The Drop

11

It was nine o’clock when Bosch came through the front door. He hurried down the hall and looked in the open door of his daughter’s bedroom. She was in bed under the covers with her laptop open next to her.

“I’m so sorry, Maddie. I’ll heat this up and bring it in.”

Standing in the doorway, he held up the bag from Jerry’s.

“It’s all right, Dad. I already ate.”

“What did you eat?”

“PB and J.”

Bosch felt the crushing guilt of selfishness. He came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. Before he could apologize further, she once again let him off the hook.

“It’s okay. You got two new cases and it was a busy day.”

He shook his head.

“No, for the last hour I was just with somebody. I met her today on the case but then she met me at Jerry’s for a sandwich and I stayed too long. Mads, I’m so—”

“God, that’s even better! You actually met someone. Who is she?”

“Just somebody — she’s a shrink who deals with criminals.”

“Cool. Is she pretty?”

He noticed that she had her Facebook page up on her computer screen.

“We’re just friends. Did you do any homework?”

“No, I didn’t feel good.”

“I thought you said you were better.”

“Relapse city.”

“Look, you gotta go to school tomorrow. You don’t want to fall behind.”

“I know!”

He didn’t want to get into an argument.

“Hey, if you’re not doing your homework, can I use your laptop for a little bit? I have to look at a disc.”

“Sure.”

She reached over and closed out the screen. He went around the bed to where there was more room. He pulled the disc from the Chateau Marmont’s front-desk security camera out of his pocket and handed it to her. He wasn’t sure how to get it to play.

Maddie put the disc into a side slot and went through the commands to make it play. There was a time stamp in the lower corner of the screen and Bosch told her to fast-forward until she got to the time George Irving checked in. The image was clear but was angled from an overhead camera, so Irving’s face was not fully visible. Bosch had only watched the check-in part once and wanted to see it again.

“So, what is this?” Maddie asked.

Bosch pointed at the screen.

“The Chateau Marmont. This guy checking in, he goes up to his room on the seventh floor last night and this morning he’s found on the sidewalk below. I have to figure out if he jumped or if he got dropped.”

She stopped the playback.

“If he was dropped, Dad. Please. You sound like a palooka when you talk like that.”

“Sorry. How do you know what a ‘palooka’ is, anyway?”

“Tennessee Williams. I read. A palooka is an old fighter who’s like a lout. You don’t want to be like that.”

“You’re right. But since you know so much about words, what do you call one of those names that is spelled the same going front and back?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, like Otto. Or Hannah.”

“It’s a palindrome. Is that your girlfriend’s name?”

“She’s not my girlfriend. I had a turkey sandwich with her.”

“Yeah, while your sick daughter was starving at home.”

“Come on. You had peanut butter and jelly, the best sandwich ever invented.”

He gently elbowed her side.

“I just hope being with Otto was worth it.”

He burst out laughing and reached over and pulled her into a hug.

“Don’t worry about Otto. You’ll always be my girl.”

“Well, I do like the name Hannah,” she conceded.

“Good. Can we watch now?”

She hit the play button and they watched the computer screen silently as Irving began the check-in process with the night deskman named Alberto Galvin. Soon the second guest appeared behind him, waiting to check in.

Irving wore the same clothes Bosch had seen in the closet in the suite. He slid a credit card across the desk and Galvin printed out the room contract. Irving quickly initialed and signed the document and slid it back in exchange for a key. He then left the camera’s view in the direction of the elevators and Galvin began the process all over again with the next guest in line.

The video confirmed that Irving had checked in without luggage.

“He jumped.”

Bosch looked from the screen to his daughter.

“Why do you say that?”

Manipulating the controls, she backed the video up to the point where Galvin slid the contract across the desk to Irving. She then hit play.

“Watch,” she said. “He doesn’t even look at it. He just signs where the guy tells him to sign.”

“Yeah, so?”

“This is when people check to see if they’re getting ripped off. You know, they check what they are getting charged, but he doesn’t even look. He doesn’t care because he knows he’ll never pay that bill.”

Bosch watched the video. She was right about what she saw. But it wasn’t conclusive. Still, he was proud of her read. He had noticed that her powers of observation were increasingly impressive. He often quizzed her on what she could remember from different places they had been and scenes they had encountered. She always picked up and retained more than he expected.

She had told him a year earlier that she wanted to be a cop when she grew up. A detective like him. He didn’t know if it was just a passing idea, but he rolled with it and began passing on what he knew. One of their favorite things to do was to go to a restaurant like Du-par’s and watch the other patrons and pull reads off their faces and mannerisms. Bosch was teaching her to look for tells.

“That’s a good read,” he said. “Play it again.”

They watched the video for the third time and this time Bosch picked up something new.

“You see that. He looks at his watch real quick there after he signs.”

“So?”

“It just seems a little off to me. I mean, what’s time to a dead man? If he was going to jump, why would he wonder what time it was? It just seems like more of a businessman’s move. It makes me think he was going to meet somebody. Or someone was going to call. But no one did.”

Bosch had already checked with the hotel and no call had come in or gone out of room 79 after Irving checked in. Bosch also had a report from forensics which examined Irving’s cell phone after Bosch had given the password his widow had provided. Irving had made no calls after a 5 P.M. call to his son Chad. It had lasted eight minutes. He had received three calls from his wife the following morning — after he was dead. By that time Deborah Irving was looking for him. She left messages each time telling her husband to call back.

Bosch took over the controls of the video and played the check-in sequence once again. He then continued on, using the fast-forward control to move quickly through the chunks of time during the night when there was nothing happening at the front desk. His daughter eventually got bored and turned on her side to go to sleep.

