The Drop - Michael Connelly [9]
“Harry, you want me to go up and talk to those guys?” Chu asked.
“No, it always starts with the body and goes from there. Always.”
Chu was used to working cold cases, where there was never a crime scene. Only reports. Also, he had issues with seeing dead bodies. It was the reason he’d opted for the cold case squad. No fresh kills, no murder scenes, no autopsies. This time things would be different.
Marmont Lane was a steep and narrow road. They came to the death scene at the northwestern corner of the hotel. The forensics team had put up a canopy over the scene to guard against visual intrusion from media choppers and the houses that terraced the hills behind the hotel.
Before stepping under the canopy, Bosch looked up the side of the hotel. He saw a man in a suit leaning over the parapet, looking down from a balcony on the top floor. He guessed it was Glanville or Solomon.
Bosch went under the canopy and found a bustle of activities involving forensic techs, coroner’s investigators and police photographers. At the center of it all was Gabriel Van Atta, whom Bosch had known for years. Van Atta had spent twenty-five years working for the LAPD as a crime scene tech and supervisor before retiring and taking a job with the coroner. Now he got a salary and a pension and still worked crime scenes. That counted as a break for Bosch. He knew that Van Atta wouldn’t be cagey about anything. He would tell Harry exactly what he thought.
Bosch and Chu stood under the canopy but stayed on the periphery. The scene belonged to the techs at the moment. Bosch could tell that the body had been turned over from the impact point and that they were far along. The body would soon be removed and transported to the medical examiner’s office. This bothered him but it was the cost of coming into a case so late.
The gruesome extent of the injuries from seven floors of gravity was on full display. Bosch could almost feel his partner’s revulsion at the sight. Harry decided to give him a break.
“Tell you what, I’ll handle this and meet you upstairs.”
“Really?”
“Really. But you’re not getting out of the autopsy.”
“That’s a deal, Harry.”
The conversation had drawn Van Atta’s attention.
“Harry B.,” he said. “I thought you were still working cold cases.”
“This one’s a special, Gabe. All right if I step in?”
Meaning the inner circle of the death scene. Van Atta waved him in. As Chu ducked out from under the canopy, Bosch grabbed a pair of paper booties from a dispenser and put them on over his shoes. He then put on rubber gloves and worked his way as best he could around the coagulated blood on the sidewalk and squatted down next to what was left of George Thomas Irving.
Death takes everything, including one’s dignity. George’s naked and battered body was surrounded on all sides by technicians who viewed it as a piece of work. His earthly vessel had been reduced to a ripped bag of skin containing shattered bones and organs and blood vessels. His body had bled out through every natural orifice and many new ones created by his impact on the sidewalk. His skull was shattered, leaving his head and face grossly misshapen like it would be in a fun house mirror. His left eye had broken free of its orbit and hung loosely on his cheek. His chest had been crushed by the impact and several sheared bones from the ribs and clavicle protruded through the skin.
Unblinking, Bosch studied the body carefully, looking for the unusual on a canvas that was anything but usual. He searched the inside of the arms for needle tracks, the fingernails for foreign debris.
“I got here late,” he said. “Anything I should know?”
“I’m thinking the guy hit face-first which is very unusual, even for a suicide,” Van Atta said. “And I want to draw your attention to something here.”
He pointed to the victim’s right arm and then the left, which were spread in the blood puddle.
“Every bone in both arms is broken, Harry. Shattered, actually. But we have no compound injuries, no breaking of