City Of Bones

took her hand. He looked back at Bosch.
    “We counted it up once,” he said. “We had a total of thirty-eight kids at one time or another. But realistically, we say we raised seventeen of them. These were kids that were with us long enough for it to have an impact. You know, anywhere from two years to-one child was with us fourteen years.”
    He turned so he could see the wall over the couch and reached up and pointed to a picture of a boy in a wheelchair. He was slightly built and had thick glasses. His wrists were bent at sharp angles. His smile was crooked.
    “That’s Benny,” he said.
    “Amazing,” Bosch said.
    He took a notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open to a blank page. He took out a pen. Just then his cell phone started chirping.
    “That’s me,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “Don’t you want to answer it?” Blaylock asked.
    “They can leave a message. I didn’t even think there’d be clear service this close to the mountain.”
    “Yeah, we even get TV.”
    Bosch looked at him and realized he had somehow been insulting.
    “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything. I was wondering if you could tell me what children you had living in your home in nineteen eighty.”
    There was a moment when everyone looked at one another and said nothing.
    “Is one of our kids involved in this?” Audrey asked.
    “I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t know who was living with you. Like I said, we’re trying to put together a profile of that neighborhood. We need to know exactly who was living there. And then we’ll go from there.”
    “Well, I am sure the Division of Youth Services can help you.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Actually, they changed the name. It’s now called the Department of Children’s Services. And they’re not going to be able to help us until Monday at the earliest, Mrs. Blaylock. This is a homicide. We need this information now.”
    Again there was a pause as they all looked at one another.
    “Well,” Don Blaylock finally said, “it’s going to be kind of hard to remember exactly who was with us at any given time. There are some obvious ones. Like Benny and Jodi and Frances. But every year we’d have a few kids that, like Audrey said, would be dropped in and then taken out. They’re the tough ones. Let’s see, nineteen eighty…”
    He stood up and turned so he could see the breadth of the wall of photos. He pointed to one, a young black boy of about eight.
    “William there. He was nineteen eighty. He-”
    “No, he wasn’t,” Audrey said. “He came to us in ’eighty-four. Don’t you remember, the Olympics? You made him that torch out of foil.”
    “Oh, yeah, ’eighty-four.”
    Bosch leaned forward in his seat. The location near the fire was now getting too warm for him.
    “Let’s start with the three you mentioned. Benny and the two others. What were their full names?”
    He was given their names, and when he asked how they could be contacted he was given phone numbers for two of them but not Benny.
    “Benny passed away six years ago,” Audrey said. “Multiple sclerosis.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “He was very dear to us.”
    Bosch nodded and waited for an appropriate silence to go by.
    “Um, who else? Didn’t you keep records of who came and for how long?”
    “We did but we don’t have them here,” Blaylock said. “They’re in storage in L.A.”
    He suddenly snapped his fingers.
    “You know, we have a list of the names of every child we tried to help or did help. It’s just not by year. We could probably cut it down a little bit, but would that help you?”
    Bosch noticed Audrey give her husband a momentary look of anger. Her husband didn’t see it but Bosch did. He knew her instincts would be to protect her children from the threat, real or not, that Bosch represented.
    “Yes, that would help a lot.”
    Blaylock left the room and Bosch looked at Audrey.
    “You don’t want him to give me that list. Why is that, Mrs. Blaylock?”
    “Because I don’t think you are being honest with us. You are looking for something. Something that will fit your needs. You don’t drive three hours in the middle of the night from Los Angeles for a ‘routine questioning,’ as you call it. You know these children come from tough backgrounds. They weren’t all angels when they came to us. And I don’t want any of them blamed for something just because of who they were or where they came from.”
    Bosch waited to make sure she was done.
    “Mrs. Blaylock, have