The Drop

wanted to be a cop when she grew up. A detective like him. He didn’t know if it was just a passing idea, but he rolled with it and began passing on what he knew. One of their favorite things to do was to go to a restaurant like Du-par’s and watch the other patrons and pull reads off their faces and mannerisms. Bosch was teaching her to look for tells.
    “That’s a good read,” he said. “Play it again.”
    They watched the video for the third time and this time Bosch picked up something new.
    “You see that. He looks at his watch real quick there after he signs.”
    “So?”
    “It just seems a little off to me. I mean, what’s time to a dead man? If he was going to jump, why would he wonder what time it was? It just seems like more of a businessman’s move. It makes me think he was going to meet somebody. Or someone was going to call. But no one did.”
    Bosch had already checked with the hotel and no call had come in or gone out of room 79 after Irving checked in. Bosch also had a report from forensics which examined Irving’s cell phone after Bosch had given the password his widow had provided. Irving had made no calls after a 5 P.M. call to his son Chad. It had lasted eight minutes. He had received three calls from his wife the following morning—after he was dead. By that time Deborah Irving was looking for him. She left messages each time telling her husband to call back.
    Bosch took over the controls of the video and played the check-in sequence once again. He then continued on, using the fast-forward control to move quickly through the chunks of time during the night when there was nothing happening at the front desk. His daughter eventually got bored and turned on her side to go to sleep.
    “I might need to go out,” he said to her. “You’ll be okay?”
    “Going back to see Hannah?”
    “No, I might go back to the hotel. You’ll be okay?”
    “Sure. I’ve got the Glock.”
    “Right.”
    The summer before, she had trained on a range and Bosch considered her proficient in weapon safety and marksmanship—in fact, she was scheduled to compete for the first time the following weekend. More important than her skills with the gun was her understanding of the responsibility of the weapon. He hoped she would never use the weapon outside of a range. But if the time came, she’d be ready.
    He stayed on the bed next to her and continued to watch the video. He saw nothing on it that intrigued him or that he felt he had to follow up on. He decided not to leave the house.
    Finished with the disc, he got up quietly, turned out the light and went out to the dining room. He was going to jump from the Irving case back to the Lily Price investigation. He opened his briefcase and spread out the files he had pulled that afternoon from the state’s Department of Probation and Parole.
    Clayton Pell had three convictions on his record as an adult. They were sexually motivated crimes that escalated over the ten years of his continued interaction with the justice system. He started at age twenty with indecent exposure, moved up to false imprisonment and indecent exposure at age twenty-one, and then three years later hit the big time with the abduction and forcible rape of a minor below the age of twelve. He got probation and county jail time for the first two convictions but served six years out of a ten-year sentence at Corcoran State Prison for the third fall. It was there that a barbaric justice was carried out by his fellow inmates.
    Bosch read through the details of the crimes. In each case the victim was a boy aged eight to ten years old. The first victim was a neighbor’s child. The second was a boy Pell had taken by the hand on a playground and led into a nearby restroom. The third crime involved lying in wait and more strategic planning. The victim was a boy who had gotten off a school bus and was walking home—a stretch of only three blocks—when Pell pulled up in his van and stopped. He told the boy he was with school security and showed him a badge. He said he needed to take the boy home because there had been an incident at school he had to inform his parents about. The boy complied and got in the van. Pell drove to a clearing and committed several sex acts upon the child in the van before releasing him and driving away.
    He did not leave DNA on the victim and was caught only because he blew through a red light after pulling out of the neighborhood. A camera took a picture of his van’s