City Of Bones

Chapter 43

DOWNTOWN arraignment court was always a zoo. When Bosch entered the courtroom at ten minutes before nine on Friday morning, he saw no judge yet on the bench but a flurry of lawyers conferring and moving about the front of the courtroom like ants on a kicked-over hill. It took a seasoned veteran to know and understand what was going on at any given time in arraignment court.

Bosch first scanned the rows of public seating for Sheila Delacroix but didn’t see her. He next looked for his partner and Portugal, the prosecutor, but they weren’t in the courtroom either. He did notice that two cameramen were setting up equipment next to the bailiff’s desk. Their position would give them a clear view of the glass prisoner docket once court was in session.

Bosch moved forward and pushed through the gate. He took out his badge, palmed it and showed it to the bailiff, who had been studying a computer printout of the day’s arraignment schedule.

“You got a Samuel Delacroix on there?” he asked.

“Arrested Wednesday or Thursday?”

“Thursday. Yesterday.”

The bailiff flipped the top sheet over and ran his finger down a list. He stopped at Delacroix’s name.

“Got it.”

“When will he come up?”

“We’ve still got some Wednesdays to finish. When we get to Thursdays it will depend on who his lawyer is. Private or public?”

“It’ll be a PD, I think.”

“They go in order. You’re looking at an hour, at least. That’s if the judge starts at nine. Last I heard he wasn’t here yet.”

“Thanks.”

Bosch moved toward the prosecution table, having to weave around two groupings of defense lawyers telling war stories while waiting for the judge to take the bench. In the first position at the table was a woman Bosch didn’t recognize. She would be the arraignments deputy assigned to the courtroom. She would routinely handle eighty percent of the arraignments, as most of the cases were minor in nature and had not yet been assigned to prosecutors. In front of her on the table was a stack of files-the morning’s cases-half a foot high. Bosch showed her his badge, too.

“Do you know if George Portugal is coming down for the Delacroix arraignment? It’s a Thursday.”

“Yes, he is,” she said, without looking up. “I just talked to him.”

She now looked up and Bosch saw her eyes go to the cut on his cheek. He’d taken the butterfly bandages off before his shower that morning but the wound was still quite noticeable.

“It’s not going to happen for an hour or so. Delacroix has a public defender. That looks like it hurts.”

“Only when I smile. Can I use your phone?”

“Until the judge comes out.”

Bosch picked up the phone and called the DA’s Office, which was three floors above. He asked for Portugal and was transferred.

“Yeah, it’s Bosch. All right if I come up? We’ve gotta talk.”

“I’m here until I’m called down to arraignments.”

“See you in five.”

On the way out Bosch told the bailiff that if a detective named Edgar checked in he should be sent up to the DA’s Office. The bailiff said no problem.

The hallway outside the courtroom was teeming with lawyers and citizens, all with some business with the courts. Everybody seemed to be on a cell phone. The marble floor and high ceiling took all of the voices and multiplied them into a fierce cacophony of white noise. Bosch ducked into the little snack bar and had to wait more than five minutes in line just to buy a coffee. After he was out, he legged it up the fire exit stairs because he didn’t want to lose another five minutes waiting for one of the horribly slow elevators.

When he stepped into Portugal’s small office Edgar was already there.

“We were beginning to wonder where you were,” Portugal said.

“What the hell happened to you?” Edgar added after seeing Bosch’s cheek.

“It’s a long story. And I’m about to tell it.”

He took the other chair in front of Portugal’s desk and put his coffee down on the floor next to him. He realized he should have brought cups for Portugal and Edgar, so he decided not to drink in front of them.

He opened his briefcase on his lap and took out a folded section of the Los Angeles Times. He closed the briefcase and put it on the floor.

“So what’s going on?” Portugal said, clearly anxious about the reason Bosch had called the meeting.

Bosch started unfolding the newspaper.

“What’s going on is we charged the wrong guy and we better fix it before he gets arraigned.”

“Whoa, shit. I knew you were going to say something like that,” Portugal said. “I don’t know if I want to hear this. You are messing up a good thing, Bosch.”

“I don’t care what I’m doing. If the guy didn’t do it, he didn’t do it.”

“But he told us he did it. Several times.”

“Look,” Edgar said to Portugal. “Let Harry say what he wants to say. We don’t want to fuck this up.”

“It may be too late with Mr. Can’t-Leave-A-Good-Thing-Alone here.”

“Harry, just go on. What’s wrong?”

Bosch told them about taking the dummy up to Wonderland Avenue and re-creating Delacroix’s supposed trek up the steep hillside.

