Michael Connelly (2 page)

“They didn’t want to mess up a crime scene but then they go poking around the body with a stick. That’s wonderful. These guys
get in after they raised the college requirement, or what?”

“Hey, Bosch, we get a call, we’ve got to check it out. Okay? You want for us to transfer all our body calls directly to the
homicide table to check out? You guys’d go nuts inside a week.”

Bosch crushed the cigarette butt in the stainless steel sink and looked out the kitchen window. Looking down the hill he could
see one of the tourist trams moving between the huge beige sound studios in Universal City. A side of one of the block-long
buildings was painted sky blue with wisps of white clouds; for filming exteriors when the natural L.A. exterior turned brown
as wheat.

Bosch said, “How’d we get the call?”

“Anonymous to nine one one. A little after oh four hundred. Dispatcher said it came from a pay phone on the boulevard. Somebody
out screwin’ around, found the thing in the pipe. Wouldn’t give a name. Said there was a stiff in the pipe, that’s all. They’ll
have the tape down at the com center.”

Bosch felt himself getting angry. He pulled the bottle of aspirin out of the cabinet and put it in his pocket. While thinking
about the 0400 call, he opened the refrigerator and bent in. He saw nothing that interested him. He looked at his watch.

“Crowley, if the report came in at four
A.M.
why are you just getting to me now, nearly five hours later?”

“Look, Bosch, all we had was an anonymous call. That’s it. Dispatcher said it was a kid, no less. I wasn’t going to send one
of my guys up that pipe in the middle of the night on information like that. Coulda been a prank. Coulda been an ambush. Coulda
been anything, fer crissake. I waited till it got light out and things slowed down around here. Sent some of my guys over
there at the end of shift. Speaking of end of shifts, I’m outta here. I’ve been waiting to hear from them and then from you.
Anything else?”

Bosch felt like asking if it ever occurred to him that it would be dark in the pipe whether they went poking around at 0400
or 0800, but let it go. What was the use?

“Anything else?” Crowley said again.

Bosch couldn’t think of anything, but Crowley filled the empty space.

“It’s probly just some hype who croaked himself, Harry. No righteous one eighty-seven case. Happens all the time. Hell, you
remember we pulled one out of that same pipe last year…. Er, well, that was before you came out to Hollywood…. So, see, what
I’m saying is some guy, he goes into this same pipe — these transients, they sleep up there all the time — and he’s a slam-mer
but he shoots himself with a hot load and that’s it. Checks out. ’Cept we didn’t find him so fast that time, and with the
sun and all beating on the pipe a couple days, he gets cooked in there. Roasted like a tom turkey. But it didn’t smell as
good.”

Crowley laughed at his own joke. Bosch didn’t. The watch sergeant continued.

“When we pulled this guy out, the spike was still in his arm. Same thing here. Just a bullshit job, a no-count case. You go
out there, you’ll be back home by noon, take a nap, maybe go catch the Dodgers. And then next weekend? Somebody else’s turn
in the barrel. You’re off watch. And that’s a three-day pass. You got Memorial Day weekend coming next week. So do me a favor.
Just go out and see what they’ve got.”

Bosch thought a moment and was about to hang up, then said, “Crowley, what did you mean you didn’t find that other one so
fast? What makes you think we found this one fast?”

“My guys out there, they say they can’t smell a thing off this stiff other than a little piss. It must be fresh.”

“Tell your guys I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell them not to fuck anymore with anything at my scene.”

“They —”

Bosch knew Crowley was going to defend his men again but hung up before he had to hear it. He lit another cigarette as he
went to the front door to get the
Times
off the step. He spread the twelve pounds of Sunday paper out on the kitchen counter, wondering how many trees died. He found
the real estate supplement and paged through it until he saw a large display ad for Valley Pride Properties. He ran his finger
down a list of Open Houses until he found one address and description marked C
ALL
J
ERRY
. He dialed the number.

“Valley Pride Properties, can I help you?”

“Jerry Edgar, please.”

A few seconds passed and Bosch heard a couple of transfer clicks before his partner got on the line.

“This is Jerry, may I help you?”

“Jed, we just got another call. Up at the Mulholland Dam. And you aren’t wearing your pager.”

