.”

He nodded toward the west, as if the war had been just down the street.

“I guess that also explains why you’re not puking your guts out,” Eckersly said. “Like most rookies would be doing right now.”

“I guess so.”

“You know what, Bosch. Maybe you’ve got a nose for this stuff.”

“Maybe I do.”

NOW

Harry Bosch and his partner, Kiz Rider, shared an alcove in the back corner of the Open-Unsolved Unit in Parker Center. Their desks were pushed together so they could face each other and discuss case matters without having to talk loudly and bother the six other detectives in the squad. Rider was writing on her laptop, entering the completion and summary reports on the Verloren case. Bosch was reading through the dusty pages of a blue binder known as a murder book.

“Anything?” Rider asked without looking up from her screen.

Bosch was reviewing the murder book since it was the next case they would work together. He hadn’t chosen it at random. It involved the 1972 slaying of June Wilkins. Bosch had been a patrolman then and had been on the job only two days when he and his partner at the time had discovered the body of the murdered woman in her bathtub. Along with the body of her dog. Both had been held underwater and drowned.

There were thousands of unsolved murders in the files of the Los Angeles Police Department. To justify the time and cost of mounting a new investigation, there had to be a hook. Something that could be sent through the forensic databases in search of a match: fingerprints, ballistics, DNA. That was what Rider was asking. Had he found a hook?

“Not yet,” he answered.

“Then why don’t you quit fooling with it and skip to the back?”

She wanted him to skip to the evidence report in the back of the binder and see if there was anything that could fit the bill. But Bosch wanted to take his time. He wanted to know all the details of the case. It had been his first DB. One of many that would come to him in the department. But he’d had no part in the investigation. He had been a rookie patrolman at the time. He had to watch the detectives work it. It would be years in the department before it was his turn to speak for the dead.

“I just want to see what they did,” he tried to explain. “See how they worked it. Most of these cases, they coulda-shoulda been cleared back in the day.”

“Well, you have till I’m finished with this summary,” Rider cautioned. “After that we better get flying on something, Harry.”

Bosch blew out his breath in mock indignation and flipped a large section of summaries and other reports over in the binder until he got to the back. He then turned to the tab marked FORENSICS and looked at an evidence inventory report.

“Okay, we’ve got latents, you happy?”

Rider looked up from her computer for the first time.

“That could work,” she said. “Tied to the suspect?”

Bosch flipped back to the evidence report to look for the summary ascribed to the specific evidence logged in the inventory. He found a one-paragraph explanation that said a right palm print had been located on the wall of the bathroom where the body had been found. Its location was sixty-six inches from the floor and seven inches right of center above the toilet.

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“It’s a palm.”

She groaned.

It was not a good hook. Databases containing palm prints were relatively new in law enforcement. Only in the past decade had palm prints been seriously collected by the FBI and the California Department of Justice. In California there were approximately ten thousand palms on file compared with the millions of fingerprints. The Wilkins murder was thirty-three years old. What were the chances that the person who had left a palm print on the wall of the victim’s bathroom would be printed two decades or more later? Ride"ju later?r had answered that one with her groan.

“It’s still worth a shot,” Bosch said optimistically. “I’ll put in the SID request.”

“You do that. Meantime, as soon as I’m done here I’ll see if I can find a case with a real hook we can run with.”

“Hold your horses, Kiz. I still haven’t run any of the names out of the book. Give me today with this and then we’ll see.”

“Not good to get emotionally involved, Harry,” she responded. “The Laura syndrome, you know.”

“It’s not like that. I’m just curious. It was sort of my first case.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“You know what I mean. I remember thinking she was an old lady when the detectives gave me the rundown on it. But she was only forty-six. I was half her age, so I thought anybody forty-six was old and had had a good run of it. I didn’t feel too bad about it.”

“Now you do.”

“Forty-six was too young, Kiz.”

“Well, you’re not going to bring her back.”

Bosch nodded.

“I know that.”

“You ever seen that movie?”

“Laura? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Detective falls in love with the murder victim. You?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t hold up too well. Sort of a parlor room murder case. I liked the Burt Reynolds take on it in the eighties. Sharky’s Machine. With Rachel Ward. You seen it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Had Bernie Casey in it. When I was a youngster I always thought he was a fine-looking man.”

