City Of Bones

surprising enough for Edgar to no longer care if Portugal knew he was out of the latest investigative moves.
    “She was searching the place. She claimed she was there for the cat, too, but she was searching the place when I got there.”
    “For what?” Edgar said.
    “She wouldn’t tell me. She claimed she wasn’t looking for anything. But after she left I stayed. I found some things.”
    Bosch held up the newspaper.
    “This is Sunday’s Metro section. It has a pretty big story on the case, mostly a generic feature about forensics on cases like this. But there’s a lot of detail about our case from an unnamed source. Mostly about the crime scene.”
    Bosch thought after reading the article the first time in Delacroix’s trailer the night before that the source was probably Teresa Corazon, since she was quoted by name in the article in regard to generic information about bone cases. He was aware of the trading that went on between reporters and sources; direct attribution for some information, no attribution for other information. But the identity of the source wasn’t important to the present discussion and he didn’t bring it up.
    “So there was an article,” Portugal asked. “What does it mean?”
    “Well, it reveals that the bones were in a shallow grave and that it appeared that the body was not buried with the use of any tools. It also says that a knapsack had been buried along with the body. A lot of other details. Also details left out, like no mention of the kid’s skateboard.”
    “Your point being?” Portugal asked with a bored tone in his voice.
    “That if you were going to put together a false confession, a lot of what you’d need is right here.”
    “Oh, come on, Detective. Delacroix gave us much more than the crime scene details. He gave us the killing itself, the driving around with the body, all of that.”
    “All of that was easy. It can’t be proved or disproved. There were no witnesses. We’ll never find the car because it’s been squashed to the size of a mailbox in some junkyard in the Valley. All we have is his story. And the only place where his story meets the physical evidence is the crime scene. And every marker he gave us he could have gotten from this.”
    He tossed the newspaper onto Portugal’s desk but the prosecutor didn’t even look at it. He leaned his elbows on the desk and brought his hands flat against each other and spread his fingers wide. Bosch could see his muscles flexing under his shirtsleeves and realized he was doing some kind of an at-your-desk exercise. Portugal spoke while his hands pushed against each other.
    “I work out the tension this way.”
    He finally stopped, releasing his breath loudly and leaning back in his seat.
    “Okay, he had the ability to concoct a confession if he wanted to do it. Why would he want to do it? We’re talking about his own son. Why would he say he killed his own son if he didn’t?”
    “Because of these,” Bosch said.
    He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out an envelope that was folded in half. He leaned forward and gently put it down on top of the newspaper on Portugal’s desk.
    As Portugal picked up the envelope and started to open it, Bosch said, “I think that was what Sheila was looking for in the trailer last night. I found it in the night table next to her father’s bed. It was underneath the bottom drawer. A hiding place there. You had to take the drawer out to find it. She didn’t do that.”
    From the envelope Portugal took a stack of Polaroid photos. He started looking through them.
    “Oh, God,” he said almost immediately. “Is this her? The daughter? I don’t want to look at these.”
    He shuffled through the remaining photos quickly and put them down on the desk. Edgar got up and leaned over the desk. With one finger he spread the photos out on the desk so he could view them. His jaw drew tight but he didn’t say anything.
    The photos were old. The white borders were yellowed, the colors of the images almost washed out by time. Bosch used Polaroids on the job all the time. He knew by the degradation of the colors that the photos on the desk were far more than a decade old and some of them were older than others. There were fourteen photos in all. The constant in each was a naked girl. Based on physical changes to the girl’s body and hair length, he had guessed that the photos spanned at least a five-year-period. The girl innocently smiled in some of the photos. In