Lost Light (42 page)

MC:
For the most part I am. The death that is investigated in the book was circumstancially inspired by a real case. But it was a case I read about in academic literature on anthropology and child abuse. The article I read did not give the circumstances of where and when the case occurred. It was only about the bones and what they told investigators. But that was enough to get me started.

TWB:
Julia Brasher is such a compelling and three-dimensional character in
City of Bones
, as a reader, you feel like you know her almost immediately. Was she inspired by someone you know? You’re so good at writing dynamic female characters, have you considered writing another book from a female perspective like
Void Moon
?

MC:
In general she was inspired by an amalgam of police officers I have known, male and female. No matter the gender, cops share a lot of traits. I just tried to put them into her and add some other things I know and mix it up and hopefully she came out as a real person. I think I will definitely write a female protagonist book again. I just don’t know when.

TWB:
In an essay on mystery writing on your website, you write that the mystery is all about “Not the solution to the puzzle but the act of putting the pieces together.” When you sit down to write a mystery, do you know what the outcome will be and set up the plot to get to that ending? Or do you discover the clues along with your investigator?

MC:
I usually know the beginning and ending and a few of the key things that will put the investigator on the right path. But the rest sort of develops as I go along. I think what I was trying to say in that essay was that it not as much about the destination as the ride. You want the ride to be exciting and fulfilling so your passengers are happy when they reach the final destination.

TWB:
What’s next for Harry Bosch? Do you have any plans to bring back Terry McCaleb or Cassie Black?

MC:
I never say never about any character but for the moment McCaleb and Black are on a back burner, hopefully keeping warm. I am just starting a Harry Bosch novel in which I take him in a new direction, one I hope will keep him interesting.

TWB:
Production has begun in Southern California for the movie based on your novel
Blood Work
. Clint Eastwood is starring, directing, and producing this adaptation. What has your participation been in this movie? Have you worked on the screenplay? Have you been to the set yet? How do you feel about the casting of the film?

MC:
My participation before filming was limited to reading the script and offering comments to Eastwood. My comments were few because I thought it was a really good script. I’ve been to the set to watch them film scenes twice. It was interesting to see this whole community of creative people working with an idea that came from me. The script was geared toward Eastwood, so although he is much older than the McCaleb in the book, I think it works.

TWB:
You’ve recently moved from Los Angeles to Florida; up to now, Los Angeles has been almost like another recurring character in so many of your books. Do you plan to keep writing about LA? Do you think that physically moving will change the way that you write or the subjects that you write about?

MC:
My plan is to keep writing about L.A. for as long as the place fascinates me. I may have moved but I have made several trips back and continue to do so to stay familiar. The move has changed how I write and the change has been stimulating and fun. I used to spend a lot of time in the places I would write about and close to the time I would write. Now I am 3,000 miles away when I am doing the writing so I now write from memory and I think this has forced me to be more creative or imaginative. I have enjoyed it. I still swing in to LA to check my work against the real stuff but when I am in the process of writing it has been different.

TWB:
This fall, you’ll be publishing a book called
Chasing the Dime
, which is based somewhat on an experience that you had when moving to a new house. What can you tell us about this book?

MC:
It is remotely based or I guess I should say sparked by my move. I got a new telephone number when I moved here and almost immediately I started getting calls for the woman who formerly had the number. Many were from her friends and relatives who did not know where she had gone and were very worried. I never found out what happened and after a few months the calls stopped. But it sparked this idea for a story about a man who has something similar happen to him and he acts on it, attempting to find out what happened to the woman whose number he had inherited. This leads him down a path into the dark side of the internet as well as his own dark side.

 

Little, Brown and Company
Boston  New York    London

T
he old lady had changed her mind about dying but by then it was too late. She had dug her fingers into the paint and plaster of the nearby wall until most of her fingernails had broken off. Then she had gone for the neck, scrabbling to push the bloodied fingertips up and under the cord. She broke four toes kicking at the walls. She had tried so hard, shown such a desperate will to live, that it made Harry Bosch wonder what had happened before. Where was that determination and will and why had it deserted her until after she had put the extension cord noose around her neck and kicked over the chair? Why had it hidden from her?

These were not official questions that would be raised in his death report. But they were the things Bosch couldn’t avoid thinking about as he sat in his car outside the Splendid Age Retirement Home on Sunset Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. It was 4:20 p.m. on the first day of the year. Bosch had drawn holiday call-out duty.

The day more than half over and that duty consisted of two suicide runs—one a gunshot, the other the hanging. Both victims were women. In both cases there was evidence of depression and desperation. Isolation. New Year’s Day was always a big day for suicides. While most people greeted the day with a sense of hope and renewal, there were those who saw it as a good day to die, some—like the old lady—not realizing their mistake until it was too late.

Bosch looked up through the windshield and watched as the latest victim’s body, on a wheeled stretcher and covered in a green blanket, was loaded into the coroner’s blue van. He saw there was one other occupied stretcher in the van and knew it was from the first suicide—a thirty-four-year-old actress who had shot herself while parked at a Hollywood overlook on Mulholland Drive. Bosch and the body crew had followed one case to the other.

Bosch’s cell phone chirped and he welcomed the intrusion into his thoughts on small deaths. It was Mankiewicz, the watch sergeant at the Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“You finished with that yet?”

“I’m about to clear.”

“Anything?”

“A changed-my-mind suicide. You got something else?”

