9 Dragons

39

The last hurdle was customs and immigration in Los Angeles. The agent at the entry booth swiped their passports and was ready to routinely stamp them when something on the computer caught his eye. Bosch held his breath.

“Mr. Bosch. You were in Hong Kong for less than a day?”

“That’s right. I didn’t even need to pack a bag. I just went to pick up my daughter.”

The agent nodded as though he understood and had seen it before. He stamped the passports. He looked at Madeline and said, “Welcome to L.A., young lady.”

“Thank you,” she said.

It was almost midnight by the time they got to the house on Woodrow Wilson Drive. Bosch carried the backpack into the guest room and his daughter followed. She was familiar with the room, having used it on several visits.

“Now that you’ll be living here full-time, we can fix up this room any way you want,” Bosch said. “I know you had a lot of posters and stuff back in Hong Kong. You can do whatever you want here.”

There were two cardboard boxes stacked in the corner that contained old case files Bosch had copied.

“I’ll get these out of here,” he said.

He moved them one at a time into his bedroom. He continued to talk to her as he moved up and down the hall.

“I know you don’t have a private bathroom but the guest bathroom in the hall is all yours. I don’t get many guests here, anyway.”

After moving the boxes, Bosch sat down on the bed and looked at his daughter. She was still standing in the middle of the room. The look on her face cut Bosch deeply. He could see the reality of the situation hitting her. It didn’t matter that she had repeatedly voiced a desire to live in L.A. She was now here permanently and grasping that fact was a daunting task.

“Maddie, I just want to tell you something,” he said. “I’m used to being your father four weeks a year. That was easy. This is going to be hard. I am going to make mistakes and I’m going to need you to be patient with me while I learn. But I promise you I will do the best I can.”

“Okay.”

“Now, what can I get you? Are you hungry? Tired? What?”

“No, I’m fine. I guess I shouldn’t have slept so much on the plane.”

“Doesn’t matter. You needed the sleep right then. And sleep is always good. It heals.”

She nodded and looked awkwardly around the room. It was a basic guest room. A bed, bureau and a table with a lamp.

“Tomorrow we’ll get you a TV to put in here. One of those flat screens. And also a computer and a desk. We’ll need to go shopping for a lot of things.”

“I think I need a new cell phone. Quick took mine.”

“Yeah, we’ll get you a new phone, too. I have your memory card from the old one, so you won’t lose your contacts.”

She looked over at him and he realized he had made a mistake.

“You have the card? Did you get it from Quick? Was his sister there?”

Bosch held his hands up in a calming gesture and shook his head.

“I never met Quick or his sister. I found your phone but it was broken. All I got was the memory card.”

“She tried to save me. She found out that Quick was going to sell me and tried to stop it. But he kicked her out of the car.”

Bosch waited for her to say more but that was it. He wanted to ask her many questions about the brother and sister and everything else but his role as father overtook his role as cop. Now wasn’t the right time. He had to get her calmed and situated. There would be time later to be a cop, to ask about Quick and He and to tell her what happened to them.

He studied her face and she seemed to be drained of emotion. She still looked tired, even after all the sleep on the plane.

“Everything’s going to be okay, Maddie. I promise.”

She nodded.

“Um, do you think I can just be alone for a little while in here”

“Sure you can. It’s your room. I think I should make some calls, anyway.”

He got up and headed to the door. He hesitated as he was closing it behind him and looked back at her.

“You’ll tell me if you need anything, right?”

“Yes, Dad. Thanks.”

He closed the door and went out to the living room. He pulled his phone and called David Chu.

“It’s Bosch. Sorry to call so late.”

“No problem. How is it going over there”

“I’m back in L.A.”

“You’re back? What about your daughter?”

“She’s safe. What’s the status on Chang?”

There was a hesitation before Chu answered. He didn’t want to be the messenger.

“Well, he walks in the morning. We don’t have anything to file on him.”

“What about the extortion?”

“I took a last run at Li and Lam today. They won’t file a formal complaint. They’re too scared of the triad. Li said somebody called already and threatened him.”

Bosch thought for a moment about the threatening call he had received on Friday. He assumed it was the same caller.

“So Chang walks out of the DDC in the morning and heads to the airport,” he said. “He gets on a plane and we never see him again.”

“Looks like we lost this one, Harry.”

Bosch shook his head, his rage boiling over.

“Goddamn those motherfuckers.”

