The Wrong Side of Goodbye(27)

After eating in his car on the side of the road, he pulled out his phone and hit redial on the last number he had called—the number Whitney Vance had given him. Once again the call went unanswered and he left a message.

“Mr. Vance, Harry Bosch again. I need you to call me back. I believe I have the information you’ve been looking for.”

He disconnected, put the phone in the center console’s cup holder, and pulled back into traffic.

It took him another twenty minutes to finish crossing the Valley south to north on Laurel Canyon. At Maclay he turned right and drove into San Fernando. Once again the detective bureau was empty when he entered, and he went directly to his cubicle.

The first thing he checked for was e-mail to his SFPD account. He had two new messages and he could tell from the subject line that they were both returns on his inquiries regarding the Screen Cutter case. The first was from a detective in the LAPD’s West Valley Division.



Dear Harry Bosch, if you are the former LAPD detective of the same name who sued the department he served for 30-plus years then I hope you get ass cancer real soon and die a slow and painful death. If you are not him, then my bad. Have a good day.



Bosch read the message twice and felt his blood get hot. It was not because of the sentiment expressed. He didn’t care about that. He hit the reply button on the e-mail and quickly typed in a response.



Detective Mattson, I am glad to know the investigators in West Valley Division carry on with the level of professionalism the citizens of Los Angeles have come to expect. Choosing to insult the requestor of information rather than consider the request shows immense dedication to the department’s mandate to Serve and Protect. Thanks to you I know that the sexual predators in the West Valley live in fear.



Bosch was about to hit the send button, when he thought better of it and deleted the message. He tried to put his upset aside. At least Mattson wasn’t a detective working in either the LAPD’s Mission or Foothill Division, where he felt sure the Screen Cutter must have been active.

He moved on and opened up the second e-mail. It was from a detective in Glendale. It was just an acknowledgment that Bosch’s request for information had been received and passed to him for action. The detective said he would ask around his department and get back to Bosch as soon as possible.

Bosch had received several similar e-mails in response to his blind inquiries. Luckily, only a few like Mattson’s had come in. Most detectives he had contacted were professional and, while overrun with cases and work, they promised to get to Bosch’s request quickly.

He closed down the e-mail page and went to the department’s DMV portal. It was time to find Dominick Santanello. As he logged in Bosch did the math on the birth date in his head. Santanello would be sixty-five years old now. Maybe newly retired, maybe living on a pension, with no idea that he was heir to a fortune. Bosch wondered if he had ever left his adoptive hometown of Oxnard. Did he know that he was adopted and that his mother’s life had ended as his began?

Bosch typed in the name and birth date from the birth certificate, and the database quickly kicked back a match, but it was a very short entry. It showed that Dominick Santanello had received a California driver’s license on January 31, 1967, the day he turned sixteen and was eligible to drive. But the license had never been renewed or surrendered. The last entry in the record simply said Deceased.

Bosch leaned back in his seat, feeling as though he had been kicked in the gut. He had been on the case less than thirty-six hours but he was invested. Vibiana’s story, Abigail’s story, Vance’s being unable to outrun the guilt of his actions all these decades later. And now to come to this. According to the DMV, Vance’s son died even before his first driver’s license had expired.

“Harry, you all right?”

Bosch looked left and saw that Bella Lourdes had entered the bureau and was heading to her cubicle across the partition wall from his.

“I’m fine,” Bosch said. “Just…just another dead end.”

“I know the feeling,” Lourdes said.

She sat down and dropped from his sight. She was no more than five two and the partition made her disappear. Bosch just stared at his computer screen. There were no details about Santanello’s death, only that it occurred during the licensing period. Bosch had gotten his first California license the year before Santanello, in 1966. He was pretty sure that back then the license period was four years before renewal. It meant Santanello had died between the ages of sixteen and twenty.

He knew that when he reported the death of his client’s son, he would have to provide Vance with full and convincing details. He also knew that back in the late 1960s, most teenagers who died were killed in car accidents or in the war. He leaned back toward the computer terminal, brought up the search page, and typed in Search the Wall. This led him to links to a number of websites associated with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where the names of every one of the fifty-eight-thousand–plus soldiers killed during the war were etched on a black granite wall.

Bosch chose the site operated by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund because he had been to the site before both as a donor and to look up the details of men he had served with and knew hadn’t made it back home. He now typed in the name Dominick Santanello and his hunch became reality as a page opened with a photo of the soldier and the details of his service.