“This is all because of Manson,” Eckersly said.

Bosch looked across the seat at his training partner, unsure of what he meant.

“Charles Manson?”

“You know, Helter Skelter and all of that shit,” Eckersly explained. “They’re still scared.”

Bosch nodded, though he still didn’t get it. He looked out the windshield. They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Almost all of the neighborhoods in Wilshire were unfamiliar to him but that was okay. Eckersly had been working patrol in the division for four years. He knew the neighborhoods.

“Somebody doesn’t answer the phone, and back east they think Squeaky and the rest of Charlie’s girls have broken in and chopped them up or something,” Eckersly continued. “We get a lot of these ‘check the lady’ calls. Nearly four years now and people still think L.A.’s been turned over to the nuts.”

Bosch had been away from the world when Manson and his people had done their thing. So he didn’t have a proper read on what the murders had done to the city. When he had come back from Vietnam he had felt an edginess in L.A. that had not been there before he left. But he didn’t know whether that was because of the changes he had been through or the ones the city had been through.

South of Santa Monica they took a left on Fourth Street and Bosch started reading numbers off of mailboxes. In a few seconds Eckersly pulled the squad car to a stop in front of a small bungalow with a driveway down the side to a single garage in the back. They both got out, Bosch taking his nightstick out of the plastic pipe on the door and sliding it into the ring on his equipment belt.