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pained.
    “When this kid was in the hospital with the hematoma, why wouldn’t he tell the doctors what was happening to him? What about his teachers, his friends?”
    “You know the answers to that as well as me, Detective,” Golliher said. “Children are reliant on their parents. They are scared of them and they love them, don’t want to lose them. Sometimes there is no explanation for why they don’t cry out for help.”
    “What about all these fractures and such? Why didn’t the doctors see it and do something?”
    “That’s the irony of what I do. I see the history and tragedy so clearly. But with a living patient it might not be apparent. If the parents came in with a plausible explanation for the boy’s injury, what reason would a doctor have to X-ray an arm or a leg or a chest? None. And so the nightmare goes unnoticed.”
    Unsatisfied, Edgar shook his head and walked to the far corner of the room.
    “Anything else, Doctor?” Bosch asked.
    Golliher checked his notes and then folded his arms.
    “That’s it on a scientific level—you’ll get the report. On a purely personal level, I hope you find the person who did this. They will deserve whatever they get, and then some.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “We’ll get him,” Edgar said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
    They walked out of the building and got into Bosch’s car. Bosch just sat there for a moment before starting the engine. Finally, he hit the steering wheel hard with the heel of his palm, sending a shock down the injured side of his chest.
    “You know it doesn’t make me believe in God like him,” Edgar said. “Makes me believe in aliens, little green men from outer space.”
    Bosch looked over at him. Edgar was leaning his head against the side window, looking down at the floor of the car.
    “How so?”
    “Because a human couldn’t have done this to his own kid. A spaceship must’ve come down and abducted the kid and done all that stuff to him. Only explanation.”
    “Yeah, I wish that was on the checklist, Jerry. Then we could all just go home.”
    Bosch put the car into drive.
    “I need a drink.”
    He started driving out of the lot.
    “Not me, man,” Edgar said. “I just want to go see my kid and hug him until this gets better.”
    They didn’t speak again until they got over to Parker Center.

8
     
    B OSCH and Edgar rode the elevator to the fifth floor and went into the SID lab, where they had a meeting set up with Antoine Jesper, the lead criminalist assigned to the bones case. Jesper met them at the security fence and took them back. He was a young black man with gray eyes and smooth skin. He wore a white lab coat that swayed and flapped with his long strides and always moving arms.
    “This way, guys,” he said. “I don’t have a lot but what I got is yours.”
    He took them through the main lab, where only a handful of other criminalists were working, and into the drying room, a large climate-controlled space where clothing and other material evidence from cases were spread on stainless steel drying tables and examined. It was the only place that could rival the autopsy floor of the medical examiner’s office in the stench of decay.
    Jesper led them to two tables where Bosch saw the open backpack and several pieces of clothing blackened with soil and fungus. There was also a plastic sandwich bag filled with an unrecognizable lump of black decay.
    “Water and mud got into the backpack,” Jesper said. “Leached in over time, I guess.”
    Jesper took a pen out of the pocket of his lab coat and extended it into a pointer. He used it to help illustrate his commentary.
    “We’ve got your basic backpack containing three sets of clothes and what was probably a sandwich or some kind of food item. More specifically, three T-shirts, three underwear, three sets of socks. And the food item. There was also an envelope, or what was left of an envelope. You don’t see that here because documents has it. But don’t get your