Bosch realized his daughter might be able to hear him. He opened one of the living room sliders and stepped out onto the rear deck. The sound from the freeway traffic down in the pass would help muffle his conversation.

“They were going to sell my kid,” he said. “For her organs.”

“God,” Chu said. “I thought they were just trying to intimi-date you.”

“Yeah, well, they took her blood and she must’ve matched somebody with a lot of money because the plan changed.”

“Well, they could’ve tested her blood to make sure she was clean before they…”

He stopped, realizing the alternate scenario wasn’t comforting. He changed directions.

“Is she back here with you, Harry?”

“I told you, she’s safe.”

Bosch knew that Chu would read his indirect answer as a lack of trust, but what was new? He couldn’t help it after the day he’d had. He tried to change the subject.

“When was the last time you talked to Ferras or Gandle?”

“I haven’t talked to your partner since Friday. I talked to the lieutenant a couple hours ago. He wanted to know where things stood as well. He’s pretty pissed off about it, too.”

It was almost midnight on a Sunday and yet the freeway down below was packed, all ten lanes across. The air was crisp and cool, a welcome change from Hong Kong.

“Who’s supposed to tell the DA’s office to kick him loose” Bosch asked.

“I was going to call over there in the morning. Unless you want to.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be there in the morning. Why don’t you handle it, but wait until ten to make the call.”

“Sure, but why ten?”

“It will give me time to get over there and say good-bye to Mr. Chang.”

“Harry, don’t do something you’ll regret.”

Bosch briefly considered the past three days.

“It’s too late for that.”

Bosch ended the call with Chu and stood against the railing, looking out at the night. There was certainly something safe about being home but he couldn’t help thinking about what had been lost and left behind. It was like the hungry ghosts of Hong Kong had followed him across the Pacific.

“Dad?”

He turned. His daughter stood in the open doorway.

“Hey, baby.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure, why?”

She stepped out onto the deck and stood next to him at the rail.

“It sounded like you were mad when you were on the phone.”

“It’s about the case. It’s not going well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. But listen, in the morning, I have to take a quick run downtown. I’ll make some calls and see if I can get somebody to watch you while I’m gone. And then when I get back we’ll go to the store, like I was saying before. Okay?”

“You mean like a babysitter”

“No…I mean, yeah, I guess so.”

“Dad, I haven’t had a babysitter or a nanny since I was, like, twelve.”

“Yeah, well, that was only a year ago.”

“I think I will be all right by myself. I mean, Mom lets me go to the mall after school by myself.”

Bosch noted her use of the present tense. He was tempted to tell her that the plan to allow her to go to the mall by herself didn’t work out so well, but he was smart enough to save that for another time. The bottom line was that he had to consider her safety ahead of everything else. Could the forces that grabbed her in Hong Kong find her all the way over here in his home?

It seemed unlikely but even if there was a small percentage chance, he couldn’t risk leaving her alone. The problem with that was he didn’t really know who he could call in. He wasn’t plugged into the neighborhood. He was the resident cop who got called when there was a problem. But otherwise he had never socialized with people on his street, or with anyone for that matter other than cops. He didn’t know who would be safe or any different from a complete stranger chosen from the child-sitter ads in the phone book. Bosch was at a loss and it was beginning to dawn on him that he had no business raising his own daughter.

“Maddie, listen, this is one of those times when I said you were going to have to be patient with me. I don’t want you left alone. Not yet. You can stay in your room if you want-you’ll probably still be asleep because of jet lag. But I want an adult in the house with you. Somebody I can trust.”

“Whatever.”

Thinking about being the resident cop in the neighborhood suddenly pushed another idea into his brain.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what. If you don’t want a sitter, then I have another idea. There’s a school down at the bottom of the hill. It’s a public middle school. I think classes started last week because I saw all the cars on my way to work. I don’t know if it’s where you’ll end up going or if we’ll try to get you into a private school, but I could take you down there and you could look around and check it out. Maybe sit in on a class or two and see what you think while I go downtown. How would that be? I know the assistant principal and I trust her. She’ll take care of you.”

His daughter hooked a strand of hair behind her ear and stared out at the view for a few moments before answering.

“I guess that would be okay.”

“Okay, good, then we’ll do that. I’ll call in the morning and set it up.”

Problem solved, Bosch thought.

“Dad?”

“What, baby?”

“I heard what you said on the phone.”

He froze.

“I’m sorry. I will try not to use that kind of language anymore. And never around you.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean when you were out here. About what you said about them selling me for my organs. Is that true?”

