Bosch nodded.

“It’s all good to know. We’ll keep it in mind.”

“Okay, good. The other contradiction-the smaller one-is the backpack. Burying it with the body was a mistake. The body decomposes at a much faster rate than the canvas. So if you get identifiers off the bag or its contents, it becomes a mistake made by the bad guy. Again poor planning in the midst of good planning. You’re smart detectives, I’m sure you’ll figure all this out.”

She smiled at Bosch and then studied her pad again, lifting the top page to look beneath it.

“I think that’s it. Everything else we talked about up at the site. I think things are going very well up there. By the end of the day we’ll have the main grave done. Tomorrow we’ll do some sampling in the other grids. But this should probably wrap by tomorrow. Like I said, we’re not going to get everything but we should get enough to do what we need to do.”

Bosch suddenly thought of Victor Frizbe’s question to the cadet at the lunch wagon and realized that the reporter might have been thinking ahead of Bosch.

“Sampling? You think there’s more than one body buried up there?”

Kohl shook her head.

“I have no indication of that at all. But we should make sure. We’ll do some sampling, sink some gas probes. It’s routine. The likelihood-especially in light of the shallow grave-is that this is a singular case, but we should be sure about it. As sure as we can be.”

Bosch nodded. He was glad he had eaten most of his sandwich because he was suddenly not hungry. The prospect of mounting an investigation with multiple victims was daunting. He looked at the others at the table.

“That doesn’t leave this table. I already caught one reporter sniffing around for a serial killer, we don’t want media hysteria here. Even if you tell them what we’re doing is routine and just to make sure, it will be the top of the story. All right?”

Everyone nodded, including Brasher. Bosch was about to say something when there was a loud banging from the row of portable toilets on the Special Services trailer on the other side of the circle. Someone was inside one of the phone booth-sized bathrooms pounding on its thin aluminum skin. After a moment Bosch could hear a woman’s voice behind the sharp banging. He recognized it and jumped up from the table.

Bosch ran across the circle and up the steps to the truck’s platform. He quickly determined which toilet the banging was coming from and went to the door. The exterior hasp-used for securing the toilet for transport-had been closed over the loop and a chicken bone had been used to secure it.

“Hold on, hold on,” Bosch yelled.

He tried to pull the bone out but it was too greasy and slipped from his grip. The pounding and screaming continued. Bosch looked around for a tool of some kind but didn’t see anything. Finally, he took his pistol out of his holster, checked the safety and used the butt of the weapon to hammer the bone through the hasp, careful all the time to aim the barrel of the gun at a downward angle.

When the bone finally popped out he put the gun away and flipped the hasp open. The door burst outward and Teresa Corazon charged out, almost knocking him over. He grabbed her to maintain his balance but she roughly pushed him away.

“You did that!”

“What? No, I didn’t! I was over there the whole-”

“I want to know who did it!”

Bosch lowered his voice. He knew everyone in the encampment was probably looking at them. The media down the street as well.

“Look, Teresa, calm down. It was a joke, okay? Whoever did it did it as a joke. I know you don’t like confined spaces but they didn’t know that. Somebody just wanted to ease the tension around here a little bit, and you just happened to be-”

“It’s because they’re jealous, that’s why.”

“What?”

“Of who I am, what I’ve done.”

Bosch was nonplussed by that.

“Whatever.”

She headed for the stairs, then abruptly turned around and came back to him.

“I’m leaving, you happy now?”

Bosch shook his head.

“Happy? That has nothing to do with anything here. I’m trying to conduct an investigation, and if you want to know the truth, not having the distraction of you and your cameraman around might be a help.”

“Then you’ve got it. And you know that phone number you called me on the other night?”

Bosch nodded. “Yeah, what about-”

“Burn it.”

She walked down the steps, angrily hooked a finger at her cameraman and headed toward her official car. Bosch watched her go.

When he got back to the picnic table, only Brasher and Edgar remained. His partner had reduced his second order of fried chicken to bones. He sat with a satisfied smirk on his face.

Bosch dropped the bone he had knocked out of the hasp onto Edgar’s plate.

“That went over real well,” he said.

He gave Edgar a look that told him he knew he had been the one who did it. But Edgar revealed nothing.

“The bigger the ego the harder they fall,” Edgar said. “I wonder if her cameraman got any of that action on tape.”

“You know, it would have been good to keep her as an ally,” Bosch said. “To just put up with her so that she was on our side when we needed her.”

Edgar picked up his plate and struggled to slide his large body out of the picnic table.

“I’ll see you up on the hill,” he said.

Bosch looked at Brasher. She raised her eyebrows.

“You mean he was the one who did it?”

Bosch didn’t answer.

Chapter 7

THE work in the city of bones lasted only two days. As Kohl had predicted, the majority of the pieces of the skeleton had been located and removed from the spot beneath the acacia trees by the end of the first day. Other bones had been found nearby in the brush in a scatter pattern indicative of disinterment over time by foraging animals. On Friday the searchers and diggers returned, but a daylong search of the hillside by fresh cadets and further excavation of the main squares of the grid found no more bones. Vapor probes and sample digs in all the remaining squares of the grid turned up no bones or other indications that other bodies had been buried beneath the acacia trees.

Kohl estimated that sixty percent of the skeleton had been collected. On her recommendation and with Teresa Corazon’s approval the excavation and search were suspended pending further developments at dusk on Friday.

Bosch had not objected to this. He knew they were facing limited returns for a large amount of effort and he deferred to the experts. He was also anxious to proceed with the investigation and identification of the bones-elements which were largely stalled as he and Edgar had worked exclusively on Wonderland Avenue during the two days, supervising the collection of evidence, canvassing the neighborhood and putting together the initial reports on the case. It was all necessary work but Bosch wanted to move on.

On Saturday morning he and Edgar met in the lobby of the medical examiner’s office and told the receptionist they had an appointment with Dr. William Golliher, the forensic anthropologist on retainer from UCLA.

“He’s waiting for you in suite A,” the receptionist said after making a call to confirm. “You know which way that is?”

Bosch nodded and they were buzzed through the gate. They took an elevator down to the basement level and were immediately greeted by the smell of the autopsy floor when they stepped out. It was a mixture of chemicals and decay that was unique in the world. Edgar immediately took a paper breathing mask out of a wall dispenser and put it on. Bosch didn’t bother.

“You really ought to, Harry,” Edgar said as they walked down the hall. “Do you know that all smells are particulate?”

Bosch looked at him.

“Thanks for that, Jerry.”

They had to stop in the hallway as a gurney was pushed out of an autopsy suite. There was a body on it, wrapped in plastic.