City Of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

to call your neighbor, Mr. Ulrich, and tell him not to mention it to any reporters, either.”
    On the way out of the house Bosch asked Brasher if she wanted her flashlight and she said she didn’t want to bother carrying it while she was helping search the hillside.
    “Get it to me whenever,” she said.
    Bosch liked the answer. It meant he would get at least one more chance to see her.
    Back at the circle Bosch found Edgar lecturing the academy cadets.
    “The golden rule of the crime scene, people, is don’t touch anything until it has been studied, photographed and charted.”
    Bosch walked into the circle.
    “Okay, we ready?”
    “They’re ready,” Edgar said. He nodded toward two of the cadets, who were holding metal detectors. “I borrowed those from SID.”
    Bosch nodded and gave the cadets and Brasher the same safety speech he had given the forensic crew. They then headed up to the crime scene, Bosch introducing Brasher to Edgar and then letting his partner lead the way through the checkpoint. He took up the rear, walking behind Brasher.
    “We’ll see if you want to be a homicide detective by the end of the day,” he said.
    “Anything’s got to be better than chasing the radio and washing puke out of the back of your car at the end of every shift.”
    “I remember those days.”
    Bosch and Edgar spread the twelve cadets and Brasher out in the areas adjacent to the stand of acacia trees and had them begin conducting side-by-side searches. Bosch then went down and brought up the two K-9 teams to supplement the search.
    Once things were under way he left Edgar with the cadets and went back to the acacias to see what progress had been made. He found Kohl sitting on an equipment crate and supervising the placement of wooden stakes into the ground so that strings could be used to set the excavation grid.
    Bosch had worked one prior case with Kohl and knew she was very thorough and good at what she did. She was in her late thirties with a tennis player’s build and tan. Bosch had once run across her at a city park, where she was playing tennis with a twin sister. They had drawn a crowd. It looked like somebody hitting the ball off a mirrored wall.
    Kohl’s straight blonde hair fell forward and hid her eyes as she looked down at the oversized clipboard on her lap. She was making notations on a piece of paper with a grid already printed on it. Bosch looked over her shoulder at the chart. Kohl was labeling the individual blocks with letters of the alphabet as the corresponding stakes were placed in the ground. At the top of the page she had written “City of Bones.”
    Bosch reached down and tapped the chart where she had written the caption.
    “Why do you call it that?”
    She shrugged her shoulders.
    “Because we’re setting out the streets and the blocks of what will become a city to us,” she said, running her fingers over some of the lines on the chart in illustration. “At least while we’re working here it will feel like it. Our little city.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “In every murder is the tale of a city,” he said.
    Kohl looked up at him.
    “Who said that?”
    “I don’t know. Somebody did.”
    He turned his attention to Corazon, who was squatting over the small bones on the surface of the soil, studying them while the lens of the video camera studied her. He was thinking of something to say about it when his rover was keyed and he took it off his belt.
    “Bosch here.”
    “Edgar. Better come on back over here, Harry. We already have something.”
    “Right.”
    Edgar was standing in an almost level spot in the brush about forty yards from the acacia trees. A half dozen of the cadets and Brasher had formed a circle and were looking down at something in the two-foot-high brush. The police chopper was circling in a tighter circle above.
    Bosch got to the circle and looked down. It was a child’s skull partially submerged in the soil, its hollow eyes staring up at him.
    “Nobody touched it,”