“By the way…”
Bosch reached down and rapped his knuckles on the file drawer.
“I forgot my key,” he said. “You have a key I can open this with? I need my files.”
“No, no key. Garcia turned in the only one. He said that was all he got from Dockweiler.”
Bosch knew that Garcia was the last detective to occupy the desk and that he had inherited it from Dockweiler. Both were casualties of the budget crunch. He’d heard in the office scuttlebutt that both men left law enforcement after being laid off. Garcia became a schoolteacher and Dockweiler saved his city paycheck and pension by transferring to the Public Works Department, where they had an opening in code enforcement.
“Anybody else have a key around here?” Bosch asked.
“Not that I know of,” Trevino said. “Why don’t you just open it with your lock picks, Harry? I heard you’re good with those.”
He said it with a tone that implied that Bosch was somehow skilled in the dark arts because he knew how to pick a lock.
“Yeah, I might do that,” Bosch said. “Thanks for the idea.”
Trevino stepped into his office and Bosch heard the door close. He made a mental note to check with Dockweiler about the missing key. He wanted to make sure the former detective didn’t have it before he took any steps toward proving Trevino was the one secretly checking his files.
Bosch reopened the DMV portal to run Aldridge’s name. He soon pulled up a history that showed Aldridge had a California driver’s license from 1948 until 2002, at which point it was surrendered when the license holder moved to Florida. He wrote down Aldridge’s date of birth and then entered it with his name on a check of the Florida DMV database. This determined that Aldridge had surrendered his license in Florida at age eighty. The last address listed was in a place called The Villages.
After writing down the information, Bosch checked for a website and found that The Villages was a massive retirement community in Sumter County, Florida. Further searching of online records found an address for Aldridge and no indication of a death record or obituary. He had likely surrendered his driver’s license because he no longer could or needed to drive, but it appeared that James Franklin Aldridge was still alive.
Curious about the incident that supposedly got Aldridge kicked out of USC, Bosch next ran the name through the crime database, doubling down on his firing offenses for the day. Aldridge had a DUI on his record from 1986 and that was it. Whatever had happened back in his freshman year of college remained hidden from Bosch.
Content that he had sufficiently chased down the name as needed for a possible cover story, Bosch decided to check through the e-mail that had accumulated on the Screen Cutter case. It was the investigation that had consumed most of his time since he had joined the ranks of the San Fernando Police Department. He had worked serial murder cases before during his time with LAPD and most, if not all, had a sexual component to them, so the territory was not new to Bosch. But the Screen Cutter case was one of the more puzzling cases he had ever encountered.
6
Screen Cutter was the case name for the serial rapist Bosch had identified among the department’s open sexual assault reports. Combing through the files in the old city jail, Bosch had found four cases since 2012 that were seemingly related by MO but previously not seen as connected.
The cases shared five suspect behaviors that alone were not unusual but when taken as a whole indicated the strong possibility of one perpetrator at work. In each case the rapist had entered the victim’s home through a rear door or window after cutting the screen rather than removing it. All four assaults occurred during the day and within fifty minutes before or after noon. The rapist used the knife to cut the victim’s clothes off rather than ordering her to remove them. In each case the rapist wore a mask—a ski mask in two attacks, a Freddy Krueger Halloween mask in a third, and a Mexican Lucha Libre wrestling mask in the fourth. And finally, the rapist used no condom or other method to avoid leaving his DNA behind.
With these commonalities in hand, Bosch focused an investigation on the four cases and soon learned that while the suspect’s semen had been collected in rape kits in three of the four cases, only in one instance had the material actually been analyzed in the L.A. County Sheriff’s crime lab and submitted for comparison to state and national DNA databases, where it found no match. Analysis in the two most recent cases was delayed because of a backlog of rape kits submitted to the county lab for examination. In the fourth case, which was actually the first reported rape, a rape kit was collected but no DNA from the rapist was found on the vaginal swab because the victim had showered and douched before calling police to report the assault.
The county lab and the LAPD lab shared the same building at Cal State L.A., and Bosch used his connections from his cold case days to speed up analysis of the two recent cases. While he awaited the results he thought would solidly connect the cases, he began requesting follow-up interviews of the victims. Each of the victims—three women in their twenties and a now-eighteen-year-old—agreed to meet with the detectives. On two of the cases he would have to turn over the questioning to Bella Lourdes because it was noted that the victims preferred to do the interviews in Spanish. It underlined the one drawback for Bosch in working cases in a city where nine out of every ten citizens were Latino and had varying capabilities when it came to English. He spoke Spanish passably, but for an interview with a crime victim, where subtle nuances of storytelling might be important, he needed Lourdes, who understood it as a first language.
To each meeting Bosch brought a copy of a victim questionnaire used by LAPD investigators who worked violent crimes. It was nine pages of questions designed to help identify habits of the victim that might have drawn the attention of the offender. The questionnaires were helpful in serial investigations, particularly in profiling the offender, and Bosch had cadged a copy from a Hollywood Division sex crimes investigator who was a friend.
The questionnaire became the stated purpose of the new round of interviews, and the stories that emerged were equal parts sad and terrifying. These were undoubtedly stranger rapes and the attacks had left each woman recovering both mentally and physically as long as four years after the crime. They all lived in fear of their attacker returning and none had recovered the confidence they once had. One of them had been married and at the time was trying to conceive a child. The attack changed things in the marriage and at the time of the follow-up interview, the couple were in the midst of divorce proceedings.
After each interview Bosch felt depressed and couldn’t help but think about his own daughter and what sort of impact such an assault would have on her. Each time, he called her within the hour to check that she was safe and okay, unable to tell her the true reason he was calling.
But the follow-up interviews did more than reopen wounds for the victims. They helped focus the investigation and underlined the urgent need to identify and arrest the Screen Cutter.
Bosch and Lourdes adopted a conversational approach to each victim that started with assurances that the case was still being investigated as a priority by the department.