The Wrong Side of Goodbye (harry Bosch, #19; Harry Bosch Universe, #29)

The nineteenth novel in Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series opens with a Vietnam War prologue. Five soldiers board a transport helicopter under fire, but snipers strike the cockpit, killing the pilot and fatally wounding the copilot. As the helicopter spirals toward a rice paddy, one unnamed soldier whispers the name "Vibiana." The craft crashes and explodes.

In present-day Los Angeles, Harry Bosch, a former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective who sued the department over his forced retirement, is summoned to Trident Security's offices. John Creighton, a former LAPD deputy chief now running the firm's California branch, presents Bosch with a $10,000 check from Whitney Vance, an 85-year-old billionaire industrialist. Vance has requested Bosch by name after reading about a recent case, wanting someone who stands his ground under pressure. Creighton insists on being kept informed, but Bosch refuses, saying he answers only to the client.

At Vance's heavily guarded Pasadena estate, the frail billionaire, who uses a wheelchair, has Bosch sign a nondisclosure agreement. In 1950, as an 18-year-old University of Southern California film student, Vance had a relationship with Vibiana Duarte, a 16-year-old Mexican girl who worked in the campus cafeteria. When she became pregnant, Vance's father sent people to pressure her into ending the pregnancy, but she disappeared. Under his father's control and fearing prosecution, Vance transferred to Caltech and never searched for her. Now near death, he wants Bosch to determine whether Vibiana had the child and whether any heir exists. He provides a DNA swab and warns that billions are at stake.

Since his retirement, Bosch has been working as an unpaid reserve detective for the San Fernando Police Department (SFPD), a tiny city surrounded by Los Angeles. Chief Anthony Valdez recruited Bosch to review cold cases, with one firm rule: Bosch cannot use his badge to support private investigations. Bosch immediately breaks this rule by searching for Vibiana Duarte in law enforcement databases, finding no records. He has also been investigating the Screen Cutter, a serial rapist he identified by linking four unconnected assaults. The attacker cuts window screens, strikes near midday, wears masks, and targets Latina women during their ovulation phase, indicating prior access to each home.

At the county vital records office, Bosch discovers Vibiana Duarte died at age 17 in 1951 by suicide at St. Helen's Home for Unwed Mothers, a facility where babies were taken for adoption with reissued birth certificates. Unable to trace the child directly, Bosch collects 67 home-birth certificates from early 1951.

A newspaper article leads Bosch to Abigail Turnbull, who was left at St. Helen's as a pregnant teenager and stayed as an employee for 50 years. Turnbull remembers Vibiana: The baby was born underweight, so Vibiana nursed him for a week until he gained enough weight for adoption. When the couple took the baby, Vibiana hanged herself. Turnbull recalls the boy was called Dominick. Among his certificates, Bosch finds one match: Dominick Santanello, adopted by a family in Oxnard, Ventura County.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial website confirms Santanello was a Navy corpsman killed in 1970 when his helicopter was shot down in Tay Ninh Province, an aircraft likely built by Advance Engineering, his unknown father's company. Bosch contacts Olivia Macdonald, Santanello's adoptive sister, at the family home in Oxnard. In the attic, he finds Santanello's military footlocker with potential DNA sources. Hidden inside a camera, a strip of negatives shows a woman holding a baby. When developed, the photos reveal the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, with a Latina woman holding a baby girl. Since the film was manufactured months after Santanello deployed, Bosch concludes he made secret trips home and fathered a daughter.

A fellow corpsman, Halley Lewis, recalls that near the end of training, Santanello met a woman named Gabriela who drew him into the Chicano Pride movement, a Mexican American cultural and activist movement in San Diego. Bosch traces Gabriela Lida to Chicano Park. Now in her seventies, Gabriela confirms she fell in love with Dominick and became pregnant. He snuck back from Vietnam twice to see her and their newborn daughter, Vibiana Veracruz, named after Dominick's birth mother. Vibiana lives in the Arts District of Los Angeles, works as a sculptress, and is raising a nine-year-old son named Gilberto Veracruz. Whitney Vance has a great-grandson.

Meanwhile, the Screen Cutter attempts a fifth attack, but the victim fights back and forces him to flee through a window, dropping a military-grade knife. When Bosch learns that Vance has died, he discovers among his mail a padded envelope containing Vance's gold pen and a handwritten will naming Bosch as executor and leaving the entire estate to "the heir of my body." Bosch's half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, confirms handwritten wills are valid in California. They agree to keep the will secret until the heir is confirmed.

The Screen Cutter case breaks open when Bella Lourdes, the SFPD's crimes-against-persons detective and Bosch's closest colleague, goes missing after visiting the Public Works building. Bosch realizes that Kurt Dockweiler, a former detective now in code enforcement, used garage-conversion inspections to access victims' homes and select targets. At Dockweiler's house in the Santa Clarita Valley, a standoff erupts when Dockweiler takes three officers hostage at gunpoint. Bosch, positioned outside, fires through glass windows and drops him. Beneath the garage, Bosch discovers an underground bunker. In a concealed compartment, he finds Lourdes: bound, gagged, and unconscious but breathing.

Bosch visits Vibiana Veracruz at her Arts District loft. Her large white sculptures depict family dioramas with a faceless daughter and a soldier father. When Bosch reveals she may be heir to the Vance fortune, she agrees to provide a DNA swab. Bosch and Haller implement a counterintelligence plan, sending decoy samples to one lab while delivering the real samples to another. That night, the decoy lab is destroyed by arson, confirming powerful corporate interests are working against them.

Two Pasadena detectives reveal that Vance was murdered, smothered with a pillow. In crime scene photos, Bosch notices the gold pen on Vance's desk, yet the real pen was already in his mailbox. He confronts Vance's longtime secretary, Ida Townes Forsythe, who had been imitating Vance's handwriting because he could no longer write. She forged the will to include a $10 million bequest for herself that Vance had omitted. When Vance recovered enough to request the document, exposing the forgery, Forsythe impulsively smothered him. Haller agrees to represent her; the detectives take her into custody.

The lab confirms a genetic match between Vance and Vibiana Veracruz, establishing her as his granddaughter and legal heir. When a man is spotted watching Vibiana's building, Bosch confronts him and discovers it is Sloan, Vance's former security chief, who quit after the arson. Sloan says he is protecting Vibiana because it is what Vance would have wanted. At the hospital, Lourdes stands at the foot of the now-paralyzed Dockweiler's bed, telling Bosch she needed to face him and let him know he did not break her. Captain Trevino, Bosch's supervisor at the SFPD, offers Bosch a full-time paid position. Bosch accepts.

In an epilogue, a crowd gathers for the dedication of a new Arts District park funded by the Fruit Box Foundation, established through the Vance estate. A shroud lifts from Vibiana's 20-foot sculpture, The Wrong Side of Goodbye: a crashed helicopter with soldiers reaching upward and, beside the wreckage, a woman holding a faceless baby. Bosch sits in the back row with his daughter Maddie. As Vibiana passes on her way to the podium, she glances back and smiles. Bosch recognizes the lopsided grin, the left corner of the mouth curling up, as the same half-smile Whitney Vance wore in every photograph on his mansion wall.