“I don’t know, darling. I don’t know what their exact plan was.”

“Quick took my blood. He said he was going to send it to you. You know, so you could run DNA and know that I was really kidnapped.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, well, he was lying to you. The video he sent was enough to convince me. The blood wasn’t necessary. He was lying to you, Mad. He betrayed you and he got what he deserved.”

She immediately turned toward him and Bosch realized he had slipped again.

“What do you mean? What happened to him?”

Bosch didn’t want to go down the slippery slope of lying to his daughter. He also knew that his daughter obviously cared about Quick’s sister, if not for Quick himself. She probably still didn’t understand the depth of his betrayal.

“He’s dead.”

Her breath caught in her throat and she brought her hands to her mouth.

“Did you?…”

“No, Maddie, I didn’t do it. I found him dead at the same time I found your phone. I guess you somehow liked him, so I’m sorry. But he betrayed you, baby, and I have to tell you, I might have done the same thing to him if I had found him alive. Let’s go in now.”

Bosch turned from the railing.

“What about He?”

Bosch stopped and looked back at her.

“I don’t know about He.”

He moved to the door and went inside. There, he had lied to her for the first time. It was to save her from some grief, but it didn’t matter. He could already feel that he was beginning to slide down the slope.

40

At 11 A.M. Monday, Bosch was waiting outside the Downtown Detention Center for the release of Bo-Jing Chang. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do or say to the murderer when he stepped through the door as a free man. But he knew he couldn’t let the moment pass. If Chang’s arrest had been the trigger that resulted in all that had happened in Hong Kong, including the death of Eleanor Wish, then Bosch would not be able to live with himself if he didn’t confront the man when he had the chance.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and he was tempted not to answer it and risk missing Chang, but he saw on the screen that it was Lieutenant Gandle calling. He took the call.

“I hear you’re back.”

“Yeah, I was going to call you.”

“You got your daughter?”

“Yeah, she’s safe.”

“Where?”

Bosch hesitated but not for too long.

“She’s with me.”

“And her mother?”

“She’s still in Hong Kong.”

“How’s that going to?”

“She’ll live with me. For a while, at least.”

“What happened back there? Anything I need to worry about?”

Bosch wasn’t sure what to tell him. He decided to put it off.

“I’m hoping there’s no blowback. But you never know.”

“I’ll let you know what I hear. Are you coming in?”

“Uh, not today. I need to take a couple days to get my daughter situated and in school and stuff. I want to get her some counseling.”

“Is this white time or vacay days? I need to put it down.”

Comp time was called “white time” in the LAPD, after the blank white form on which supervisors kept track of it.

“Doesn’t matter. I think I have the white time.”

“Then I’ll go with that. Are you okay, Harry?”

“I’m fine.”

“I guess Chu told you about Chang getting kicked.”

“Yeah, he told me.”

“His prick lawyer was already here this morning to pick up his suitcase. I’m sorry, Harry. There’s nothing we could do. The case isn’t there and those two wimps up in the Valley won’t help us hold him on the extortion.”

“I know.”

“Didn’t help that your partner stayed home all weekend. Claimed he was sick.”

“Yeah, well…”

Bosch had reached the end of his patience with Ferras but that was between him and his partner. He wouldn’t discuss it with Gandle yet.

The door to the release office opened and Bosch saw an Asian man in a suit step out, carrying a briefcase. It wasn’t Chang. The man held the door with his body and waved up the street to a waiting car. Bosch knew this was it. The man in the suit was a well-known defense attorney named Anthony Wing.

“Lieutenant, I gotta go. Can I call you back?”

“Just call me when you decide how many days you’re taking and when I can put you back on the schedule. Meantime, I’ll find something for Ferras to do. Something inside.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

Bosch closed the phone just as a black Cadillac Escalade cruised up and Bo-Jing Chang stepped through the jail’s release door. Bosch moved into the path between him and the SUV. Wing then stepped between Bosch and Chang.

“Excuse me, Detective,” Wing said. “You are impeding my client’s path.”

“Is that what I’m doing?, ‘impeding’? What about him impeding John Li’s life?”

Bosch saw Chang smirk and shake his head behind Wing. He heard a car door slam behind him and Wing’s attention moved over Harry’s shoulder.

“Make sure you get this,” he commanded.

Bosch looked behind him and saw that a man with a video camera had gotten out of the big SUV. The lens of the camera was pointed at Bosch.

“What is this?”

