City Of Bones

then?”
    Delacroix nodded.
    “That means yes?”
    “Yes. Yes.”
    There was a soft knock on the door. Bosch nodded to Edgar, who got up and went out. Bosch assumed it was the prosecutor but he wasn’t going to interrupt things now to make introductions. He pressed on.
    “What did you do next? After Arthur was dead.”
    “I took him out the back and down the steps to the garage. Nobody saw me. I put him in the trunk of my car. I then went back to his room, I cleaned up and put some of his clothes in a bag.”
    “What kind of bag?”
    “It was his school bag. His backpack.”
    “What clothes did you put into it?”
    “I don’t remember. Whatever I grabbed out of the drawer, you know?”
    “All right. Can you describe this backpack?”
    Delacroix shrugged his shoulders.
    “I don’t remember. It was just a normal backpack.”
    “Okay, after you put clothes in it, what did you do?”
    “I put it in the trunk. And I closed it.”
    “What car was that?”
    “That was my ’seventy-two Impala.”
    “You still have it?”
    “I wish; it’d be a classic. But I wrecked it. That was my first DUI.”
    “What do you mean ‘wrecked’?”
    “I totaled it. I wrapped it around a palm tree in Beverly Hills. It was taken to a junkyard somewhere.”
    Bosch knew that tracing a thirty-year-old car would be difficult, but news that the vehicle had been totaled ended all hope of finding it and checking the trunk for physical evidence.
    “Then let’s go back to your story. You had the body in the trunk. When did you dispose of it?”
    “That night. Late. When he didn’t come home from school that day we started looking for him.”
    “We?”
    “Sheila and me. We drove around and we looked. We went to all the skateboard spots.”
    “And all the time Arthur’s body was in the trunk of the car you were in?”
    “That’s right. You see, I didn’t want her to know what I had done. I was protecting her.”
    “I understand. Did you make a missing person report with the police?”
    Delacroix shook his head.
    “No. I went to the Wilshire station and talked to a cop. He was right there where you walk in. At the desk. He told me Arthur probably ran away and he’d be back. To give it a few days. So I didn’t make out the report.”
    Bosch was trying to cover as many markers as he could, going over story facts that could be verified and therefore used to buttress the confession when Delacroix and his lawyer withdrew it and denied it. The best way to do this was with hard evidence or scientific fact. But cross-matching stories was also important. Sheila Delacroix had already told Bosch and Edgar that she and her father had driven to the police station on the night Arthur didn’t come home. Her father went in while she waited in the car. But Bosch found no record of a missing person report. It now seemed to fit. He had a marker that would help validate the confession.
    “Mr. Delacroix, are you comfortable talking to me?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “You are not feeling coerced or threatened in any way?”
    “No, I’m fine.”
    “You are talking freely to me, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Okay, when did you take your son’s body from the trunk?”
    “I did that later. After Sheila went to sleep I went back out to the car and I took it to where I could hide the body.”
    “And where was that?”
    “Up in the hills. Laurel Canyon.”
    “Can you remember more specifically where?”
    “Not too much. I went up Lookout Mountain past the school. Up in around there. It was dark and I… you know, I was drinking because I felt so bad about the accident, you know.”
    “Accident?”
    “Hitting Arthur too hard like I did.”
    “Oh. So up past the school, do you remember what road you were on?”
    “Wonderland.”
    “Wonderland? Are you sure?”
    “No, but that’s what I think it was. I’ve spent all these years… I tried to forget as much about this as I could.”
    “So you’re saying you were intoxicated when you hid the body?”
    “I was drunk. Don’t you think I’d have to be?”
    “It doesn’t matter what I think.”
    Bosch felt the first tremor of danger go through him. While Delacroix was offering a complete confession, Bosch had elicited information that might be damaging to the case as well. Delacroix being drunk could explain why the body had apparently been hurriedly dropped in the hillside woods and quickly covered with loose soil and pine needles. But Bosch recalled his own difficult climb