“I might need to go out,” he said to her. “You’ll be okay?”

“Going back to see Hannah?”

“No, I might go back to the hotel. You’ll be okay?”

“Sure. I’ve got the Glock.”

“Right.”

The summer before, she had trained on a range and Bosch considered her proficient in weapon safety and marksmanship — in fact, she was scheduled to compete for the first time the following weekend. More important than her skills with the gun was her understanding of the responsibility of the weapon. He hoped she would never use the weapon outside of a range. But if the time came, she’d be ready.

He stayed on the bed next to her and continued to watch the video. He saw nothing on it that intrigued him or that he felt he had to follow up on. He decided not to leave the house.

Finished with the disc, he got up quietly, turned out the light and went out to the dining room. He was going to jump from the Irving case back to the Lily Price investigation. He opened his briefcase and spread out the files he had pulled that afternoon from the state’s Department of Probation and Parole.

Clayton Pell had three convictions on his record as an adult. They were sexually motivated crimes that escalated over the ten years of his continued interaction with the justice system. He started at age twenty with indecent exposure, moved up to false imprisonment and indecent exposure at age twenty-one, and then three years later hit the big time with the abduction and forcible rape of a minor below the age of twelve. He got probation and county jail time for the first two convictions but served six years out of a ten-year sentence at Corcoran State Prison for the third fall. It was there that a barbaric justice was carried out by his fellow inmates.

Bosch read through the details of the crimes. In each case the victim was a boy aged eight to ten years old. The first victim was a neighbor’s child. The second was a boy Pell had taken by the hand on a playground and led into a nearby restroom. The third crime involved lying in wait and more strategic planning. The victim was a boy who had gotten off a school bus and was walking home — a stretch of only three blocks — when Pell pulled up in his van and stopped. He told the boy he was with school security and showed him a badge. He said he needed to take the boy home because there had been an incident at school he had to inform his parents about. The boy complied and got in the van. Pell drove to a clearing and committed several sex acts upon the child in the van before releasing him and driving away.

He did not leave DNA on the victim and was caught only because he blew through a red light after pulling out of the neighborhood. A camera took a picture of his van’s license plate in the intersection just minutes before the boy was found wandering in a daze a few blocks away. Because of his past record he became a suspect. The victim made an identification at a lineup and the case was filed. But the ID — as with any made by a nine-year-old — was shaky and Pell was offered a deal. He pleaded guilty and got a ten-year sentence. He probably felt he had gotten the better side of things until the day he was cornered in the laundry at Corcoran, held down and castrated with a shank.

With each conviction Pell was psychologically evaluated as part of the PSI, or pre-sentence investigation. Bosch knew from experience that these tended to piggyback on each other. The evaluators were busy with a crushing caseload and often relied on the evaluation performed the first time. So Bosch paid careful attention to the PSI report from the first conviction for indecent exposure.

The evaluation detailed a truly horrible and traumatic childhood. Pell was the son of a heroin-addicted mother who dragged the boy with her to dealer dens and shooting galleries, often paying for her drugs by performing sex acts on drug dealers right in front of her son. The child did not attend school with any regularity and had no real home that he could remember. He and his mother moved about constantly, living in hotels and motels and with men who put up with them for short periods of time.

Bosch keyed in on a long paragraph that described one particular stretch of time when Pell was eight years old. He described for the evaluator an apartment where he lived for what he believed was the longest period of time he’d ever spent under one roof. His mother had hooked up with a man named Johnny who used her for sex and to buy drugs for him. Often, the boy was left in Johnny’s care while his mother went out to sell sex in order to buy drugs. Sometimes she was gone for days and Johnny became angry and frustrated. He alternately left the boy locked in a closet for long periods of time or beat him brutally, often whipping him with a belt. The report noted that Pell still had the scars on his back and buttocks that supported the story. The beatings were horrible enough but the man also took to sexually abusing the boy, forcing him to perform oral sex and threatening him with harsher beatings if he dared tell his mother or anyone else.

Soon after, that situation ended when his mother moved on from Johnny. But the horrors of Pell’s childhood veered in a new direction when he was thirteen years old and his mother overdosed on a motel bed while he was sleeping right next to her. He was taken into the custody of the Department of Children and Family Services and placed in a series of foster homes. But he never stayed in one place for long, choosing to run away whenever the opportunity presented itself. He told the evaluator that he had been living on his own since he was seventeen. When asked if he had ever held a job, he said the only thing he had ever been paid for was sex with older men.

It was a gruesome story and Bosch knew that a version of it was shared by many of the denizens of the streets and the prisons, the traumas and depravities of childhood manifesting themselves in adulthood, often in repetitive behavior. It was the mystery Hannah Stone said she investigated on a regular basis.

Bosch checked the two other PSI reports and found variations of the same story, though some of Pell’s recollections of the dates and ages shifted slightly. Still, it was largely the same story and its repeated nature was either a testament to the laziness of the evaluators or to Pell’s telling the truth. Bosch guessed that it was somewhere in the middle. The evaluators only reported what they had been told or they copied it off a prior report. No effort had been made to confirm Pell’s story or even to find the people who had abused him.

Bosch took out his notebook and wrote down a summary of the story about the man named Johnny. He was now sure that there had been no screwup in the handling of evidence. In the morning, he and Chu had an appointment at the regional lab and Chu at least would keep it — if only to eventually be able to testify that they had exhaustively investigated all possibilities.

But Bosch had no doubt that the lab was in the clear. He could feel the trickle of adrenaline dripping into his bloodstream. He knew it would soon become a relentless torrent and he would move with its flow. He believed he now knew who had killed Lily Price.