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“Good. Then go.”

“Yes, sir. As soon as I let the juvenile go, I’ll head — ”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll handle it with a phone call. You get up to Wonderland. Now.”

“Is there an address?”

“You don’t need the address. You’ll know it when you see it.”

Kuster hung up.

Twenty minutes later, Bosch pulled the juvie car, an eight-year-old Dodge Polara, to a stop behind a news van because the street ahead was clogged with patrol cars, a fire truck, and assorted other vehicles. The last most likely belonged to the reporters who were massing at the foot of a driveway where three patrol officers stood guard.

Bosch got out, opened his badge wallet, folded it back, and then slipped one side into the breast pocket of his sport coat so the badge would be displayed. He waded through the crowd of reporters to the uniformed officers. He knew them all by sight, but one of them — Phil Rickard — had been an academy classmate.

“There he is,” Rickard said. “Hollywood’s own Harry Bosch.”

“Rickets,” Bosch said, his academy sobriquet.

“But you’re in the wrong place, Hobo,” Rickard said, returning with the same jab. “This here is a homicide. Not some juvie jive.”

Bosch smiled. They employed the same sarcastic banter whenever they crossed paths. It was all in good humor. Academy classmates were bonded for life.

“So I’m told,” Bosch said. “They sent me up here anyway. The big boys from downtown are still an hour out and they wanted me to make sure you guys didn’t fuck up the scene before they got here.”

“Oh, really? Yeah, we’re just a bunch of hillbillies who don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

“Exactly what they told me.”

Bosch stepped back and surveyed the scene on the street. The murder house was a contemporary with open parking on the first-floor level and steps going up the hillside to the other levels. It was a more modern build than most of the wooden bungalows and bohemian firetraps that had made Laurel Canyon so attractive to the musicians who had populated its steep and densely wooded neighborhoods in the seventies. Most of them had left for Malibu at the turn of the decade thanks to the explosion of cash that came with making rock and roll. The canyon was now a popular spot for drug dealers to homestead because it was geographically good for business. It was at the top of Hollywood — just ten minutes away from the clubs on the Sunset Strip — and on a direct route north to the San Fernando Valley. Even in the drug trade, being convenient to customers was an important advantage.

“One of you guys go get the tape out of your car,” Bosch said. “We need to set up two perimeters. One for the media, one for the neighborhood lookie-loos.”

One of the uniforms — his nameplate read HOLDEN — said he had tape and went to get it.

“You want to start moving the reporters back, Rickets?” Bosch said.

“You giving me orders now, Hobo?” Rickard responded.

“Pretty much, yeah. We also need to clear the street so RHD and crime scene techs and the coroner don’t have to park down the block like I did.”

“You the man, Bosch. For now.”

Rickard and the other officer — nameplate DANTE — moved off to execute the orders. Bosch turned and looked at the open door at the top of the steps that ran from the carport up the side of the house. Without hesitation he went up the stairs and stopped on the landing. He leaned in to look. The door opened to a living room where Bosch saw a body on the shag carpet in front of a couch. It was a woman, though that was not readily apparent because of all the blood. Her hair and upper torso were completely matted with it. There was more blood on the couch and on a pillow. Whoever killed her had struck her many times with an object that threw her blood onto the wall behind the couch and all the way to the ceiling. On the ceiling was a bloody scratch made by the weapon. Bosch could see thread marks, indicating that the murder weapon was a pipe. During the brutal assault, the woman had somehow crawled or fallen off the couch to the floor. She was fully clothed, suggesting to Bosch that this was not a sexually motivated crime. More of a payback of some kind.

Bosch noted a spill of pills across a coffee table next to the body and more pills in the thick carpeting.

That was one body. He knew there were three more in the house. Bosch turned and looked down the steps to the street to see where the uniforms were. Holden was stringing crime scene tape while Rickard and Dante were trying to push the gathered members of the media down the hill. Bosch checked his watch and figured he had at least fifteen minutes before the RHD bulls got to the house.

He put his hands in his pockets and stepped inside.

The higher he ascended in the house, the more blood and horrors were revealed. There were two bedrooms on the top level. In the front room Bosch saw the body of a man under a quilt on a brass bed. His face had been destroyed by multiple blows, his skull crushed to the point that jagged pieces of bone were readily visible in the mush of what had been his brain. There was blood spatter on the ceiling and heavier spatter on the wall over the brass railing at the head of the bed. To the right of the man’s body, blood had soaked into the mattress from where another victim had been attacked. This would have been the victim who survived the assault and had been transported to the hospital.

Bosch wasn’t sure why he moved on to the rear bedroom; he knew it would be more blood and more evidence of extreme violence, but he was compelled. He felt his calling would be to work homicide investigations, and although as a patrol officer he had responded to shooting scenes and other violent crimes ending in murder, he had never had the chance to contemplate a murder scene as an investigator. He didn’t dwell too long on whether this was practice for the future or just prurient interest, but he crossed the hall and entered the rear bedroom, careful not to step in the blood that had most likely dripped off the murder weapon as the killers had moved about the house.

The room was a duplicate of the first bedroom in terms of the violence that had occurred. A TV on a cart in the corner was on but showed only static gray snow on its screen.

A dead woman lay under the sheets, her head on a pillow covered with so much of her blood that it had coagulated into a red halo around her dark hair. She appeared to have been asleep when the fatal blows rained down upon her. If she was lucky, she had died without ever knowing the fear or pain of the attack.