“Detective, if you touch or harass Mr. Chang in any way, it will be documented and offered to the media.”

Bosch turned back to Wing and Chang. Chang’s smirk had turned into a satisfied smile.

“You think this is over, Chang? I don’t care where you go, this isn’t over. You and your people made it personal, asshole, and I don’t forget that.”

“Detective, move aside,” Wing said, clearly playing to the camera. “Mr. Chang is leaving because he is innocent of the charges you tried to concoct against him. He is returning to Hong Kong because of LAPD harassment. Because of you, he is unable to continue enjoying the life he has known here for several years.”

Bosch stepped out of their way and let them pass to the car.

“You are full of shit, Wing. Take your camera and shove it up your ass.”

Chang got into the backseat of the Escalade first, then Wing signaled the cameraman to get into the front seat.

“We have your threat on film now, Detective,” Wing said. “Remember that.”

Wing got in next to Chang and closed the door. Bosch stood there and watched the big SUV glide off, probably taking Chang directly to the airport to complete his legal escape.

When Bosch got back to the school, he went to the assistant principal’s office to check in. Sue Bambrough had agreed that morning to allow Madeline to audit eighth-grade classes and see if she liked the school. When he stepped in, Bambrough asked him to sit down and then proceeded to tell him that his daughter was still in class and assimilating quite well. Bosch was surprised. She had been in L.A. a little more than twelve hours after losing her mother and spending a harrowing weekend in captivity. Bosch had feared that the drop-off at the school might be disastrous.

Bosch already knew Bambrough. A couple of years earlier, a neighbor who had a child attending the school asked him to speak to the kid’s class about police work and crime. Bambrough was a bright, hands-on administrator who had interviewed Bosch at length before allowing him to address any students. Bosch had rarely been grilled so thoroughly by defense attorneys in court. She had taken a hard line on the quality of police work in the city but her arguments were well thought out and articulate. Bosch respected her.

“Class ends in ten minutes,” Bambrough said. “I’ll take you to her then. There is something I would like to talk to you about first, Detective Bosch.”

“I told you last time, call me Harry. What is it you want to talk about?”

“Well, your daughter’s quite a storyteller. She was overheard during the midmorning break telling other students that she just moved here from Hong Kong because her mother was murdered and she got kidnapped. My concern is that she’s self-aggrandizing in order to-”

“It’s true. All of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was abducted and her mother was killed trying to res-cue her.”

“Oh, dear God! When did this happen”

Bosch regretted not telling Bambrough the whole story when they had talked that morning. He had simply told her that his daughter was going to be living with him and wanted to check the school out.

“Over the weekend,” he answered. “We arrived from Hong Kong last night.”

Bambrough looked like she had taken a punch.

“Over the weekend? Are you telling me the truth?”

“Of course I am. She’s been through a lot. I know it might be too soon to put her in school, but this morning I had…an appointment I couldn’t avoid. I’ll take her home now and if she wants to come back in a few days, I’ll let you know.”

“Well, what about counseling? What about a physical examination”

“I’m working on all of that.”

“Don’t be afraid to get her help. Children like to talk about things. It’s just that sometimes it’s not to their parents. I have found that children have an innate ability to know what they need in order to heal themselves and survive. Without her mother and with you being new at full-time parenting, Madeline may need an outside party to talk to.”

Bosch nodded at the end of the lecture.

“She’ll get whatever she needs. What would I need to do if she wants to go to school here?”

“Just call me. You’re in the district and we have the space. There will be some minor paperwork for enrollment and we’ll have to get her transcript from Hong Kong. You’ll need her birth certificate and that’s about it.”

Bosch realized that his daughter’s birth certificate was probably back in the apartment in Hong Kong.

“I don’t have her birth certificate. I’ll have to apply for one. I think she was born in Las Vegas.”

“You think?”

“I, uh, didn’t meet her until she was already four. At the time, she lived with her mother in Las Vegas and I assume she was born there. I can ask her.”

Bambrough looked even more puzzled.

“I have her passport,” Bosch offered. “It’ll say where she was born. I just haven’t looked at it.”

“Well, we can make do with that until you get the birth certificate. I think the important thing now is to take care of your daughter psychologically. This is a terrible trauma for her. You need to get her talking to a counselor.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

A chime sounded the change of classes and Bambrough stood up. They left the office and walked down a main hallway. The campus was long and narrow because it was built on the hillside. Bosch saw Bambrough still trying to absorb the idea of what Madeline had just been through and survived.

