City Of Bones

Teresa.”
    “That’s it?”
    She pointed at the shoe box.
    “This is it.”
    He handed her the Polaroids and started taking the lid off the box. It was clear she was not asking him in for a glass of New Year’s champagne.
    “You want to do this right here?”
    “I don’t have a lot of time. I thought you’d be here sooner. What moron took these?”
    “That would be me.”
    “I can’t tell anything from these. Do you have a glove?”
    Bosch pulled a latex glove out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. He took the photos back and put them in an inside pocket of his jacket. She expertly snapped the glove on and reached into the open box. She held the bone up and turned it in the light. He was silent. He could smell her perfume. It was strong as usual, a holdover from her days when she spent most of her time in autopsy suites.
    After a five-second examination she put the bone back down in the box.
    “Human.”
    “You sure?”
    She looked up at him with a glare as she snapped off the glove.
    “It’s the humerus. The upper arm. I’d say a child of about ten. You may no longer respect my skills, Harry, but I do still have them.”
    She dropped the glove into the box on top of the bone. Bosch could roll with all the verbal sparring from her, but it bothered him that she did that with the glove, dropping it on the child’s bone like that.
    He reached into the box and took the glove out. He remembered something and held the glove back out to her.
    “The man whose dog found this said there was a fracture on the bone. A healed fracture. Do you want to take a look and see if you-”
    “No. I’m late for an engagement. What you need to know right now is if it is human. You now have that confirmation. Further examination will come later under proper settings at the medical examiner’s office. Now, I really have to go. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
    Bosch held her eyes for a long moment.
    “Sure, Teresa, have a good time tonight.”
    She broke off the stare and folded her arms across her chest. He carefully put the top back on the shoe box, nodded to her and headed back to his car. He heard the heavy door close behind him.
    Thinking of the movie again as he passed the koi pond, he spoke the film’s final line quietly to himself.
    “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
    He got in the car and drove home, his hand holding the shoe box secure on the seat next to him.

Chapter 5
    BY nine o’clock the next morning the end of Wonderland Avenue was a law enforcement encampment. And at its center was Harry Bosch. He directed teams from patrol, K-9, the Scientific Investigation Division, the medical examiner’s office and the Special Services unit. A department helicopter circled above and a dozen police academy cadets milled about, waiting for orders.
    Earlier, the aerial unit had locked in on the sagebrush Bosch had wrapped in yellow crime scene tape and used it as a base point to determine that Wonderland offered the closest access to the spot where Bosch had found the bones. The Special Services unit then swung into action. Following the trail of crime scene tape up the hillside, the six-man team hammered and strung together a series of wooden ramps and steps with rope guidelines that led up the hillside to the bones. Accessing and exiting the site would now be much easier than it had been for Bosch the evening before.
    It was impossible to keep such a nest of police activity quiet. Also by 9 A.M. the neighborhood had become a media encampment. The media trucks were stacked behind the roadblocks set a half block from the turnaround circle. The reporters were gathering into press conference-sized groups. And no fewer than five news helicopters were circling at an altitude above the department’s chopper. It all created a background cacophony that had already resulted in numerous complaints from residents on the street to police administrators at Parker Center downtown.
    Bosch was getting ready to lead the first group up to the crime scene. He first conferred with Jerry Edgar, who had been apprised of the case the night before.
    “All right, we’re going to take the ME and SID up first,” he said, pronouncing the acronyms as Emmy and Sid. “Then we’ll take the cadets and the dogs up. I want you to oversee that part of it.”
    “No problem. You see your pal the ME’s got her damn cameraman with her?”
    “Nothing we can do about it at the moment. Let’s just hope she gets bored and goes back