“Shit,” Edgar said, and there was silence. Bosch could almost hear him thinking, I’ve got three showings today. There was
more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown. “What’s the
call?”

Bosch told him what little he knew.

“If you want me to take this one solo, I will,” Bosch said. “If anything comes up with Ninety-eight, I’ll be able to cover
it. I’ll tell him you’re taking the TV thing and I’m doing the stiff in the pipe.”

“Yeah, I know you would, but it’s okay, I’m on my way. I’m just going to have to find someone to cover for my ass first.”

They agreed to meet at the body, and Bosch hung up. He turned the answering machine on, took two packs of cigarettes from
the cabinet and put them in his sport coat pocket. He reached into another cabinet and took out the nylon holster that held
his gun, a Smith & Wesson 9mm — satin finished, stainless steel and loaded with eight rounds of XTPs. Bosch thought about
the ad he had seen once in a police magazine. Extreme Terminal Performance. A bullet that expanded on impact to 1.5 times
its width, reaching terminal depth in the body and leaving maximum wound channels. Whoever had written it had been right.
Bosch had killed a man a year earlier with one shot from twenty feet. Went in under the right armpit, exited below the left
nipple, shattering heart and lungs on its way. XTP. Maximum wound channels. He clipped the holster to his belt on the right
side so he could reach across his body and take it with his left hand.

He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth without toothpaste: he was out and had forgotten to go by the store. He dragged
a wet comb through his hair and stared at his red-rimmed, forty-year-old eyes for a long moment. Then he studied the gray
hairs that were steadily crowding out the brown in his curly hair. Even the mustache was going gray. He had begun seeing flecks
of gray in the sink when he shaved. He touched a hand to his chin but decided not to shave. He left his house then without
changing even his tie. He knew his client wouldn’t mind.

• • •

Bosch found a space where there were no pigeon droppings and leaned his elbows on the railing that ran along the top of the
Mulholland Dam. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he looked through the cleft of the hills to the city below. The sky
was gunpowder gray and the smog was a form-fitted shroud over Hollywood. A few of the far-off towers in downtown poked up
through the poison, but the rest of the city was under the blanket. It looked like a ghost town.

There was a slight chemical odor on the warm breeze and after a while he pegged it. Malathion. He’d heard on the radio that
the fruit fly helicopters had been up the night before spraying North Hollywood down through the Cahuenga Pass. He thought
of his dream and remembered the chopper that did not land.

To his back was the blue-green expanse of the Hollywood reservoir, 60 million gallons of the city’s drinking water trapped
by the venerable old dam in a canyon between two of the Hollywood Hills. A six-foot band of dried clay ran the length of the
shoreline, a reminder that L.A. was in its fourth year of drought. Farther up the reservoir bank was a ten-foot-high chain-link
fence that girded the entire shoreline. Bosch had studied this barrier when he first arrived and wondered if the protection
was for the people on one side of the fence or the water on the other.

Bosch was wearing a blue jumpsuit over his rumpled suit. His sweat had stained through the underarms and back of both layers
of clothing. His hair was damp and his mustache drooped. He had been inside the pipe. He could feel the slight, warm tickle
of a Santa Ana wind drying the sweat on the back of his neck. They had come early this year.

Harry was not a big man. He stood a few inches short of six feet and was built lean. The newspapers, when they described him,
called him wiry. Beneath the jumpsuit his muscles were like nylon cords, strength concealed by economy of size. The gray that
flecked his hair was more partial to the left side. His eyes were brown-black and seldom betrayed emotion or intention.

The pipe was located above ground and ran for fifty yards alongside the reservoir’s access road. It was rusted inside and
out, and was empty and unused except by those who sought its interior as a shelter or its exterior as a canvas for spray paint.
Bosch had had no clue to its purpose until the reservoir caretaker had volunteered the information. The pipe was a mud break.
Heavy rain, the caretaker said, could loosen earth and send mud sliding off the hillsides and into the reservoir. The three-foot-wide
pipe, left over from some unknown district project or boondoggle, had been placed in a predicted slide area as the reservoir’s
first and only defense. The pipe was held in place by half-inch-thick iron rebar that looped over it and was embedded in concrete
below.

