1
THE old lady had changed her mind about dying but by then it was
too late. She had dug her fingers into the paint and plaster of the
nearby wall until most of her fingernails had broken off. Then she had
gone for the neck, scrabbling to push the bloodied fingertips up and
under the cord. She broke four toes kicking at the walls. She had tried
so hard, shown such a desperate will to live, that it made Harry Bosch
wonder what had happened before. Where was that determination and will
and why had it deserted her until after she had put the extension cord
noose around her neck and kicked over the chair? Why had it hidden from
her?
These were not official questions that would be raised in his death
report. But they were the things Bosch couldn't avoid thinking about as
he sat in his car outside the Splendid Age Retirement Home on Sunset
Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. It was 4:20 P.M. on the first
day of the year. Bosch had drawn holiday call-out duty.
The day more than half over and that duty consisted of two suicide runs
-- one a gunshot, the other the hanging. Both victims were women. In
both cases there was evidence of depression and desperation. Isolation.
New Year's Day was always a big day for suicides. While most people
greeted the day with a sense of hope and renewal, there were those who
saw it as a good day to die, some -- like the old lady -- not realizing
their mistake until it was too late.
Bosch looked up through the windshield and watched as the latest
victim's body, on a wheeled stretcher and covered in a green blanket,
was loaded into the coroner's blue van. He saw there was one other
occupied stretcher in the van and knew it was from the first suicide --
a thirty-four-year-old actress who had shot herself while parked at a
Hollywood overlook on Mulholland Drive. Bosch and the body crew had
followed one case to the other.
Bosch's cell phone chirped and he welcomed the intrusion into his
thoughts on small deaths. It was Mankiewicz, the watch sergeant at the
Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.
"You finished with that yet?"
"I'm about to clear."
"Anything?"
"A changed-my-mind suicide. You got something else?"
"Yeah. And I didn't think I should go out on the radio with it. Must be
a slow day for the media -- getting more what's-happening calls from
reporters than I am getting service calls from citizens. They all want
to do something on the first one, the actress on Mulholland. You know, a
death-of-a-Hollywood-dream story. And they'd probably jump all over this
latest call, too."
"Yeah, what is it?"
"A citizen up in Laurel Canyon. On Wonderland. He just called up and
said his dog came back from a run in the woods with a bone in its mouth.
The guy says it's human -- an arm bone from a kid."
Bosch almost groaned. There were four or five call outs like this a
year. Hysteria always followed by simple explanation: animal bones.
Through the windshield he saluted the two body movers from the coroner's
office as they headed to the front doors of the van.
"I know what you're thinking, Harry. Not another bone run. You've done
it a hundred times and it's always the same thing. Coyote, deer,
whatever. But listen, this guy with the dog, he's an MD. And he says
there's no doubt. It's a humerus. That's the upper arm bone. He says
it's a child, Harry. And then, get this. He said . . .