Bosch looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Before I switched teams,” she said. “Then I rented it a couple years ago and Bernie didn’t do it for me. I liked Rachel Ward.”

Her bringing up her sexuality seemed to put an uneasiness between them. She turned back to her computer. Bosch looked down at the evidence report.

“Well, we know one thing,” he said after a while. “We’re looking for a left-handed man.”

She turned back to look at him.

“How do you know that?”

“He put his right hand on the wall over the toilet.”

“And?”

“It’s just like a gun, Kiz. He aimed with his left hand because he’s left-handed.”

She shook her head dismissively.

“Men…”

She went back to work on her computer, and Bosch went back to the murder book. He wrote down the information he would need to give to the latent prints section of the Scientific Investigation Division in order for a tech to look up the palm print in their files. He then asked if Rider wanted him to pick her up a coffee or a soda from the cafeteria while he was floating around the building. She said no and he was off. He took the murder book with him.

Bosch filled out the comparison request forms and gave them to a print tech named Larkin. He was one of the older, more experienced techs. Bosch had gone to him before and knew that he would move quickly with the request.

“Let’s hope we hit the jackpot, Harry,” Larkin said as he took the forms.

It was true that there was always a sense of excitement when you put an old print into a computer and let it ride. It was like pulling the lever on a slot machine. The jackpot payoff was a match, a cold hit in police parlance.

After leaving SID Bosch went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to finish reading through the murder book. He decided he could handle the constant background noise of the cafeteria better than he could the intrusive questions from Kiz Rider.

He understood where his partner was coming from. She wanted to choose their cases dispassionately from the thousands that were open. Her concern was that if they went down a path in which Bosch was exorcizing ghosts or choosing cases with personal attachments, they would burn out sooner rather than later.

But Bosch was not as concerned. He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her.

The killing of June Wilkins was as horrible as it was cunning. The woman was bound hands and feet with a dog collar and a leash and then drowned in the tub. Her dog was treated to the same death. The autopsy showed no bruising or injuries on Wilkins suggestive of a struggle. But analysis of blood and tissue samples taken during autopsy indicated that she had been drugged with a veterinary paralytic. It meant that it was likely that Wilkins was conscious but unable to move her muscles to fight or defend herself when she was submerged in the water in the bathtub. Analysis of the dog’s blood found that the animal ith the anhad been drugged with the same substance.

A textbook investigation followed the murder but it ultimately led to no arrests or the identification of a suspect. June Wilkins had lived alone. She had been divorced and had one child, a college student who went to school in Philadelphia. June worked as an assistant to a casting director in an office in a building at Hollywood and Vine, but had been on a two-week vacation at the time of her death.

No evidence was found that she’d had an ongoing romantic relationship or that there were any hard feelings from a former relationship. It appeared to neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers and family members that the love of her life was her dog, a miniature poodle named Frenchy.

The dog was also the focus of her life. He was of pure breed, and the only travel Wilkins did in the year most recent to her death had been to attend dog shows in San Diego and Las Vegas, where Frenchy competed. The second bedroom of her bungalow had been converted into a grooming salon, where ribbons from previous dog shows lined the mirrors.

The original investigation was conducted by partners Joel Speigelman and Dan Finster of Wilshire Division. They began with a wide focus on Wilkins’s life and then narrowed in on the dog. The use of the veterinary drug by the killer and the killing of the dog suggested some connection to that aspect of the victim’s life. But that avenue soon hit a dead end when the detectives found no indication of a dispute or difficulty involving Wilkins in the competitive world of dog shows. They learned that Wilkins was considered a harmless novice in that world and was neither taken seriously by her competitors nor competitive in nature herself. The detectives also learned that Frenchy, though a purebred animal, was not a champion-caliber dog and the ribbons he took home were more often than not awarded for simply competing, not winning.

The detectives changed their theory and began to consider the possibility that the killer had purposely misdirected the investigation toward the dog show angle. But what the correct angle of investigation should have been was never determined. The investigation stalled. The detectives never linked the palm print on the bathroom wall to anyone and lacking any other solid leads the case was pushed into the wait-and-see pile. That meant it was still on the desk but the investigators were waiting for something to break-an anonymous tip, a confession or even another murder of similar method. But nothing came up and after a year it was moved off the table and into the archives to gather dust.