“Yeah. And I didn’t think I should go out on the radio with it. Must be a slow day for the media—getting more what’s-happening calls from reporters than I am getting service calls from citizens. They all want to do something on the first one, the actress on Mulholland. You know, a death-of-a-Hollywood-dream story. And they’d probably jump all over this latest call, too.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“A citizen up in Laurel Canyon. On Wonderland. He just called up and said his dog came back from a run in the woods with a bone in its mouth. The guy says it’s human—an arm bone from a kid.”

Bosch almost groaned. There were four or five call outs like this a year. Hysteria always followed by simple explanation: animal bones. Through the windshield he saluted the two body movers from the coroner’s office as they headed to the front doors of the van.

“I know what you’re thinking, Harry. Not another bone run. You’ve done it a hundred times and it’s always the same thing. Coyote, deer, whatever. But listen, this guy with the dog, he’s an MD. And he says there’s no doubt. It’s a humerus. That’s the upper arm bone. He says it’s a child, Harry. And then, get this. He said . . .”

There was silence while Mankiewicz apparently looked for his notes. Bosch watched the coroner’s blue van pull off into traffic. When Mankiewicz came back he was obviously reading.

“The bone’s got a fracture clearly visible just above the medial epicondyle, whatever that is.”

Bosch’s jaw tightened. He felt a slight tickle of electric current go down the back of his neck.

“That’s off my notes, I don’t know if I am saying it right. The point is, this doctor says it was just a kid, Harry. So could you humor us and go check out this humerus?”

Bosch didn’t respond.

“Sorry, had to get that in.”

“Yeah, that was funny, Mank. What’s the address?”

Mankiewicz gave it to him and told him he had already dispatched a patrol team.

“You were right to keep it off the air. Let’s try to keep it that way.”

Mankiewicz said he would. Bosch closed his phone and started the car. He glanced over at the entrance to the retirement home before pulling away from the curb. There was nothing about it that looked splendid to him. The woman who had hung herself in the closet of her tiny bedroom had no next of kin, according to the operators of the home. In death, she would be treated the way she had been in life, left alone and forgotten.

Bosch pulled away from the curb and headed toward Laurel Canyon.

B
osch listened to the Lakers game on the car radio while he made his way into the canyon and then up Lookout Mountain to Wonderland Avenue. He wasn’t a religious follower of professional basketball but wanted to get a sense of the situation in case he needed his partner, Jerry Edgar. Bosch was working alone because Edgar had lucked into a pair of choice seats to the game. Bosch had agreed to handle the call outs and to not bother Edgar unless a homicide or something Bosch couldn’t handle alone came up. Bosch was alone also because the third member of his team, Kizmin Rider, had been promoted nearly a year earlier to Robbery-Homicide Division and still had not been replaced.

It was early third quarter, and the game with the Trail Blazers was tied. While Bosch wasn’t a hardcore fan he knew enough from Edgar’s constant talking about the game and begging to be left free of call-out duty that it was an important matchup with one of the Los Angeles team’s top rivals. He decided not to page Edgar until he had gotten to the scene and assessed the situation. He turned the radio off when he started losing the AM station in the canyon.

The drive up was steep. Laurel Canyon was a cut in the Santa Monica Mountains. The tributary roads ranged up toward the crest of the mountains. Wonderland Avenue dead-ended in a remote spot where the half-million-dollar homes were surrounded by heavily wooded and steep terrain. Bosch instinctively knew that searching for bones in the area would be a logistical nightmare. He pulled to a stop behind a patrol car already at the address Mankiewicz had provided and checked his watch. It was 4:38, and he wrote it down on a fresh page of his legal pad. He figured he had less than an hour of daylight left.

A patrol officer he didn’t recognize answered his knock. Her nameplate said Brasher. She led him back through the house to a home office where her partner, a cop whom Bosch recognized and knew was named Edgewood, was talking to a white-haired man who sat behind a cluttered desk. There was a shoe box with the top off on the desk.

Bosch stepped forward and introduced himself. The white-haired man said he was Dr. Paul Guyot, a general practitioner. Leaning forward Bosch could see that the shoe box contained the bone that had drawn them all together. It was dark brown and looked like a gnarled piece of driftwood.

He could also see a dog lying on the floor next to the doctor’s desk chair. It was a large dog with a yellow coat.

“So this is it,” Bosch said, looking back down into the box.

“Yes, Detective, that’s your bone,” Guyot said. “And as you can see . . .”

He reached to a shelf behind the desk and pulled down a heavy copy of
Gray’s Anatomy.
He opened it to a previously marked spot. Bosch noticed he was wearing latex gloves.

The page showed an illustration of a bone, anterior and posterior views. In the corner of the page was a small sketch of a skeleton with the humerus bone of both arms highlighted.

“The humerus,” Guyot said, tapping the page. “And then we have the recovered specimen.”

He reached into the shoe box and gently lifted the bone. Holding it above the book’s illustration he went through a point-by-point comparison.

“Medial epicondyle, trochlea, greater and lesser tubercle,” he said. “It’s all there. And I was just telling these two officers, I know my bones even without the book. This bone is human, Detective. There’s no doubt.”

Bosch looked at Guyot’s face. There was a slight quiver, perhaps the first showing of the tremors of Parkinson’s.

“Are you retired, Doctor?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know a bone when I see —”

“I’m not challenging you, Dr. Guyot.” Bosch tried to smile. “You say it is human, I believe it. Okay? I’m just trying to get the lay of the land here. You can put that back into the box now if you want.”

Guyot replaced the bone in the shoe box.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Calamity.”

Bosch looked down at the dog. It appeared to be sleeping.

“When she was a pup she was a lot of trouble.”