The Wrong Side of Goodbye

35

Bosch went home, took a long shower, and then crawled into his bed for what he intended to be a four-hour nap. He even tied a bandanna around his head and over his eyes to keep out the light of the day. But less than two hours into a deep trench of sleep he was awakened by a blaring guitar riff. He yanked the bandanna off and tried to do the same with the vestiges of sleep. Then clarity came and he realized it was the ringtone his daughter had programmed into his phone so he would know when she was calling: “Black Sun” by Death Cab for Cutie. She had programmed it into her own phone for his calls to her as well.

He grabbed at the phone, knocking it off the bed table to the floor, before finally picking it up and answering.

“Maddie? What’s wrong?”

“Uh, nothing. What’s wrong with you? You sound weird.”

“I was sleeping. What’s going on?”

“Well I thought we were maybe going to have lunch today. Are you still at your hotel?”

“Shoot, I’m sorry, Maddie. I forgot to call you. I’m back home. I got called back last night on an emergency. An officer got abducted and we worked all night on it.”

“Holy shit! Abducted? Did you get him back?”

“It was a she, and yes, we got her back. But it was a long night and I’m just catching up. I think I’m going to be kind of busy for a few days. Can we do lunch or dinner this weekend or early next week?”

“Yeah, no worries. But how was she abducted?”

“Uh, it’s kind of a long story but he was a wanted guy and he sort of grabbed her before she grabbed him. But we got her back, he’s under arrest, and everything’s okay.”

He left the explanation short because he didn’t want her to know the details of what had happened to Bella Lourdes or that he had shot her abductor. That would make for a long conversation.

“Well, good. I guess, then, I’ll let you go back to sleep.”

“Did you have classes this morning?”

“Psychology and Spanish. I’m finished for the day.”

“That’s nice.”

“Uh, Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“I kind of also wanted to say I was sorry about what I said yesterday about the restaurant and everything. I didn’t know your reasons and it kind of sucked that I jumped on you. I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, baby. You didn’t know and it’s all right.”

“So we’re cool?”

“We’re cool.”

“Love you, Dad. Now go to sleep.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“That’s what you used to say to me when I was little. ‘Love you, now go to sleep.’”

“I remember that.”

After disconnecting, Bosch pulled the bandanna back over his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

And failed.

Twenty minutes into the effort, with the Death Cab guitar hook an earworm playing in his head, he gave up on finding the sleep trench again and got out of bed. He took another quick shower to refresh himself and headed back north to San Fernando.

The number of media trucks outside the police station had doubled since the week before when the Screen Cutter was just a wanted man. Now that he had been identified, had abducted one cop, and had been shot by another, the case was big news. Bosch went in the side door as usual and was able to escape notice from the reporters gathered in the front lobby. The department’s media officer was usually the captain, as part of his catchall duties, but Bosch assumed Trevino would not be the point man on a story he had played a significant part in. He suspected the media management on this story would fall to Sergeant Rosenberg, who was affable and telegenic in a cop sort of way. He looked like a cop and talked like a cop and that’s what the media wanted.

The detective bureau was deserted and that was the way Bosch needed it. After an event like that of the night before, people tended to want to talk. They’d gather around the desk and tell it from their point of view, listen to it from somebody else’s point of view. It was therapeutic. But Bosch didn’t want to talk. He wanted to work. He had to write what he knew would be a lengthy and detailed charging document that would be first scrutinized by his superiors in the department, then by multiple prosecutors with the District Attorney’s Office and then a defense lawyer and, eventually, even the media. He wanted focus, and the quiet detective bureau would be perfect.

Sisto wasn’t in the bureau but his presence was immediately felt. When Bosch got to his desk and dropped his car keys, he found four neat stacks of code inspection reports waiting for him. The young detective had come through.

Bosch sat down to work and almost immediately felt the weight of exhaustion settle onto him. He had not gotten enough rest after the events of the night before. His shoulder was aching from the impact of the curtain frame in Dockweiler’s fallout shelter, but where he was feeling it most was in his legs. That run back up the slope of the wash was the first time he had fired the pistons in a long time and he was sore and fatigued. He signed in to the computer, opened a blank document, and left it ready while he went down the hallway to the station’s kitchen.

On the way he passed the open door of the chief’s office and saw Valdez seated at his desk, the telephone to his ear. The snippet of conversation he heard was enough for Bosch to know the chief was talking to a reporter, saying that the department was not going to identify the officer who had been abducted, because she was the victim of a sexual assault. Bosch thought that in a department as small as San Fernando’s it would not take a good reporter more than a few calls to figure out who was being protected. That would result in reporters camped on the front lawn of Bella Lourdes’s house, unless her address was protected by being deeded in Taryn’s name.

There was a fresh pot of coffee already brewed and Bosch poured two cups, leaving both black. On the way back to the bureau he stopped by the open door of the chief’s office and held one up as an offer. Valdez nodded and covered the phone to respond.

“Harry, you’re the man.”

Bosch stepped into the office and put the cup down on the desk.

“Knock ’em dead, Chief.”

Five minutes later Bosch was back in his cubicle and going through the inspection reports. It only took him an hour because once he became familiar with the form, he was able to quickly go through it and identify the street where each inspection took place. He was looking for the five streets where the known victims,including Beatriz Sahagun, lived. At the end of the hour he had placed Dockweiler on each victim’s street in the months before her assault or attempted assault. In two of the cases he had actually inspected the victim’s home as long as nine months earlier.

