mental note to ask the caretaker if the bulb had been checked lately.
When Bosch returned to his spot at the railing a blur of movement from below drew his attention. He looked down and saw a coyote sniffing among the pine needles and trash that covered the earth below the trees in front of the dam. The animal was small and its coat was scruffy and completely missing some patches of hair. There were only a few of them left in the city's protected areas, left to scavenge among the debris of the human scavengers.
"They're pulling it out now," a voice said from behind.
Bosch turned and saw one of the uniforms that had been assigned to the crime scene. He nodded and followed him off the dam, under the yellow tape, and back to the pipe.
• • •
A cacophony of grunts and heavy gasps echoed from the mouth of the graffiti-scarred pipe. A shirtless man, with his heavily muscled back scratched and dirty, emerged backward, towing a sheet of heavy black plastic on top of which lay the body. The dead man was still face up with his head and arms mostly obscured in the wrapping of the black shirt. Bosch looked around for Donovan and saw him stowing a video recorder in the back of the blue crime scene van. Harry walked over.
"Now I'm going to need you to go back in. All the debris in there, newspapers, cans, bags, I saw some hypos, cotton, bottles, I need it all bagged."
"You got it," Donovan said. He waited a beat and added, "I'm not saying anything, but, Harry, I mean, you really think this is the real thing? Is it worth busting our balls on?"
"I guess we won't know until after the cut."
He started to walk away but stopped.
"Look, Donnie, I know it's Sunday and, uh, thanks for going back in."
"No problem. It's straight OT for me."
The shirtless man and a coroner's technician were sitting on their haunches, huddled over the body. They both wore white rubber gloves. The technician was Larry Sakai, a guy Bosch had known for years but had never liked. He had a plastic fishing-tackle box open on the ground next to him. He took a scalpel from the box and made a one-inch-long cut into the side of the body, Just above the left hip. No blood came from the slice. From the box he then removed a thermometer and attached it to the end of a curved probe. He stuck it into the incision, expertly though roughly turning it and driving it up into the liver.
The shirtless man grimaced, and Bosch noticed he had a blue tear tattooed at the outside corner of his right eye. It somehow seemed appropriate to Bosch. It was the most sympathy the dead man would get here.
"Time of death is going to be a pisser," Sakai said. He did not look up from his work. "That pipe, you know, with the heat rising, it's going to skew the temperature loss in the liver. Osito took a reading in there and it was eighty-one. Ten minutes later it was eighty-three. We don't have a fixed temp in the body or the pipe."
"So?" Bosch said.
"So I am not giving you anything here. I gotta take it back and do some calculating."
"You mean give it to somebody else who knows how to figure it?" Bosch asked.
"You'll get it when you come in for the autopsy, don't worry, man."
"Speaking of which, who's doing the cutting today?"
Sakai didn't answer. He was busy with the dead man's legs. He grabbed each shoe and manipulated the ankles. He moved his hands up the legs and reached beneath the thighs, lifting each leg and watching as it bent at the knee. He then pressed his hands down on the abdomen as if feeling for contraband. Lastly, he reached inside the shirt and tried to turn the dead man's head. It didn't move. Bosch knew rigor mortis worked its way from the head through the body and then into the extremities.
"This guy's neck is locked but good," Sakai said. "Stomach's getting there. But the extremities still have good movement."
He took a pencil from behind his ear and pressed the eraser end against the skin on the side of the torso. There was purplish blotching on the half of the body closest to the ground, as if the body were half full of red wine. It was post-mortem lividity. When the heart stops pumping, the blood seeks the