The Wrong Side of Goodbye

5

Murder knows no bounds or city limits. Most of the cases Bosch reviewed and pursued took him into LAPD turf. It was only expected. Two of the big city’s police divisions shared borders with San Fernando: Mission Division to the west and Foothill Division to the east. In four months Bosch had cleared two unsolved gang murders-connecting them through ballistics to murders in L.A. for which the perpetrators were already in prison-and linked a third to a pair of suspects already being sought for murder by the larger department.

Additionally, Bosch had used MO-modus operandi-and then DNA to connect four sexual assault cases in San Fernando over a four-year period and was in the process of determining whether the attacker was responsible for any rapes in Los Angeles as well.

Driving the 210 away from Pasadena allowed Bosch to check for a tail. Midday traffic was light and by alternately driving five miles below the speed limit and then taking it up to fifteen above it, he could check the mirrors for vehicles following the same pattern. He wasn’t sure how seriously to take Whitney Vance’s concerns about the secrecy of his investigation but it didn’t hurt to be alert to a tail. He didn’t see anything on the road behind him. Of course, he knewthat his car could have been tagged with a GPS tracker while he was in the mansion with Vance, or even the day before while he met with Creighton at the U.S. Bank Tower. He would need to check for that later.

In fifteen minutes he had crossed the top of the Valley and was back in L.A. He took the Maclay Street exit and dropped down into San Fernando, where he turned onto First Street. The SFPD was located in a single-story building with white stucco walls and a red barrel-tile roof. The population of the tiny town was 90 percent Latino and its municipal structures were all designed with a nod to Mexican culture.

Bosch parked in the employee lot and used an electronic key to enter the station through the side door. He nodded to a couple of uniform cops through the window of the report room and followed the back hallway past the chief’s office toward the detective bureau.

“Harry?”

Bosch turned and looked through the door to the chief’s office. Valdez was behind his desk, waving him in.

Harry stepped into the office. It wasn’t as big as the LAPD chief’s suite but it was comfortable and had a sitting area for informal discussions. Hanging from the ceiling was a black-and-white toy helicopter with SFPD painted on its body. The first time Bosch had been in the office Valdez had explained that this was the department’s helicopter-a joking reference to the fact that the department didn’t have its own bird and had to call in air support when needed from the LAPD.

“How’s it going?” Valdez asked.

“Can’t complain,” Bosch said.

“Well, we certainly appreciate what you’re doing around here. Anything happening on the Screen Cutter?”

It was a reference to the serial rapist case Bosch had identified.

“I’m about to go check on responses to our e-mail. After that I’ll get with Bella to talk about next moves.”

“I read the report from the profiler when I approved the payment. Interesting stuff. We gotta get this guy.”

“Working on it.”

“Okay, well, I won’t hold you up.”

“Okay, Chief.”

Bosch glanced at the helicopter for a moment and then left the office. The detective bureau was just a few paces down the hall. By LAPD or any standards, it was quite small. It had once consisted of two rooms, but one room had been subleased to the County Coroner’s Office as a satellite office for two of its investigators. Now there were three detective cubicles crammed into one room with a closet-size supervisor’s office adjoining.

Bosch’s cubicle had five-foot walls that allowed him privacy from three sides. But the fourth side was open to the office door of the squad’s supervisor. That post was supposed to be a full-time lieutenant’s slot, but it had been vacant since the budget crunch and the supervisor was currently the department’s only captain. His name was Trevino and he had so far not been convinced that having Bosch on the premises and handling cases was a good thing. He seemed suspicious of Bosch’s motives for working so many hours for no pay and kept a careful watch over him. For Bosch, the only thing that alleviated this unwanted attention was that Trevino wore multiple hats in the department, as is often the case with small agencies. He was running the detective bureau and was also in charge of interior operations in the station, including the dispatch center, the indoor firing range, and the sixteen-bed jail built to replace the aging facility across the street. These responsibilities often drew Trevino out of the detective bureau and off Bosch’s back.