“She’s a strong kid,” he offered.

“She’ll have to be after an experience like that.”

Bosch wanted to change the subject.

“What classes has she been in?”

“She started in math and then had a short break before social studies. They then went to lunch and now she just finished Spanish.”

“She was learning Chinese in Hong Kong.”

“I’m sure this is just one of the many difficult changes she’ll be going through.”

“Like I said, she’s tough. I think she’ll make it.”

Bambrough turned and smiled as she walked.

“Like her father, I assume.”

“Her mother was tougher.”

Children were crowding the hallway as they changed classes. Bambrough saw Bosch’s daughter before he did.

“Madeline,” she called.

Bosch waved. Maddie had been walking with two girls and somehow seemed to be already making friends. She said good-bye to them and rushed over.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hey, how’d you like it?”

“It was all right, I guess.”

Her voice was reserved and Bosch didn’t know if that was because the assistant principal was standing right there with them.

“How was Spanish” Bambrough asked.

“Um, I was kind of lost.”

“I heard you were learning Chinese. It’s a much more difficult language than Spanish. I think you’d pick up Spanish very quickly here.”

“I guess.”

Bosch decided to save her from the small talk.

“Well, are you ready, Mad? We’re going to go shopping today, remember?”

“Sure, I’m ready.”

Bosch looked at Bambrough and nodded.

“Thank you for doing this, and I’ll be in touch.”

His daughter chimed in with her own thanks and they left the school. Once they got in the car, Bosch started up the hill to their house.

“So, now that we’re alone, what did you really think, Mad?”

“Uh, it was okay. It’s just not the same, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. We can look at some private schools. There’s a few nearby on the Valley side.”

“I don’t want to be a Valley girl, Dad.”

“I kind of doubt you’ll ever be a Valley girl. It’s not about where you go to school, anyway.”

“I think that school will be fine,” she said after some thought. “I met some girls there and they were pretty nice.”

“You sure?”

“I think so. Can I start tomorrow”

Bosch looked over at her and then back at the curving road.

“That’s sort of fast, isn’t it? You just got here last night.”

“I know, but what am I supposed to do? Sit up in that house and cry all day?”

“No, but I thought if we took things kind of slow, it might-”

“I don’t want to fall behind. School started last week.”

Bosch thought for a few moments about what Bambrough had said about kids knowing what they need to heal. He decided to trust his daughter’s instincts.

“Okay, if you feel it’s right. I’ll call Mrs. Bambrough back and tell her you want to enroll. By the way, you were born in Las Vegas, right”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Yeah, I know. I just wanted to make sure because I have to apply for a copy of your birth certificate. For the school.”

She didn’t respond. Bosch pulled into the carport next to the house.

“So, Vegas, right?”

“Yes! You really didn’t know, did you? God!”

Before he could work up a response, Bosch was saved by his phone. It buzzed and he pulled it out. Without looking at the screen, he told his daughter he had to take it.

It was Ignacio Ferras.

“Harry, I hear you’re back and your daughter’s safe.”

He sure was late getting the news. Bosch unlocked the kitchen door and held it open for his daughter.

“Yeah, we’re good.”

“You’re taking off a few days?”

“That’s the plan. What are you working on?”

“Oh, just a few things. Writing up some summaries on John Li.”

“What for? That one’s over. We blew it.”

“I know but we need to keep the file complete and I need to file the search warrant returns with the court. That’s sort of why I’m calling. You bugged out Friday without leaving any notes on what you found on the searches of the phone and the suitcase. I already wrote up the car search.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t find anything. That’s one reason why we didn’t have a case to file, remember?”

Bosch threw his keys on the dining room table and watched his daughter go down the hall to her room. He felt a growing annoyance with Ferras. At one point he had embraced the idea of mentoring the young detective and teaching him the mission. But he was now finally accepting the reality that Ferras would never recover from being wounded in the line of duty. Physically, yes. Mentally, no. He would never be the full package again. He would be a paper pusher.

“So put down zero returns” Ferras asked.

Bosch momentarily thought of the business card from the taxi service in Hong Kong. It had been a dead end and wasn’t worth putting into the search warrant return that had to go back to the judge.

“Yeah, zero returns. There was nothing.”

“And nothing on the phone.”

Bosch suddenly realized something but also knew in the same instant that it was probably too late.

“Nothing on the phone, but did you guys go to the company for the records?”

Chang might have wiped all call records off his phone but he wouldn’t have been able to touch the records kept by his cellular service carrier. There was a pause before Ferras answered.

