“Yeah.”

Bosch picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and saw it had a redial button. He pushed it and waited. He recognized the voice that answered as Morton’s. It was an answering machine. Morton said he wasn’t home and to leave a message.

Bosch called Lt. Billets’s direct line. She answered right away and Bosch could tell she was eating.

“Well, I hate to break this to you while you’re eating, but we’re up here at Trent’s place. It looks like he killed himself.”

There was silence for a long moment and then she asked Bosch if he was sure.

“I’m sure he’s dead and I’m pretty sure he did it himself. Hung himself with a couple of wire hangers in the shower. There’s a three-page note here. He denies anything to do with the bones. He blames his death on Channel Four and the police mostly-me and Edgar in particular. You’re the first one I’ve called.”

“Well, we all know it wasn’t you who-”

“That’s okay, Lieutenant, I don’t need the absolution. What do you want me to do here?”

“You handle the routine call outs. I’ll call Chief Irving’s office and tell him what has transpired. This is going to get hot.”

“Yes. What about Media Relations? There’s already a gang of reporters out on the street.”

“I’ll call them.”

“Did you do anything about Thornton yet?”

“Already in the pipeline. The woman from IAD, Bradley, is running with it. With this latest thing, I’d bet Thornton not only leaked his way out of a job, but they might want to go after him with a charge of some kind.”

Bosch nodded. Thornton deserved it. He still had no second thoughts about the scam he had devised.

“All right, well, we’ll be here. For a while, at least.”

“Let me know if you find anything there that connects him to the bones.”

Bosch thought of the boots with the dirt in the treads and the skateboard.

“You got it,” he said.

Bosch clicked off the call and then immediately made calls to the coroner’s office and SID.

In the living room Morton had finished reading the note.

“Mr. Morton, when was the last time you talked to Mr. Trent?” Bosch asked.

“Last night. He called me at home after the news on Channel Four. His boss had seen it and called him.”

Bosch nodded. That accounted for the last call.

“You know his boss’s name?”

Morton pointed to the middle page on the table.

“Right here on the list. Alicia Felzer. She told him she was going to seek his termination. The studio makes movies for children. She couldn’t have him on a set with a child. You see? The leaking of his record to the media destroyed this man. You recklessly took a man’s existence and-”

“Let me ask the questions, Mr. Morton. You can save your outrage for when you go outside and talk to the reporters yourself, which I know you’ll do. What about that last page? He mentions the children. His children. What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. He obviously was emotionally distraught when he wrote this. It may mean nothing.”

Bosch remained standing, studying the attorney.

“Why did he call you last night?”

“Why do you think? To tell me you had been here, that it was all over the news, that his boss had seen it and wanted to fire him.”

“Did he say whether he buried that boy up there on the hill?”

Morton put on the best indignant look he could muster.

“He certainly said that he did not have a thing to do with it. He believed he was being persecuted for a past mistake, a very distant mistake, and I’d say he was correct about that.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay, Mr. Morton, you can leave now.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not going to-”

“This house is now a crime scene. We are investigating your client’s death to confirm or deny it was by his own hand. You are no longer welcome here. Jerry?”

Edgar stepped over to the couch and waved Morton up.

“Come on. Time to go out there and get your face on TV. It’ll be good for business, right?”

Morton stood up and left in a huff. Bosch walked over to the front windows and pulled the curtain back a few inches. When Morton came down the side of the house to the driveway, he immediately walked to the center of the knot of reporters and started talking angrily. Bosch couldn’t hear what was said. He didn’t need to.

When Edgar came back into the room, Bosch told him to call the watch office and get a patrol car up to Wonderland for crowd control. He had a feeling that the media mob, like a virus replicating itself, was going to start growing bigger and hungrier by the minute.

Chapter 19

THEY found Nicholas Trent’s children when they searched his home following the removal of his body. Filling the entire two drawers of a small desk in the living room, a desk Bosch had not searched the night before, were files, photographs and financial records, including several thick bank envelopes containing canceled checks. Trent had been sending small amounts of money on a monthly basis to a number of charitable organizations that fed and clothed children. From Appalachia to the Brazilian rain forest to Kosovo, Trent had been sending checks for years. Bosch found no check for an amount higher than twelve dollars. He found dozens and dozens of photographs of the children he was supposedly helping as well as small handwritten notes from them.

Bosch had seen any number of public-service ads for the charities on late-night television. He had always been suspicious. Not about whether a few dollars could keep a child from going hungry and unclothed, but about whether the few dollars would actually get to them. He wondered if the photos Trent kept in the drawers of his desk were the same stock shots sent to everybody who contributed. He wondered if the thank-you notes in childish printing were fake.

“Man,” Edgar said as he surveyed the contents of the desk. “This guy, it’s like I think he was paying a penance or something, sending all his cash to these outfits.”

“Yeah, a penance for what?”

“We may never know.”

Edgar went back to searching the second bedroom. Bosch studied some of the photos he had spread on the top of the desk. There were boys and girls, none looking older than ten, though this was hard to estimate because they all had the hollow and ancient eyes of children who have been through war and famine and indifference. He picked up one shot of a young white boy and turned it over. The information said the boy had been orphaned during the fighting in Kosovo. He had been injured in the mortar blast that killed his parents. His name was Milos Fidor and he was ten years old.

Bosch had been orphaned at age eleven. He looked into the boy’s eyes and saw his own.

At 4 P.M. they locked Trent’s home and took three boxes of seized materials to the car. A small group of reporters lingered outside during the whole afternoon, despite word from Media Relations that all information on the day’s events would be distributed through Parker Center.

The reporters approached them with questions but Bosch quickly said that he was not allowed to comment on the investigation. They put the boxes in the trunk and drove off, heading downtown, where a meeting had been called by Deputy Chief Irvin Irving.

Bosch was uncomfortable with himself as he drove. He was ill at ease because Trent’s suicide-and he had no doubts now that it was-had served to deflect the forward movement of the investigation of the boy’s death. Bosch had spent half the day going through Trent’s belongings when what he had wanted to be doing was nailing down the ID of the boy, running out the lead he had received in the call-in reports.

“What’s the matter, Harry?” Edgar asked at one point on the drive.

“What?”

“I don’t know. You’re acting all morose. I know that’s probably your natural disposition, but you usually don’t show it so much.”