Page 40 of The Hollow | AllFreeNovel

THAT NIGHT, AFTER the arrest of the Talbots, Bosch went back to work on the MacLaren case. On the off chance that Anton Cerny, the youth hall’s director, was not long dead by now, he googled the name and quickly found a 1994 obituary from the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. It stated that Cerny had been MacLaren’s director for twenty-five years before retiring a decade before his death. Even in 1994, the place was labeled by the newspaper as “controversial” and “much maligned,” as horror stories about it were mounting. Bosch noted that nine more years had gone by before it was finally shuttered.

The obit said Cerny had been born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1915 and had escaped to the United States in 1948 following a Communist coup. He became a US citizen three years later and worked through the fifties in the administration of the Sister Kenny Polio Hospital, then stayed on as director of operations when the facility transitioned to a youth hall.

The obituary said that while Cerny never returned to his native country, he was active in US-based efforts to support the so-called Velvet Revolution, which effectively ended Communist control of the country in 1989. Cerny served for a time as president of the SoCal Sokol, a social club with monthly meetings at a Czech-owned restaurant of the same name in North Hollywood. Sokol was the Czech word for falcon, the Slavic country’s symbol of vigilance and freedom.

The obituary did not state Cerny’s cause of death, but since he’d been seventy-nine years old, Bosch had nothing to be suspicious about.

After running down Anton Cerny, Bosch attempted to trace Nick Stokely, the kid prone to violence who had possibly been placed in the hollow with Charles Lamb on the day of Lamb’s death.

As with Cerny, his first priority was determining whether Stokely was still alive. A quick Google search brought up nothing, not even a hit on LinkedIn. Next he went to the Social Security Death Index. Though Nicholas Stokely was not an uncommon name, Bosch winnowed down the list by focusing only on Stokelys whose Social Security numbers had been issued to California residents in the 1950s and ’60s. He figured that if Stokely had not gotten a government ID number shortly after he was born, he would have been issued one through MacLaren in preparation for his possible adoption if he was an orphan or his return to his guardian family.

Based on the assumption that he and Stokely were the same age or close to it, Bosch was able to further narrow his search.

He found no evidence in the SSDI indicating that Stokely was dead, so he moved on to the California death records database. This too was open to the public and contained digitized files going back to World War II. Bosch found no record of Stokely’s death. He was beginning to believe that he was looking for someone who was still alive.

He next checked for Stokely’s military service. Like Bosch, Stokely had come of age during the Vietnam War and would have been eligible for the draft. Bosch called Gary McIntyre, his longtime source at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, and asked him to look into it. The answer from McIntyre came quickly: Stokely had no service record with any branch of the military.

Bosch’s suspicion that Stokely might still be alive began to diminish. He searched through various online genealogical sites and found men named Nicholas Stokely, but he determined by age, race, or geographic location that none was the Nicholas Stokely he was looking for. Knowing Stokely’s record of violence at MacLaren and given the possibility that he murdered Charlie Lamb, Bosch checked the state and federal prison databases available to the public to see if Stokely was incarcerated. But Stokely had no prison record that he could find.

Bosch enlisted the help of Lorna Taylor, Mickey Haller’s office manager, who reluctantly searched the list of plaintiffs in the MacLaren case and reported that Stokely had not joined any lawsuit against the county.

While all of this suggested the probability that Stokely was dead, it was not conclusive. He might have elected not to join the lawsuit, or he might not have known about it. The latter seemed unlikely because the lawsuit had been highly publicized and several local law firms had put great effort into identifying and contacting possible victims to represent. Bosch himself had been contacted by no fewer than five lawyers seeking to engage him as a client in the suit. Bosch ignored the first four, but the fifth solicitor happened to be Mickey Haller.

All of these unsuccessful efforts to find Stokely led Bosch to the possibility that he might have been adopted and his name changed to that of his adoptive parents. This seemed like a lottery-level long shot. Stokely would have been at least fifteen years old at the time of the adoption, and the chances of a child finding an adoptive family, or even a foster family, dwindled with every passing year. Added to that was Stokely’s history of aggression. He clearly wasn’t a top candidate for adoption.

And yet Bosch could not find him anywhere, dead or alive. Feeling defeated by his quest, he ended his work for the day and went to bed, but he slept fitfully, continually running the moves he had made through his mind, hoping to find a new path to follow.

The morning brought hope and one final gambit. Bosch called Mickey Haller, catching him in his electric car on his way to work at the former taxi depot.

“Does the discovery material in the MacLaren case contain a complete list of every child who was moved through that place?” he asked. “Not just the ones who joined the lawsuit?”

“I don’t know how complete it is, but there are records,” Haller said. “Starting in 1961. The county settlement would apply to anybody who was housed there between then and 2003. All records from MacLaren were turned over in discovery.”

“Okay, I’m looking for somebody who didn’t file a lawsuit but was in that place until he was at least sixteen. Would his name still be in the reports that were part of discovery?”

“Possibly. But — ”

“What if he got adopted? Are those records in there?”