City Of Bones

You’re the first one I’ve called.”
    “Well, we all know it wasn’t you who-”
    “That’s okay, Lieutenant, I don’t need the absolution. What do you want me to do here?”
    “You handle the routine call outs. I’ll call Chief Irving’s office and tell him what has transpired. This is going to get hot.”
    “Yes. What about Media Relations? There’s already a gang of reporters out on the street.”
    “I’ll call them.”
    “Did you do anything about Thornton yet?”
    “Already in the pipeline. The woman from IAD, Bradley, is running with it. With this latest thing, I’d bet Thornton not only leaked his way out of a job, but they might want to go after him with a charge of some kind.”
    Bosch nodded. Thornton deserved it. He still had no second thoughts about the scam he had devised.
    “All right, well, we’ll be here. For a while, at least.”
    “Let me know if you find anything there that connects him to the bones.”
    Bosch thought of the boots with the dirt in the treads and the skateboard.
    “You got it,” he said.
    Bosch clicked off the call and then immediately made calls to the coroner’s office and SID.
    In the living room Morton had finished reading the note.
    “Mr. Morton, when was the last time you talked to Mr. Trent?” Bosch asked.
    “Last night. He called me at home after the news on Channel Four. His boss had seen it and called him.”
    Bosch nodded. That accounted for the last call.
    “You know his boss’s name?”
    Morton pointed to the middle page on the table.
    “Right here on the list. Alicia Felzer. She told him she was going to seek his termination. The studio makes movies for children. She couldn’t have him on a set with a child. You see? The leaking of his record to the media destroyed this man. You recklessly took a man’s existence and-”
    “Let me ask the questions, Mr. Morton. You can save your outrage for when you go outside and talk to the reporters yourself, which I know you’ll do. What about that last page? He mentions the children. His children. What does that mean?”
    “I have no idea. He obviously was emotionally distraught when he wrote this. It may mean nothing.”
    Bosch remained standing, studying the attorney.
    “Why did he call you last night?”
    “Why do you think? To tell me you had been here, that it was all over the news, that his boss had seen it and wanted to fire him.”
    “Did he say whether he buried that boy up there on the hill?”
    Morton put on the best indignant look he could muster.
    “He certainly said that he did not have a thing to do with it. He believed he was being persecuted for a past mistake, a very distant mistake, and I’d say he was correct about that.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Okay, Mr. Morton, you can leave now.”
    “What are you talking about? I’m not going to-”
    “This house is now a crime scene. We are investigating your client’s death to confirm or deny it was by his own hand. You are no longer welcome here. Jerry?”
    Edgar stepped over to the couch and waved Morton up.
    “Come on. Time to go out there and get your face on TV. It’ll be good for business, right?”
    Morton stood up and left in a huff. Bosch walked over to the front windows and pulled the curtain back a few inches. When Morton came down the side of the house to the driveway, he immediately walked to the center of the knot of reporters and started talking angrily. Bosch couldn’t hear what was said. He didn’t need to.
    When Edgar came back into the room, Bosch told him to call the watch office and get a patrol car up to Wonderland for crowd control. He had a feeling that the media mob, like a virus replicating itself, was going to start growing bigger and hungrier by the minute.

Chapter 19
    THEY found Nicholas Trent’s children when they searched his home following the removal of his body. Filling the entire two drawers of a small desk in the living room, a desk Bosch had not searched the night before, were files, photographs and financial records, including several thick bank envelopes containing canceled checks. Trent had been sending small amounts of money on a monthly basis to a number of charitable organizations that fed and clothed children. From Appalachia to the Brazilian rain forest to Kosovo, Trent had been sending checks for years. Bosch found no check for an amount higher than twelve dollars. He found dozens and dozens of photographs of the children he was supposedly helping as well as small handwritten