The Wrong Side of Goodbye

4

Working cold cases had made Bosch proficient in time travel. He knew how to go back into the past to find people. Going back to 1951 would be the farthest and likely the most difficult trek he had ever made but he believed he was up to it and that made him excited about the challenge.

The starting point was finding the birth date of Vibiana Duarte and he believed he knew the best way to accomplish that. Rather than go home after his meeting with Vance, Bosch took the 210 freeway across the northern rim of the Valley and headed toward the city of San Fernando.

Barely bigger than two square miles in size, San Fernando was an island city within the megalopolis of Los Angeles. A hundred years earlier all of the small towns and cities that comprised the San Fernando Valley were annexed into Los Angeles for one reason: the newly built Los Angeles Aqueduct offered bountiful supplies of water that would keep their rich agricultural fields from drying up and blowing away. One by one they were added and Los Angeles grew and spread north, eventually taking in the area’s entire sprawl. All except for the 2.3 square miles of the Valley’s namesake, the city of San Fernando. The little town didn’t need L.A.’s water. Its ground supplies were more than adequate.Avoiding the overture of the big city that now surrounded it, it stayed independent.

A hundred years later it remained so. The Valley’s agriculture pedigree may have long ago given way to urban sprawl and urban blight, but the city of San Fernando remained a quaint throwback to small-town sensibilities. Of course, urban issues and crime were unavoidable but they were nothing the tiny town’s police department couldn’t routinely take care of.

That is, until the financial crash of 2008. When the banking crisis happened and economies constricted and spiraled downward around the world, it was only a few years before the tidal wave of financial pain hit San Fernando. Deep budget cuts occurred and then occurred again. Police Chief Anthony Valdez saw his department drop from forty sworn officers, including himself, in 2010 to thirty officers by 2016. He saw his detective squad of five investigators shrink to just two-one detective to handle property crimes and one to handle crimes against persons. Valdez saw cases start to pile up unsolved, some not even initially investigated fully and properly.

Valdez was born and raised in San Fernando but was seasoned as a cop with the LAPD, putting in twenty years and rising to the rank of captain before taking his pension and checking out, then landing the top spot at his hometown’s department. His connections to the bigger department that surrounded his own ran deep, and his solution to the budget crisis was to expand SFPD’s reserve program and bring in more officers who worked part-time hours but for free.

And it was this expansion that led Chief Valdez to Harry Bosch. One of Valdez’s early assignments when he was with the LAPD had been in a gang-suppression unit in the Hollywood Division. There he ran afoul of a lieutenant named Pounds, who filed an internal complaint and unsuccessfully attempted to have Valdez demoted or even fired.

Valdez avoided both and just a few months later heard about a detective named Bosch who himself got into an altercation with Pounds and ended up throwing him through a plate-glass window at Hollywood Station. Valdez always remembered that name, and years later when he read about a now-retired Harry Bosch suing the LAPD for forcing him out of his job on the cold case squad, he picked up the phone.

Valdez couldn’t offer Bosch a paycheck, but he could offer him something Bosch valued more: a detective’s badge and access to all of the tiny city’s unsolved cases. The SFPD’s reserve unit had only three requirements. Its officers had to maintain their state training standards as law enforcement officers, qualify once a month at the department’s shooting range, and work at least two shifts a month.

It was a no-brainer for Bosch. The LAPD didn’t want or need him anymore but the little town up in the Valley certainly did. And there was work to be done and victims waiting for justice. Bosch took the job the moment it was offered. He knew it would allow him to continue his life’s mission, and he needed no paycheck for that.

Bosch easily met and surpassed the reserve officer minimums. It was rare that he didn’t put in at least two shifts a week, let alone a month, in the detective bureau. He was there so often that he was permanently assigned one of the cubicles that had been left open when the squad was trimmed in the budget crunch.

Most days he was working in the cubicle or across First Street from the police station in the old city jail where the cells were repurposed as storage rooms. The former drunk tank now housed three rows of standing shelves stocked with open case files going back decades.

Because of the statute of limitations on all crimes but murder, the great majority of these cases would never be solved or even examined.The small city didn’t have a lot of murders, but Bosch was meticulously going through them, looking for ways to apply new technologies to old evidence. He also took on a review of all sexual assaults, nonfatal shootings, and attacks resulting in major injuries within the statute of limitations for those crimes.

The job had a lot of freedom to it. Bosch could set his own hours and could always take time away if a case came up for him in private investigation. Chief Valdez knew he was lucky to have a detective with Bosch’s experience working for him, and he never wanted to impinge on Bosch’s ability to take on a paying job. He just stressed to Bosch that the two could never mix. Harry could not use his badge and access as a San Fernando cop to facilitate or further any private investigation. That would be a firing offense.