“No, I thought-you had the phone, Harry. I thought you contacted the phone company.”

“I didn’t, because I was heading to Hong Kong.”

All phone companies had established protocols for receiving and accepting search warrants. It usually amounted to faxing the signed search warrant to the legal affairs office. It was a simple thing to do but it had fallen through the cracks. Now Chang had been kicked loose and was probably long gone.

“Goddamnit,” Bosch said. “You should’ve been on that, Ignacio.”

“Me? You had the phone, Harry. I thought you did it.”

“I had the phone but you were on point with the warrants. You should have checked it off before you left Friday.”

“That’s bullshit, man. You’re going to blame me for this?”

“I’m blaming us both. Yeah, I could’ve done it, but you should’ve made sure it was done. You didn’t because you left early and you let it slide. You’ve been letting the whole job slide, partner.”

There, he had said it.

“And you are full of shit, partner. You mean because I’m not like you, losing my family to the job and then risking my family to the job, that I’m letting it slide? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bosch was stunned silent by the verbal shot. Ferras had hit him right in the spot where he had been living for the past seventy-two hours. Finally, he shook it off and came back.

“Ignacio,” he said calmly. “This isn’t working. I don’t know when I will be back into the squad this week, but when I get in there, we’re gonna talk.”

“Fine. I’ll be here.”

“Of course you will. You’re always in the squad. I’ll see you then.”

Bosch closed the phone before Ferras could protest his final shot. Bosch was sure Gandle would back him when he asked for a new partner. He went back into the kitchen to grab a beer and take the edge off the conversation. He opened the refrigerator and started to reach in but stopped. It was too early and he was going to be driving his daughter around the Valley shopping for the rest of the afternoon.

He closed the refrigerator and walked down the hallway. The door to his daughter’s room was closed.

“Maddie, you ready to go?”

“I’m changing. I’ll be out in a minute.”

She had answered in a clipped don’t-bother-me tone. Bosch wasn’t sure what to make of it. The plan was to go to the phone store first and then to get clothing and furniture and a laptop computer. He was going to get his daughter whatever she wanted and she knew it. Yet she was being short with him and he wasn’t sure why. One day on the job as a full-time father and he already felt like he was lost at sea.

41

The next morning Bosch and his daughter set to work assembling some of the purchases of the day before. Maddie was not in school yet because her enrollment would take an additional day to wind through public school bureaucracy-a delay Bosch welcomed because it gave them more time together.

First in line for assembly was the computer desk and chair they had bought at the IKEA store in Burbank. They had gone on a four-hour shopping spree, accumulating school supplies, clothes, electronics and furniture, completely filling Bosch’s car and leaving him with a feeling of guilt that was new to him. He knew that buying his daughter everything she pointed at or asked for was a form of trying to buy her happiness-and the forgiveness that would hopefully come with it.

He had moved the coffee table out of the way and spread the parts of the prefabricated desk out on the floor of the living room. The instructions said it could be completely assembled with only one tool-a small Allen wrench that came with it. Harry and Madeline sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to understand the assembly map.

“It looks like you start by attaching the side panels to the desktop,” Madeline said.

“You sure?”

“Yes. See, everything that is marked ‘one’ is part of the first step.”

“I thought that just meant you have one of those parts.”

“No, because there are two side panels and they’re marked ‘one.’ I think it means step one.”

“Oh.”

A phone rang and they looked at each other. Madeline had gotten a new phone the day before and it was once again a match to her father’s. The trouble was, she had not selected an individual ring tone, so both phones sounded the same. She had received a series of calls throughout the morning from friends in Hong Kong whom she had sent messages to, saying she had moved to Los Angeles.

“I think that’s you,” she said. “I left mine in my room.”

Bosch slowly climbed to his feet, his knees aching after being rescued from his cross-legged position. He made it over to the dining room table to grab the phone before the caller hung up.

“Harry, it’s Dr. Hinojos, how are you?”

“Plugging away, Doc. Thanks for the callback.”

Bosch opened the slider and stepped out onto the deck, closing the door behind him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get back until today,” Hinojos said. “Mondays are always brutal here. What’s up”

Hinojos ran the department’s Behavioral Science Section, the unit that offered psychiatric services to the rank and file. Bosch had known her almost fifteen years, ever since she had been a frontline counselor assigned to evaluate him after he’d had a physical altercation with his supervisor at Hollywood Division.

