Bosch shook his head. “I’d have seen the outline of it through your shirt. Crucifix?”
Patrick stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “Wife likes me to wear it.” He held out his hand. “Patrick Kenzie. I’m not a cop. I’m an independent contractor.”
Bosch shook his hand. “You like baseball, Pat?”
“Patrick.”
“You like baseball, Patrick?”
“Big-time. Why?”
“You’re the first guy I’ve seen in this town not wearing a Sox hat.”
Patrick pulled off his hat and considered the front of it as he ran a hand through his hair. “Imagine that. I didn’t even look when I left the house.”
“Is that a rule around here? You’ve all got to represent Red Sox Nation or something?”
“It’s not a rule, per se, more like a guideline.”
Bosch looked at the hat again. “Who’s the crooked smiley-faced guy?”
“Toothface,” Patrick said. “He’s, like, the logo, I guess, of a record store I like.”
“You still buy records?”
“CDs. You?”
“Yeah. Jazz mostly. I hear it’s all going to go away. Records, CDs, the whole way we buy music. MP3s and iPods are the future.”
“Heard that too.” Patrick looked over his shoulder at the street. “We looking at the same guy here, Harry?”
“Don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m looking at a guy for a murder back in nineteen-ninety. I need to get some DNA.”
“What guy?”
“Tell you what, why don’t I go over to District Thirteen and check in with the captain and make this all legit? I’ll identify myself, you identify yourself. A cop and a private eye working together to ease the burden of the Boston PD. Because I don’t want my captain back in L.A. catching a call from—”
“Is it Paisley? Are you watching Edward Paisley?”
He looked at Patrick for a long moment. “Who is Edward Paisley?”
“Bullshit. Tell me about the case from nineteen-ninety.”
“Look, you’re a private dick with no ‘need to know’ that I can see and I’m a cop—”
“Who didn’t follow protocol and check in with the local PD.” He craned his head around the car. “Unless there’s a D-13 liaison on this street who’s really fucking good at keeping his head down. I got a girl missing right now and Edward Paisley’s name popped up in connection to her. Girl’s twelve, Bosch, and she’s been out there three days. So I’d love to hear what happened back in nineteen-ninety. You tell me, I’ll be your best friend and everything.”
“Why is no one looking for your missing girl?”
“Who’s to say they’re not?”
“Because you’re looking and you’re private.”
Patrick got a whiff of something sad coming off the L.A. cop. Not the kind of sad that came from bad news yesterday but from bad news most days. Still, his eyes weren’t dead; they pulsed instead with appetite — maybe even addiction — for the hunt. This wasn’t a house cat who’d checked out, who kept his head down, took his paycheck, and counted the days till his twenty. This was a cop who kicked in doors if he had to, whether he knew what was on the other side or not, and had stayed on after twenty.
Patrick said, “She’s the wrong color, wrong caste, and there’s enough plausible anecdotal shit swirling around her situation to make anyone question whether she was abducted or just walked off.”
“But you think Paisley could be involved.”
Patrick nodded.
“Why?”
“He’s got two priors for sexual abuse of minors.”
Bosch shook his head. “No. I checked.”
“You checked domestic. You didn’t know to check Costa Rica and Cuba. Both places where he was arrested, charged, had the shit beat out of him, and ultimately bought his way out. But the arrests are on record over there.”
“How’d you find them?”
“I didn’t. Principal of Dearborn Middle School was getting a bad feeling about Paisley when he drove a bus for them. One girl said this, one boy said that, another girl said such and such. Nothing you could build a case on, but enough for the principal to call Paisley into her office a couple times to discuss it.” Patrick pulled a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket, flipped it open. “Principal told me Paisley would have passed both interviews with flying colors but he mentioned milk one time too many.”
“Milk?”
“Milk.” Patrick looked up from his notes and nodded. “He told the principal during their first meeting — he’d already been working there a year; the principal doesn’t have shit to do with hiring bus drivers, that’s HR downtown — that she should smile more because it made him think of milk. He told her in the second meeting that the sun in Cuba was whiter than milk, which is why he liked Cuba, the white lording over everything and all. It stuck with her.”
“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, L.A., 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.