“Wait a minute,” he said. “It’s my case. I know it better than anybody. I should do the interview.”
“The priority here is Bella,” Trevino said. “Not the case. And I know her better than you.”
Bosch shook his head like he didn’t get it.
“That makes no sense,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how well you know her. It’s how well you know the case. He’s the Screen Cutter. He grabbed Bella because she got too close on the case or figured it out when she was with him. Let me talk to him.”
“We don’t know he’s the Screen Cutter for sure yet,” Trevino said. “We need to first—”
“Did you see his eyes?” Bosch said, interrupting. “Swollen and purple from where Beatriz Sahagun hit him with the stick. He tried to cover it with makeup. There’s no doubt. He’s the Screen Cutter. You may not know it but I do.”
Bosch again turned to Valdez on appeal.
“Chief, I’ve got to do this,” he said.
“Harry,” the chief said. “The captain and I talked about this before any of this with Bella even came up. It’s about what could happen down the line, you know, in court with your history.”
“My history?” Bosch asked. “Really? You mean the hundred-plus murders I’ve cleared? That history?”
“You know what he means,” Trevino said. “Your controversies. They make you a target in court. They undercut you.”
“We also have the reserve issue,” Valdez added. “You’re not full-time and that’s something that a lawyer will pick apart in court. It won’t look good in front of a jury.”
“I probably put in as many hours a week as Sisto does,” Bosch said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Trevino said. “You’re a reserve. It is what it is. I’m going to do this interview and I want you to go through the house and look for any sign of Bella, any evidence at all that he had her here. And when you’re finished with that, go search the truck.”
For a third time Bosch looked at Valdez, and it was clear he was siding with Trevino on this.
“Just do it, Harry,” he said. “Do it for Bella, okay?”
“Yeah, sure thing,” Bosch said. “For Bella. Call me when you need me.”
Trevino turned and started back toward the kitchen.
Valdez lingered a bit and just nodded to Bosch before following his captain. Bosch was supremely frustrated at being pulled away from his own case but not interested in putting his professional pride and emotions above the ultimate goal, especially with Bella Lourdes unaccounted for. He had no doubt he should be handling the interview and had the better skills for drawing information from Dockweiler. But he also believed that he would eventually get the chance to use them.
“Captain?” he said.
Trevino turned around to look back at him.
“Don’t forget to read him his rights,” Bosch said.
“Of course,” Trevino said.
He then went through the archway into the kitchen.
31
Bosch moved into the living room and then down a hallway leading to bedrooms. He knew he had to be very careful and put emotions aside here. He believed that the exigent circumstances of having an officer missing allowed him to search Dockweiler’s house without legal risk. But searching for evidence in the Screen Cutter case was different. He would need a warrant for that. The contradiction put him in a legal predicament. He had to search the house for Lourdes and any indication or evidence of her location, but he couldn’t dig deeper for evidence that Dockweiler committed the rapes.
He had to be realistic too. His newfound knowledge of Dockweiler and the fact that he had kept a key and had been secretly entering the police station to read the investigative file was convincing evidence that he was Screen Cutter. With that conclusion in mind it seemed unlikely to Bosch that they were going to find Bella alive, and possibly unlikely they would find her at all. He needed to put the Screen Cutter case first here and preserve it against any future legal challenge.
He put on a pair of latex gloves and began the search by starting at the end of the bedroom hallway and working his way back toward the kitchen. There were three bedrooms but only one was used as such. He searched Dockweiler’s room first and found it to be a mess, with clothes and shoes strewn on the floor everywhere around the bed, most likely in the spots where they were shed. The bed was unmade and the sheets had a dingy gray cast to them. The walls were yellowed but not with paint. The room smelled sour with perspiration and cigarette smoke. Bosch kept a rubber-gloved hand over his mouth as he moved through it.
The attached bath was just as unkempt, with more clothing thrown in the bathtub and a horribly stained toilet. Bosch picked a hanger up off the floor and fished around in the bathtub to make sure there wasn’t anything or anyone hidden beneath the clothes. The clothes in the tub seemed dirty in a way separate from the clothes left on the floor of the bedroom. They were caked with a granular gray dust that Bosch believed might be concrete dust. He wondered if it was debris from an inspection or a Public Works project.
The phone booth shower was empty, its white tiles as dingy as the bedroom sheets, and the drain had trapped more of the concrete powder and granules. He next moved into a small walk-in closet in the bathroom and found it to be surprisingly neat, primarily because most of the items of clothing it would normally hold were on the bedroom floor and in the bathtub.
The two other bedrooms were used for storage. The small room was lined with glass-door gun cabinets with several rifles and shotguns on display. Most had tags attached to the trigger guards that identified the ammunition they were presumably loaded with. The larger guest bedroom was used for storage of life-sustaining supplies. There were stacked pallets of bottled water and energy drinks and boxes of canned and powdered goods that would presumably have distant expiration dates.
The closets of both rooms were similarly stacked, and there was no sign of Bella in that side of the house. As Bosch worked his way through the bedroom wing he could hear muffled voices from the kitchen. He could not make out words but he could detect tones and individual voices. It was Trevino doing almost all of the talking. He wasn’t getting anywhere with Dockweiler.
In the hallway near the bedrooms Bosch noticed an attic access door in the ceiling. There were fingerprint smears on the frame around it but these offered no hint as to how long it had been since Dockweiler was up there.
Bosch looked around and saw a four-foot-long wooden dowel with a hook on the end of it leaning against the wall in the corner. Grabbing it and threading the hook through the metal eyelet on the attic door, he pulled it open and found it very similar to the attic entrance at Olivia Macdonald’s house. He folded the hinged ladder down and started the climb.
Bosch found the pull string for an overhead light and soon was scanning the attic. The space was small and more boxes of survivalist supplies were stacked to the roof rafters. He climbed all the way up so he could see around boxes and into every angle of the attic to make sure Bella Lourdes was not there. He then climbed back down but left the attic open and the ladder unfolded so it could be accessed for a more thorough search with a warrant.
When Bosch moved into the living room and dining area he could clearly hear what was being said in the kitchen. Dockweiler was not cooperating and Trevino had moved to a threatening form of interrogation that Bosch knew was rarely successful.