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Authors: Michael Connelly
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of relentlessness.
What lit the match this time was Lexi Parks’s hands. She had obviously tried to fight her attacker. She had struggled and put her arms up to ward off the assault. But she was quickly overpowered by repeated blows to her face. Her hands fell back on the bed, palms up, almost as if she was raising them in surrender. It touched Bosch. It made him angry, made him want to find and hurt whoever had done this.
How could Haller defend the man who did this?
Harry went into the bathroom to fill a glass with water. He drank it while standing in the doorway and looking at the photos from the side. He worked to calm himself so that he could continue to professionally assess the photos and the crime scene.
He went back to the bed and studied the photos again and soon started drawing conclusions about the crime. He believed that the victim had been asleep in her bed. She was on the right side of a king, having left room for her husband on the left. It appeared to Bosch that the killer had surprised her in her sleep, straddling her and taking immediate control as she awoke. He probably put one hand over her mouth, maybe held a weapon with the other. She got her hands loose to fight and then he started striking her.
And he didn’t stop. Long after her defenses were down and she was incapacitated, she was struck over and over again with a hard object. The face of the victim in the photos bore no resemblance to the face Bosch had seen accompanying the many newspaper stories generated by her murder. The face of the victim in the photos in fact bore no resemblance to any face at all. The nose was literally gone, interred in the pulp of blood and tissue that had been her face. Both eye sockets were crushed and misshapen, pieces of broken teeth and bone shone brightly in the blood. The eyes were half-lidded and the normal singular focus was broken. One stared forward, the other down and to the left.
Bosch sat down on a chair in the corner of the room and looked at the grid of photos from afar. The only thing worse would have been his being at the real scene, which would have added a multisensory dimension to his revulsion. No murder scene ever smelled pleasant. No matter how fresh, no matter how clean the environment.
His eyes kept going to the hands and he noticed from his new position a slight discoloration to the victim’s skin on the left wrist. He got up to go back to the bed. The photo was a wide shot that displayed the entire body in situ. He bent over the photo with the magnifying glass and saw that the woman’s wrist had slight tan lines left by a thick bracelet or, most likely, a watch.
Since he had seen nothing in the summaries or reports about the murder being possibly motivated by robbery, the missing watch was curious to Bosch. Had the victim been wearing it at the time of the attack? Had she taken it off to sleep? Had it fallen or been pulled off during her struggle to live? Had it been taken by her attacker as a souvenir?
Bosch studied the bed table next to the body. There was a bottle of water, a prescription bottle, and a paperback novel, but the watch wasn’t there. He went back to the printouts and looked at the property report. Since the victim was murdered in her own home, the property report dealt primarily with items from the crime scene and the house that were specifically examined by the investigators or forensics team. There was nothing here about the watch. It had apparently not come off in the victim’s struggle. It had not been noted as having been found in the bedding, on the floor, or anywhere else.
Bosch next flipped back into the Chronological Log to check if he had missed a mention of the watch in the early stages of the investigation—before there was a focus on Da’Quan Foster. He found nothing and wrote a note about the watch on the outside of the file below his other notations.
He collected all the photos of the body from the bed and put the stack to the side in case his
What lit the match this time was Lexi Parks’s hands. She had obviously tried to fight her attacker. She had struggled and put her arms up to ward off the assault. But she was quickly overpowered by repeated blows to her face. Her hands fell back on the bed, palms up, almost as if she was raising them in surrender. It touched Bosch. It made him angry, made him want to find and hurt whoever had done this.
How could Haller defend the man who did this?
Harry went into the bathroom to fill a glass with water. He drank it while standing in the doorway and looking at the photos from the side. He worked to calm himself so that he could continue to professionally assess the photos and the crime scene.
He went back to the bed and studied the photos again and soon started drawing conclusions about the crime. He believed that the victim had been asleep in her bed. She was on the right side of a king, having left room for her husband on the left. It appeared to Bosch that the killer had surprised her in her sleep, straddling her and taking immediate control as she awoke. He probably put one hand over her mouth, maybe held a weapon with the other. She got her hands loose to fight and then he started striking her.
And he didn’t stop. Long after her defenses were down and she was incapacitated, she was struck over and over again with a hard object. The face of the victim in the photos bore no resemblance to the face Bosch had seen accompanying the many newspaper stories generated by her murder. The face of the victim in the photos in fact bore no resemblance to any face at all. The nose was literally gone, interred in the pulp of blood and tissue that had been her face. Both eye sockets were crushed and misshapen, pieces of broken teeth and bone shone brightly in the blood. The eyes were half-lidded and the normal singular focus was broken. One stared forward, the other down and to the left.
Bosch sat down on a chair in the corner of the room and looked at the grid of photos from afar. The only thing worse would have been his being at the real scene, which would have added a multisensory dimension to his revulsion. No murder scene ever smelled pleasant. No matter how fresh, no matter how clean the environment.
His eyes kept going to the hands and he noticed from his new position a slight discoloration to the victim’s skin on the left wrist. He got up to go back to the bed. The photo was a wide shot that displayed the entire body in situ. He bent over the photo with the magnifying glass and saw that the woman’s wrist had slight tan lines left by a thick bracelet or, most likely, a watch.
Since he had seen nothing in the summaries or reports about the murder being possibly motivated by robbery, the missing watch was curious to Bosch. Had the victim been wearing it at the time of the attack? Had she taken it off to sleep? Had it fallen or been pulled off during her struggle to live? Had it been taken by her attacker as a souvenir?
Bosch studied the bed table next to the body. There was a bottle of water, a prescription bottle, and a paperback novel, but the watch wasn’t there. He went back to the printouts and looked at the property report. Since the victim was murdered in her own home, the property report dealt primarily with items from the crime scene and the house that were specifically examined by the investigators or forensics team. There was nothing here about the watch. It had apparently not come off in the victim’s struggle. It had not been noted as having been found in the bedding, on the floor, or anywhere else.
Bosch next flipped back into the Chronological Log to check if he had missed a mention of the watch in the early stages of the investigation—before there was a focus on Da’Quan Foster. He found nothing and wrote a note about the watch on the outside of the file below his other notations.
He collected all the photos of the body from the bed and put the stack to the side in case his
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