Golliher returned to the autopsy table and gently placed the skull down.

“I don’t think I need to summarize for you, Detectives, but in short, somebody beat the shit out of this boy on a regular basis. Eventually, they went too far. It will all be in the report to you.”

He turned from the autopsy table and looked at them.

“There is a glimmer of light in all of this, you know. Something that might help you.”

“The surgery,” Bosch said.

“Exactly. Opening a skull is a very serious operation. There will be records somewhere. There had to be follow-up. The roundel is held back in place with metal clips after surgery. There were none found with the skull. I would assume they were removed in a second procedure. Again, there will be records. The surgical scar also helps us date the bones. The trephine holes are too large by today’s standards. By the mid-eighties the tools were more advanced than this. Sleeker. The perforations were smaller. I hope this all helps you.”

Bosch nodded and said, “What about the teeth? Anything there?”

“We are missing the lower mandible,” Golliher said. “On the upper teeth present there is no indication of any dental work despite indication of ante-mortem decay. This in itself is a clue. I think it puts this boy in the lower levels of social classification. He didn’t go to the dentist.”

Edgar had pulled his mask down around his neck. His expression was pained.

“When this kid was in the hospital with the hematoma, why wouldn’t he tell the doctors what was happening to him? What about his teachers, his friends?”

“You know the answers to that as well as me, Detective,” Golliher said. “Children are reliant on their parents. They are scared of them and they love them, don’t want to lose them. Sometimes there is no explanation for why they don’t cry out for help.”

“What about all these fractures and such? Why didn’t the doctors see it and do something?”

“That’s the irony of what I do. I see the history and tragedy so clearly. But with a living patient it might not be apparent. If the parents came in with a plausible explanation for the boy’s injury, what reason would a doctor have to X-ray an arm or a leg or a chest? None. And so the nightmare goes unnoticed.”

Unsatisfied, Edgar shook his head and walked to the far corner of the room.

“Anything else, Doctor?” Bosch asked.

Golliher checked his notes and then folded his arms.

“That’s it on a scientific level-you’ll get the report. On a purely personal level, I hope you find the person who did this. They will deserve whatever they get, and then some.”

Bosch nodded.

“We’ll get him,” Edgar said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

They walked out of the building and got into Bosch’s car. Bosch just sat there for a moment before starting the engine. Finally, he hit the steering wheel hard with the heel of his palm, sending a shock down the injured side of his chest.

“You know it doesn’t make me believe in God like him,” Edgar said. “Makes me believe in aliens, little green men from outer space.”

Bosch looked over at him. Edgar was leaning his head against the side window, looking down at the floor of the car.

“How so?”

“Because a human couldn’t have done this to his own kid. A spaceship must’ve come down and abducted the kid and done all that stuff to him. Only explanation.”

“Yeah, I wish that was on the checklist, Jerry. Then we could all just go home.”

Bosch put the car into drive.

“I need a drink.”

He started driving out of the lot.

“Not me, man,” Edgar said. “I just want to go see my kid and hug him until this gets better.”

They didn’t speak again until they got over to Parker Center.

Chapter 8

BOSCH and Edgar rode the elevator to the fifth floor and went into the SID lab, where they had a meeting set up with Antoine Jesper, the lead criminalist assigned to the bones case. Jesper met them at the security fence and took them back. He was a young black man with gray eyes and smooth skin. He wore a white lab coat that swayed and flapped with his long strides and always moving arms.

“This way, guys,” he said. “I don’t have a lot but what I got is yours.”

He took them through the main lab, where only a handful of other criminalists were working, and into the drying room, a large climate-controlled space where clothing and other material evidence from cases were spread on stainless steel drying tables and examined. It was the only place that could rival the autopsy floor of the medical examiner’s office in the stench of decay.

Jesper led them to two tables where Bosch saw the open backpack and several pieces of clothing blackened with soil and fungus. There was also a plastic sandwich bag filled with an unrecognizable lump of black decay.

“Water and mud got into the backpack,” Jesper said. “Leached in over time, I guess.”

Jesper took a pen out of the pocket of his lab coat and extended it into a pointer. He used it to help illustrate his commentary.

“We’ve got your basic backpack containing three sets of clothes and what was probably a sandwich or some kind of food item. More specifically, three T-shirts, three underwear, three sets of socks. And the food item. There was also an envelope, or what was left of an envelope. You don’t see that here because documents has it. But don’t get your hopes up, guys. It was in worse shape than that sandwich-if it was a sandwich.”

Bosch nodded. He made a list of the contents in his notebook.

“Any identifiers?” he asked.

Jesper shook his head.

“No personal identifiers on the clothing or in the bag,” he said. “But two things to note. First, this shirt here has a brand-name identifier. ‘Solid Surf.’ Says it across the chest. You can’t see it now but I picked it up with the black light. Might help, might not. If you are not familiar with the term ‘Solid Surf,’ I can tell you that it is a skateboarding reference.”

“Got it,” Bosch said.

“Next is the outside flap of the bag.”

He used his pointer to flip over the flap.

“Cleaned this up a little bit and came up with this.”

Bosch leaned over the table to look. The bag was made of blue canvas. On the flap was a clear demarcation of color forming a large letter B at the center.

“It looks like there was some kind of adhesive applicate at one time on the bag,” Jesper said. “It’s gone now and I don’t really know if that occurred before or after this thing was put in the ground. My guess is before. It looks like it was peeled off.”

Bosch stepped back from the table and wrote a few lines in his notebook. He then looked at Jesper.

“Okay, Antoine, good stuff. Anything else?”

“Not on this stuff.”

“Then let’s go to documents.”

Jesper led the way again through the central lab and then into a sub-lab where he had to enter a combination into a door lock to enter.

The documents lab contained two rows of desks that were all empty. Each desk had a horizontal light box and a magnifying glass mounted on a pivot. Jesper went to the middle desk in the second row. The nameplate on the desk said Bernadette Fornier. Bosch knew her. They had worked a case previously in which a suicide note had been forged. He knew she did good work.

Jesper picked up a plastic evidence pouch that was sitting in the middle of the desk. He unzipped it and removed two plastic viewing sleeves. One contained an unfolded envelope that was brown and smeared with black fungus. The other contained a deteriorated rectangular piece of paper that was broken into three parts along the folds and was also grossly discolored by decay and fungus.

“This is what happens when stuff gets wet, man,” Jesper said. “It took Bernie all day just to unfold the envelope and separate the letter. As you can see, it came apart at the folds. And as far as whether we’ll ever be able to tell what was in the letter, it doesn’t look good.”