The information garnered from the reports helped draw a solid picture of Dockweiler’s MO. Bosch believed that he first saw the victims while conducting inspections, then stalked them and carefully planned the assaults for weeks and sometimes months. As a code inspector and former police officer he had skills that aided this process. Bosch had no doubt that Dockweiler entered and prowled the homes of the victims, possibly even while they were at home and asleep.

Finished with the code inspection piece of the puzzle, Bosch began writing the charging document. He was a two-finger typist but he was fast just the same, especially when he knew and was confident in the story he wanted to tell.

He worked another two hours without a break or even a look up from the computer screen. When he was finished he took a gulp of cold black coffee and hit the print button. The universal printer on the other side of the room spit out six single-spaced pages of a chronology that began with the first Screen Cutter rape four years earlier and ended with Kurt Dockweiler lying facedown on his kitchen floor with a bullet lodged in his spine. Bosch proofed it with a red pen, made the corrections on the computer, and printed it again. He then took it to the chief’s office, where he found him talking on the phone to yet another reporter. He covered the receiver again.

“USA Today,” he said. “This story is going coast to coast.”

“Make sure they spell your name right,” Bosch said. “I’m going to need you to read and approve this. I want to file on Dockweiler first thing tomorrow morning. I’m going for five counts of forciblerape, one count attempted rape, then kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, and multiple counts of theft of government property.”

“The kitchen-sink approach. I like it.”

“Let me know. I have to go write up the evidence report and the search warrant that we got approved last night.”

Bosch was about to leave the office, when Valdez held up a finger, then returned to his phone call.

“Donna, I need to go,” he said. “You have the details in the press release, and like I said, we’re not putting out either officer’s name at this time. We took a really bad character out of circulation and we’re all very proud of that. Thank you.”

Valdez hung up the phone, even as he and Bosch could hear the reporter’s voice asking another question.

“All day long,” Valdez said. “They’re calling from all over the place. Everybody wants to get photos of the dungeon. Everybody wants to talk to Bella and you.”

“I heard you on the phone earlier when you used that word dungeon,” Bosch said. “That’s how things take on a whole new life in the media. It’s a fallout shelter, not a dungeon.”

“Well, as soon as Dockweiler has a lawyer he can sue me. These reporters…One of them told me the average cost of incarcerating an inmate is thirty K a year but with Dockweiler likely being a paraplegic now, it will double for him. I said, so what are you saying, we should have just executed him on the spot to save the money?”

“We did have our chance.”

“I’ll forget you said that, Harry. I don’t even want to think about what you were going to do to him last night.”

“Just what was necessary to find Bella.”

“Well, we did anyway.”

“We got lucky.”

“That wasn’t luck. That was good detective work. Anyway, you should be ready. They’re trying to find out who the shooter was and when they learn it was you, they’ll connect it to West Hollywood last year and everything else before. Be prepared.”

“I’ll take a vacation and disappear.”

“Good idea. So this is good to go?”

He had picked up the document Bosch had delivered.

“You tell me,” Bosch said.

“Okay, give me fifteen minutes,” Valdez said.

“By the way, where’s the captain been all day? Sleeping?”

“No, he’s staying at the hospital with Bella. I wanted someone there to keep the media away and in case she needed anything.”

Bosch nodded. It was a good move. He told Valdez he would be in the bureau and to call or e-mail if he wanted any changes to the charging document.

He returned to his computer in the detective bureau. He was just putting the finishing touches on a report summarizing the physical evidence they had amassed in the case when his cell phone buzzed. It was Mickey Haller calling.

“Yo, Bro, haven’t heard from you,” the lawyer said. “You talk to the granddaughter yet?”

The Vance case had been so thoroughly crowded out of Bosch’s mind with the events of the past eighteen hours that it seemed like his trip to San Diego had been a month ago.

“No, not yet,” Bosch said.

“What about Ida Parks Whatever-Her-Name-Is?” Haller asked.

“Ida Townes Forsythe. No, haven’t gotten to her yet either. Things have sort of been crazy with my other job.”

“Holy shit. You’re on that thing with the guy and the dungeon up there in Santa Clorox?”

It was an old nickname for Santa Clarita, reflecting its early incarnation as a destination for white flight from Los Angeles. It seemed somehow inappropriate coming from a guy Bosch knew grew up in Beverly Hills, the county’s first bastion of white isolationism and privilege.

“Yes, I’m on the case,” Bosch said.

“Tell me, is the guy hooked up with a lawyer yet?” Haller asked.

Bosch hesitated before answering.

“You don’t want to go there,” he said.

“Hey, I’ll go anywhere,” Haller said. “Have case, will travel. But you’re right, this probate stuff may keep me occupied for a while.”

“They file probate on Vance yet?”

“Nope. Waiting.”

“Well, I should be back on that sometime tomorrow. When I find the granddaughter I’ll let you know.”

“Bring her in, Harry. I’d like to meet her.”

Bosch didn’t answer. His attention was drawn to his screen, where he had just received an e-mail from Valdez approving his case summary and charging affidavit. He now had to finish the evidence report and the search warrant and he would be good to go.