City Of Bones

Chapter 23

BEFORE dawn Bosch was on the road. He left Julia Brasher sleeping in her bed and started on his way to his home, after first stopping at Abbot’s Habit for a coffee to go. Venice was like a ghost town, with the tendrils of the morning fog moving across the streets. But as he got closer to Hollywood the lights of cars on the streets multiplied and Bosch was reminded that the city of bones was a twenty-four-hour city.

At home he showered and put on fresh clothes. He then climbed back into his car and went down the hill to Hollywood Division. It was 7:30 when he got there. Surprisingly, a number of detectives were already in place, chasing paperwork and cases. Edgar wasn’t among them. Bosch put his briefcase down and walked to the watch office to get coffee and to see if any citizen had brought in doughnuts. Almost every day a John Q who still kept the faith brought in doughnuts for the division. A little way of saying there were still those out there who knew or at least understood the difficulties of the job. Every day in every division cops put on the badge and tried to do their best in a place where the populace didn’t understand them, didn’t particularly like them and in many instances outright despised them. Bosch always thought it was amazing how far a box of doughnuts could go in undoing that.

He poured a cup and dropped a dollar in the basket. He took a sugar doughnut out of a box on the counter that had already been decimated by the patrol guys. No wonder. They were from Bob’s Donuts in the farmers’ market. He noticed Mankiewicz sitting at his desk, his dark eyebrows forming a deep V as he studied what looked like a deployment chart.

“Hey, Mank, I think we pulled a grade A lead off the call-in sheets. Thought you’d want to know.”

Mankiewicz answered without looking up.

“Good. Let me know when my guys can give it a rest. We’re going to be short on the desk the next few days.”

Bosch knew this meant he was juggling personnel. When there weren’t enough uniforms to put in cars-due to vacations, court appearances or sick-outs-the watch sergeant always pulled people off the desk and put them on wheels.

“You got it.”

Edgar still wasn’t at the table when Bosch got back to the detective squad room. Bosch put his coffee and doughnut down next to one of the Selectrics and went to get a search warrant application out of a community file drawer. For the next fifteen minutes he typed out an addendum to the search warrant he had already delivered to the records custodian at Queen of Angels. It asked for all records from the care of Arthur Delacroix circa 1975 to 1985.

When he was finished he took it to the fax machine and sent it to the office of Judge John A. Houghton, who had signed all the hospital search warrants the day before. He added a note requesting that the judge review the addendum application as soon as possible because it might lead to the positive identification of the bones and therefore swing the investigation into focus.

Bosch returned to the table and from a drawer pulled out the stack of missing person reports he had gathered while fiche-ing in the archives. He started looking through them quickly, glancing only at the box reserved for the name of the missing individual. In ten minutes he was finished. There had been no report in the stack about Arthur Delacroix. He didn’t know what this meant but he planned to ask the boy’s sister about it.

It was now eight o’clock and Bosch was ready to leave to visit the sister. But still no Edgar. Bosch ate the remainder of his doughnut and decided to give his partner ten minutes to show before he would leave on his own. He had worked with Edgar for more than ten years and still was bothered by his partner’s lack of punctuality. It was one thing to be late for dinner. It was another to be late for a case. He had always taken Edgar’s tardiness as a lack of commitment to their mission as homicide investigators.

His direct line rang and Bosch answered it with an annoyed rasp, expecting it to be Edgar announcing he was running late. But it wasn’t Edgar. It was Julia Brasher.

“So, you just leave a woman high and dry in bed, huh?”

Bosch smiled and his frustration with Edgar quickly drained away.

“I got a busy day here,” he said. “I had to get going.”

“I know but you could’ve said good-bye.”

Bosch saw Edgar making his way through the squad room. He wanted to get going before Edgar started his coffee, doughnut and sports-page ritual.

“Well, I’m saying good-bye now, okay? I’m in the middle of something here and I gotta run.”

“Harry…”

“What?”

“I thought you were going to hang up on me or something.”

“I’m not, but I gotta go. Look, come by before you go up for roll call, okay? I’ll probably be back by then.”

“All right. I’ll see you.”

Bosch hung up and stood up just as Edgar got to the homicide table and dropped the folded sports page at his spot.

“You ready?”

“Yeah, I was just going to get-”

“Let’s go. I don’t want to keep the lady waiting. And she’ll probably have coffee there.”

On the way out Bosch checked the incoming tray on the fax machine. His search warrant addendum had been signed and returned by Judge Houghton.

“We’re in business,” Bosch said to Edgar, showing him the warrant as they walked to the car. “See? You come in early, you get stuff done.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is that a crack on me?”

“It means what it means, I guess.”

“I just want some coffee.”