While reading through the binder Bosch had written down a list of names of people who had come up in the investigation. These included family members, neighbors and coworkers of the victim as well as acquaintances she encountered through veterinary services and the dog shows she attended.

In most cases Speigelman and Finster had asked for birth dates, addresses and even Social Security numbers while conducting their interviews. It was standard operating procedure. Their thoroughness back then would now help Bosch when he ran every name from the list through the crime computer.

When finished reading, Bosch closed the murder book and looked at his list. He had collected thirty-six names to run through the computer. He knew he had theen w he ha names and the palm print and that was about it. He could also run ketamine hydrochloride through the computer to see if it had come up in any other investigations since 1972.

He decided that if nothing came out of the three angles of investigation he would drop the case, admit defeat to his partner and press on to the next case that had a valid hook.

As he finished his coffee, he thought about the palm print. There had been no analysis of it other than to measure its location on the wall and have it ready for comparison to suspects that might come up in the investigation. But Bosch knew that there was more to it than that. If the print was sixty-six inches up the wall, that meant it was likely that the man who had left it was over six feet tall. He came to this conclusion because he knew that if the suspect leaned forward to brace himself while urinating, he would probably put his hand on the wall at shoulder level or slightly above. Add a foot in height for his neck and head and you have a man ranging from six two to six six in total height. A tall, left-handed man.

“That narrows it down,” Bosch said to himself, noting his own sarcasm.

He got up, dumped his coffee cup and headed out of the cafeteria. On the elevator up to five he thought about the times he had leaned his hand on the wall over a toilet. He was either drunk, middle-of-the-night sleepy or burdened by something besides a heavy bladder. He wondered which of these conditions had fit the tall, left-handed man.

Most of the police department’s civilian offices were on the fifth floor along with the Open-Unsolved Unit. He passed the unit’s door and went down to the Personnel Department. He picked up contact information on Speigelman, Finster and his old partner, Eckersly. In years past such information would be jealously guarded. But under order from the Office of the Chief of Police, detectives with the Open-Unsolved Unit were given carte blanche because it was part of investigatory protocol to contact and interview the original investigators of a case that had been reopened.

Eckersly, of course, was not one of the original investigators. He was only there on the morning they had found the lady in the tub. But Bosch thought it might be worth a call to see if he remembered that day and had any thoughts on the reinvestigation of the case. Bosch had lost contact with Eckersly after he completed his street training and was transferred out of Wilshire Division. He assumed he was no longer on the job and was not mistaken. Eckersly had pulled the plug at twenty years, and his pension was sent to the town of Ten Thousand Palms, where he was the police chief.

Nice move, Bosch thought. Running a small-town police force in the desert and collecting an LAPD pension on the side. Every cop’s dream.

Bosch also noted the coincidence of Eckersly now living in a town called Ten Thousand Palms and the fact that Bosch was currently running an angle through a database of ten thousand palm prints.

Rider was not at her desk when Bosch got back to the unit. There was no note of explanation left on his desk and he figured she had simply taken a break. He sat at her desk and looked at her laptop. She had left it on but had cleared the screen before leavingchifore le the office. He pulled the list of names out of the murder book and connected to the National Crime Index Computer. He didn’t have his own computer and was not highly skilled in the use of the Internet and most law enforcement databases. But the NCIC had been around for years and he knew how to run names on it.

All thirty-six names on his list would have been run through existing databases in 1972 and cleared. What he was looking for now was whether any of the thirty-six people had been arrested for any kind of significant or similar crime in the years after the June Wilkins murder.

The first name he entered came back with multiple hits for drunk driving arrests. This didn’t get Bosch particularly excited but he circled the name on the list anyway and moved on. No hits came up on the next seven and he crossed them out. The next name after that scored a hit with an arrest for disturbing the peace. Bosch circled it but again was not feeling the tug of a hook yet.

The process continued with most of the names coming up clean. It wasn’t until he entered the twenty-ninth name that Bosch looked at the screen and felt a tightness grip in his chest.

