The Wrong Side of Goodbye(52)

But he knew she had volunteered to make the contact with the LAPD divisions because of the animosity toward Bosch in some quarters of the department. She wanted to make sure she got access to LAPD files and didn’t get stiffed because somebody had a grudge against Bosch.

“Where do you live, Bella?” he asked.

“Chatsworth,” she said. “We have a house off Winnetka.”

“Nice.”

“We like it. But it’s the same everywhere. It’s all about the schools. We’ve got good schools.”

Bosch guessed from the photos he saw pinned to the separation wall that Rodrigo was no more than three years old. Lourdes was already worried about his future.

“I’ve got a nineteen-year-old,” he said. “A girl. She had some hard knocks in her life. Lost her mother young. But she made it through. Kids are amazing, as long as they have the push in the right direction at home.”

Lourdes just nodded and Bosch felt like a fool for dispensing unwanted and obvious advice.

“Rodrigo a Dodgers fan?” he asked.

“He’s a little young but he will be,” she said.

“Then it’s you. You said Beatriz swung the broomstick like Adrian Gonzales.”

Gonzalez was a fan favorite, especially among the Latino fan base.

“Yeah, we love going to Chavez Ravine and watching Gonzo.”

Bosch nodded and changed the subject back to work.

“So, nothing of value in the calls this morning?”

“Nothing. You were right. I don’t think anything is going to pan out and now this guy knows we’ve connected the dots. Why stick around?”

“I haven’t even gotten to my stack. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Once back at the station Bosch finally dug into his stack of tips and phone messages. He spent the next six hours working his way through it, making calls and asking questions. As with Lourdes, he ended up with nothing to show for it except a reinforcement of his belief that humans will sink to the lowest depths if the right opportunity presents itself. They were trying to catch a serial rapist who was evolving, according to the profile, into a murderer, and people were out there using the situation to settle scores and fuck over their enemies.





22

Sunday was no different. He was greeted upon his arrival with a fresh batch of call-in tips. These he went through quickly in his cubicle, first separating out the Spanish-only calls and putting them on Lourdes’s desk for her to handle the following day. He then responded to the remaining tips with calls when necessary and the trash can when warranted. By noon he had completed the task and had only one potentially viable lead to show for the effort.

The lead came from an anonymous female caller who reported seeing a man wearing a mask running down Seventh Street toward Maclay shortly after 12 p.m. Friday. She refused to give her name and had called in on a cell phone with a blocked number. She told the operator that she had been driving west on Seventh when she saw the man in the mask. He was running east on the opposite side of the street and stopped at one point to try the door handles on three cars parked along Seventh. When he was unable to open these cars he continued running toward Maclay. The caller said she lost sight of the man after she passed by him.

Bosch was intrigued by the tip because the timing of the sighting coincided with the attempted assault on Beatriz Sahagun just a few blocks away. What pushed the tip even further toward legitimacy was that the caller described the mask worn by the runner as black with a green-and-red design. This matched Sahagun’s description of the mask worn by her would-be rapist, and these descriptors had not been released publicly through the media.

What troubled Bosch about the tip was why the suspect would have kept the mask on while fleeing from Sahagun’s house. A man running while wearing a mask would draw far more attention than just a man running. Harry thought that maybe the man was still disoriented after being struck by Sahagun with the broomstick. Another reason could be that he was known to people in that neighborhood and wanted to shield his identity.

The caller said nothing about whether the man was wearing gloves but Bosch assumed that if he kept the mask on, he had also kept his gloves on.

Bosch got up from his desk chair and started pacing in the tiny detective bureau as he considered the tip and what it could mean. The scenario as reported by the anonymous caller suggested that the Screen Cutter was trying to find an unlocked car that he could steal in order to make his getaway. This suggested that he did not have a getaway vehicle or the one he did have had for some unknown reason become unavailable to him. This idea intrigued Bosch the most. The previous assaults credited to the Screen Cutter appeared to be carefully planned and choreographed. Escape is always a critical part of any plan. What happened to the getaway car? Was there an accomplice who panicked and took off? Or was there another reason for the escape on foot?

The second issue was the mask. The caller said the suspect was running toward Maclay, a commercial street lined with small shops and mom-and-pop-style restaurants. At noon on Friday motorists and pedestrians would be on Maclay and the appearance of a man wearing a Mexican wrestling mask would be noticed by many. And yet this was the only tip so far that mentioned the running man. This told Bosch that the Screen Cutter pulled the mask off just as he got to the corner and either turned onto Maclay or crossed it.

Bosch knew the answers to his questions wouldn’t be found while pacing in the detective bureau. He went back to his desk and grabbed his keys and sunglasses off the desk.