The Wrong Side of Goodbye

21

The Santa Clarita Valley was a sprawling bedroom community built into the cleft of the San Gabriel and Santa Susana Mountains. It was north of the city of Los Angeles and buffered from it and its ills by those same mountain chains. It was a place that from its beginning drew families north from the city, families looking for cheaper homes, newer schools, greener parks, and less crime. Those same features were also the draw for hundreds of law officers who wanted to get away from the places they protected and served. It was said that over time Santa Clarita became the safest place in the county to live because there was a cop residing on almost every block.

But even with that deterrent and the mountains as a wall, the ills of the city were inescapable and they eventually started to migrate through the mountain passes and into the neighborhoods and parks. Jonathan Danbury could attest to that. He told Bosch and Lourdes that his $300 TitaniumEdge knife had been stolen from the glove compartment of his car parked right in the driveway of his house on Featherstar Avenue. To add insult to injury, the theft occurred right across the street from the home of a Sheriff’s deputy.

It was a nice neighborhood of middle- to upper-middle-classhomes, with a natural drainage swale called the Haskell Canyon Wash running behind it. Danbury had answered the door in a T-shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops. He explained that he was an Internet-based travel agent who worked from home, while his wife sold real estate in the Saugus area of the Valley. He said he had forgotten all about his stolen knife until Bosch presented it in its evidence bag.

“Never thought I’d see that again,” he said. “Wow.”

“You reported it stolen to TitaniumEdge six years ago,” Bosch said. “Was there a report made with the Sheriff’s Department too?”

Santa Clarita had no police department and had contracted since its inception with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“I called them,” Danbury said. “In fact, Tillman, the deputy who lived across the street back then, came over and took the report. But nothing ever came of it.”

“You get a follow-up from a detective?” Bosch asked.

“I think I remember getting a call but they weren’t too enthused about it. The detective thought it was probably just kids in the neighborhood. I thought that was pretty bold.”

He pointed across the street to illustrate the story.

“There was a sheriff’s car parked right there and my car is right here, twenty feet away, and these kids have the cojones to break into the car to steal my knife.”

“They break the window, set off the car’s alarm?”

“Nope. The detective concluded I left the car unlocked, made it sound like I was at fault. But I didn’t leave it unlocked. I never do. I think those kids had a Slim Jim or something and they got in without breaking the window.”

“So no arrests came about as far as you know?”

“If there were, they sure as shit didn’t tell me.”

“Did you keep a copy of the report, sir?” Lourdes asked.

“I did but that was a long time ago,” Danbury said. “I got three kids and run a business out of here. That’s why I’m not asking you in. The place is a perpetual mess and I would need some time to look for the report in all the debris that we call a house.”

He laughed. Bosch didn’t. Lourdes just nodded.

Danbury pointed at the evidence bag.

“So I don’t see any blood on it,” Danbury said. “Please don’t tell me someone was stabbed or something.”

“Nobody was stabbed,” Bosch said.

“Seems like it would be something serious for you to come all the way up here.”

“It was serious but we’re not at liberty to discuss it.”

Bosch reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and acted like he didn’t find what he was looking for. He then patted his other pockets.

“You don’t have a smoke I could borrow, do you, Mr. Danbury?” he asked.

“No, don’t smoke,” Danbury said. “Sorry.”

He pointed to the knife.

“Well, will I get it back?” he asked. “It’s probably worth more than what I paid for it. People collect those.”

“So I’ve heard,” Bosch said. “Detective Lourdes will give you her card. You can check with her in a few weeks about getting it back. Can I ask you something? Why’d you have the knife?”

“Well, to be honest, I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s ex-military and he collects this sort of stuff. I thought maybe it would be good to have some protection but I think I mostly got it to impress him. I ordered it and at first I kept it in my night table. But then I realized that was stupid. It might end up hurting one of the kids. So I put it in the glove box. I actually forgot about it until I got in the car one day and saw the box was open. I checked and the knife was gone.”

“Anything else taken?” Lourdes asked.

“No, just the knife,” Danbury said. “That was the only thing of value in the whole car.”

Bosch nodded, then turned and glanced back to the house across the street.

“Where did the deputy move?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Danbury said. “We weren’t really friends. I think it might’ve been Simi Valley.”

Bosch nodded. They had gleaned what they could about the knife from Danbury and he had seemingly passed the smoke test. He decided to ask a door slammer-a question that could result in the angry end of a voluntary conversation.

“Do you mind telling us where you were yesterday around lunchtime?” he asked.

