Trunk Music

Grand Central Publishing

As he drove along Mulholland Drive toward the Cahuenga Pass, Bosch began to hearthe music. It came to him in fragments of strings and errant horn sequences,echoing off the brown summer-dried hills and blurred by the white noise oftraffic carrying up from the Hollywood Freeway. Nothing he could identify. Allhe knew was that he was heading toward its source.

He slowed when he saw the cars parked off to the side of a gravel turn-off road.Two detective sedans and a patrol car. Bosch pulled his Caprice in behind themand got out. A single officer in uniform leaned against the fender of the patrolcar. Yellow plastic crime-scene tape—the stuff used by the mile in LosAngeles—was strung from the patrol car's sideview mirror across the gravelroad to the sign posted on the other side. The sign said, in black-on-whiteletters that were almost indistinguishable behind the graffiti that covered thesign:

L.A.F.D. FIRE CONTROL MOUNTAIN FIRE DISTRICT ROAD NO PUBLIC ADMITTANCE—NOSMOKING!

The patrol cop, a large man with sun-reddened skin and blond bristly hair,straightened up as Bosch approached. The first thing Bosch noted about him otherthan his size was the baton. It was holstered in a ring on his belt and thebusiness end of the club was marred, the black acrylic paint scratched away toreveal the aluminum beneath. Street fighters wore their battle-scarred sticksproudly, as a sign, a not so subtle warning. This cop was a headbanger. No doubtabout it. The plate above the cop's breast pocket said his name was Powers. Helooked down at Bosch through Ray-Bans, though it was well into dusk and a sky ofburnt orange clouds was reflected in his mirrored lenses. It was one of thosesundowns that reminded Bosch of the glow the fires of the riots had put in thesky a few years back.

"Harry Bosch," Powers said with a touch of surprise. "When did you get back onthe table?"

Bosch looked at him a moment before answering. He didn't know Powers but thatdidn't mean anything. Bosch's story was probably known by every cop in HollywoodDivision.

"Just did," Bosch said.

He didn't make any move to shake hands. You didn't do that at crime scenes.

"First case back in the saddle, huh?"

Bosch took out a cigarette and lit it. It was a direct violation of departmentpolicy but it wasn't something he was worried about.

"Something like that." He changed the subject. "Who's down there?"

"Edgar and the new one from Pacific, his soul sister."

"Rider."

"Whatever."

Bosch said nothing further about that. He knew what was behind the contempt inthe uniform cop's voice. It didn't matter that he knew Kizmin Rider had the giftand was a top-notch investigator. That would mean nothing to Powers, even ifBosch told him it was so. Powers probably saw only one reason why he was stillwearing a blue uniform instead of carrying a detective's gold badge: that he wasa white man in an era of female and minority hiring and promotion. It was thekind of festering sore better left undisturbed.

Powers apparently registered Bosch's nonresponse as disagreement and went on.

"Anyway, they told me to let Emmy and Sid drive on down when they get here. Iguess they're done with the search. So you can drive down instead of walking, Iguess."

It took a second for Bosch to register that Powers was referring to the medicalexaminer and the Scientific Investigation Division tech. He'd said the names asif they were a couple invited to a picnic.

Bosch stepped out to the pavement, dropped the half cigarette, and made sure heput it out with his shoe. It wouldn't be good to start a brush fire on his firstjob back with the homicide table.

"I'll walk it," he said. "What about Lieutenant Billets?"

"Not here yet."

Bosch went back to his car and reached in through the open window for hisbriefcase. He then walked back to Powers.

"You the one who found it?"

"That was me."

Powers was proud of himself.

"How'd you open it?"

"Keep a slim jim in the car. Opened the door, then popped the trunk."

"Why?"

"The smell. It was obvious."

"Wear gloves?"

"Nope. Didn't have any."

"What did you touch?"

Powers had to think about it for a moment.

"Door handle, the trunk pull. That'd be about it."

"Did Edgar or Rider take a statement? You write something up?"

"Nothing yet."

Bosch nodded.

"Listen, Powers, I know you're all proud of yourself, but next time don't openthe car, okay? We all want to be detectives but not all of us are. That's howcrime scenes get fucked up. And I think you know that."

Bosch watched the cop's face turn a dark shade of crimson and the skin go tightaround his jaw.

"Listen, Bosch," he said. "What I know is that if I just called this in as asuspicious vehicle that smells like there's a stiff in the trunk, thenyou people would've said, 'What the fuck does Powers know?' and left it there torot in the sun until there was nothing left of your goddamn crime scene."

"That might be true but, see, then that would be our fuckup to make. Instead,we've got you fucking us up before we start."

Powers remained angry but mute. Bosch waited a beat, ready to continue thedebate, before dismissing it.

