Page 15 of The Hollow | AllFreeNovel

“Not enough. But she’s got a boyfriend and her own life.”

“He’s a cop, right?”

“No, that one didn’t work out. This new one’s a writer. A freelance journalist. She met him on a story he was writing.”

“You like him?”

“Don’t know him well enough yet. I was thinking of asking them if they want to join us when we go see the Pacific Jazz Orchestra. Would that be okay? I reserved a table for four.”

“Sure. I’d like to see her and meet him. You think they like jazz?”

“She heard jazz in my house the whole time she was growing up.”

“In that case, great. I can’t wait.”

Bosch pushed his bowl aside. It was a heavy soup and he had eaten enough. He wanted to go home and get to work on what he had printed out in the Faraday cage.

BOSCH CLEARED THE dining table of the medical-billing documents and post-treatment instructions from his recent knee-replacement surgery, spread out the printouts from the Faraday cage, and set to work. He created three stacks: the reports from the Charles Lamb file, the staff reports from April 1, and the staff reports from April 2, the day Lamb died.

He was most interested in the reports from April 1, 1965, because he believed these had been filed with appropriate department heads or supervisors before the death in the facility. After the death, there would likely have been a bureaucratic hesitation to document anything. Bosch remembered that whenever a child died at MacLaren — and there had been more than a few while he was there — a general hush fell over the place, from the administration level to the probation officers who enforced the rules. They walked quietly and whispered low while awaiting the fallout from the death of one of their charges, no matter its cause.

It didn’t take Bosch long to zero in on three April 1 reports regarding injuries to Poes — as the kids called the probation officers — that required medical attention; two were treated at the facility’s nursing center and one at the emergency room at El Monte Hospital.

One Poe, Franklin Gentry, was treated at the nursing center for “cuts and bruises” suffered while breaking up a fight between two boys. It did not give the names of the boys or note what the fight was about. The injuries were declared minor, and the document stated that Gentry returned to work that day.

The other person treated at the center was a female Poe, Sheila Davies, who had been knocked to the ground while breaking up a fight. Davies hit the back of her head on the floor of the cafeteria, after which she reported dizziness. She was kept in the nursing center for a few hours for observation and then sent home for the day. The report did not say if Davies was hurt in the same scuffle in which Gentry was injured.

The third reported injury was sustained by a Poe named Vernon Bishop; he was sent to the hospital after being hit in the mouth by a plate Frisbeed at him in the dining hall. His injuries were listed as the loss of two teeth and a gash on his upper lip. Though Bishop suffered the most severe injury of the three, he had RTW written on the report — he returned to work the same day.

The question was, did Bishop return to work to do his job or to seek revenge on whoever had hurled the plate at him? Bosch remembered those plates, left over from when the place was a polio hospital. They were heavy, chip-resistant porcelain, and if you were hit by one, it would surely do painful damage.

The names Davies and Gentry meant nothing to Bosch. MacLaren had employed hundreds of probation officers over his time there. But he recognized the name Vernon Bishop. Bishop had been an enforcer, a man who didn’t spare the rod, a man who had cornered Bosch in a hallway once and slapped his face so hard, it left a red imprint that lasted two days. He was a Poe to steer clear of.

There was a time when only law enforcement officers could easily access private citizens’ personal information. From criminal records to unlisted phone numbers, it was all at your fingertips if you had a badge and the right contacts, but the public couldn’t get to it. That was not so much the case anymore. While it was true that some intel was still beyond the reach of those without a badge, the internet and artificial intelligence were great equalizers. AI software trawling the net and genealogy databases often got the same information law enforcement had access to. Within thirty minutes of writing the three names down, Bosch learned that Franklin Gentry had died in San Bernardino in 1993 and that Sheila Davies and Vernon Bishop were still living, though Davies was now in Tampa, Florida. Bishop wasn’t geographically far from where he had been in 1965. Bosch found an address for him in Glendale, a city on the east side of the San Fernando Valley and behind the mountain on which stood the Hollywood sign. He also learned that Bishop hadn’t spent his whole career at MacLaren. The Glendale News-Press, a weekly community paper, had run a story in 2002 about his retirement after forty years as a probation officer who over the decades had supervised more than a thousand probationers and parolees from state prison.

Bosch got up and opened the slider onto the deck. He went out to the rail and looked at his slice of the city. Gazing past the 101 and over the shoulder of Mount Lee, he could see the dense stretch of the city curling around the mountain through Burbank and the western flank of Glendale. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called Ballard. While he waited for her to pick up, he checked the trees for birds. A pair of red-tailed hawks had built a nest at the top of one of the coastal pines, but he saw no activity there.