The twenty-ninth name was Jonathan Gillespie. He had been described in the murder book as a dog breeder who sold miniature poodles in 1972. He had sold the dog Frenchy to June Wilkins two years before her death and was interviewed by Speigelman and Finster when they were trying to run down the dog show angle on the case. According to the NCIC records, Gillespie went to prison on a rape charge in 1981 and served six years in prison. He was now a registered sexual offender living in Huntington Beach. There had been no other arrests since 1981. He was sixty-eight years old.

Bosch underlined the name on the list and wrote down the case number. It had an LAPD prefix. Though he immediately wanted to go to work on Gillespie, he finished running the rest of the names through the NCIC database first. He got two more hits, one for a DUI and one for a hit-and-run accident with injuries. He circled the names to keep with his procedure but was not excited about them.

Before signing out of the NCIC system, he switched over to the crime-tracking database and entered ketamine hydrochloride into the search window. He got several hits back, all within the last fifteen years, and learned that the substance was being used increasingly as a date rape drug. He scrolled through the cases listed and didn’t see anything that linked them to June Wilkins. He logged off the database to begin his pursuit of Jonathan Gillespie.

Closed cases from 1981 had gone to microfiche archives and the department was slowly moving backward and entering case information into the department’s computerized database. But 1981 was too far back. The only way Bosch would be able to look at the sexual assault case that had sent Gillespie to prison would be to go to the records archives, which were housed over at Piper Tech, the storage facility and air squadron base at the edge of downtown.

Bosch went to his side of the desk and wrote a note to Rider telling her he had come up with a hot angle and was chasing it through Piper Tech. The phone on his desk started to ring. He finished the note and grabbed the phone while standing up to reach the note over to Rider’s desk.

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“Open-Unsolved, this is Bosch.”

“Harry, it’s Larkin.”

“I was just going to call you.”

“Really? Why?”

“I have a name for you.”

“Funny, I have a name for you. I matched your palm and you’re not going to like it.”

“Jonathan Gillespie.”

“What?”

“Jonathan Gillespie.”

“Who is that?”

“That’s not your match?”

“Not quite.”

Bosch sat back down at his desk. He pulled a pad over in front of him and got ready to write.

“Who did you come up with?”

“The palm print belonged to one of ours. Guy must have left it while at the crime scene. Sorry about that.”

“Who is it?”

“The name is Ronald Eckersly. He worked for us ’sixty-five to ’eighty-five, then he pulled the pin.”

Bosch almost didn’t hear anything else Larkin said.

“… shows that he was a patrol lieutenant upon retirement. You could go to personnel and get a current location if you need to talk to him. But it looks like he might have just screwed up and put his hand on the wall while he was at the scene. Back then they didn’t know anything about crime scene protocol and some of these guys would-hell, about twenty years ago I was dusting a homicide scene and one of the detectives who had been there all night started frying an egg in the dead guy’s kitchen. He said, ‘He ain’t gonna miss it and I’m goddamn starved.’ You believe that? So no matter how hard you drill into them not to touch-”

“Thanks, Larkin,” Bosch said. “I’ve got to go.”

Bosch hung up, grabbed the note off Rider’s desk and crumpled it in his hand. He took his cell phone off his belt and called Rider’s cell number. She answered right away.

“Where are you?” Bosch asked.

“Having a coffee.”

“You want to take a ride?”

“I’ve got the case"0egot the summary to finish. A ride where?”

“Ten Thousand Palms.”

“Harry, that’s not a ride. That’s a journey. That’s at least ninety minutes each way.”

“Get me a coffee for the road. I’ll be right down.”

He hung up before she could protest.

On the drive out Bosch told Rider about the moves he had made with the case and how the print had come back to his old partner. He then recounted the morning he and Eckersly had found the lady in the tub. Rider listened without interrupting, then she had only one question at the end.

“This is important, Harry,” she said. “You are dealing with your own memory and you know from case experience how faulty memories can be. We’re talking thirty-three years ago. Are you sure there wasn’t a moment when Eckersly could have put his hand on the wall?”

“Yeah, like he might’ve leaned against the wall and taken a leak while I didn’t notice.”

“I’m not talking about taking a leak. Could he have leaned against the wall when you found the body, like he got grossed out or sick and leaned against the wall for support?”

“No, Kiz. I was in that room the whole time he was. He said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and he was the first one out. He did not go back in. We called in the detectives and then stood outside keeping the neighbors away when everybody showed up.”

“Thirty-three years is a long time, Harry.”

