The Wrong Side of Goodbye

31

Bosch moved into the living room and then down a hallway leading to bedrooms. He knew he had to be very careful and put emotions aside here. He believed that the exigent circumstances of having an officer missing allowed him to search Dockweiler’s house without legal risk. But searching for evidence in the Screen Cutter case was different. He would need a warrant for that. The contradiction put him in a legal predicament. He had to search the house for Lourdes and any indication or evidence of her location, but he couldn’t dig deeper for evidence that Dockweiler committed the rapes.

He had to be realistic too. His newfound knowledge of Dockweiler and the fact that he had kept a key and had been secretly entering the police station to read the investigative file was convincing evidence that he was Screen Cutter. With that conclusion in mind it seemed unlikely to Bosch that they were going to find Bella alive, and possibly unlikely they would find her at all. He needed to put the Screen Cutter case first here and preserve it against any future legal challenge.

He put on a pair of latex gloves and began the search by starting at the end of the bedroom hallway and working his way back toward the kitchen. There were three bedrooms but only one wasused as such. He searched Dockweiler’s room first and found it to be a mess, with clothes and shoes strewn on the floor everywhere around the bed, most likely in the spots where they were shed. The bed was unmade and the sheets had a dingy gray cast to them. The walls were yellowed but not with paint. The room smelled sour with perspiration and cigarette smoke. Bosch kept a rubber-gloved hand over his mouth as he moved through it.

The attached bath was just as unkempt, with more clothing thrown in the bathtub and a horribly stained toilet. Bosch picked a hanger up off the floor and fished around in the bathtub to make sure there wasn’t anything or anyone hidden beneath the clothes. The clothes in the tub seemed dirty in a way separate from the clothes left on the floor of the bedroom. They were caked with a granular gray dust that Bosch believed might be concrete dust. He wondered if it was debris from an inspection or a Public Works project.

The phone booth shower was empty, its white tiles as dingy as the bedroom sheets, and the drain had trapped more of the concrete powder and granules. He next moved into a small walk-in closet in the bathroom and found it to be surprisingly neat, primarily because most of the items of clothing it would normally hold were on the bedroom floor and in the bathtub.

The two other bedrooms were used for storage. The small room was lined with glass-door gun cabinets with several rifles and shotguns on display. Most had tags attached to the trigger guards that identified the ammunition they were presumably loaded with. The larger guest bedroom was used for storage of life-sustaining supplies. There were stacked pallets of bottled water and energy drinks and boxes of canned and powdered goods that would presumably have distant expiration dates.

The closets of both rooms were similarly stacked, and there wasno sign of Bella in that side of the house. As Bosch worked his way through the bedroom wing he could hear muffled voices from the kitchen. He could not make out words but he could detect tones and individual voices. It was Trevino doing almost all of the talking. He wasn’t getting anywhere with Dockweiler.

In the hallway near the bedrooms Bosch noticed an attic access door in the ceiling. There were fingerprint smears on the frame around it but these offered no hint as to how long it had been since Dockweiler was up there.

Bosch looked around and saw a four-foot-long wooden dowel with a hook on the end of it leaning against the wall in the corner. Grabbing it and threading the hook through the metal eyelet on the attic door, he pulled it open and found it very similar to the attic entrance at Olivia Macdonald’s house. He folded the hinged ladder down and started the climb.

Bosch found the pull string for an overhead light and soon was scanning the attic. The space was small and more boxes of survivalist supplies were stacked to the roof rafters. He climbed all the way up so he could see around boxes and into every angle of the attic to make sure Bella Lourdes was not there. He then climbed back down but left the attic open and the ladder unfolded so it could be accessed for a more thorough search with a warrant.

When Bosch moved into the living room and dining area he could clearly hear what was being said in the kitchen. Dockweiler was not cooperating and Trevino had moved to a threatening form of interrogation that Bosch knew was rarely successful.

“You’re cooked, my friend,” Trevino said. “It’s a DNA case. As soon as we match yours to the evidence collected from the victims, it’s over. You’re over. You’ll get consecutive sentences and never breathe free air again. The only way you can help yourself is to giveus back Bella. Tell us where she is and we’ll go to bat for you. With the DA, with the judge, you name it.”

Trevino’s plea was met with silence. Everything the captain said was true but delivering it as threat would rarely get a suspect with the Screen Cutter’s profile to cooperate and talk. Bosch knew that a proper interview would appeal to his narcissism, his genius. Harry would’ve attempted to make Dockweiler think he was controlling the interview and bleed information out of him bit by bit.

Bosch crossed through the living room and into the entrance hallway. He saw Valdez leaning against the wall next to the archway to the kitchen, watching the interview with Dockweiler go nowhere. He looked back at Bosch and raised his chin, asking if Harry had found anything. Bosch just shook his head.

