The Wrong Side of Goodbye

11

Bosch drove west from the Sierra Winds until he hit Laurel Canyon Boulevard and then pointed the car north. It might have been quicker to jump on a freeway but Bosch wanted to take his time and think about the story Abigail Turnbull had told him. He needed to grab something to eat as well and went through an In-N-Out drive-thru.

After eating in his car on the side of the road, he pulled out his phone and hit redial on the last number he had called-the number Whitney Vance had given him. Once again the call went unanswered and he left a message.

“Mr. Vance, Harry Bosch again. I need you to call me back. I believe I have the information you’ve been looking for.”

He disconnected, put the phone in the center console’s cup holder, and pulled back into traffic.

It took him another twenty minutes to finish crossing the Valley south to north on Laurel Canyon. At Maclay he turned right and drove into San Fernando. Once again the detective bureau was empty when he entered, and he went directly to his cubicle.

The first thing he checked for was e-mail to his SFPD account. He had two new messages and he could tell from the subject line that they were both returns on his inquiries regarding the ScreenCutter case. The first was from a detective in the LAPD’s West Valley Division.

Dear Harry Bosch, if you are the former LAPD detective of the same name who sued the department he served for 30-plus years then I hope you get ass cancer real soon and die a slow and painful death. If you are not him, then my bad. Have a good day.

Bosch read the message twice and felt his blood get hot. It was not because of the sentiment expressed. He didn’t care about that. He hit the reply button on the e-mail and quickly typed in a response.

Detective Mattson, I am glad to know the investigators in West Valley Division carry on with the level of professionalism the citizens of Los Angeles have come to expect. Choosing to insult the requestor of information rather than consider the request shows immense dedication to the department’s mandate to Serve and Protect. Thanks to you I know that the sexual predators in the West Valley live in fear.

Bosch was about to hit the send button, when he thought better of it and deleted the message. He tried to put his upset aside. At least Mattson wasn’t a detective working in either the LAPD’s Mission or Foothill Division, where he felt sure the Screen Cutter must have been active.

He moved on and opened up the second e-mail. It was from a detective in Glendale. It was just an acknowledgment that Bosch’s request for information had been received and passed to him for action. The detective said he would ask around his department and get back to Bosch as soon as possible.

Bosch had received several similar e-mails in response to his blind inquiries. Luckily, only a few like Mattson’s had come in. Most detectives he had contacted were professional and, while overrun with cases and work, they promised to get to Bosch’s request quickly.

He closed down the e-mail page and went to the department’s DMV portal. It was time to find Dominick Santanello. As he logged in Bosch did the math on the birth date in his head. Santanello would be sixty-five years old now. Maybe newly retired, maybe living on a pension, with no idea that he was heir to a fortune. Bosch wondered if he had ever left his adoptive hometown of Oxnard. Did he know that he was adopted and that his mother’s life had ended as his began?

Bosch typed in the name and birth date from the birth certificate, and the database quickly kicked back a match, but it was a very short entry. It showed that Dominick Santanello had received a California driver’s license on January 31, 1967, the day he turned sixteen and was eligible to drive. But the license had never been renewed or surrendered. The last entry in the record simply said Deceased.

Bosch leaned back in his seat, feeling as though he had been kicked in the gut. He had been on the case less than thirty-six hours but he was invested. Vibiana’s story, Abigail’s story, Vance’s being unable to outrun the guilt of his actions all these decades later. And now to come to this. According to the DMV, Vance’s son died even before his first driver’s license had expired.

“Harry, you all right?”

Bosch looked left and saw that Bella Lourdes had entered the bureau and was heading to her cubicle across the partition wall from his.

“I’m fine,” Bosch said. “Just…just another dead end.”

“I know the feeling,” Lourdes said.

She sat down and dropped from his sight. She was no more than five two and the partition made her disappear. Bosch just stared at his computer screen. There were no details about Santanello’s death, only that it occurred during the licensing period. Bosch had gotten his first California license the year before Santanello, in 1966. He was pretty sure that back then the license period was four years before renewal. It meant Santanello had died between the ages of sixteen and twenty.