Bosch waited a moment before responding.

“I know this sounds sad and sick but your first DB is like your first love. You remember the details. Plus…”

He didn’t finish.

“Plus what?”

“Plus my mother was murdered when I was a kid. I think it’s why I became a cop. So finding that woman-my second day on the job-was sort of like finding my mother. I can’t explain it. But what I can tell you is that I remember being in that house like it was yesterday. And Eckersly never touched a thing in there, let alone put his hand on the wall over the toilet.”

Now she was silent for a long moment before responding.

“Okay, Harry.”

Ten Thousand Palms was on the outskirts of Joshua Tree. They made good time and pulled into the visitor parking space in front of the tiny police station shortly before one. They had worked out how they would handle Eckersly in the last half hour of the drive.

They went in and I rwent inasked a woman who was sitting behind a front counter if they could speak with Eckersly. They flashed the gold and told her they were from the Open-Unsolved Unit. The woman picked up a phone and communicated the information to someone on the other end. Before she hung up, a door behind her opened and there stood Ron Eckersly. He was thicker and his skin a dark and worn brown from the desert. He still had a full head of hair, which was cut short and silver. Bosch had no trouble recognizing him. But it didn’t appear that he recognized Bosch.

“Detectives, come on back,” he said.

He held the door and they walked into his office. He was wearing a blue blazer with a maroon tie over a white shirt. It did not appear to Bosch that he had a gun on his belt. Maybe in a little desert town a gun wasn’t needed.

The office was a small space with LAPD memorabilia and photographs on the wall behind the desk. Rider introduced herself and shook Eckersly’s hand and then Bosch did the same. There was a hesitation in Eckersly’s shake and then Bosch knew. Instinctively, he knew. He was holding the hand of June Wilkins’s killer.

“Harry Bosch,” Eckersly said. “You were one of my boots, right?”

“That’s right. I came on the job in ’seventy-two. We rode Wilshire patrol for nine months.”

“Imagine that, one of my boots coming back to see me.”

“Actually, we want to talk to you about a case from ’seventy-two,” Rider said.

As planned, she took the lead. They took seats and Bosch once again tried to determine if Eckersly was armed. There was no telltale bulge beneath the blazer.

Rider explained the case to Eckersly and reminded him that he and Bosch had been the patrol officers who discovered the body. She asked if he remembered the case at all.

Eckersly leaned back in his desk chair, his jacket falling to his sides and revealing no holster or weapon on his belt. He looked for an answer on the ceiling. Finding nothing, he leaned forward and shook his head.

“I’m drawing a blank, Detectives,” he said. “And I’m not sure why you would come all the way out here to ask an old patrol dog about a DB. My guess is we were in and out, and we cleared the way for the dicks. Isn’t that right, partner?”

He looked at Bosch, his last word a reminder that they had once protected each other’s back.

“Yes, we were in and out.”

“But we have information-newly discovered information-that you apparently had a relationship with the victim,” Rider said matter-of-factly. “And that this relationship was not brought to light during the initial investigation.”

Eckersly looked closely at her, wondering how to read the situation. Bosch knew this wase wnew thi the pivotal moment. If Eckersly were to make a mistake, it would be now.

“What information?” Eckersly asked.

“We’re not at liberty to discuss it, Chief,” Rider responded. “But if you have something to tell us, tell us now. It would be best for you to clear this up before we go down the road with it.”

Eckersly’s face cracked into a smile and he looked at Bosch.

“This is a joke, right? Bosch, you’re putting her up to this, right?”

Bosch shook his head.

“No joke,” Bosch said. “You’re in a spot here, Chief.”

Eckersly shook his head as if not comprehending the situation.

“You said Open-Unsolved, right? That’s cold case stuff. DNA. This a DNA case?”

Bosch felt things tumbling into place. Eckersly had made the mistake. He had taken the bait and was fishing for information. It wasn’t what an innocent man would do. Rider felt it, too. She leaned toward his desk.

“Chief, do you mind if I give you a rights warning before we go further with this?”

“Oh, come on,” Eckersly protested. “You can’t be serious. What relationship?”

Rider read Eckersly the standard Miranda rights warning from a card she pulled out of a pocket in her blazer.

“Chief Eckersly, do you understand your rights as I have read them?”