"Can you lift the tape now, please?"

Powers stepped back to the tape. He was about thirty-five, Bosch guessed, andhad the long-practiced swagger of a street veteran. In L.A. that swagger came toyou quickly, as it had in Vietnam. Powers held the yellow tape up and Boschwalked under. As he passed, the cop said, "Don't get lost."

"Good one, Powers. You got me there."

The fire road was one lane and overgrown at its sides with brush that came ashigh as Bosch's waist. There was trash and broken glass strewn along the gravel,the trespasser's answer to the sign at the gate. Bosch knew the road wasprobably a favorite midnight haunt for teenagers from the city below.

The music grew louder as he went further in. But he still could not identify it.About a quarter mile in, he came to a gravel-bedded clearing that he guessed wasa staging point for fire-fighting apparatus in the event that a brush fire brokeout in the surrounding hills. Today it would serve as a crime scene. On the farside of the clearing Bosch saw a white Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Standing nearit were his two partners, Rider and Edgar. Rider was sketching the crime sceneon a clipboard while Edgar worked with a tape measure and called outmeasurements. Edgar saw Bosch and gave an acknowledging wave with a latex-glovedhand. He let the tape measure snap back into its case.

"Harry, where you been?"

"Painting," Bosch said as he walked up. "I had to get cleaned up and changed,put stuff away."

As Bosch stepped closer to the edge of the clearing, the view opened below him.They were on a bluff rising above the rear of the Hollywood Bowl. The roundedmusic shell was down to the left, no more than a quarter mile. And the shell wasthe source of the music. The L.A. Philharmonic's end-of-the-season Labor Dayweekend show. Bosch was looking down at eighteen thousand people in concertseats stretching up the opposite side of the canyon. They were enjoying one ofthe last Sunday evenings of the summer.

"Jesus," he said out loud, thinking of the problem.

Edgar and Rider walked over.

"What've we got?" Bosch asked.

Rider answered.

"One in the trunk. White male. Gunshots. We haven't checked him out much furtherthan that. We've been keeping the lid closed. We've got everybody rolling,though."

Bosch started walking toward the Rolls, going around the charred remnants of anold campfire that had burned in the center of the clearing. The other twofollowed.

"This okay?" Bosch asked as he got close to the Rolls.

"Yeah, we did the search," Edgar said. "Nothing much. Got some leakageunderneath the car. That's about it, though. Cleanest scene I've been at in awhile."

Jerry Edgar, called in from home like everybody else on the team, was wearingblue jeans and a white T-shirt. On the left breast of the shirt was a drawing ofa badge and the words LAPD Homicide. As he walked past Bosch, Harry saw that theback of the shirt said Our Day Begins When Your Day Ends. The tight-fittingshirt contrasted sharply with Edgar's dark skin and displayed his heavilymuscled upper body as he moved with an athletic grace toward the Rolls. Boschhad worked with him on and off for six years but they had never become closeoutside of the job. This was the first time it had dawned on Bosch that Edgaractually was an athlete, that he must regularly work out.

It was unusual for Edgar not to be in one of his crisp Nordstrom's suits. ButBosch thought he knew why. His informal dress practically guaranteed he wouldavoid having to do the dirty work, next-of-kin notification.

They slowed their steps when they got close to the Rolls, as if perhaps whateverwas wrong here might be contagious. The car was parked with its rear end facingsouth and visible to the spectators in the upper levels of the Bowl across theway. Bosch considered their situation again.

"So you want to pull this guy out of there with all those people with their wineand box lunches from the Grill watching?" he asked. "How do you think that'sgoing to play on the TV tonight?"

"Well," Edgar replied, "we thought we'd kind of leave that decision to you,Harry. You being the three."

Edgar smiled and winked.

"Yeah, right," Bosch said sarcastically. "I'm the three."

Bosch was still getting used to the idea of being a so-called team leader. Ithad been almost eighteen months since he had officially investigated a homicide,let alone headed up a team of three investigators. He had been assigned to theHollywood Division burglary table when he returned to work from his involuntarystress leave in January. The detective bureau commander, Lieutenant GraceBillets, had explained that his assignment was a way of gradually easing himback into detective work. He knew that explanation was a lie and that she hadbeen told where to put him, but he took the demotion without complaint. He knewthey would come for him eventually.

After eight months of pushing papers and making the occasional burglary arrest,Bosch was called into the CO's office and Billets told him she was makingchanges. The division's homicide clearance rate had dipped to its lowest pointever. Fewer than half of the killings were cleared. She had taken over commandof the bureau nearly a year earlier, and the sharpest decline, she struggled toadmit, had come under her own watch. Bosch could have told her that the declinewas due in part to her not following the same statistical deceptions practicedby her predecessor, Harvey Pounds, who had always found ways of pumping up theclearance rate, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he sat quietly whileBillets laid out her plan.

