“Not everything. You wouldn’t sell that stupid fire bell we have in the backyard. Anyway, that was when we sold the skateboard.”

“Do you remember who you sold it to?”

“Yes, the man who lived next door. Mr. Trent.”

“When was this?”

“Summer of ’ninety-two. Right after we sold the house. We were still in escrow, I remember.”

“Why do you remember selling the skateboard to Mr. Trent? ’Ninety-two was a long time ago.”

“I remember because he bought half of what we were selling. The junky half. He gathered it all up and offered us one price for everything. He needed it all for his work. He was a set designer.”

“Set decorator,” her husband corrected. “There is a difference.”

“Anyway, he used everything he bought from us on movie sets. I always hoped I would see something in a movie that I’d know came from our house. But I never did.”

Bosch scribbled some notes in his pad. He had just about everything he needed from the Blaylocks. It was almost time to head south, back to the city to put the case together.

“How did you get the skateboard?” Audrey asked him.

Bosch looked up from his notepad.

“Uh, it was in Mr. Trent’s possessions.”

“He’s still on the street?” Don Blaylock asked. “He was a great neighbor. Never a problem at all with him.”

“He was until recently,” Bosch said. “He passed away, though.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Audrey proclaimed. “What a shame. And he wasn’t that old a man.”

“I just have a couple more questions,” Bosch said. “Did John Stokes ever tell either of you how he came to have the skateboard?”

“He told me that he had won it during a contest with some other boys at school,” Audrey said.

“The Brethren School?”

“Yes, that’s where he went. He was going when he first came to us and so we continued it.”

Bosch nodded and looked down at his notes. He had everything. He closed the notebook, put it in his coat pocket and stood up to go.

Chapter 51

BOSCH pulled the car into a space in front of the Lone Pine Diner. The booths by all the windows were filled and almost all of the people in them looked out at the LAPD car two hundred miles from home.

He was starved but knew he needed to talk to Edgar before delaying any further. He took out the cell phone and made the call. Edgar answered after half a ring.

“It’s me. Did you put the BOLO out?”

“Yeah, it’s out. But it’s a little hard to do when you don’t know what the fuck is going on, partner.”

He said the last word as if it was a synonym for asshole. It was their last case together and Bosch felt bad that they were going to end their time this way. He knew it was his fault. He had cut Edgar out of the case for reasons Bosch wasn’t even sure about.

“Jerry, you’re right,” he said. “I fucked up. I just wanted to keep things moving and that meant driving through the night.”

“I would’ve gone with you.”

“I know,” Bosch lied. “I just didn’t think. I just drove. I’m coming back now.”

“Well, start at the beginning so I know what the fuck is going on in our own case. I feel like a moron here, putting out a BOLO and not even knowing why.”

“I told you, Stokes is the guy.”

“Yeah, you told me that and you didn’t tell me anything else.”

Bosch spent the next ten minutes watching diners eat their food while he recounted his moves for Edgar and brought him up to date.

“Jesus Christ, and we had him right here,” Edgar said when Bosch was finished.

“Yeah, well, it’s too late to worry about that. We have to get him back.”

“So you’re saying that when the kid packed up and ran away, he went to Stokes. Then Stokes leads him up there into the woods and just kills him.”

“More or less.”

“Why?”

“That’s what we have to ask him. I’ve got a theory, though.”

“What, the skateboard?”

“Yeah, he wanted the skateboard.”

“He’d kill a kid over a skateboard?”

“We’ve both seen it done for less and we don’t know if he intended to kill him or not. It was a shallow grave, dug by hand. Nothing premeditated about that. Maybe he just pushed him and knocked him down. Maybe he hit him with a rock. Maybe there was something else going on between them we don’t even know about.”

Edgar didn’t say anything for a long moment and Bosch thought maybe they were finished and he could get some food.

“What did the foster parents think about your theory?”

Bosch sighed.

“I didn’t really spin it for them. But put it this way, they weren’t too surprised when I started asking questions about Stokes.”

“You know something, Harry, we’ve been spinning our wheels is what we’ve been doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole case. It comes down to what?-a thirteen-year-old killing a twelve-year-old over a fucking toy. Stokes was a juvy when this went down. Ain’t nobody going to prosecute him now.”

Bosch thought about this for a moment.

“They might. Depends on what we get out of him after we pick him up.”

“You just said yourself there was no sign of premed. They’re not going to file it, partner. I’m telling you. We’ve been chasing our tail. We close the case but nobody goes away for it.”

Bosch knew Edgar was probably right. Under the law, it was rare that adults were prosecuted for crimes committed while they were juveniles as young as thirteen. Even if they pulled a full confession out of Stokes he would probably walk.

“I should have let her shoot him,” he whispered.

“What’s that, Harry?”

“Nothing. I’m going to grab something to eat and get on the road. You going to be there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I’ll let you know if anything happens.”

“All right.”

He hung up and got out of the car, thinking about the likelihood of Stokes walking away from his crime. As he entered the warm diner and was hit with the smells of grease and breakfast, he suddenly realized he had lost his appetite.

Chapter 52

BOSCH was just coming down out of the squiggle of treacherous freeway called The Grapevine when his phone chirped. It was Edgar.

“Harry, I’ve been trying to call you. Where y’at?”

“I was in the mountains. I’m less than an hour out. What’s going on?”

“They’ve got a fix on Stokes. He’s squatting in the Usher.”

Bosch thought about this. The Usher was a 1930s hotel a block off Hollywood Boulevard. For decades it was a weekly flophouse and prostitution center until redevelopment on the boulevard pushed up against it and suddenly made it a valuable property again. It was sold, closed and readied to go through a major renovation and restoration that would allow it to rejoin the new Hollywood as an elegant grand dame. But the project had been delayed by city planners who held final approval. And in that delay was an opportunity for the denizens of the night.

While the Hotel Usher awaited rebirth, the rooms on its thirteen floors became the homes of squatters who snuck past the fences and plywood barriers to find shelter. In the previous two months Bosch had been inside the Usher twice while searching for suspects. There was no electricity. There was no water, but the squatters used the toilets anyway and the place smelled like an aboveground sewer. There were no doors on any of the rooms and no furniture. People used rolled-up carpets in the rooms as their beds. It was a nightmare to try to search safely. You moved down the hall and every doorway was open and a possible blind for a gunman. You kept your eyes on the openings and you might step on a needle.

Bosch flipped on the car’s emergency lights and put his foot hard on the pedal.

“How do we know he’s in there?” he asked.

“From last week when we were looking for him. Some guys in narcs were working something in there and got a line on him squatting all the way up on the thirteenth floor. You gotta be scared of something to go all the way to the top in a place with the elevators shut down.”