Just before the kitchen entrance, there was a door that led into the garage. Bosch entered, flicked on the overhead lights, and closed the door behind him. The space was also used for storage of survival supplies. More pallets of canned goods, water, and powdered mixes. Somehow Dockweiler had gotten hold of a supply of U.S. Army-produced MREs-Meals Ready to Eat. There were also nonedible supplies here. Boxes of batteries, lanterns, first-aid kits, tool kits, CO₂ scrubbers, water filters, and enzyme additives for water filtration and use in chemical toilets. There were boxes of light sticks and medical supplies such as Betadine and potassium iodide. Bosch remembered those from his military training, when the threat of nuclear holocaust from the Soviet Union seemed real. Both chemicals acted as thyroid protection against cancer-causing radioactive iodine. It looked like Dockweiler was prepped for all possibilities, from terrorist attack to nuclear detonation.

Bosch returned to the door and stuck his head back into the entrance hallway. He drew Valdez’s attention and signaled him into the garage.

As the police chief entered, his eyes held on the stacks of supplies in the center of the garage.

“What is all of this?” he asked.

“Dockweiler’s a survivalist,” Bosch said. “Looks like he must put all his money into this stuff. The attic and two of the bedrooms are full of D-day supplies and weapons. He’s got an arsenal in one bedroom. And it looks like he could go three or four months with this stuff as long as he doesn’t mind eating Army beef stew out of a can.”

“Well, I hope he packed a can opener.”

“It might explain some of his motivation. When the world is coming to an end, people act out, take what they want. Is Trevino getting anywhere?”

“No, nowhere. Dockweiler’s just playing games, denying everything, then hinting he might know something.”

Bosch nodded. He assumed that he would get his shot as soon as he was finished with the search.

“I’m going to take a quick look at the truck and then call a judge. I want a legit warrant to really do a down-and-dirty search of this place.”

Valdez was smart enough to read Bosch’s thinking.

“So you think Bella’s gone, huh?”

Bosch hesitated but then nodded somberly.

“I mean, why would he keep her alive?” he said. “Our profiler said this guy was going to graduate to murder. Bella could ID him. Why let her live?”

Valdez dropped his chin to his chest.

“Sorry, Chief,” Bosch said. “Just being realistic about things.”

“I know,” Valdez said. “But we’re not going to stop until we find her. One way or the other.”

“I wouldn’t want to.”

Valdez clapped him on the arm and went back through the door into the house.

Bosch moved down a narrow passageway through the stacks to the driveway and Dockweiler’s truck. The front cab was unlocked and he opened it on the passenger side since it was most likely that side would show an indication if Bella Lourdes had been in the truck. On the passenger seat sat a large closed bag from a McDonald’s restaurant. Bosch stripped off a glove and placed the back of his fingers against the bag. It was slightly warm to the touch and Bosch assumed that Dockweiler’s arrival at the house had come after he went out to pick up dinner.

Bosch put the glove back on and opened the bag. He still had the flashlight he’d collected off the front lawn. He pulled it from his back pocket and pointed the beam down into the bag. He counted two cardboard sandwich cartons and two large sleeves of French fries.

Bosch knew that the contents of the bag could easily constitute dinner for one big man like Dockweiler, but he also knew it was more likely dinner for two. For the first time since they had entered Dockweiler’s house, he was hit with the hope that Bella was alive. He pondered whether Dockweiler was stopping by his house before taking the food to his captive someplace else, or whether she was here somewhere and he just hadn’t found her. He thought of the drainage wash down the slope behind Dockweiler’s house. Maybe she was down there.

He left the food bag in place and used the flashlight beam to comb the dark carpet and sides of the passenger seat. He saw nothing that held his attention or indicated Bella had been in the truck.

He kept the flashlight on and moved to the back of the pickup. He pointed the beam into the far corners of the truck’s bed and camper shell. Again he saw nothing that connected to Lourdes orto the Screen Cutter. Still, Dockweiler had been doing something at the tailgate when the chief’s phone sounded the alarm. He had also opened the garage with a purpose other than parking his truck. Bosch still couldn’t figure out what he had been up to.

Stored in the back of the pickup was an upside-down wheel-barrow, a two-wheeled hand truck, and several long tools-three shovels, a hoe, a push broom, and a pick-as well as several drop cloths for keeping work spaces clean. The shovels were not duplicates. One had a pointed spade for digging and the other two had straight edges of different widths, and Bosch knew these would be used for scooping up debris. Each of them was dirty-the pointed spade with a dark red soil and the straight-edge blades with the same gray concrete dust as in the bathtub.