Bosch checked his mail slot upon entering and found a remindernotice that he was overdue qualifying this month on the range. He moved into his cubicle and sat down at his desk.

Along the way he saw that Trevino’s door was closed and the glass transom above it was dark. The captain was most likely in another part of the building carrying out one of his other duties. Bosch thought he understood Trevino’s suspicion and lack of welcome. Any success he had in clearing cases could be seen as a failing on Trevino’s part. After all, the detective bureau was currently his domain. And it didn’t help when word got around that Bosch had once thrown his LAPD supervisor through a plate-glass window.

Still, there was nothing Trevino could do about Bosch’s placement in the office, because he was part of the police chief’s effort to overcome personnel cuts.

Bosch turned on his computer terminal and waited for it to boot up. It had been four days since he was last in the office. A flyer for a department bowling night had been left on his desk and he immediately transferred this to the recycle bin beneath it. He liked the people he worked with in the new department, but he wasn’t much of a bowler.

Using a key to open a locked file cabinet in his desk, he pulled out a few folders pertaining to open cases he was working and spread them on his desk so it would appear he was engaged in SFPD business. He noticed when he reached for his Screen Cutter folder that it wasn’t there. He found it in the wrong spot in the drawer. It had been misfiled under the first victim’s name rather than under the unknown suspect’s moniker: Screen Cutter. This immediately alarmed and annoyed Bosch. He didn’t believe he could have mis-filed the case. All of his career he had carefully managed his case files. The file-whether it was a murder book or a manila folder-was the heart of the case and it always needed to be neatly and thoroughly put together and safely stored.

He put the folder on his desk and considered that someone with a duplicate key might be reading his files and checking his work. And he knew exactly who that might be. He reversed himself and returned all his files to the drawer, then closed and locked it with his key. He had a plan for smoking out the intruder.

He sat up straight to look over the partitions and saw that both of the other detective cubicles were empty. Bella Lourdes, the CAPs investigator, and Danny Sisto, who handled property crimes, were probably out in the field following up on crime reports. They often went out to handle much of their fieldwork together.

Once he was logged into the department’s computer system, Bosch opened up the law enforcement databases. He got out his notebook and began the search for Vibiana Duarte, knowing he was breaking the one rule the police chief had given him: using his SFPD access to supplement a private investigation. Not only was it a firing offense at SFPD but it was a crime in California to access a law enforcement database for information not pertaining to a police investigation. If Trevino ever decided to audit Bosch’s use of the computer, there would be a problem. But Bosch figured that would not happen. Trevino would know that if he made a move against Bosch, he was making a move against the police chief, and that was most likely career suicide.

The search for Vibiana Duarte was short. There was no listing of her ever having a driver’s license in California, no record of her ever committing a crime or even getting a parking ticket. Of course, the digital databases were less complete the farther back the search went but Bosch knew from experience that it was rare not to find any reference to an entered name. It supported the possibility that Duarte had been an illegal and possibly returned to Mexico in 1950 after becoming pregnant. Abortion in California was against the law back then. She might have crossed the border to have her babyor to have the pregnancy terminated in one of the backroom clinics in Tijuana.

Bosch knew the law on abortion back then because he had been born in 1950 to an unmarried woman and, soon after becoming a cop, he had looked up the laws so that he would better understand the choices his mother had faced and made.

What he was not familiar with was the California penal code in 1950. He accessed it next and checked the laws about sexual assault. He pretty quickly learned that in 1950 under penal code section 261, sexual intercourse with a female under age eighteen was considered a chargeable offense of rape. Consensual relations were not listed as an exclusion to prosecution. The only exclusion offered was if the woman was the wife of the offender.

Bosch thought about Vance’s father believing the pregnancy was a trap set by Duarte to force a marriage that would bring her citizenship and money. If that was the case, the penal code gave her a solid piece of leverage. But the lack of any record of Duarte in California seemed to belie that angle. Rather than use her leverage, Duarte had disappeared, possibly back to Mexico.

Bosch switched the screen, went back to the DMV interface, and typed in “James Franklin Aldridge,” the cover name Vance had given him.

