Chapter 19
AFTER GETTING BACK to the island, Stilwell sequestered himself in his office at the sub.
It was early Sunday afternoon and quiet.
He opened a file cabinet and took out the murder book he had put together from the reports shared by Ballard and Laffont on the missing-hikers investigation.
He had printed everything out and put it in a three-ring binder.
He stood it on its two-inch-wide spine, took his hand away, and let it fall open randomly.
“Okay, Harry Bosch,” he said, “let’s see what you’ve got.”
The binder opened to a section of crime scene photos from the excavation and recovery of Candace Neary’s remains.
He had previously studied these, noting that the depth of the grave matched that of Angela Metier.
Both victims were buried close to the base of a tree—the ironwood with Angela and a live oak with Candace.
He had read extensively about the Catalina ironwood, hoping to find a clue as to why it was chosen but had come up empty.
Convinced that there was nothing new to be gleaned from the photos, he flipped to the next section.
It was the autopsy report on Neary. He had nothing to compare it to in the Metier case because the autopsy had only recently been completed and Ballard had stopped sending reports to him.
He took out his phone and texted her, asking that she continue to share reports as they came in.
He ended the message jokingly, saying he needed the reports because he was now looking at the case Harry Bosch–style.
He hoped it would at least get a smile from her and persuade her to keep him in the loop.
He pressed on with the review, going through interview summaries with Neary’s roommates, coworkers, and family members. These reports he had already read repeatedly, to the point that he knew what each person said before he actually saw it in the summary.
“Come on, Harry,” he said. “Give me something.”
He came across a topographic map of Griffith Park.
He had previously checked to see if there was a correlation between the altitudes where the bodies were buried, but there was not.
Metier had been buried a thousand feet higher than Neary.
He didn’t know what it would have meant if they had been buried at the same level, but checking even these details underlined his need to find something that would advance the case.
The last section of the murder book contained several pages of photographs taken by police, media, and citizens during the search of Griffith Park in the days and weeks after Neary was reported missing.
It had been a monumental task. Griffith Park was four thousand acres of up-and-down terrain at the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Though much of it was landscaped and included the observatory on Mount Hollywood, the Greek Theatre complex, and other municipal facilities, the vast majority of the park’s acreage was urban wilderness with steep rises and deep canyons.
Neary’s disappearance and the publicity around it drew hundreds of citizens and the media to the search effort.
In criminal investigations of violent acts, it was common for the perpetrators to return to the scene as a means of psychological fulfillment—to witness firsthand the horror and fear they had caused.
This led law enforcement to collect media reports, photos, and videos for study later.
This procedure was particularly successful in cases of arson; the guilty party often showed up to watch the flames and destruction.
But because foul play had not been considered in Neary’s disappearance until after several days of searching, the media coverage was not collected until Ballard’s team got the case.
Though Ballard told Stilwell that studying the visuals had not brought any leads, he had put his own eyes on the photos and videos.
He did it again now, hoping to come up with something new.
After studying all the photos, Stilwell moved to his laptop, where he had downloaded a file containing videos from news reports about the missing woman.
Something he saw in the fourth video, a segment that was aired on KCAL 9 News, made him freeze the image on his screen.
The field reporter was interviewing a woman named Monica Katz, a friend of Neary’s and one of the organizers of the park searches.
In the background, other volunteers were moving up a hillside in a line, all spaced six feet apart.
Also in the background was another news crew pointing a camera and microphone at a park ranger positioned in front of a tree.
It was the tree that made Stilwell stop the video. It was a live oak that had a distinctive split in its trunk from what he guessed was a lightning strike.
Stilwell quickly went back to the front of the murder book and leafed through the most recent reports until he reached the section where he had started, the photos documenting the excavation of the bones.
The tree that stood at the foot of the grave showed the same split, though over the years it had healed, and the tree looked much healthier.
Stilwell considered what he had found and what it might mean.
First of all, it showed that the searchers had been right there but apparently had not noticed any suspicious disturbance in the terrain.
Perhaps the damage from the lightning strike had made a natural variance in the ground that caused no one alarm.
Additionally, the news report was from the first search for Neary, before foul play was considered.
Searchers were looking for someone who was lost or injured, not buried four feet down.
Stilwell thought about the ironwood under which Angela Metier had been buried.
He recalled nothing unique about it like lightning damage.
But still he wondered whether the killer had chosen the tree in Griffith Park because of a distinctiveness that would allow him to find it again when he returned, possibly to relive the crime.
Stilwell was tempted to call Ballard, but he was unsure what all this meant.
He stared at the tree in the paused video for a long moment before his eyes moved to the man being interviewed beneath it.
He wore a uniform of dark green pants and a lighter green shirt and had on an equipment belt.
He was clearly a park ranger. The TV reporter holding the microphone to the ranger’s mouth was a readily recognizable blonde who had worked in the L.A.
market for years. Stilwell even knew her name, Donna Driscoll, because she had been covering pretrial hearings in the mayor’s case for Channel 5 News.
He hit the Play button and watched the rest of the KCAL report, hoping to get a better look at the ranger.
A moment before the cameras cut away to the studio anchor, the ranger in the background turned his head slightly and pointed in the direction of the line of searchers moving methodically up the hill.
Stilwell froze the image again, studied it, and then his breath caught.