“I made it-just barely,” he said, gently touching his cheek. “But the point is, Del-”

“Yeah, you made it,” Portugal said. “You made it, so Delacroix could have made it. What’s the problem with that?”

“The problem is that I was sober when I did it and he says he wasn’t. I also knew where I was going. I knew it leveled off up there. He didn’t.”

“This is all minor bullshit.”

“No, what’s bullshit is Delacroix’s story. Nobody dragged that kid’s body up there. He was alive when he was up there. Somebody killed him up there.”

Portugal shook his head in frustration.

“This is all wild conjecture, Detective Bosch. I’m not going to stop this whole process because-”

“It’s conjecture. Not wild conjecture.”

Bosch looked over at Edgar but his partner didn’t look back at him. He had a glum look on his face. Bosch looked back at Portugal.

“Look, I’m not done. There’s more. After I got home last night I remembered Delacroix’s cat. We left it in his trailer and told him we’d take care of it but we forgot. So I went back.”

Bosch could hear Edgar breathing heavily and he knew what the problem was. Edgar had been left out of the loop by his own partner. It was embarrassing for him to be getting this information at the same time as Portugal. In a perfect world Bosch would have told him what he had before going to the prosecutor. But there hadn’t been time for that.

“All I was going to do was feed the cat. But when I got there somebody was already in the trailer. It was his daughter.”

“Sheila?” Edgar said. “What was she doing there?”

The news was apparently surprising enough for Edgar to no longer care if Portugal knew he was out of the latest investigative moves.

“She was searching the place. She claimed she was there for the cat, too, but she was searching the place when I got there.”

“For what?” Edgar said.

“She wouldn’t tell me. She claimed she wasn’t looking for anything. But after she left I stayed. I found some things.”

Bosch held up the newspaper.

“This is Sunday’s Metro section. It has a pretty big story on the case, mostly a generic feature about forensics on cases like this. But there’s a lot of detail about our case from an unnamed source. Mostly about the crime scene.”

Bosch thought after reading the article the first time in Delacroix’s trailer the night before that the source was probably Teresa Corazon, since she was quoted by name in the article in regard to generic information about bone cases. He was aware of the trading that went on between reporters and sources; direct attribution for some information, no attribution for other information. But the identity of the source wasn’t important to the present discussion and he didn’t bring it up.

“So there was an article,” Portugal asked. “What does it mean?”

“Well, it reveals that the bones were in a shallow grave and that it appeared that the body was not buried with the use of any tools. It also says that a knapsack had been buried along with the body. A lot of other details. Also details left out, like no mention of the kid’s skateboard.”

“Your point being?” Portugal asked with a bored tone in his voice.

“That if you were going to put together a false confession, a lot of what you’d need is right here.”

“Oh, come on, Detective. Delacroix gave us much more than the crime scene details. He gave us the killing itself, the driving around with the body, all of that.”

“All of that was easy. It can’t be proved or disproved. There were no witnesses. We’ll never find the car because it’s been squashed to the size of a mailbox in some junkyard in the Valley. All we have is his story. And the only place where his story meets the physical evidence is the crime scene. And every marker he gave us he could have gotten from this.”

He tossed the newspaper onto Portugal’s desk but the prosecutor didn’t even look at it. He leaned his elbows on the desk and brought his hands flat against each other and spread his fingers wide. Bosch could see his muscles flexing under his shirtsleeves and realized he was doing some kind of an at-your-desk exercise. Portugal spoke while his hands pushed against each other.

“I work out the tension this way.”

He finally stopped, releasing his breath loudly and leaning back in his seat.

“Okay, he had the ability to concoct a confession if he wanted to do it. Why would he want to do it? We’re talking about his own son. Why would he say he killed his own son if he didn’t?”

“Because of these,” Bosch said.

He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out an envelope that was folded in half. He leaned forward and gently put it down on top of the newspaper on Portugal’s desk.

As Portugal picked up the envelope and started to open it, Bosch said, “I think that was what Sheila was looking for in the trailer last night. I found it in the night table next to her father’s bed. It was underneath the bottom drawer. A hiding place there. You had to take the drawer out to find it. She didn’t do that.”

From the envelope Portugal took a stack of Polaroid photos. He started looking through them.

“Oh, God,” he said almost immediately. “Is this her? The daughter? I don’t want to look at these.”

He shuffled through the remaining photos quickly and put them down on the desk. Edgar got up and leaned over the desk. With one finger he spread the photos out on the desk so he could view them. His jaw drew tight but he didn’t say anything.

