Angle of Investigation

involved, Harry,” she responded. “The Laura syndrome, you know.”
    “It’s not like that. I’m just curious. It was sort of my first case.”
    “No, it wasn’t.”
    “You know what I mean. I remember thinking she was an old lady when the detectives gave me the rundown on it. But she was only forty-six. I was half her age, so I thought anybody forty-six was old and had had a good run of it. I didn’t feel too bad about it.”
    “Now you do.”
    “Forty-six was too young, Kiz.”
    “Well, you’re not going to bring her back.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “I know that.”
    “You ever seen that movie?”
    “ Laura ? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Detective falls in love with the murder victim. You?”
    “Yeah, but it doesn’t hold up too well. Sort of a parlor room murder case. I liked the Burt Reynolds take on it in the eighties. Sharky’s Machine . With Rachel Ward. You seen it?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Had Bernie Casey in it. When I was a youngster I always thought he was a fine-looking man.”
    Bosch looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
    “Before I switched teams,” she said. “Then I rented it a couple years ago and Bernie didn’t do it for me. I liked Rachel Ward.”
    Her bringing up her sexuality seemed to put an uneasiness between them. She turned back to her computer. Bosch looked down at the evidence report.
    “Well, we know one thing,” he said after a while. “We’re looking for a left-handed man.”
    She turned back to look at him.
    “How do you know that?”
    “He put his right hand on the wall over the toilet.”
    “And?”
    “It’s just like a gun, Kiz. He aimed with his left hand because he’s left-handed.”
    She shook her head dismissively.
    “Men…”
    She went back to work on her computer, and Bosch went back to the murder book. He wrote down the information he would need to give to the latent prints section of the Scientific Investigation Division in order for a tech to look up the palm print in their files. He then asked if Rider wanted him to pick her up a coffee or a soda from the cafeteria while he was floating around the building. She said no and he was off. He took the murder book with him.
    Bosch filled out the comparison request forms and gave them to a print tech named Larkin. He was one of the older, more experienced techs. Bosch had gone to him before and knew that he would move quickly with the request.
    “Let’s hope we hit the jackpot, Harry,” Larkin said as he took the forms.
    It was true that there was always a sense of excitement when you put an old print into a computer and let it ride. It was like pulling the lever on a slot machine. The jackpot payoff was a match, a cold hit in police parlance.
    After leaving SID Bosch went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to finish reading through the murder book. He decided he could handle the constant background noise of the cafeteria better than he could the intrusive questions from Kiz Rider.
    He understood where his partner was coming from. She wanted to choose their cases dispassionately from the thousands that were open. Her concern was that if they went down a path in which Bosch was exorcizing ghosts or choosing cases with personal attachments, they would burn out sooner rather than later.
    But Bosch was not as concerned. He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her.
    The killing of June Wilkins was as horrible as it was cunning. The woman was bound hands and feet with a dog collar and a leash and then drowned in the tub. Her dog was treated to the same death. The autopsy showed no bruising or injuries on Wilkins suggestive of a struggle. But analysis of blood and tissue samples taken during autopsy indicated that she had been drugged with a veterinary paralytic. It meant that it was likely that Wilkins was conscious but unable to move her muscles to fight or defend herself when she was submerged in the water in the bathtub. Analysis of the dog’s blood found that the animal ith the anhad been drugged with the same substance.
    A textbook investigation followed