The Drop(31)
“And it’s not because he’s a suspect?”
“No, he was too young. We know he’s not the killer. But he’s a witness.”
She shook her head.
“I’ve been talking to him four times a week for nearly six months. I think if he had witnessed this girl’s murder, it would have come up on some level, subconscious or not.”
Bosch held up his hands to stop her.
“Not an eyewitness. He wasn’t there and probably doesn’t even know a thing about her. But I think he knew the killer. He can help me. Here, just take a look at this.”
He opened his briefcase on the floor between his feet. He pulled out the original Lily Price murder book and quickly opened it to the plastic sleeves containing the faded Polaroid photos of the crime scene. Stone got up and came around to the side of his chair so she could look.
“Okay, these are really old and faded but if you look at the victim’s neck, you can make out the pattern left by the ligature. She was strangled.”
Bosch heard her sharp intake of breath.
“Oh, my god,” she said.
He closed the binder quickly and looked up at her. She had brought one hand to her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were used to seeing stuff like—”
“I am, I am. It’s just that you never get used to it. My specialty is sexual deviancy and dysfunction. To see the ultimate . . .”
She pointed to the closed binder.
“That’s what I try to stop. It’s awful to see it.”
Bosch nodded and she told him to go back to the photos. He reopened the binder and returned to the plastic sleeves. He chose a close-up of the victim’s neck and pointed out the vague indentation on Lily Price’s skin.
“You see what I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” Stone said. “Poor girl.”
“Okay, now look at this one.”
He switched to a different Polaroid on the next sleeve and told her once again to look at the ligature pattern. There was a noticeable indentation in the skin.
“I see it but what does it mean?”
“The angle is different on this photo and it shows the top line of the ligature. The first shot shows the lower line.”
He flipped the sleeve back and used his finger to outline the differences between the two shots.
“You see it?”
“Yes. But I’m not following. You have two lines. What do they mean?”
“Well, the lines don’t match. They’re on different levels of her neck. So it means that they are the top and bottom edges of the ligature. Take them together and we get an idea of how wide the ligature was and, more important, what it was.”
Spacing his thumb and forefinger he traced two lines on one of the photos, outlining a ligature that would have been almost two inches wide.
“It’s all we have after so long,” he said. “The autopsy photos weren’t in the archives file. So these photos are it, and they show that the ligature was at least an inch and a half wide on the neck.”
“Like a belt?”
“Exactly. And then look at this. Right under the ear we have another indentation, another pattern.”
He went to another photo in the second sleeve.
“It looks like a square.”
“Right. Like a square belt buckle. Now let’s go to the blood.”
He flipped to the first sleeve and zeroed in on the first three Polaroids. They all showed shots of the blood smear on the victim’s neck.
“Just one drop of blood that was smeared on her neck. It’s right in the middle of the ligature pattern, meaning it could have been transferred from the ligature. Twenty-two years ago their theory was that the guy was cut and was bleeding and a drop fell on her. He wiped it away but left the smear.”
“But you think it was a transfer.”
“Right. And that’s where Pell comes in. It was his blood—his eight-year-old blood on her. How did it get there? Well, if we go with the transfer theory, it came off the belt. So the real question is not how did it get on Lily, it’s how did it get on the belt?”
Bosch closed the binder and returned it to his briefcase. He pulled out the thick file from the Department of Probation and Parole. He held it up with two hands and shook it.
“Right here. I told you last night when you said you could not reveal client confidences that I already had his PSI evaluations. Well, I read them last night after I got home and there’s something here and it ties in with your whole thing about repetitive behavior and—”
“He was whipped with a belt.”
Bosch smiled.
“Careful, Doctor, you don’t want to be revealing confidences. Especially because you don’t have to. It’s all right here. Every time Pell got a psych evaluation, he told the same story. When he was eight years old, he and his mother lived with a guy who abused him physically and eventually sexually. It was probably what sent him down the path he’s been on. But the physical abuse included being whipped with a belt.”