Bosch kept his voice low.

“I wanted to ask if you would do something for me as a favor.”

“Depends on what it is.”

“I want you to talk to my daughter.”

“Your daughter? Last you talked to me about her she lived with her mother in Vegas.”

“They moved. She’s been living in Hong Kong for the past six years. Now she’s with me. Her mother’s dead.”

There was a pause before Hinojos responded. Bosch got a -call-waiting beep in his ear but ignored the second call and waited her out.

“Harry, you know that we see police officers only here, not their families. I can give you a referral for a child practitioner.”

“I don’t want a child shrink. I’ve got the yellow pages here if I wanted that. That’s where the favor comes in. I want her to talk to you. You know me, I know you. Like that.”

“But Harry, it doesn’t work like that here.”

“She got abducted over there in Hong Kong. And her mother got killed trying to get her back. The kid’s got baggage, Doc.”

“Oh, my God! How long ago did this happen?”

“Last weekend.”

“Oh, Harry!”

“Yeah, not good. She needs to talk to somebody besides me. I want it to be you, Doctor.”

Another pause and again Bosch let it play out. There wasn’t much sense in pushing it with Hinojos. Bosch knew that from firsthand experience.

“I guess I could meet her off campus. Has she asked to talk to anyone?”

“She didn’t ask but I told her I wanted her to. She didn’t object. I think she’ll like you. When could you meet with her”

Bosch was pushing it, he knew. But it was for a good cause.

“Well, I have some time today,” Hinojos said. “I could meet her after lunch. What is her name?”

“Madeline. What time?”

“Could she meet me at one?”

“No problem. Should I bring her there, or will that be a problem?”

“I think it will be fine. I won’t record it as an official session.”

Bosch’s phone beeped again. This time he pulled it away from his ear to check the caller ID. It was Lieutenant Gandle.

“Okay, Doc,” Bosch replied. “Thank you for this.”

“It will be good to see you, too. Maybe you and I should have a conversation. I know your ex-wife still meant a lot to you.”

“Let’s take care of my daughter first. Then we can worry about me. I’ll drop her with you and then get out of the way, maybe walk over to Philippe’s or something.”

“See you then, Harry.”

He hung up and checked to see if Gandle had left a message. There was none. He headed back inside and saw that his daughter had already assembled the main structure of the desk.

“Wow, girl, you know what you’re doing.”

“It’s pretty easy.”

“Didn’t seem that way to me.”

He had just gotten back down on the floor when the landline started to ring from the kitchen. He got up and hustled to get it. It was an old wall-mounted phone with no caller ID screen.

“Bosch, what are you doing?”

It was Lieutenant Gandle.

“I told you I was taking a few days.”

“I need you to come in, and bring your daughter.”

Bosch was looking down into the empty sink.

“My daughter? Why, Lieutenant?”

“Because there are two guys from the Hong Kong Police Department sitting in Captain Dodds’s office and they want to talk to you. You didn’t tell me that your ex-wife is dead, Harry. You didn’t tell me about all the dead bodies they say you left in your wake over there.”

Bosch paused as he considered his options.

“Tell them I’ll see them at one-thirty,” he finally said.

Gandle’s response was sharp.

“One-thirty? What do you need three hours for? Get down here now.”

“I can’t, Lieutenant. I’ll see them at one-thirty.”

Bosch hung the phone up and then pulled his cell from his pocket. He had known that the Hong Kong cops would eventually come, and he had already made a plan for what to do.

The first call he made was to Sun Yee. He knew it was late in Hong Kong but he couldn’t wait. The phone rang eight times and then went to message.

“It’s Bosch. Call me when you get this.”

Bosch hung up and stared at his phone for a long moment. He was concerned. It was one-thirty in the morning in Hong Kong, not a time when he would have expected Sun Yee to be away from his phone. Unless it wasn’t by his choice.

He next scrolled through the contact list on his phone and found a number he had not used in at least a year.

He called the number now and this time got an immediate answer.

“Mickey Haller.”

“It’s Bosch.”

“Harry? I didn’t think I’d-”

“I think I need a lawyer.”

There was a pause.

“Okay, when?”

“Right now.”

42

Gandle came charging out of his office the moment he saw Bosch enter the squad room.

“Bosch, I told you to get in here forthwith. Why haven’t you been answering your-”

He stopped when he saw who entered behind Bosch. Mickey Haller was a well-known defense attorney. There wasn’t a detective in the RHD who didn’t know him on sight.