Danbury looked at them uncomfortably for a moment and then broke into an awkward smile.

“Hey, come on, what is this?” he asked. “Am I a suspect in something?”

“It’s a routine question,” Bosch said. “The knife was recovered in a burglary yesterday about noon. It would just save us some time if you could tell us where you were. That way our boss doesn’t see it’s not in the report and send us back to bother you.”

Danbury reached back and put his hand on the doorknob. He was close to ending things and slamming the door on them.

“I was here all day long,” he said curtly. “Except when I took two of my kids home sick from school to the doctor around eleven. All that can be easily checked. Anything else?”

“No, sir,” Bosch said. “Thanks for your time.”

Lourdes handed Danbury a business card and followed Bosch off the front stoop. They heard the door close sharply behind them.

They drove back toward the freeway and stopped at the drive-thru at a fast-food franchise so Bosch could eat something while they headed south. Lourdes said she had eaten earlier and passed. They did not speak about the interview at first. Bosch wanted to think about the conversation with Danbury before discussing it. Once they were on the 5 and Lourdes had opened the windows to blow out the smell of fast food, he brought it up.

“So what do you think about Danbury?” he asked.

Lourdes closed the windows.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was hoping he’d know who took the knife. We need to pull the Sheriff’s report, just to see if they did look at anybody.”

“So you’re not thinking he reported it stolen as a cover?”

“Reported it stolen and then two years later started raping people in San Fernando? I don’t think it hunts,” Lourdes said.

“The reported rapes started two years later. As we know from last night’s callers, there are probably other rapes. They could have started earlier.”

“True. But I don’t see Danbury. His record’s clean. He doesn’t fit the profile. Doesn’t smoke. Is married, has kids.”

“You said profilers aren’t always right,” Bosch reminded her. “He has his lunchtimes free working from home and with the kids in school.”

“But not yesterday. He gave us an alibi we could easily check with the doctor and the school. It’s not him, Harry.”

Bosch nodded. He agreed but felt it was good to play devil’s advocate to avoid tunnel thinking.

“It’s still weird when you think about it,” Lourdes said.

“Think about what?” Bosch asked.

“How a knife stolen up here in blue-eyed Santa Clarita ends upwith a white guy wearing masks and going after Latinas in San Fernando.”

“Yeah. We’ve talked about the racial side of this. Maybe we have to hit that harder now.”

“Yeah, how?”

“Go back to the LAPD. They probably keep files at Foothill and Mission on racist threats, arrests, that sort of thing. Maybe we come up with some names.”

“Okay, I can do that.”

“Monday. Take tomorrow off.”

“Planning on it.”

But he knew she had volunteered to make the contact with the LAPD divisions because of the animosity toward Bosch in some quarters of the department. She wanted to make sure she got access to LAPD files and didn’t get stiffed because somebody had a grudge against Bosch.

“Where do you live, Bella?” he asked.

“Chatsworth,” she said. “We have a house off Winnetka.”

“Nice.”

“We like it. But it’s the same everywhere. It’s all about the schools. We’ve got good schools.”

Bosch guessed from the photos he saw pinned to the separation wall that Rodrigo was no more than three years old. Lourdes was already worried about his future.

“I’ve got a nineteen-year-old,” he said. “A girl. She had some hard knocks in her life. Lost her mother young. But she made it through. Kids are amazing, as long as they have the push in the right direction at home.”

Lourdes just nodded and Bosch felt like a fool for dispensing unwanted and obvious advice.

“Rodrigo a Dodgers fan?” he asked.

“He’s a little young but he will be,” she said.

“Then it’s you. You said Beatriz swung the broomstick like Adrian Gonzales.”

Gonzalez was a fan favorite, especially among the Latino fan base.

“Yeah, we love going to Chavez Ravine and watching Gonzo.”

Bosch nodded and changed the subject back to work.

“So, nothing of value in the calls this morning?”

“Nothing. You were right. I don’t think anything is going to pan out and now this guy knows we’ve connected the dots. Why stick around?”

“I haven’t even gotten to my stack. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Once back at the station Bosch finally dug into his stack of tips and phone messages. He spent the next six hours working his way through it, making calls and asking questions. As with Lourdes, he ended up with nothing to show for it except a reinforcement of his belief that humans will sink to the lowest depths if the right opportunity presents itself. They were trying to catch a serial rapist who was evolving, according to the profile, into a murderer, and people were out there using the situation to settle scores and fuck over their enemies.