Sisto wasn’t in the bureau but his presence was immediately felt. When Bosch got to his desk and dropped his car keys, he found four neat stacks of code inspection reports waiting for him. The young detective had come through.
Bosch sat down to work and almost immediately felt the weight of exhaustion settle onto him. He had not gotten enough rest after the events of the night before. His shoulder was aching from the impact of the curtain frame in Dockweiler’s fallout shelter, but where he was feeling it most was in his legs. That run back up the slope of the wash was the first time he had fired the pistons in a long time and he was sore and fatigued. He signed in to the computer, opened a blank document, and left it ready while he went down the hallway to the station’s kitchen.
On the way he passed the open door of the chief’s office and saw Valdez seated at his desk, the telephone to his ear. The snippet of conversation he heard was enough for Bosch to know the chief was talking to a reporter, saying that the department was not going to identify the officer who had been abducted, because she was the victim of a sexual assault. Bosch thought that in a department as small as San Fernando’s it would not take a good reporter more than a few calls to figure out who was being protected. That would result in reporters camped on the front lawn of Bella Lourdes’s house, unless her address was protected by being deeded in Taryn’s name.
There was a fresh pot of coffee already brewed and Bosch poured two cups, leaving both black. On the way back to the bureau he stopped by the open door of the chief’s office and held one up as an offer. Valdez nodded and covered the phone to respond.
“Harry, you’re the man.”
Bosch stepped into the office and put the cup down on the desk.
“Knock ’em dead, Chief.”
Five minutes later Bosch was back in his cubicle and going through the inspection reports. It only took him an hour because once he became familiar with the form, he was able to quickly go through it and identify the street where each inspection took place. He was looking for the five streets where the known victims, including Beatriz Sahagun, lived. At the end of the hour he had placed Dockweiler on each victim’s street in the months before her assault or attempted assault. In two of the cases he had actually inspected the victim’s home as long as nine months earlier.
The information garnered from the reports helped draw a solid picture of Dockweiler’s MO. Bosch believed that he first saw the victims while conducting inspections, then stalked them and carefully planned the assaults for weeks and sometimes months. As a code inspector and former police officer he had skills that aided this process. Bosch had no doubt that Dockweiler entered and prowled the homes of the victims, possibly even while they were at home and asleep.
Finished with the code inspection piece of the puzzle, Bosch began writing the charging document. He was a two-finger typist but he was fast just the same, especially when he knew and was confident in the story he wanted to tell.
He worked another two hours without a break or even a look up from the computer screen. When he was finished he took a gulp of cold black coffee and hit the print button. The universal printer on the other side of the room spit out six single-spaced pages of a chronology that began with the first Screen Cutter rape four years earlier and ended with Kurt Dockweiler lying facedown on his kitchen floor with a bullet lodged in his spine. Bosch proofed it with a red pen, made the corrections on the computer, and printed it again. He then took it to the chief’s office, where he found him talking on the phone to yet another reporter. He covered the receiver again.
“USA Today,” he said. “This story is going coast to coast.”
“Make sure they spell your name right,” Bosch said. “I’m going to need you to read and approve this. I want to file on Dockweiler first thing tomorrow morning. I’m going for five counts of forcible rape, one count attempted rape, then kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, and multiple counts of theft of government property.”
“The kitchen-sink approach. I like it.”
“Let me know. I have to go write up the evidence report and the search warrant that we got approved last night.”
Bosch was about to leave the office, when Valdez held up a finger, then returned to his phone call.
“Donna, I need to go,” he said. “You have the details in the press release, and like I said, we’re not putting out either officer’s name at this time. We took a really bad character out of circulation and we’re all very proud of that. Thank you.”
Valdez hung up the phone, even as he and Bosch could hear the reporter’s voice asking another question.
“All day long,” Valdez said. “They’re calling from all over the place. Everybody wants to get photos of the dungeon. Everybody wants to talk to Bella and you.”
“I heard you on the phone earlier when you used that word dungeon,” Bosch said. “That’s how things take on a whole new life in the media. It’s a fallout shelter, not a dungeon.”
“Well, as soon as Dockweiler has a lawyer he can sue me. These reporters…One of them told me the average cost of incarcerating an inmate is thirty K a year but with Dockweiler likely being a paraplegic now, it will double for him. I said, so what are you saying, we should have just executed him on the spot to save the money?”
“We did have our chance.”
“I’ll forget you said that, Harry. I don’t even want to think about what you were going to do to him last night.”
“Just what was necessary to find Bella.”
“Well, we did anyway.”
“We got lucky.”
“That wasn’t luck. That was good detective work. Anyway, you should be ready. They’re trying to find out who the shooter was and when they learn it was you, they’ll connect it to West Hollywood last year and everything else before. Be prepared.”
“I’ll take a vacation and disappear.”
“Good idea. So this is good to go?”
He had picked up the document Bosch had delivered.
“You tell me,” Bosch said.
“Okay, give me fifteen minutes,” Valdez said.
“By the way, where’s the captain been all day? Sleeping?”
“No, he’s staying at the hospital with Bella. I wanted someone there to keep the media away and in case she needed anything.”
Bosch nodded. It was a good move. He told Valdez he would be in the bureau and to call or e-mail if he wanted any changes to the charging document.
He returned to his computer in the detective bureau. He was just putting the finishing touches on a report summarizing the physical evidence they had amassed in the case when his cell phone buzzed. It was Mickey Haller calling.
“Yo, Bro, haven’t heard from you,” the lawyer said. “You talk to the granddaughter yet?”
The Vance case had been so thoroughly crowded out of Bosch’s mind with the events of the past eighteen hours that it seemed like his trip to San Diego had been a month ago.
“No, not yet,” Bosch said.
“What about Ida Parks Whatever-Her-Name-Is?” Haller asked.
“Ida Townes Forsythe. No, haven’t gotten to her yet either. Things have sort of been crazy with my other job.”
“Holy shit. You’re on that thing with the guy and the dungeon up there in Santa Clorox?”
It was an old nickname for Santa Clarita, reflecting its early incarnation as a destination for white flight from Los Angeles. It seemed somehow inappropriate coming from a guy Bosch knew grew up in Beverly Hills, the county’s first bastion of white isolationism and privilege.
“Yes, I’m on the case,” Bosch said.
“Tell me, is the guy hooked up with a lawyer yet?” Haller asked.
Bosch hesitated before answering.
“You don’t want to go there,” he said.
“Hey, I’ll go anywhere,” Haller said. “Have case, will travel. But you’re right, this probate stuff may keep me occupied for a while.”
“They file probate on Vance yet?”
“Nope. Waiting.”
“Well, I should be back on that sometime tomorrow. When I find the granddaughter I’ll let you know.”