The Wrong Side of Goodbye(41)

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. I saw some of his other work. From the bush. From his missions.”

“I’d love to see it. Maybe there’s something that could be done with it.”

Bosch nodded but was concentrating on the photos in front of him.

“You can’t tell when these photos were taken, can you?” he asked.

“No, there was no time stamp on the film,” Claudy said. “Not really done back then.”

Bosch expected that to be the case.

“But what I can tell you is when the film was made,” Claudy added. “Down to a three-month period. Fuji coded their film stock by production cycle.”

Bosch turned around and looked at Claudy.

“Show me.”

Claudy came forward and went to one of the prints made from a broken negative. The negative’s frame was part of the print. Claudy pointed to a series of letters and numbers in the frame.

“They marked the film by year and three-month manufacturing run. You see here? This is it.”

He pointed to a section of the coding: 70-AJ.

“This film was made between April and June of 1970,” he said.

Bosch considered the information.

“But it could have been used any time after that, right?” he asked.

“Right,” Claudy said. “It only marks when it was made, not when it was used in a camera.”

Something didn’t add up about that. The film was manufactured as early as April of 1970 and the photographer, Dominick Santanello, was killed in December 1970. He could have easily bought and used the film sometime in the eight intervening months, then sent it home with his belongings.

“You know where that is, right?” Claudy asked.

“Yeah, the del Coronado,” Bosch said.

“Sure hasn’t changed much.”

“Yeah.”

Bosch stared at the photo of mother and child again and then he got it. He understood.

Dominick Santanello trained down in the San Diego area in 1969 but he would have been shipped overseas before the end of the year. Bosch was looking at photos taken in San Diego in April 1970 at the very earliest and that was well after Santanello was in Vietnam.

“He came back,” Bosch said.

“What?” Claudy asked.

Bosch didn’t answer. He was riding the wave. Things were cascading, coming together. The civvies in the box, the long hair in the bristles of the brush, the photos removed from the inside of the footlocker, and the hidden photos of the baby on the beach. Santanello had made an unauthorized trip back to the States. He hid the photo negatives because they were proof of his crime. He had risked court-martial and the stockade to see his girlfriend.

And his newborn daughter.

Bosch now knew. There was an heir somewhere out there. Born in 1970. Whitney Vance had a granddaughter. Bosch was sure of it.





17

Claudy put all of the photos into a stiff cardboard folder to keep them from getting bent or damaged. In the car, Bosch opened the folder and looked at the photo of the woman and the baby one more time. He knew there were a lot of aspects of his theory to confirm and some that could never be confirmed. The film negatives that produced the photos in the folder were found secreted in Nick Santanello’s camera but that did not necessarily mean he had taken the photos himself. The photos could have been taken for him and then the negatives mailed to him in Vietnam. Harry knew it was a possibility that could not be completely dismissed but his gut told him that it was an unlikely scenario. The negatives had been found with his camera and other negatives of photos taken by him. It was clear to him Santanello had taken the shot of the woman and the baby.

The other question that hung over the theory was why Santanello would keep his relationship and fatherhood secret from his family, most notably his sister, back in Oxnard. Bosch knew that family dynamics were almost as unique as fingerprints and it might take several more visits with Olivia to get to the truth of the relationships within the Santanello family. He decided that the best use of his time would be to prove or disprove that Santanello was Whitney Vance’s son and that he may have produced an heir—the baby in the Hotel del Coronado photos. The other explanations could come later, if they still mattered at that point.

He closed the folder and snapped the attached elastic band back around it.

Before starting the car, Bosch pulled out his phone and called Gary McIntyre, the investigator at the National Personnel Records Center. The day before, Olivia Macdonald had written an e-mail to McIntyre granting Bosch permission to receive and review records of her brother’s military service. He now checked with McIntyre on the status of his search.

“Just finished pulling everything together,” McIntyre said. “It’s too big to e-mail. I’ll drop it on our download site and e-mail you the password.”

Bosch wasn’t sure when he would get to a computer terminal to download a dense digital file, or if he could even figure out how to do it.

“That’s fine,” he said. “But I’m on the road today heading to San Diego and I’m not sure I can access it. I’d love knowing what you came up with during his training—since I’ll be down there.”

Bosch let that hang in the air. He knew a guy like McIntyre would be slammed with records requests from all over the country and needed to move on to the next case. But Harry hoped that the intrigue involved in the Santanello file—a soldier killed forty-six years earlier—would win the day and push McIntyre toward answering at least a few questions on the phone. The NCIS investigator probably spent most of his days pulling files on Gulf War vets accused of drug-and alcohol-infused crimes or locked up in Baker Act wards.