“Look, man, I don’t know. He told me once that when he worked for the Sheriff’s up at Wayside, they did things to the gays.”
That struck a chord with Bosch. Wayside Honor Rancho was a county jail located in the Santa Clarita Valley. All new deputies were assigned to jail duty right out of the academy. Bosch remembered Lourdes telling him that when it appeared that it would be several years before she got a chance to transfer out of the jail division, she started applying to other departments and ended up at San Fernando.
“What things did they do?”
“He said they’d put them in situations, you know. Put them in modules where they knew they would get fucked with, beat up. They took bets and stuff on how long they’d last before they got jumped.”
“Did he know Bella when she was there?”
“I don’t know. I never asked.”
“Who came to San Fernando first?”
“Pretty sure it was Dock.”
Bosch nodded. Dockweiler had seniority on Bella, yet she was retained instead of him when the budget crisis hit. That had to have built animosity.
“What happened when he got moved out of the department?” he asked. “Was he angry?”
“Well, yeah, wouldn’t you be?” Sisto answered. “But he was cool about it. They found him the spot over here. So it was kind of lateral—he didn’t even lose salary.”
“Except no badge and no gun.”
“I think code enforcement has a badge.”
“Not the same, Sisto. You ever heard the phrase ‘If you’re not cop, you’re little people’?”
“Uh, no.”
Bosch grew quiet as he studied the top of Dockweiler’s desk. Nothing he saw seemed suspicious. He heard the dinging of a text on Sisto’s phone.
Pinned to the privacy wall between Dockweiler’s and another desk was a map of the city, partitioned into four code enforcement zones that mirrored the police department’s patrol areas. There was also a list of tips for spotting illegal garage conversions with photo examples of each giveaway:
Extension cords, cables, and hoses running from house to garage Tape over the seams of the garage door
Air-conditioning units on garage walls
Barbecue grills closer to the garage than the house
Boats, bikes, and other garaged property stored outside
Studying the list, Bosch pictured the houses where the Screen Cutter rapes had occurred. Just three days ago, he had driven the circuit that included all four places. He saw now what he didn’t see then. Each had a garage, each was in a neighborhood where illegal garage conversions were a problem and would draw the attention of code inspectors. Beatriz Sahagun’s house had a garage too.
“It was him,” Bosch said quietly.
Sisto didn’t hear him. Bosch kept grinding it down, putting things together. Dockweiler could roam the city as a code inspector. He could have knocked on doors to perform inspections and selected his victims when he saw them in the course of his work. It was the reason to wear the mask each time.
He realized also that it was Dockweiler who had the extra key to Bosch’s desk. He’d kept it when he left the department but snuck back to read the file on the investigation once Bosch had connected the cases. He knew what Bosch knew and what he was doing at every step of the investigation. And the horror of it all, Bosch knew, was that he had sent Lourdes right to him. The fear and guilt of that realization boiled up in him. He turned away from the desk and saw Sisto typing a text on his phone.
“Is that Dockweiler?” he demanded. “Are you texting Dockweiler?”
“No, man, it’s my girlfriend,” Sisto said. “She wants to know where I am. Why would I text—”
Bosch snatched the phone out of Sisto’s hand and looked at the screen.
“Hey, what the fuck!” Sisto exclaimed.
Bosch read the text and confirmed it was an innocuous Home soon missive. He then flipped the phone back at the young detective but the toss was too hard for such a close distance. It went right through Sisto’s hands, hit him square in the chest, and then clattered to the floor.
“You asshole!” Sisto yelled as he quickly dropped down to grab the phone off the floor. “It better not be—”
As he straightened up Bosch moved in, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and drove him back into the room’s door, banging his back and head hard against it. He then moved right up into his face.
“You lazy fuck, you should’ve gone with her today. Now she’s out there somewhere and we have to find her. Do you understand?”
Bosch racked him hard against the door again.
“Where does Dockweiler live?”
“I don’t know! Get the fuck off me!”
Sisto shoved Bosch off with such force that he was nearly driven into the opposite wall. He hit a counter with his hip and an empty glass coffeepot fell off its hot plate and shattered on the floor.
Drawn by the harsh voices and crashing glass, Valdez and Trevino came charging through the door. It swung right into Sisto, hitting him from behind and knocking him out of the way.
“What the hell’s going on?” Valdez demanded.
One hand holding the back of his head, Sisto pointed a finger at Bosch with the other.
“He’s crazy! Keep him the fuck away from me.”
Bosch pointed right back at him.
“You should’ve gone with her. But you gave her a bullshit line and she went up there on her own.”
“What about you, old man? It wasn’t my case. It was yours. You shoulda been there, not me.”
Bosch turned away from him and looked at Valdez.
“Dockweiler,” he said. “Where does he live?”
“Up in Santa Clarita, I think,” Valdez said. “At least he did when he worked for me. Why? What’s going on here?”
He put a hand on Bosch’s shoulder to keep Bosch from moving toward Sisto. Bosch shrugged it off and pointed at Dockweiler’s desk like it was incontrovertible evidence of something only he could see.
“It’s him,” Bosch said. “Dockweiler’s the Screen Cutter. And he’s got Bella.”
29
They took two cars and headed code 3 up the 5 freeway. Valdez and Bosch were in the lead car with Valdez behind the wheel. The police chief had wisely separated Bosch from Sisto, who drove the second car with Trevino riding shotgun and probably miffed that the tensions between Bosch and Sisto had resulted in his being separated from the chief.
Valdez was on the phone barking an order to someone in the communications center.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Call whoever you have to call. Just get me the goddamn address. I don’t care if you need to send cars to their houses to get a response.”
He disconnected and cursed. So far the com center had not been able to make contact with the director of Public Works or the city manager to get access to city payroll records and Dockweiler’s address. They had checked DMV records before leaving the station and found that Dockweiler had somehow managed himself or benefited from a bureaucratic glitch to keep a law enforcement officer block on his address nearly five years after leaving the police department.
So they were heading to the Santa Clarita Valley based solely on Valdez’s memory that Dockweiler lived somewhere up there five years ago.
“We might get up there and have no place to go,” Valdez said.
He banged the steering wheel with an open palm and changed the subject.
“What was that all about back there with Sisto, Harry?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you act like that.”
“I’m sorry, Chief,” Bosch said. “I lost it. If I could have thrown myself against the door, I would have. But I took it out on Sisto.”
“Took what out?”
“I should’ve been with Bella today. My case, I should’ve been there. Instead, I told her to take Sisto and I should’ve known she’d go alone if he wasn’t around.”
“Look, we don’t even know if this Dockweiler thing is legit. So hold off on beating yourself up. I need you focused here.”