Vengeance(96)

“I will never leave you, General,” Manuel said. His voice was low and hoarse, the voice of the rebels and criminals of Santa Lucia de Piedras, the General thought. He had done his duty. They had no right to haunt him.

“If you give me trouble, you will wind up in the gutter,” the General said. He raised his voice so angrily that he did not hear the familiar wheeze and grunt of the school bus stopping.

“Give me back my son,” said Manuel.

“You have no son.”

“He was ten years old, a mere boy, no bigger than Alejandro.”

“I know nothing of him.” But the General remembered the bodies in the plaza, men and women and other, smaller corpses — they had spared no living thing, not even the chickens and donkeys. And what did a few peasants more or less matter? The hills were full of bandits and rebels.

“I was gone on the day of the massacre,” said Manuel. “I came home to find them all dead.”

“It was war,” said the General. “It was an accident of war.”

Now Manuel gave a thin, ghastly smile. “You drink blood,” he said.

“That’s enough.” The General slipped his hand into his pocket for the stubby handgun that never left his side.

Manuel took a step toward him. He was so unsteady that he lurched against one of the ornamental planters beside the pool. “Give me back my son,” he cried in a voice fit to wake the dead. “Before I die, give me my son.”

He took another step, and it seemed to the General that the old man was covered in blood, that he had risen from the wet red ground of Santa Lucia de Piedras or from the filth of the interrogation room, that he was advancing irresistibly. The General raised his pistol, and, though he heard a cry at the very periphery of his awareness, he fired.

Manuel’s hat was flung off; his white shirt blossomed red, and he collapsed at the edge of the pool, his blood spoiling the pure aquamarine of the water. He looked past the General and struggled to say one last thing, his throat already rattling: “You see now what your father is.”

And the General knew, even before he turned around, that Manuel spoke to Alejandro.





A FINE MIST OF BLOOD

BY MICHAEL CONNELLY


The DNA hits came in the mail, in yellow envelopes from the regional crime lab’s genetics unit. Fingerprint matches were less formal; notification usually came by e-mail. Case-to-case data hits were rare birds and were handled in yet a different manner — direct contact between the synthesizer and the submitting investigator.

Harry Bosch had a day off and was in the waiting area outside the school principal’s office when he got the call. More like a half a day off. His plan was to head downtown to the PAB after dealing with the summons from the school’s high command.

The buzzing of his phone brought an immediate response from the woman behind the gateway desk.

“There’s no cell phones in here,” she said.

“I’m not a student,” Bosch said, stating the obvious as he pulled the offending instrument from his pocket.

“Doesn’t matter. There’s no cell phones in here.”

“I’ll take it outside.”

“I won’t come out to find you. If you miss your appointment then you’ll have to reschedule, and your daughter’s situation won’t be resolved.”

“I’ll risk it. I’ll just be in the hallway, okay?”

He pushed through the door into the hallway as he connected to the call. The hallway was quiet, as it was the middle of the fourth period. The ID on the screen had said simply LAPD data but that had been enough to give Bosch a stirring of excitement.

The call was from a tech named Malek Pran. Bosch had never dealt with him and had to ask him to repeat his name twice. Pran was from Data Evaluation and Theory — known internally as the DEATH squad — which was part of a new effort by the Open-Unsolved Unit to clear cases through what was called data synthesizing.

For the past three years the DEATH squad had been digitizing archived murder books — the hard-copy investigative records — of unsolved cases, creating a massive database of easily accessible and comparable information on unsolved crimes. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions — anything that an investigator thought important enough to note in an investigative record was now digitized and could be compared with other cases.

The project had actually been initiated simply to create space. The city’s records archives were bursting at the seams with acres of files and file boxes. Shifting it all to digital would make room in the cramped department.

Pran said he had a case-to-case hit. A witness listed in a cold case Bosch had submitted for synthesizing had come up in another case, also a homicide, as a witness once again. Her name was Diane Gables. Bosch’s case was from 1999 and the second case was from 2007, which was too recent to fall under the purview of the Open-Unsolved Unit.