Angels Flight

there,” Bosch said.
    He watched Rider move the cursor to a button below the final photo that said HOME on it. It seemed sadly ironic to Bosch that clicking HOME was the way out. Rider clicked the mouse and the screen went back to the spider’s web. Bosch pulled his chair back to his spot and dropped down into it. Fatigue and depression suddenly hit him. He wanted to go home and go to sleep and forget everything he knew.
    “People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.”
    Bosch got up and walked over to one of the other nearby desks. It belonged to a burglary detective named McGrath. He opened the drawers and started looking through them.
    “Harry,” Rider said, “what are you looking for?”
    “A cigarette. I thought Paul kept his smokes in his desk.”
    “He used to. I told him to start taking them home with him.”
    Bosch looked over at her, his hand still holding one of the drawers.
    “You told him that?”
    “I didn’t want you slipping, Harry.”
    Bosch shoved the drawer closed and came back to his chair.
    “Thanks a lot, Kizmin. You saved me.”
    There wasn’t a drop of thanks in the tone he had used.
    “You’ll get through this, Harry.”
    Bosch gave her a look.
    “You probably haven’t smoked an entire cigarette in your entire life and you’re going to tell me about quitting and how I’ll get through it?”
    “Sorry. I’m just trying to help.”
    “Like I said, thanks.”
    He looked over at her computer and nodded.
    “What else? What are you thinking about? How does that tie in Sam and Kate Kincaid to the point we should’ve advised them?”
    “They had to know about this,” Rider said, amazed that Bosch didn’t see what she saw. “The man in the photos, that’s got to be Kincaid.”
    “Whoah!” Edgar said. “How can you say that? You couldn’t see the guy’s face. We were just talking to the guy and he and his wife are still righteously fucked-up over this.”
    It hit Bosch then. When he had first seen the photos on the computer he had thought they were taken by the girl’s abductor.
    “You’re saying these photos are old,” he said. “That she was abused before she was abducted.”
    “I’m saying there probably wasn’t an abduction at all. Stacey Kincaid was an abused child. My guess is that her stepfather defiled her and then probably killed her. And that doesn’t happen without tacit knowledge, if not approval, by the mother.”
    Bosch was silent. Rider had spoken with such fervor and even pain that he couldn’t help but wonder if she was talking from some kind of personal experience.
    “Look,” Rider said, apparently sensing the skepticism of her partners. “There was a time that I thought I wanted to move into child sex crimes. This was before I put in for homicide. There was an opening on the endangered-child team in Pacific and the job was mine if I wanted it. They first sent me to Quantico for a two-week training program the bureau puts on once a year on child sex crimes. I lasted eight days. I realized I couldn’t hack it. I came back and put in for homicide.”
    She stopped there but neither Bosch nor Edgar said anything. They knew there was more.
    “But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”
    “It’s still not evidence in this specific case, Kiz,” Bosch said gently. “This could still be the rare exception. It wasn’t Harris who came through the window but this guy.”
    He pointed to her computer, though the images of the headless man’s assault on Stacey Kincaid were thankfully not on the screen.
    “Nobody came through the window,” Rider insisted.
    She pulled a file over and opened it. Bosch saw it contained a copy of the protocol from the autopsy of Stacey Kincaid. She leafed through it until she came to the photos. She picked the one she wanted and handed it to Bosch. While he looked at it she started paging through the protocol.
    The photo Bosch held was a shot of Stacey Kincaid’s body in situ – the position and place where it was found. Her arms were spread wide. Sheehan had been right. Her body was darkening with interior decomposition and the face was gaunt, but there was an angelic quality to her in repose. His heart ached from looking at the