The photos were old. The white borders were yellowed, the colors of the images almost washed out by time. Bosch used Polaroids on the job all the time. He knew by the degradation of the colors that the photos on the desk were far more than a decade old and some of them were older than others. There were fourteen photos in all. The constant in each was a naked girl. Based on physical changes to the girl’s body and hair length, he had guessed that the photos spanned at least a five-year-period. The girl innocently smiled in some of the photos. In others there was sadness and maybe even anger evident in her eyes. It had been clear to Bosch from the moment he first looked at them that the girl in the photos was Sheila Delacroix.

Edgar sat back down heavily. Bosch could no longer tell if he was upset by being so far behind on the case or by the content of the photos.

“Yesterday this was a slam dunk,” Portugal said. “Today it’s a can of worms. I assume you are going to give me your theory on these, Detective Bosch?”

Bosch nodded.

“You start with a family,” he said.

As he spoke he leaned forward and collected the photos, squared the edges and put them back in the envelope. He didn’t like them being on display. He held the envelope in his hand.

“For one reason or another, the mother’s weak,” he said. “Too young to marry, too young to have kids. The boy she has is too hard to handle. She sees where her life is going and she decides she doesn’t want to go there. She ups and splits and that leaves Sheila… to pick up with the boy and to fend for herself with the father.”

Bosch glanced from Portugal to Edgar to see how he was playing so far. Both men seemed hooked by the story. Bosch held the envelope with the photos up.

“Obviously, a hellish life. And what could she do about it? She could blame her mother, her father, her brother. But who could she lash out against? Her mother was gone. Her father was big and overpowering. In control. That only left… Arthur.”

He noticed a subtle shake of Edgar’s head.

“What are you saying, that she killed him? That doesn’t make sense. She’s the one who called us and gave us the ID.”

“I know. But her father doesn’t know she called us.”

Edgar frowned. Portugal leaned forward and started doing his hand exercise again.

“I don’t think I am following you, Detective,” he said. “How does this have anything to do with whether or not he killed the son?”

Bosch also leaned forward and became more animated. He held the envelope up again, as if it was the answer to everything.

“Don’t you see? The bones. All the injuries. We had it wrong. It wasn’t the father who hurt him. It was her. Sheila. She was abused and she turned right around and became the abuser. To Arthur.”

Portugal dropped his hands to the desk and shook his head.

“So you are saying that she killed the boy and then twenty years later called up and gave you a key clue in the investigation. Don’t tell me, you’re going to say she has amnesia about killing him, right?”

Bosch let the sarcasm go.

“No, I’m saying she didn’t kill him. But her record of abuse led her father to suspect she did. All these years Arthur’s been gone, the father thought she did it. And he knew why.”

Once more Bosch proffered the envelope of photos.

“And so he carried the guilt of knowing his actions with Sheila caused it all. Then the bones come up, he reads it in the paper and puts two and two together. We show up and he starts confessing before we’re three feet in the door.”

Portugal raised his hands wide.

“Why?”

Bosch had been turning it over in his mind ever since he had found the photos.

“Redemption.”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m serious. The guy’s getting old, broken down. When you have more to look back at than forward to, you start thinking about the things you’ve done. You try making up for things. He thinks his daughter killed his son because of his own actions. So now he’s willing to take the fall for her. After all, what’s he got to lose? He lives in a trailer next to the freeway and works at a driving range. This is a guy who once had a shot at fame and fortune. Now look at him. He could be looking at this as his last shot at making up for everything.”

“And he’s wrong about her but doesn’t know it.”

“That’s right.”

Portugal kicked his chair back from his desk. It was on wheels and he let it bang into the wall behind his desk.

“I got a guy waiting down there I could put in Q with one hand tied to my balls and you come in here and want me to kick him loose.”

Bosch nodded.

“If I’m wrong, you could always charge him again. But if I’m right, he’s going to try to plead guilty down there. No trial, no lawyer, nothing. He wants to plead and if the judge lets him, then we’re done. Whoever really killed Arthur is safe.”

Bosch looked over at Edgar.

“What do you think?”

“I think you got your mojo working.”

Portugal smiled but not because he found any humor in the situation.

“Two against one. That’s not fair.”

“There’s two things we can do,” Bosch said. “To help be sure. He’s probably down there in the holding tank by now. We can go down there, tell him it was Sheila who gave us the ID and flat out ask him if he’s covering for her.”

“And?”

“Ask him to take a polygraph.”

“They’re worthless. We can’t admit them in-”

“I’m not talking about court. I’m talking about bluffing him. If he’s lying, he won’t take it.”

Portugal pulled his chair back to his desk. He picked up the paper and glanced at the story for a moment. His eyes then appeared to take a roving inventory of the desktop while he thought and came to a decision.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Go do it. I’m dropping the charge. For now.”