He put the light on the wheelbarrow’s rubber wheel and saw larger chunks of concrete caught in the tread. Dockweiler had no doubt been involved in a recent project involving concrete but Bosch held off concerns that he had buried Bella Lourdes. The clothes in the bathtub with the same debris as the tools accounted for several changes of clothes. The indications were that this was a longtime project, not something taken on in the last eight hours, when Bella had gone missing.

The orange soil on the digging spade gave him pause, however. That could have been used and dirtied anytime.

Bosch pulled the hand truck out to the tailgate so he could look at it more closely. He assumed that Dockweiler used it to move the stacks of boxes he kept in his home and garage. He then noticed a label taped to the axle between the two rubber wheels. It said:

Property of City of San Fernando Department of Public Works

Dockweiler had stolen or borrowed the hand truck for his own purposes. Bosch assumed that if he looked closely enough, many of the tools in the truck and garage would be seen to have come from the workbenches in the Public Works yard. But he wasn’t sure how the hand truck fit with what Dockweiler was doing that night at the tailgate.

Bosch felt he had worked the exigent circumstances to the maximum allowed. He backed away from the truck and pulled his phone. He scrolled through his contact list to the letter J, where he kept the contact information of judges that he’d had good enough experiences with to ask for and receive their cell numbers.

He first called Judge Robert O’Neill, who had presided over a four-month murder trial on which Bosch had been lead detective. Bosch checked his watch after sending the call and saw it was not yet 11 p.m., which always seemed to be the witching hour with judges. They got upset when you called them later, even in an emergency.

O’Neill answered promptly with no sign of sleep or intoxicants in his voice. This was something to note. Bosch had once had a case where the defense lawyer challenged the validity of a search warrant because it had been signed by a judge at 3 a.m. after Bosch had woken him from sleep.

“Judge O’Neill, it’s Harry Bosch. I hope I’m not waking you.”

“Harry, how are you? And, no, you didn’t wake me. These days I stay up late and sleep even later.”

Bosch wasn’t sure what he’d meant by the last part.

“Are you on vacation, sir? Could you still approve a telephonic affidavit? We’ve got a missing-”

“Let me stop you right there, Harry. You apparently didn’t hear the news. I’m off the bench. I pulled the plug three months ago.”

Bosch was stunned and embarrassed. Since his own retirementfrom the LAPD he had not kept track of who held sway in the courtrooms in the Foltz building.

“You retired?” he asked.

“I did,” O’Neill said. “And last I heard, you did too. Is this some kind of a prank?”

“Uh, no, sir. No prank. I’m doing some work for the San Fernando Police Department now. And I need to go. We have an emergency situation here and I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

Bosch disconnected before O’Neill could ask anything else and waste Harry’s time. He quickly went back to his contact list, deleted O’Neill, and then called Judge John Houghton, who was next in line on the list of judges friendly to Bosch. He was known as Shootin’ Houghton among local cops and lawyers because he had a concealed-carry permit and once fired a shot into the ceiling of his courtroom to restore order during a brawl between defendants in a Mexican mafia prosecution. He was subsequently censured by the county judicial committee and the California Bar, and was also charged by the City Attorney with illegal use of a firearm, a misdemeanor. Despite all of that he routinely won landslide reelection each term as a law and order judge.

He, too, answered with a clear voice.

“Harry Bosch? I thought you retired.”

“Retired and hired, Judge. I’m working for San Fernando PD now. Part-time, on their backlog of cold cases. But I’m calling because we have an all-hands emergency going-a missing officer- and I’m outside a suspect’s house and need to conduct a search. We’re hoping to find her still alive.”

“A female officer?”

“Yes, sir. A detective. We think the suspect in a serial rape case grabbed her about seven or eight hours ago. We did a quick run-through of the property under exigent circumstance. Now wewould like to go back in for a deep look for the officer and anything relating to the underlying rape case.”

“I understand.”

“This is all moving very quickly and I don’t have time to go back to the station to print up an affidavit. Can I run down the probable cause for you and follow up with the paperwork tomorrow?”

“Go ahead. Give it to me.”

The first hurdle jumped, Bosch spent the next five minutes going through the steps and the evidence that led them to Dockweiler as the Screen Cutter suspect. He threw in many other bits of information that he could not connect to either the Screen Cutter case or the abduction of Bella Lourdes but that he knew would help paint the picture for the judge and lead to his approval to search. Things like the digging tools in the truck, the warm bag of food for two, the terrible condition of the home. All of it, combined with Dockweiler’s pedigree as a former police officer, won the day, and Houghton gave Bosch permission to search Dockweiler’s house and vehicle.

Bosch thanked the judge profusely and promised to turn in a written search warrant affidavit the next day.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Houghton said.