The first part of the plan was to move Bosch back to the homicide table as ofthe start of September. A detective named Selby, who barely pulled his weight,would go from homicide to Bosch's slot on the burglary table. Billets was alsoadding a young and smart detective transfer she had previously worked with inthe Pacific Division detective bureau, Kizmin Rider. Next, and this was theradical part, Billets was changing the traditional pairing of detectives.Instead, the nine homicide detectives assigned to Hollywood would be groupedinto three teams of three. Each of the three teams would have a detective thirdgrade in charge. Bosch was a three. He was named team leader of squad one.

The reasoning behind the change was sound—at least on paper. Mosthomicides are solved in the first forty-eight hours after discovery or theyaren't solved at all. Billets wanted more solved, so she was going to put moredetectives on each one. The part that didn't look so good on paper, especiallyto the nine detectives, was that previously there had been four pairs ofpartners working homicide cases. The new changes meant each detective would beworking every third case that came up instead of every fourth. It meant morecases, more work, more court time, more overtime, and more stress. Only theovertime was considered a positive. But Billets was tough and didn't care muchfor the complaints of the detectives. And her new plan quickly won her theobvious nickname.

"Anybody talk to Bullets yet?" Bosch asked.

"I called," Rider said. "She was up in Santa Barbara for the weekend. Left anumber with the desk. She's coming down early but she's still at least an hourand a half from us. She said she was going to have to drop the hubby off firstand would probably just roll to the bureau."

Bosch nodded and stepped to the rear of the Rolls. He picked up the smell rightaway. It was faint but it was there, unmistakable. Like no other. He nodded tono one in particular again. He placed his briefcase on the ground, opened it,and took a pair of latex gloves from the cardboard box inside. He then closedthe case and placed it a few feet behind him and out of the way.

"Okay, let's take a look," he said while stretching the gloves over his hands.He hated how they felt. "Let's stand close; we don't want to give the people inthe Bowl more of a show than they paid for."

"It ain't pretty," Edgar said as he stepped forward.

The three of them stood together at the back end of the Rolls to shield the viewfrom the concertgoers. But Bosch knew that anybody with a decent pair of fieldglasses would know what was going on. This was L.A.

Before opening the trunk, he noticed the car's personalized license plate. Itsaid TNA. Before he could speak, Edgar answered his unasked question.

"Comes back to TNA Productions. On Melrose."

"T and A?"

"No, the letters, T-N-A, just like on the plate."

"Where on Melrose?"

Edgar took a notebook out of his pocket and looked through the pages. Theaddress he gave was familiar to Bosch but he couldn't place it. He knew it wasdown near Paramount, the sprawling studio that took up the entire north side ofthe fifty-five-hundred block. The big studio was surrounded by smallerproduction houses and mini-studios. They were like sucker fish that swam aroundthe mouth of the big shark, hoping for the scraps that didn't get sucked in.

"Okay, let's do it."

He turned his attention back to the trunk. He could see that the lid had beenlightly placed down so it would not lock closed. Using one rubber-coated finger,he gently lifted it.

As the trunk was opened, it expelled a sickeningly fetid breath of death. Boschimmediately wished he had a cigarette but those days were through. He knew whata defense lawyer could do with one ash from a cop's smoke at a crime scene.Reasonable doubts were built on less.

He leaned in under the lid to get a close look, careful not to touch the bumperwith his pants. The body of a man was in the trunk. His skin was a grayish whiteand he was expensively dressed in linen pants sharply pressed and cuffed at thebottom, a pale blue shirt with a flowery pattern and a leather sport coat. Hisfeet were bare.

The dead man was on his right side in the fetal position except his wrists werebehind him instead of folded against his chest. It appeared to Bosch that hishands had been tied behind him and the bindings then removed, most likely afterhe was dead. Bosch looked closely and could see a small abrasion on the leftwrist, probably caused by the struggle against the bindings. The man's eyes wereclosed tightly and there was a whitish, almost translucent material dried in thecorners of the sockets.

"Kiz, I want you taking notes on appearance."

"Right."

Bosch bent further into the trunk. He saw a froth of purged blood had dried inthe dead man's mouth and nose. His hair was caked with blood which had spreadover the shoulders and to the trunk mat, coating it with a coagulated pool. Hecould see the hole in the floor of the trunk through which blood had drained tothe gravel below. It was a foot from the victim's head and appeared to be evenlycut in the metal underlining in a spot where the floor mat was folded over. Itwas not a bullet hole. It was probably a drain or a hole left by a bolt that hadvibrated loose and fallen out.