Angle of Investigation

contrition and agreement.
    “What I don’t get,” his partner said, “is how the hell did you smell that at the front door?”
    Bosch shrugged.
    “Used to it, I guess.”
    He nodded toward the west, as if the war had been just down the street.
    “I guess that also explains why you’re not puking your guts out,” Eckersly said. “Like most rookies would be doing right now.”
    “I guess so.”
    “You know what, Bosch. Maybe you’ve got a nose for this stuff.”
    “Maybe I do.”

NOW

    Harry Bosch and his partner, Kiz Rider, shared an alcove in the back corner of the Open-Unsolved Unit in Parker Center. Their desks were pushed together so they could face each other and discuss case matters without having to talk loudly and bother the six other detectives in the squad. Rider was writing on her laptop, entering the completion and summary reports on the Verloren case. Bosch was reading through the dusty pages of a blue binder known as a murder book.
    “Anything?” Rider asked without looking up from her screen.
    Bosch was reviewing the murder book since it was the next case they would work together. He hadn’t chosen it at random. It involved the 1972 slaying of June Wilkins. Bosch had been a patrolman then and had been on the job only two days when he and his partner at the time had discovered the body of the murdered woman in her bathtub. Along with the body of her dog. Both had been held underwater and drowned.
    There were thousands of unsolved murders in the files of the Los Angeles Police Department. To justify the time and cost of mounting a new investigation, there had to be a hook. Something that could be sent through the forensic databases in search of a match: fingerprints, ballistics, DNA. That was what Rider was asking. Had he found a hook?
    “Not yet,” he answered.
    “Then why don’t you quit fooling with it and skip to the back?”
    She wanted him to skip to the evidence report in the back of the binder and see if there was anything that could fit the bill. But Bosch wanted to take his time. He wanted to know all the details of the case. It had been his first DB. One of many that would come to him in the department. But he’d had no part in the investigation. He had been a rookie patrolman at the time. He had to watch the detectives work it. It would be years in the department before it was his turn to speak for the dead.
    “I just want to see what they did,” he tried to explain. “See how they worked it. Most of these cases, they coulda-shoulda been cleared back in the day.”
    “Well, you have till I’m finished with this summary,” Rider cautioned. “After that we better get flying on something, Harry.”
    Bosch blew out his breath in mock indignation and flipped a large section of summaries and other reports over in the binder until he got to the back. He then turned to the tab marked FORENSICS and looked at an evidence inventory report.
    “Okay, we’ve got latents, you happy?”
    Rider looked up from her computer for the first time.
    “That could work,” she said. “Tied to the suspect?”
    Bosch flipped back to the evidence report to look for the summary ascribed to the specific evidence logged in the inventory. He found a one-paragraph explanation that said a right palm print had been located on the wall of the bathroom where the body had been found. Its location was sixty-six inches from the floor and seven inches right of center above the toilet.
    “Well…”
    “Well, what?”
    “It’s a palm.”
    She groaned.
    It was not a good hook. Databases containing palm prints were relatively new in law enforcement. Only in the past decade had palm prints been seriously collected by the FBI and the California Department of Justice. In California there were approximately ten thousand palms on file compared with the millions of fingerprints. The Wilkins murder was thirty-three years old. What were the chances that the person who had left a palm print on the wall of the victim’s bathroom would be printed two decades or more later? Ride"ju later?r had answered that one with her groan.
    “It’s still worth a shot,” Bosch said optimistically. “I’ll put in the SID request.”
    “You do that. Meantime, as soon as I’m done here I’ll see if I can find a case with a real hook we can run with.”
    “Hold your horses, Kiz. I still haven’t run any of the names out of the book. Give me today with this and then we’ll see.”
    “Not good to get emotionally