“Of course, I understand them. I’ve only been a cop for forty years. What the hell is going on here?”

“What’s going on is that we are giving you the opportunity to explain the relationship you had with this woman. If you choose not to cooperate, then it’s not going to work out well for you.”

“I told you. There was no relationship and you can’t prove there was. That body had been in that tub for a week. From what I heard, it practically came apart when they were taking it out of there. You got no DNA. Nobody even knew about DNA back then.”

Rider made a quick glance toward Bosch and this was her signal that he could step in if he wanted. He did.

“You worked Wilshire for four years before that morning,” Bosch said. “Did you meet her on patrol? When she was out walking the dog? Where did you meet her, Chief? You told me you were working solo for four months before I was put in the car with you. Is that when you met her? When you were out working alone?”

Eckersly angrily grabbed the phone out of its cradle on his dellyle on hsk.

“I still know some people at Parker Center. I’m going to see if they are aware of what you two people are doing. Coming to my office to accuse me of this crap!”

“If you call anyone, you better call your lawyer,” Bosch said.

Eckersly slammed the phone back down into its cradle.

“What do you want from me? I did not know that woman. Just like you, I saw her for the first time floating with her dog in the bathtub. First and last time. And I got out of there as fast as I goddamn could.”

“And you never went back in.”

“That’s right, boot. I never went back in.”

There, they had him.

“Then how come your palm print was on the wall over the toilet?”

Eckersly froze. Bosch read his eyes. He remembered the moment he had put his hand on the wall. He knew they had him.

Eckersly glanced out the office’s only window. It was to his left and it offered a view of a fire department equipment yard. He then looked back at Bosch and spoke in a quiet voice.

“You know how often I wondered when somebody like you would show up here… how many years I’ve been waiting?”

Bosch nodded.

“It must have been a burden,” he said without sympathy.

“She wanted more, she wanted something permanent,” Eckersly said. “Christ, she was fifteen years older than me. She was just a patrol pal, that’s what we called them. But then she got the wrong idea about things and when I had to set her straight she said she was going to make a complaint about me. She was going to go to the captain. I was married back then. I couldn’t…”

He said nothing else. His eyes were downcast. He was looking at the memory. Bosch could put the rest of it together. Eckersly hatched a plan that would throw the investigation off, send it in the wrong direction. His only mistake was the moment he put his hand on the wall over the toilet.

“You have to come with us now, Chief,” Rider said.

She stood up. Eckersly looked up at her.

“With you?” he said. “No, I don’t.”

With his right hand he pulled open the desk drawer in front of him and quickly reached in with his left. He withdrew a black, steel pistol and brought it up to his neck.

“No!” Rider yelled.

›

Eckersly pressed the muzzle deep into the left side of his neck. He angled the weapon upward and pulled the trigger. The weapon’s contact against his skin muffled the blast. His head snapped back and blood splattered across the wall of police memorabilia behind him.

Bosch never moved in his seat. He just watched it happen. Pretty soon the woman from the front counter came running in and she screamed and held her hands up to her mouth.

Bosch turned and looked at Rider.

“That was a long time coming,” he said.

Laura was already rented at Eddie’s Saturday Matinee, so Bosch rented Sharky’s Machine instead. He watched it at home that night while drinking beer and eating peanut butter sandwiches, and trying to keep his mind away from what had happened in Eckersly’s office. It wasn’t a bad movie, though he could see almost everything coming. Burt Reynolds and Bernie Casey made pretty good cops and Rachel Ward was the call girl with a heart of gold. Bosch saw what Burt saw in her. He thought he could easily fall in love with her, too. Call girl or not, dead or alive.

Near the end of the movie, there was a shootout and Bernie Casey got wounded. Bleeding and out of bullets, he used a Zen mantra to make himself invisible to the approaching shooter.

It worked. The shooter walked right by him, and Bernie lived to tell about it. Bosch liked that. At the end of the movie he remembered that moment the best. He wished there were a Zen chant he could use now so Ronald Eckersly could just walk on by him, too. But he knew there was no such thing. Eckersly would take his place with the others that came to him at night. The ones he remembered.

Bosch thought about calling Kiz and telling her what he thought of the movie. But he knew it was too late and she would get upset with him. He killed the TV instead and turned off the lights.