Read Online Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Short Stories by Michael Connelly - Free Book Online

worked it. Most of these cases, they coulda-shoulda been cleared back in the day.”
    “Well, you have till I’m finished with this summary,” Rider cautioned. “After that we better get flying on something, Harry.”
    Bosch blew out his breath in mock indignation and flipped a large section of summaries and other reports over in the binder until he got to the back. He then turned to the tab marked FORENSICS and looked at an evidence inventory report.
    “Okay, we’ve got latents, you happy?”
    Rider looked up from her computer for the first time.
    “That could work,” she said. “Tied to the suspect?”
    Bosch flipped back to the evidence report to look for the summary ascribed to the specific evidence logged in the inventory. He found a one-paragraph explanation that said a right palm print had been located on the wall of the bathroom where the body had been found. Its location was sixty-six inches from the floor and seven inches right of center above the toilet.
    “Well…”
    “Well, what?”
    “It’s a palm.”
    She groaned.
    It was not a good hook. Databases containing palm prints were relatively new in law enforcement. Only in the past decade had palm prints been seriously collected by the FBI and the California Department of Justice. In California there were approximately ten thousand palms on file compared with the millions of fingerprints. The Wilkins murder was thirty-three years old. What were the chances that the person who had left a palm print on the wall of the victim’s bathroom would be printed two decades or more later? Ride"ju later?r had answered that one with her groan.
    “It’s still worth a shot,” Bosch said optimistically. “I’ll put in the SID request.”
    “You do that. Meantime, as soon as I’m done here I’ll see if I can find a case with a real hook we can run with.”
    “Hold your horses, Kiz. I still haven’t run any of the names out of the book. Give me today with this and then we’ll see.”
    “Not good to get emotionally involved, Harry,” she responded. “The Laura syndrome, you know.”
    “It’s not like that. I’m just curious. It was sort of my first case.”
    “No, it wasn’t.”
    “You know what I mean. I remember thinking she was an old lady when the detectives gave me the rundown on it. But she was only forty-six. I was half her age, so I thought anybody forty-six was old and had had a good run of it. I didn’t feel too bad about it.”
    “Now you do.”
    “Forty-six was too young, Kiz.”
    “Well, you’re not going to bring her back.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “I know that.”
    “You ever seen that movie?”
    “ Laura ? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Detective falls in love with the murder victim. You?”
    “Yeah, but it doesn’t hold up too well. Sort of a parlor room murder case. I liked the Burt Reynolds take on it in the eighties. Sharky’s Machine . With Rachel Ward. You seen it?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Had Bernie Casey in it. When I was a youngster I always thought he was a fine-looking man.”
    Bosch looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
    “Before I switched teams,” she said. “Then I rented it a couple years ago and Bernie didn’t do it for me. I liked Rachel Ward.”
    Her bringing up her sexuality seemed to put an uneasiness between them. She turned back to her computer. Bosch looked down at the evidence report.
    “Well, we know one thing,” he said after a while. “We’re looking for a left-handed man.”
    She turned back to look at him.
    “How do you know that?”
    “He put his right hand on the wall over the toilet.”
    “And?”
    “It’s just like a gun, Kiz. He aimed with his left hand because he’s left-handed.”
    She shook her head dismissively.
    “Men…”
    She went back to work on her computer, and Bosch went back to the murder book. He wrote down the information he would need to give to the latent prints section of the Scientific Investigation Division in order for a tech to look up the palm print in their