Angle of Investigation_ Three Harry Bosch Stories - Michael Connelly [24]
The first name he entered came back with multiple hits for drunk driving arrests. This didn’t get Bosch particularly excited but he circled the name on the list anyway and moved on. No hits came up on the next seven and he crossed them out. The next name after that scored a hit with an arrest for disturbing the peace. Bosch circled it but again was not feeling the tug of a hook yet.
The process continued with most of the names coming up clean. It wasn’t until he entered the twenty-ninth name that Bosch looked at the screen and felt a tightness grip in his chest.
The twenty-ninth name was Jonathan Gillespie. He had been described in the murder book as a dog breeder who sold miniature poodles in 1972. He had sold the dog Frenchy to June Wilkins two years before her death and was interviewed by Speigelman and Finster when they were trying to run down the dog show angle on the case. According to the NCIC records, Gillespie went to prison on a rape charge in 1981 and served six years in prison. He was now a registered sexual offender living in Huntington Beach. There had been no other arrests since 1981. He was sixty-eight years old.
Bosch underlined the name on the list and wrote down the case number. It had an LAPD prefix. Though he immediately wanted to go to work on Gillespie, he finished running the rest of the names through the NCIC database first. He got two more hits, one for a DUI and one for a hit-and-run accident with injuries. He circled the names to keep with his procedure but was not excited about them.
Before signing out of the NCIC system, he switched over to the crime-tracking database and entered ketamine hydrochloride into the search window. He got several hits back, all within the last fifteen years, and learned that the substance was being used increasingly as a date rape drug. He scrolled through the cases listed and didn’t see anything that linked them to June Wilkins. He logged off the database to begin his pursuit of Jonathan Gillespie.
Closed cases from 1981 had gone to microfiche archives and the department was slowly moving backward and entering case information into the department’s computerized database. But 1981 was too far back. The only way Bosch would be able to look at the sexual assault case that had sent Gillespie to prison would be to go to the records archives, which were housed over at Piper Tech, the storage facility and air squadron base at the edge of downtown.
Bosch went to his side of the desk and wrote a note to Rider telling her he had come up with a hot angle and was chasing it through Piper Tech. The phone on his desk started to ring. He finished the note and grabbed the phone while standing up to reach the note over to Rider’s desk.
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“Open-Unsolved, this is Bosch.”
“Harry, it’s Larkin.”
“I was just going to call you.”
“Really? Why?”
“I have a name for you.”
“Funny, I have a name for you. I matched your palm and you’re not going to like it.”
“Jonathan Gillespie.”
“What?”
“Jonathan Gillespie.”
“Who is that?”
“That’s not your match?”
“Not quite.”
Bosch sat back down at his desk. He pulled a pad over in front of him and got ready to write.
“Who did you come up with?”
“The palm print belonged to one of ours. Guy must have left it while at the crime scene. Sorry about that.”
“Who is it?”
“The name is Ronald Eckersly. He worked for us ’sixty-five to ’eighty-five, then he pulled the pin.”
Bosch almost didn’t hear anything else Larkin said.
“… shows that he was a patrol lieutenant upon retirement. You could go to personnel and get a current location if you need to talk to him. But it looks like he might have just screwed up and put his hand on the wall while he was at the scene. Back then they didn’t know anything about crime scene protocol and some of these guys would—hell, about twenty years ago I was dusting