6

It felt like the detective bureau had become a fishbowl and he was the only one in the water. He had to get away from the curious eyes that were watching him. Bosch picked up the stack of blue binders and walked out the backdoor into the parking lot. Then he quickly walked back into the station through the watch office door, went down a short hallway past the lockup and up a staircase to the second-floor storage room. It was called the Bridal Suite because of the cots in the back corner. An unofficial official cooping station. There was an old cafeteria table up there and a phone. And it was quiet. It was all he needed.

The room was empty today. Bosch put the stack of binders down and cleared a dented bumper marked with an evidence tag off the table. He leaned it against a stack of file boxes next to a broken surfboard that had also been tagged as evidence. Then he got down to work.

Harry stared at the foot-high stack of binders. Pounds said the division had sixty-six homicides so far in the year. Figuring the rotation and including Harry’s two-month absence while recovering from the bullet wound, Porter had probably caught fourteen of the cases. With eight still open, that meant he had cleared six others. It wasn’t a bad record, considering the transient nature of homicide in Hollywood. Nationwide, the vast majority of murder victims know their killer. They are the people they eat with, drink with, sleep with, live with. But Hollywood was different. There were no norms. There were only deviations, aberrations. Strangers killed strangers here. Reasons were not a requirement. The victims turned up in alleys, on freeway shoulders, along the brushy hillsides in Griffith Park, in bags dropped like garbage into restaurant Dumpsters. One of Harry’s open files was the discovery of a body in parts-one on each of the fire escape landings of a six-story hotel on Gower. That one didn’t raise too many eyebrows in the bureau. The joke going around was that it was a lucky thing that the victim hadn’t stayed at the Holiday Inn. It was fifteen stories.

The bottom line was that in Hollywood a monster could move smoothly in the flow of humanity. Just one more car on the crowded freeway. And some would always be caught and some would always be untraceable, unless you counted the blood they left behind.

Porter had gone six and eight before punching out. It was a record that wouldn’t get him any commendations but, still, it meant six more monsters were out of the flow. Bosch realized he could balance Porter’s books if he could clear one of the eight open cases. The broken-down cop would at least go out with an even record.

Bosch didn’t care about Pounds and his desire to clear one more case by midnight on New Year’s Eve. He felt no allegiance to Pounds and believed the annual tabulating, charting and analysing of lives sacrificed added up to nothing. He decided that if he was to do this job, he would do it for Porter. Fuck Pounds.

He pushed the binders to the back of the table so he would have room to work. He decided to quickly scan each murder book and separate them into two piles. One stack of possible quick turns, another for the cases he did not think he could do anything with in a short time.

He reviewed them in chronological order, starting with a Valentine’s Day strangulation of a priest in a stall at a bathhouse on Santa Monica. By the time he was done two hours had passed and Harry had only two of the blue binders in his stack of possibilities. One was a month old. A woman was pulled from a bus stop bench on Las Palmas into the darkened entranceway of a closed Hollywood memorabilia store and raped and stabbed. The other was the eight-day-old discovery of the body of a man behind a twenty-four-hour diner on Sunset near the Directors Guild building. The victim had been beaten to death.

Bosch focused on these two because they were the most recent cases and experience had instilled in him a firm belief that cases become exponentially more difficult to clear with each day that passes. Whoever strangled the priest was as good as gold. Harry knew the percentages showed that the killer had gotten away.

Bosch also saw that the two most recent cases could quickly be cleared if he caught a break. If he could identify the man found behind the restaurant, then that information could lead to his family, friends and associates and most likely to a motive and maybe a killer. Or, if he could trace the stabbing victim’s movement back to where she was before going to the bus stop, he might be able to learn where and how the killer saw her.

It was a toss-up and Bosch decided to read each case file thoroughly before deciding. But going with the percentages he decided to read the freshest case first. The body found behind the restaurant was the warmest trail.

On first glance, the murder book was notable for what it did not contain. Porter had not picked up a finished, typed copy of the autopsy protocol. So Bosch had to rely on the Investigator’s Summary reports and Porter’s own autopsy notes, which simply said the victim had been beaten to death with a “blunt object”-policespeak, meaning just about anything.

The victim, estimated to be about fifty-five years old, was referred to as Juan Doe #67. This because he was believed to be Latin and was the sixty-seventh unidentified Latin man found dead in Los Angeles County during the year. There was no money on the body, no wallet and no belongings other than the clothing-all of it manufactured in Mexico. The only identification key was a tattoo on the upper left chest. It was a monocolor outline of what appeared to be a ghost. There was a Polaroid snapshot of it in the file. Bosch studied this for several moments, deciding the blue line drawing of a Casper-like ghost was very old. The ink was faded and blurred. Juan Doe #67 had gotten the tattoo as a young man.

The crime scene report Porter had filled out said the body had been found at 1:44A.M. on December18 by an off-duty police officer, identified only by his badge number, going in for an early breakfast or late dinner when he saw the body lying next to the Dumpster near the kitchen door of the Egg and I Diner.

R/O #1101 had recently reported code seven and parked behind the location with the intention of entering to eat. Victim was viewed on the eastern side of the dumpster. Body was laying in a supine position, head to the north and feet to the south. Extensive injuries were readily noticeable and R/O notified the watch commander that a homicide callout was necessary. R/O saw no other individuals in the vicinity of the dumpster before or after the body was located.

Bosch looked through the binder for a summary filed by the reporting officer but there was none. He next reviewed the other photos in the binder. These were of the body in place, before the techs had moved it to the morgue.

Bosch could see the victim’s scalp had been rent open by one vicious blow. There were also wounds on the face and dried black blood on the neck and all over the once-white T-shirt the man was wearing. The dead man’s hands lay open at his sides. In close-ups of the hands, Bosch saw two fingers on the right hand bent backward in compound fractures-classic defense wounds. Aside from the wounds, Bosch noted the rough and scarred hands and the ropey muscles that went up the arms. He had been a worker of some kind. What had he been doing in the alley behind the diner at one o’clock in the morning?

Next in the binder were witness statements taken from employees at the Egg and I. They were all men, which seemed wrong to Bosch because he had eaten at the Egg and I on several early mornings and remembered that there were always waitresses working the tables. Porter had apparently decided they were unimportant and concentrated only on the kitchen help. Each of the men interviewed said he did not recall seeing the victim in life or death.