He knew that when he reported the death of his client’s son, he would have to provide Vance with full and convincing details. He also knew that back in the late 1960s, most teenagers who died were killed in car accidents or in the war. He leaned back toward the computer terminal, brought up the search page, and typed in Search the Wall. This led him to links to a number of websites associated with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where the names of every one of the fifty-eight-thousand-plus soldiers killed during the war were etched on a black granite wall.

Bosch chose the site operated by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund because he had been to the site before both as a donor and to look up the details of men he had served with and knew hadn’t made it back home. He now typed in the name Dominick Santanello and his hunch became reality as a page opened with a photo of the soldier and the details of his service.

Before reading anything, Bosch stared at the image. Until this point, there had been no photos of any of the principals of the investigation. He had only conjured images of Vibiana and Dominick. But there on the screen was the black-and-white portrait of Santanello in suit and tie and smiling at the camera. Maybe it was a high school yearbook picture or a shot taken during his military induction. The young man had dark hair and even darker piercingeyes. Even in the black-and-white photo it was clear to Bosch that he was a mixture of Caucasian and Latino genes. Bosch studied the eyes and thought it was there that he saw the resemblance to Whitney Vance. Bosch was instinctively sure that he was looking at the old man’s son.

The page dedicated to Santanello listed the panel and line number where his name was etched on the Vietnam Memorial. It also carried the basic details of his service and casualty. Bosch wrote these down in his notebook. Santanello was listed as a Navy corpsman. His date of enlistment was June 1, 1969, just four months after he turned eighteen years old. His date of casualty was December 9, 1970, in the Tay Ninh Province. His assigned base at the time of his casualty was the First Medical Battalion, Da Nang. Location of final interment was listed as the Los Angeles National Cemetery.

Bosch had served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam as a tunnel engineer, more commonly referred to as a tunnel rat. The specialty assignment put him on callouts to many of the different provinces and combat zones where enemy tunnel networks had been discovered and needed to be cleared. It also put him to work with soldiers from all branches of service: Air Force, Navy, Marines. It gave him a rudimentary overview and knowledge of the war effort that allowed him to interpret the basic details supplied on the memorial site about Dominick Santanello.

Bosch knew that Navy corpsmen were the medics that backed the Marines. Every Marine recon unit had an attached corpsman. Though Santanello’s assignment was to First Med, Da Nang, his death in the Tay Ninh Province, which ran along the Cambodian border, told Bosch that Santanello was on a recon mission when he was killed.

The memorial site was set up to list soldiers by date of casualty because the memorial itself listed the names of the dead on thewall in the chronological order of their deaths. This meant that Bosch could click on the right and left arrows on his screen and see the names and details of the soldiers who were killed on the same day as Santanello. He did this now and determined that there were a total of eight men killed in the Tay Ninh Province on December 9, 1970.

The war killed young men by the dozens almost every day but Bosch thought that eight men dead in the same province on the same day was unusual. It had to have been an ambush or a friendly-fire bomb drop. He studied the soldiers’ ranks and assignments and identified them all as Marines, with two of them being pilots and one being a door gunner.

This was a revelation. Bosch knew that door gunners flew on slicks-the transport helicopters that carried soldiers in and out of the bush. He now realized that Dominick Santanello had gone down in a helicopter. He had been killed in an aircraft that his unknown father had probably helped manufacture. The cruel irony of it was stunning to Bosch. He wasn’t sure how he would break that kind of news to Whitney Vance.

“You sure you’re okay?”

Bosch looked up and saw Lourdes looking over the separation wall into his cubicle. Her eyes were on the stack of birth certificates Bosch had put down on his desk.

“Uh, yeah, I’m fine,” he said quickly. “What’s up?”

He tried to put his arm down casually on top of the stack but the move came off as awkward and he could see her register it.

“I got an e-mail from a friend that works sex-bats at Foothill,” Lourdes said. “She said she’s found a case that might be related to our guy. No screen cutting but other aspects match up.”

Bosch felt the dread rise in his chest.

“Is it a fresh case?” he asked.

“No, it’s old. She was backtracking in her spare time for us and came up with it. It could’ve been our guy before he started cutting screens.”

“Maybe.”

“You want to go with me?”

