But what if it wasn’t a cop that made the tagger throw the paint over the fence? What if the tagger had seen the body being delivered to the pipe? Bosch thought about what Crowley had said about an anonymous caller reporting the body. A kid, no less. Was it the tagger who called? Bosch took the can back to the SID truck and handed it to Donovan.
“Print this after the kit and the stove,” he said. “I think it might belong to a witness.”
“Will do,” Donovan said.
***
Bosch drove down out of the hills and took the Barham Boulevard ramp onto the northbound Hollywood Freeway. After coming up through the Cahuenga Pass he went west on the Ventura Freeway and then north again on the San Diego Freeway. It took about twenty minutes to go the ten miles. It was Sunday and traffic was light. He exited on Roscoe and went east a couple of blocks into Meadows’s neighborhood on Langdon.
Sepulveda, like most of the suburban communities within Los Angeles, had both good and bad neighborhoods. Bosch wasn’t expecting trimmed lawns and curbs lined with Volvos on Meadows’s street, and he wasn’t disappointed. The apartments were at least a decade past being attractive. There were bars over the windows of the bottom units and graffiti on every garage door. The sharp smell of the brewery on Roscoe wafted into the neighborhood. The place smelled like a 4A.M. bar.
Meadows had lived in a U-shaped apartment building that had been built in the 1950s, when the smell of hops wasn’t yet in the air, gangbangers weren’t on the street corner and there was still hope in the neighborhood.