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hopes up, guys. It was in worse shape than that sandwich— if it was a sandwich.”
    Bosch nodded. He made a list of the contents in his notebook.
    “Any identifiers?” he asked.
    Jesper shook his head.
    “No personal identifiers on the clothing or in the bag,” he said. “But two things to note. First, this shirt here has a brand-name identifier. ‘Solid Surf.’ Says it across the chest. You can’t see it now but I picked it up with the black light. Might help, might not. If you are not familiar with the term ‘Solid Surf,’ I can tell you that it is a skateboarding reference.”
    “Got it,” Bosch said.
    “Next is the outside flap of the bag.”
    He used his pointer to flip over the flap.
    “Cleaned this up a little bit and came up with this.”
    Bosch leaned over the table to look. The bag was made of blue canvas. On the flap was a clear demarcation of color forming a large letter B at the center.
    “It looks like there was some kind of adhesive applicate at one time on the bag,” Jesper said. “It’s gone now and I don’t really know if that occurred before or after this thing was put in the ground. My guess is before. It looks like it was peeled off.”
    Bosch stepped back from the table and wrote a few lines in his notebook. He then looked at Jesper.
    “Okay, Antoine, good stuff. Anything else?”
    “Not on this stuff.”
    “Then let’s go to documents.”
    Jesper led the way again through the central lab and then into a sub-lab where he had to enter a combination into a door lock to enter.
    The documents lab contained two rows of desks that were all empty. Each desk had a horizontal light box and a magnifying glass mounted on a pivot. Jesper went to the middle desk in the second row. The nameplate on the desk said Bernadette Fornier. Bosch knew her. They had worked a case previously in which a suicide note had been forged. He knew she did good work.
    Jesper picked up a plastic evidence pouch that was sitting in the middle of the desk. He unzipped it and removed two plastic viewing sleeves. One contained an unfolded envelope that was brown and smeared with black fungus. The other contained a deteriorated rectangular piece of paper that was broken into three parts along the folds and was also grossly discolored by decay and fungus.
    “This is what happens when stuff gets wet, man,” Jesper said. “It took Bernie all day just to unfold the envelope and separate the letter. As you can see, it came apart at the folds. And as far as whether we’ll ever be able to tell what was in the letter, it doesn’t look good.”
    Bosch turned on the light box and put the plastic sleeves down on it. He swung the magnifier over and studied the envelope and the letter it had once contained. There was nothing remotely readable on either document. One thing he noted was that it looked like there was no stamp on the envelope.
    “Damn,” he said.
    He flipped the sleeves over and kept looking. Edgar came over next to him as if to confirm the obvious.
    “Woulda been nice,” he said.
    “What will she do now?” Bosch asked Jesper.
    “Well, she’ll probably try some dyes, some different lights. Try to get something that reacts with the ink, brings it up. But she wasn’t too optimistic yesterday. So like I said, I wouldn’t be getting my hopes up about it.”
    Bosch nodded and turned off the light.

9
     
    N EAR the back entrance to the Hollywood Division station was a bench with large sand-filled ashtrays on either side. It was called the Code 7, after the radio call for out-of-service or on break. At 11:15 P.M. on Saturday night Bosch was the only occupant on the Code 7 bench. He wasn’t smoking, though he wished he was. He was waiting. The bench was dimly lit by the lights over the station’s back door and had a view of the parking lot jointly shared by the station and the firehouse on the back end of the city complex.
    Bosch watched as the patrol units came in from the three-to-eleven shift and the