“Uh…”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll go. You look like you’re busy.”

“I could go but if you can handle it…”

“Of course. I’ll call you if it’s anything to get excited about.”

Lourdes left the office and Bosch went back to work. To keep his notes complete he went screen by screen and wrote down the names and details of all the men killed during the mission in Tay Ninh. In doing so he realized that only one of the men was assigned as a door gunner. Bosch knew there were always two on every slick- two sides, two doors, two door gunners. It meant that whether the Tay Ninh slick had been shot down or simply crashed, there might have been a survivor.

Before leaving the site, Bosch went back to the page dedicated to Dominick Santanello. He clicked on a button marked Remembrances and was taken to a page where people had left messages honoring Santanello’s service and sacrifice. Bosch scrolled through these without reading them and judged that there were about forty messages left over a period beginning in 1999, when, Bosch presumed, the site was established. He started reading them now in the order in which they were left, beginning with a message from someone who stated that he was a classmate of Dominick’s at Oxnard High and would always remember him for his sacrifice in a land so far away.

Some of the remembrances were from total strangers who simply wished to honor the fallen soldier and had apparently come across his entry randomly. But others, like the high school classmate,clearly had known him. One of these was a man named Bill Bisinger who identified himself as a former Navy corpsman. He had trained with Santanello in San Diego before they were both shipped out to Vietnam in late 1969 and assigned to medical duties on the hospital ship Sanctuary, anchored on the South China Sea.

This bit of information made Bosch pause. He had been on the Sanctuary in late 1969 after being wounded in a tunnel in Cu Chi. He realized that he and Santanello had probably been on the ship at the same time.

Bisinger’s remembrance gave some clarity to what had happened to Santanello. The fact that it was written as if directly to Dominick made it all the more haunting.

Nicky, I remember being at chow on Sanctuary when I heard about you getting shot down. The gunner that got burned up but survived had come to us so we knew the story. I felt so bad. For anybody to die in a place so far from home and for something that didn’t seem to mean so much anymore. I remember begging you not to go out there to First Med. I begged you. I said don’t get off the boat, man. But you didn’t listen. You had to get that CMB and see the war. I’m so sorry, man. I feel like I let you down because I couldn’t stop you.

Bosch knew that CMB meant combat medical badge. Below Bisinger’s outpouring of feelings was a comment from another site visitor, named Olivia Macdonald.

Don’t feel so bad, Bill. We all knew Nick and how headstrong he was and how he wanted adventure. He joined up for adventure. He picked medic because he thought he could be in the middle of things, but just help people and not have to kill anybody. That was his spirit and we should celebrate that, not second-guess our actions.

The comment showed an intimate knowledge of Santanello that made Bosch think Olivia was a family member or maybe a former girlfriend. Bisinger had written a return comment, thanking Olivia for her understanding.

Bosch continued to scroll through the messages and saw that Olivia Macdonald had posted five more times over the years, always on November 11-Veterans Day. These posts were not as intimate and always along the lines of “Gone but not forgotten.”

There was a sign-up button at the top of the remembrance page that allowed users to be alerted whenever a new message was posted to the Santanello page. Bosch scrolled back down to the post from Bisinger and saw that Olivia Macdonald’s comment had come only a day after his original post. Bisinger’s thank-you to her came on the same day as her post.

The quickness of the responses indicated to Bosch that both Macdonald and Bisinger had signed up for the post alerts. He quickly opened a comment block under Bisinger’s thank-you and wrote a message to both of them. He didn’t want to reveal exactly what he was doing in a public forum, no matter how infrequently the Dominick Santanello remembrance page was visited. He crafted a message that he hoped would draw at least one of them into making contact.

Olivia and Bill, I am a Vietnam Vet. I was wounded in 1969 and treated on the Sanctuary. I want to talk to you about Nick. I have information.

Bosch put both his personal e-mail and cell phone number on the message and then posted it. He hoped he would hear back from one of them soon.

Bosch printed out the screen that had Dominick Santanello’s photo and then logged off the computer. He closed his notebook and put it in his pocket. He picked up the stack of birth certificates and left the cubicle, taking the copy of the photo out of the communal printer tray as he left the office.