“My job back then was in the laundry,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot of money. There were no dryers. We hung everything on the clotheslines in the field behind the kitchen. Before they built the addition there.
“Anyway, the morning after the adoption, I took sheets out to hang and I saw that one of the clotheslines was missing.”
“Vibiana.”
“And then I heard. One of the girls told me. Vibby had hanged herself. She had gone into the bathroom and tied the rope to one of the shower pipes. They found her in there but it was too late. She was dead.”
Turnbull looked down. It was as if she didn’t want to make eye contact with Bosch over such a horrible story.
Bosch was repelled by the tale. It sickened him. But he needed more. He needed to find Vibiana’s son.
“So that was it?” he asked. “The boy was taken and never came back?”
“Once they were gone, they were gone.”
“You remember his name? The name of the couple who adopted him?”
“Vibby called him Dominick. I don’t know if that name stayed with him. They usually didn’t. I called my daughter Sarah. When she came back to me her name was Kathleen.”
Bosch pulled up the stack of birth certificates. He was sure he remembered seeing the name Dominick when he had gone through the documents that morning on the back deck. He started quickly moving through the stack again, looking for the name. When he found it, he studied the full name and date. Dominick Santanello was born on January 31, 1951. But his birth wasn’t registered with the recorder’s office until fifteen days later. He knew the delay was probably caused by the baby’s weight postponing the adoption.
He showed the sheet to Turnbull.
“Is this him?” he asked. “Dominick Santanello?”
“I told you,” Turnbull said. “I only know what she called him.”
“It’s the only birth certificate with Dominick on it from that time period. It’s got to be him. It’s listed as a home birth, which was how they did it back then.”
“Then I guess you found who you’re looking for.”
Bosch glanced at the birth certificate. In the boxes denoting the race of the child, “Hisp.” was checked. The Santanello family’s address was in Oxnard in Ventura County. Luca and Audrey Santanello, both of them twenty-six years old. Luca Santanello’s occupation was listed as appliance salesman.
Bosch noticed that Abigail Turnbull’s hands tightly gripped the aluminum tubes of her walker. Thanks to her, Bosch believed he had found Whitney Vance’s long missing child, but the price had been high. Bosch knew he would carry the story of Vibiana Duarte with him for a long time.
11
Bosch drove west from the Sierra Winds until he hit Laurel Canyon Boulevard and then pointed the car north. It might have been quicker to jump on a freeway but Bosch wanted to take his time and think about the story Abigail Turnbull had told him. He needed to grab something to eat as well and went through an In-N-Out drive-thru.
After eating in his car on the side of the road, he pulled out his phone and hit redial on the last number he had called—the number Whitney Vance had given him. Once again the call went unanswered and he left a message.
“Mr. Vance, Harry Bosch again. I need you to call me back. I believe I have the information you’ve been looking for.”
He disconnected, put the phone in the center console’s cup holder, and pulled back into traffic.
It took him another twenty minutes to finish crossing the Valley south to north on Laurel Canyon. At Maclay he turned right and drove into San Fernando. Once again the detective bureau was empty when he entered, and he went directly to his cubicle.
The first thing he checked for was e-mail to his SFPD account. He had two new messages and he could tell from the subject line that they were both returns on his inquiries regarding the Screen Cutter case. The first was from a detective in the LAPD’s West Valley Division.
Dear Harry Bosch, if you are the former LAPD detective of the same name who sued the department he served for 30-plus years then I hope you get ass cancer real soon and die a slow and painful death. If you are not him, then my bad. Have a good day.
Bosch read the message twice and felt his blood get hot. It was not because of the sentiment expressed. He didn’t care about that. He hit the reply button on the e-mail and quickly typed in a response.
Detective Mattson, I am glad to know the investigators in West Valley Division carry on with the level of professionalism the citizens of Los Angeles have come to expect. Choosing to insult the requestor of information rather than consider the request shows immense dedication to the department’s mandate to Serve and Protect. Thanks to you I know that the sexual predators in the West Valley live in fear.
Bosch was about to hit the send button, when he thought better of it and deleted the message. He tried to put his upset aside. At least Mattson wasn’t a detective working in either the LAPD’s Mission or Foothill Division, where he felt sure the Screen Cutter must have been active.
He moved on and opened up the second e-mail. It was from a detective in Glendale. It was just an acknowledgment that Bosch’s request for information had been received and passed to him for action. The detective said he would ask around his department and get back to Bosch as soon as possible.
Bosch had received several similar e-mails in response to his blind inquiries. Luckily, only a few like Mattson’s had come in. Most detectives he had contacted were professional and, while overrun with cases and work, they promised to get to Bosch’s request quickly.
He closed down the e-mail page and went to the department’s DMV portal. It was time to find Dominick Santanello. As he logged in Bosch did the math on the birth date in his head. Santanello would be sixty-five years old now. Maybe newly retired, maybe living on a pension, with no idea that he was heir to a fortune. Bosch wondered if he had ever left his adoptive hometown of Oxnard. Did he know that he was adopted and that his mother’s life had ended as his began?
Bosch typed in the name and birth date from the birth certificate, and the database quickly kicked back a match, but it was a very short entry. It showed that Dominick Santanello had received a California driver’s license on January 31, 1967, the day he turned sixteen and was eligible to drive. But the license had never been renewed or surrendered. The last entry in the record simply said Deceased.
Bosch leaned back in his seat, feeling as though he had been kicked in the gut. He had been on the case less than thirty-six hours but he was invested. Vibiana’s story, Abigail’s story, Vance’s being unable to outrun the guilt of his actions all these decades later. And now to come to this. According to the DMV, Vance’s son died even before his first driver’s license had expired.
“Harry, you all right?”
Bosch looked left and saw that Bella Lourdes had entered the bureau and was heading to her cubicle across the partition wall from his.
“I’m fine,” Bosch said. “Just…just another dead end.”
“I know the feeling,” Lourdes said.
She sat down and dropped from his sight. She was no more than five two and the partition made her disappear. Bosch just stared at his computer screen. There were no details about Santanello’s death, only that it occurred during the licensing period. Bosch had gotten his first California license the year before Santanello, in 1966. He was pretty sure that back then the license period was four years before renewal. It meant Santanello had died between the ages of sixteen and twenty.