“Clearly.”
“But so did the Cuba reference. It takes work to get to Cuba. You gotta fly to Canada or the Caribbean, pretend you banged around there when in fact you hopped a flight to Havana. So when her least favorite bus driver got a DUI while driving her students, she eighty-sixed his ass straightaway, but then started wondering about Cuba. She pulled his résumé and found gaps — six-month unexplained absence in eighty-nine, ten-month absence in ninety-six. Our friendly principal — and remember, Bosch, your principal is your pal — kept digging. Didn’t take long to find out that the six months in eighty-nine were spent in a Costa Rican jail, the ten months in ninety-six were spent in a cell in Havana. Plus, he moved around a lot in general — Phoenix, LA, Chicago, Philly, and, finally, Boston. Always drives a bus, and only has one known relative — a sister, Tasha. Both times he was released from foreign jails he was released into her custody. And I’m willing to bet she walked a bag of cash onto her flight that she didn’t have with her on the flight back home. So now, now he’s here and Chiffon Henderson is not. And you know everything I know, Detective Bosch, but I bet you can’t say the same.”
Bosch leaned back against his seat hard enough to make the leather crackle. He looked over at Patrick Kenzie and told the story of Letitia Williams. She was fourteen years old and stolen from her bedroom in the night. No leads, few clues. The abductor had cut out the screen on her bedroom window. Didn’t remove the screen, frame and all. Cut the screen out of the frame with a razor and then climbed in.
The cut screen put immediate suspicion on the disappearance. The case was not shunted aside as a presumed runaway situation the way Chiffon Henderson’s would be fifteen years later. Detectives from the major crimes unit rolled that morning after the girl was discovered gone. But the abduction scene was clean. No trace evidence of any kind recovered from the girl’s bedroom. The presumption was the abductor or abductors had worn gloves, entered, and quickly incapacitated the girl, and just as quickly removed her through the window.
However, there was one piece of presumed evidence gathered outside the house on the morning of the initial investigation. In the alley that ran behind the home where Letitia Williams lived investigators found a flashlight. The first guess was that it had belonged to the abductor and it had inadvertently been dropped while the victim was carried to a waiting vehicle. There were no fingerprints on the flashlight as it was assumed the perpetrator had worn gloves. But an examination of the inside of the flashlight found two viable latent fingerprints on one of the batteries.
It was thought to be the one mistake that would prove the abductor’s undoing. But the thumb and forefinger prints were compared to those on file with the city and state and no match was found. The prints were then sent on to the FBI for comparison with prints in the bureau’s vast data banks, but again there was no hit and the lead died on the vine.
In the meantime, the body of Letitia Williams was found exactly one week after her abduction on a hillside in Griffith Park, right below the observatory. It appeared as though the killer had specifically chosen the location because the body would be spotted quickly in daylight hours by someone looking down from the observatory.
The autopsy on the victim determined that she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and then strangled. The case drew heavy attention from the media and the major crimes unit but eventually it was shelved. No clues, no evidence, no leads. In 1992 Los Angeles was ripped apart by race riots, and cases like the murder of Letitia Williams dropped off the public radar. The file went to archives until the Open-Unsolved Unit was formed after the start of the new century and eventually Bosch came to the archived case files and the fingerprints that were matched to Edward Paisley in Boston.
“That’s why I’m here,” Bosch said.
“Did you come with a warrant?”
Bosch shook his head. “No, no warrant. The prints match is not enough. The flashlight was found in the alley, not in Letitia’s bedroom. There is no direct tie to the crime. I came to get DNA. I was going to follow him and collect it. Wait for him to toss a cup of coffee or a pizza crust or something. I’d take it back with me and see if it matches semen collected from the body. Then I’d be in business. Then I’d come back with a warrant and take him down.”
They sat in the car and stared out at the street and Bosch could feel Kenzie stewing on something. He wasn’t a big man and he had a friendly, boyish face; he dressed in the street clothes of a neighborhood guy, kind of guy would pour your beer or fix your car. On first glance and even on a second, he seemed harmless and sweet, kind of guy you’d be happy for your sister to bring home. But Bosch had spent enough time in his company now to feel a hot wire running in the guy’s blood. Most people probably never tripped it. But God help the ones who did.
Kenzie’s right knee started to jackhammer up and down in such a way that Bosch doubted he was aware of it. He turned on the seat, looked at Harry. “You said in your case the girl’s body was found a week after the abduction.”
“That’s right.”
“But she was dumped there because she would be found almost right away by the people at the observatory.”
“Yeah, the body was left at night and noticed the next morning after daylight.”
“How long had she been dead?”
Bosch reached to the backseat and opened the briefcase. He brought back a thick blue binder full of records from the case. He spoke as he looked through the pages. He had the answers in his head already. He was just looking at the autopsy report for confirmation.
“She had been dead seventy-two hours when found.”
“That’s three days. That meant the guy kept her alive for four days.”
“Right. The indications were that she was repeatedly—”
“This is the fourth day. If this asshole follows any sort of pattern, well, shit, Chiffon Henderson was taken Monday afternoon.” He pointed back down the sidewalk at the gray row house. “We need to get in that house.”
Patrick took the front door while Bosch went around back. Patrick had told the LA cop he was reasonably proficient picking a lock, but Paisley’s front door sported a lock Patrick had never seen before. New, too. And expensive by the looks of it — a five-hundred-dollar lock on a forty-dollar door. Patrick tried a series of picks but none of them could get to first base with the cylinders. It was like trying to pass a plastic stirrer through a rock.
The second time he dropped a pick, he bent to retrieve it and the door opened in front of him.
He looked up at Harry Bosch standing on the threshold, a Glock dangling from his left hand. “I thought you said you could pick a lock.”
“I clearly overestimated my prowess.” He straightened. “How’d you get in?”
“He left a window unlocked.” Bosch shrugged. “People, right?”
Patrick had expected a dump inside but the house was quite clean and mostly bare. The furniture was modern Scandinavian — lots of bright white and brighter chrome that clashed with the older wainscoting and dark wallpaper. Paisley was renting; the landlord probably had no idea about the lock.
“Something in here he doesn’t want people to see,” Patrick said.
“Gotta be in the basement, then,” Bosch said. He jerked a thumb back at the shotgun layout of the apartment — foyer and living room and then a long corridor that went straight back to the kitchen, all the other rooms branching off it. “I cleared this floor.”