Before the results came up, he saw Captain Trevino enter the squad room, carrying a cup of coffee from Starbucks. Bosch knew there was a store located a few blocks away on Truman. He often took a break from computer work in the bureau and walked over himself. This was not only to give his eyes a rest but to indulge in a recent addiction to iced lattes that had developed since he began routinely meeting with his daughter at various coffee shops near her school campus.

“Harry, what brings you in today?” Trevino said.

The captain always greeted him cordially and by his first name.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d check e-mail and send out a few more alerts on the Screen Cutter.”

As he spoke, he killed the DMV screen and pulled up the e-mail account he had been given by the department. He didn’t turn around as Trevino went to the door of his office and unlocked it.

Bosch heard the door open but then felt Trevino’s presence behind him in the cubicle.

“In the neighborhood?” Trevino said. “All the way up here? And all dressed up in a suit!”

“Well, actually, I was in Pasadena seeing somebody and then I just took the Foothill across,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d just send out a few e-mails, then get out of here.”

“Your name’s not on the board, Harry. You have to sign in to get credit for your hours.”

“Sorry, I was only going to be here a few minutes. And I don’t have to worry about making my hours. I put in twenty-four last week alone.”

There was an attendance board by the entrance to the detective bureau on which Bosch had been instructed to sign in and out so Trevino could chart his hours and make sure he hit the reserve officer minimum.

“I still want you signing in and out,” Trevino said.

“You got it, Cap,” Bosch said.

“Good.”

“By the way…”

Bosch reached down and rapped his knuckles on the file drawer.

“I forgot my key,” he said. “You have a key I can open this with? I need my files.”

“No, no key. Garcia turned in the only one. He said that was all he got from Dockweiler.”

Bosch knew that Garcia was the last detective to occupy the desk and that he had inherited it from Dockweiler. Both were casualties of the budget crunch. He’d heard in the office scuttlebutt that both men left law enforcement after being laid off. Garcia became a schoolteacher and Dockweiler saved his city paycheck and pension by transferring to the Public Works Department, where they had an opening in code enforcement.

“Anybody else have a key around here?” Bosch asked.

“Not that I know of,” Trevino said. “Why don’t you just open it with your lock picks, Harry? I heard you’re good with those.”

He said it with a tone that implied that Bosch was somehow skilled in the dark arts because he knew how to pick a lock.

“Yeah, I might do that,” Bosch said. “Thanks for the idea.”

Trevino stepped into his office and Bosch heard the door close. He made a mental note to check with Dockweiler about the missing key. He wanted to make sure the former detective didn’t have it before he took any steps toward proving Trevino was the one secretly checking his files.

Bosch reopened the DMV portal to run Aldridge’s name. He soon pulled up a history that showed Aldridge had a California driver’s license from 1948 until 2002, at which point it was surrendered when the license holder moved to Florida. He wrote down Aldridge’s date of birth and then entered it with his name on a check of the Florida DMV database. This determined that Aldridge had surrendered his license in Florida at age eighty. The last address listed was in a place called The Villages.

After writing down the information, Bosch checked for a website and found that The Villages was a massive retirement community in Sumter County, Florida. Further searching of online records found an address for Aldridge and no indication of a death record or obituary. He had likely surrendered his driver’s license becausehe no longer could or needed to drive, but it appeared that James Franklin Aldridge was still alive.

Curious about the incident that supposedly got Aldridge kicked out of USC, Bosch next ran the name through the crime database, doubling down on his firing offenses for the day. Aldridge had a DUI on his record from 1986 and that was it. Whatever had happened back in his freshman year of college remained hidden from Bosch.

Content that he had sufficiently chased down the name as needed for a possible cover story, Bosch decided to check through the e-mail that had accumulated on the Screen Cutter case. It was the investigation that had consumed most of his time since he had joined the ranks of the San Fernando Police Department. He had worked serial murder cases before during his time with LAPD and most, if not all, had a sexual component to them, so the territory was not new to Bosch. But the Screen Cutter case was one of the more puzzling cases he had ever encountered.