Trunk Music

There was a cross-cut pattern through the arch and then the print was cut off by the edge of the bumper.
    “Tennis shoe,” Donovan said. “Maybe a work shoe.”
    After he photographed it, he moved the wand around the trunk again, but there was nothing but wipe marks.
    “Okay,” Donovan said. “Open it.”
    Using a penlight to guide his way, Bosch made it to the driver’s door and bent in to pull the trunk release. Shortly afterward, the smell of death flooded the shed.
    It looked to Bosch as though the body had not shifted during the transport. But the victim took on a ghoulish look under the harsh examination of the laser, his face almost skeletal, like the monsters painted in Day-Glo in fun-house hallways. The blood seemed blacker and the bone chips in the jagged wound were luminescent in bright counterpoint.
    On his clothes, small strands of hair and tiny threads glowed. Bosch moved in with a pair of tweezers and a plastic vial like the kind made to hold a stack of silver half dollars. He carefully picked these pieces of potential evidence off the clothing and collected them in the vial. It was painstaking work and there was nothing much there. He knew this kind of material could be found on anybody at anytime. It was common.
    When he was done he said to Donovan, “The tail of the jacket. I flipped it up to check for a wallet.”
    “Okay, pull it back down.”
    Bosch did so, and there on Aliso’s hip was another footprint. It matched the footprint on the bumper but was more complete. On the heel was another circle pattern with off-shooting lines. In the lower arch was what looked like a brand name but it was unreadable.
    Regardless of whether they could identify the shoe, Bosch knew it was a good find. It meant that a careful killer had made a mistake. At least one. If nothing else, it gave rise to the hope that there might be other mistakes, that they might eventually lead him to the killer.
    “Take the wand.”
    Bosch did so and Donovan did his thing with the camera again.
    “I’m just shooting this to document it, but we’ll take the jacket off before the body goes,” he said.
    Next Donovan moved the laser up around the inside of the trunk lid. Here the laser illuminated numerous fingerprints, mostly thumbprints, where a hand would have been placed to prop the lid open while loading things in or out. Many of the prints overlapped each other, a sign that they were old, and Bosch knew right away they probably belonged to the victim himself.
    “I’ll shoot these, but don’t count on anything,” Donovan said.
    “I know.”
    When he was done, Donovan put the wand and the camera on top of the laser box and said, “Okay, why don’t we take this fellow out of there, lay ’im out and scan ’im real quick before he’s outta here?”
    Without waiting for an answer, he flipped the fluorescents back on and everybody put their hands to their eyes as the harsh light blinded them. A few moments later the body movers and Matthews went to the trunk and started transferring the corpse to a black plastic body bag they had unfolded on a gurney.
    “This guy is loose,” Matthews said as they put the corpse down.
    “Yeah,” Bosch said. “What do you think?”
    “Forty-two to forty-eight. But let me do some stuff and see what we’ve got.”
    But first Donovan put out the lights again and moved the wand over the body, from the head down. The tear pools in the eye sockets glowed white in the light. There were a few hairs and fibers on the dead man’s face and Bosch dutifully collected them. There was also a slight abrasion high on the right cheekbone, which had been hidden when the body was lying on its right side in the trunk.
    “He could’ve been hit or it mighta been from being shoved into the trunk,” Donovan said.
    As the beam moved down over the chest, Donovan got excited.
    “Well lookee here.”
    Glowing in the laser light were what looked like a complete handprint on the right shoulder of the leather jacket and two smudged thumbprints, one on each of the lapels. Donovan bent down very close to look.
    “This is treated leather, it doesn’t absorb the acids in the prints. We caught a major break here, Harry. This guy wears anything else and forget it. The hand is excellent. These thumbs didn’t take…I think we can raise them up with some glue. Harry, bend one of the lapels over.”
    Bosch reached for the left lapel and carefully turned the cloth over. There on the inside of the crease were