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Tepps looked at the numbers, then pointed to the closed binder on the table.
“You got these out of there?” he asked.
“In the handwritten notes,” Bosch said. “From the back pocket.”
“Okay, well… let me see what I can find. These two cases came after your case.”
“Looks that way.”
Tepps was stating the obvious, but Bosch knew that it revealed that he had not seen the case numbers when he reviewed the murder book before allowing Bosch to see it. He was now probably wondering whether he had let Bosch open a can of worms.
“You didn’t leave anything out, right?” Bosch asked.
“What do you mean — from the book?” Tepps said. “What would I leave out?”
“I don’t know, but it looks like somebody picked through it. There are no witness statements.”
“Maybe because they were juveniles?”
“If that was the concern, they could have redacted names,” Bosch said. “And there had to have been statements from staff. But none of it’s there.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” Tepps said. “The case has been sitting around for sixty-plus years. Anything could have happened. Let me see if I can find these other two. Sit tight and I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be here.”
Tepps left the room and Bosch reopened the murder book. He checked to see if the pages were numbered, which would allow him to determine if documents had been removed, but they were not. He realized that he was looking for something that might not have existed in the first place, but he had to wonder who would have stripped interview summaries out of a murder book.
It was ten minutes before Tepps returned. He had only one binder in his hand.
“Sorry it took so long,” he said. “I found one, right where it should have been. But not the other one. I checked to see if it was misfiled, but I couldn’t find it.”
“Is that strange?” Bosch asked.
“Not really. Our archives are… well, let’s just say we don’t have the fancy library with sliding shelves that L.A. has. I’ve been over to Ahmanson, and Renée gave me the grand tour. It’s nice.”
The Ahmanson Center was the LAPD’s main training facility near the airport. It also housed the Open-Unsolved Unit’s archive.
“It’s like the Taj Mahal compared to what we’ve got here,” Tepps said. “Our homicide archive is a hunt-and-peck situation. We have an intern, and I’ll send him in there to do a deeper dive than I just did.”
“Thanks,” Bosch said.
He gestured to the binder in Tepps’s hand.
“So it’s a murder?” he asked.
“Yeah, homicide,” Tepps said. “Another kid — Lorraine Henderson.”
“A girl?”
“Yeah, fourteen years old.”
“At MacLaren?”
“That’s what it says.”
Bosch was surprised, even though he knew the population at MacLaren included both boys and girls. Tepps handed the binder over and Bosch pushed the Charles Lamb book to the side and opened it.
“How much longer do you think you’ll be?” Tepps asked.