Bosch had put on the jumpsuit before going into the pipe. The letters LAPD were printed in white across the back. After taking
it out of the trunk of his car and stepping into it, he realized it was probably cleaner than the suit he was trying to protect.
But he wore it anyway, because he had always worn it. He was a methodical, traditional, superstitious detective.

As he had crawled with flashlight in hand into the damp-smelling, claustrophobic cylinder, he felt his throat tighten and
his heartbeat quicken. A familiar emptiness in his gut gripped him. Fear. But he snapped on the light and the darkness receded
along with the uneasy feelings, and he set about his work.

Now he stood on the dam and smoked and thought about things. Crowley, the watch sergeant, had been right, the man in the pipe
was certainly dead. But he had also been wrong. This would not be an easy one. Harry would not be home in time for an afternoon
nap or to listen to the Dodgers on KABC. Things were wrong here. Harry wasn’t ten feet inside the pipe before he knew that.

There were no tracks in the pipe. Or rather, there were no tracks that were of use. The bottom of the pipe was dusty with
dried orange mud and cluttered with paper bags, empty wine bottles, cotton balls, used syringes, newspaper bedding — the debris
of the homeless and addicted. Bosch had studied it all in the beam of the flashlight as he slowly made his way toward the
body. And he had found no clear trail left by the dead man, who lay headfirst into the pipe. This was not right. If the dead
man had crawled in of his own accord, there would be some indication of this. If he had been dragged in, there would be some
sign of that, too. But there was nothing, and this deficiency was only the first of the things that troubled Bosch.

When he reached the body, he found the dead man’s shirt — a black, open-collar crew shirt — pulled up over his head with his
arms tangled inside. Bosch had seen enough dead people to know that literally nothing was impossible during the last breaths.
He had worked a suicide in which a man who had shot himself in the head had then changed pants before dying, apparently because
he did not want his body to be discovered soaked in human waste. But the shirt and the arms on the dead man in the pipe did
not seem acceptable to Harry. It looked to Bosch as if the body had been dragged into the pipe by someone who had pulled the
dead man by the collar.

Bosch had not disturbed the body or pulled the shirt away from the face. He noted that it was a white male. He detected no
immediate indication of the fatal injury. After finishing his survey of the body, Bosch carefully moved over the corpse, his
face coming within a half foot of it, and then continued through the pipe’s remaining forty yards. He found no tracks and
nothing else of evidentiary value. In twenty minutes he was back in the sunlight. He then sent a crime scene tech named Donovan
in to chart the location of debris in the pipe and video the body in place. Donovan’s face had betrayed his surprise at having
to go into the pipe on a case he’d already written off as an OD. He had tickets to the Dodgers, Bosch figured.

After leaving the pipe to Donovan, Bosch had lit a cigarette and walked to the dam’s railing to look down on the fouled city
and brood.

At the railing he could hear the sound of traffic filtering up from the Hollywood Freeway. It almost sounded gentle from such
a distance. Like a calm ocean. Down through the cleft of the canyon he saw blue swimming pools and Spanish tile roofs.

A woman in a white tank top and lime-green jogging shorts ran by him on the dam. A compact radio was clipped to her waistband,
and a thin yellow wire carried sound to the earphones clamped to her head. She seemed to be in her own world, unaware of the
grouping of police ahead of her until she reached the yellow crime scene tape stretched across the end of the dam. It told
her to stop in two languages. She jogged in place for a few moments, her long blond hair clinging to sweat on her shoulders,
and watched the police, who were mostly watching her. Then she turned and headed back past Bosch. His eyes followed her, and
he noticed that when she went by the pump house she deviated her course to avoid something. He walked over and found glass
on the pavement. He looked up and saw the broken bulb in the socket above the pump house door. He made a mental note to ask
the caretaker if the bulb had been checked lately.

When Bosch returned to his spot at the railing a blur of movement from below drew his attention. He looked down and saw a
coyote sniffing among the pine needles and trash that covered the earth below the trees in front of the dam. The animal was
small and its coat was scruffy and completely missing some patches of hair. There were only a few of them left in the city’s
protected areas, left to scavenge among the debris of the human scavengers.