“This is your lawyer?” Gandle said with disgust. “I told you to bring your daughter, not your lawyer.”

“Lieutenant,” Bosch said, “let’s get something straight from the start. My daughter is not part of this equation. Mr. Haller is here to advise me and help me explain to the men from Hong Kong that I committed no crimes while I was in their city. Now, do you want to introduce me to them or should I do it myself?”

Gandle hesitated and then relented.

“This way.”

Gandle led them to the conference room off Captain Dodds’s office. Waiting there were the two men from Hong Kong. They stood up upon Bosch’s arrival and handed him business cards. Alfred Lo and Clifford Wu. They both were from HKPD’s Triad Bureau.

Bosch introduced Haller and handed the cards to him.

“Do we need a translator, gentlemen?” Haller asked.

“That is not necessary,” Wu said.

“Well, that’s a start,” Haller said. “Why don’t we sit down and hash this big old thing around.”

Everyone, including Gandle, took a seat around the conference table. Haller spoke first.

“Let me start things off here by saying that my client, Detective Bosch, is not waiving any of his constitutionally guaranteed rights at this time. We are on American soil here and that means he doesn’t have to speak to you gentlemen. However, he is also a detective and he knows what you two men are up against on a daily basis. Against my advice he is willing to talk to you. So the way we will work this is that you can ask him questions and he’ll try to answer them if I think he should. There will be no recording of this session but you can take notes if you like. We hope to end this conversation with you two fellows leaving with a greater understanding of the events of this past weekend in Hong Kong. But one thing that is for certain is that you will not be leaving with Detective Bosch. His cooperation in this matter ends when this meeting ends.”

Haller punctuated his opening salvo with a smile.

Before coming into the PAB, Bosch had met with Haller for nearly an hour in the back of Haller’s Lincoln Town Car. They were parked at the dog park near Franklin Canyon and were able to watch Harry’s daughter walk around and pet the sociable dogs while they talked. After they were finished, they took Maddie to her meeting with Dr. Hinojos and then drove over to the PAB.

They were not operating in complete agreement but had forged a strategy. A quick Internet search on Haller’s laptop had even provided some backup material. They had come in ready to make Bosch’s case to the men from Hong Kong.

Being a detective, Bosch was walking a thin line. He wanted his colleagues from across the Pacific to know what had happened, but he wasn’t going to put himself, his daughter or Sun Yee in jeopardy. He believed that all his actions in Hong Kong were justified. He told Haller he had been in kill-or-be-killed situations initiated by others. And that included his encounter with the hotel manager at Chung-king Mansions. In each case he had emerged victorious. There was no crime in that. Not in his book.

Lo took out a pen and notebook and Wu asked the first question, revealing that he was the lead man.

“First, we would ask, why did you go to Hong Kong on such short trip”

Bosch shrugged like the answer was obvious.

“To get my daughter and bring her back here.”

“On Saturday morning your former wife, she report the daughter missing to police,” Wu said.

Bosch stared at him for a long moment.

“Is that a question?”

“Was she missing?”

“My understanding is that she was indeed missing but on Saturday morning I was thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific. I can’t speak to what my ex-wife was doing then.”

“We believe your daughter was taken by someone named Peng Qingcai. Do you know him?”

“Never met him.”

“Peng is dead,” Lo said.

Bosch nodded.

“That doesn’t make me unhappy.”

“Mr. Peng’s neighbor, Mrs. Fengyi Mai, she recall speaking with you at her home Sunday,” Wu said. “You and Mr. Sun Yee.”

“Yes, we knocked on her door. She wasn’t much help.”

“Why is this”

“I guess because she didn’t know anything. She didn’t know where Peng was.”

Wu leaned forward, his body language easy to read. He thought he was zeroing in on Bosch.

“Did you go to Peng’s apartment?”

“We knocked on the door but nobody answered. After a while we left.”

Wu leaned back, disappointed.

“You acknowledge that you were with Sun Yee?” he asked.

“Sure. I was with him.”

“How do you know this man?”

“Through my ex-wife. They met me at the airport Sunday morning and informed me that they were looking for my daughter because the police department there did not believe she had been abducted.”

Bosch studied the two men for a moment before continuing.

“You see, your police department dropped the ball. I hope you will include that in your reports. Because if I’m dragged into this, I certainly will. I’ll call every newspaper in Hong Kong-doesn’t matter what language-and tell them my story.”

The plan was to use the threat of international embarrassment to the HKPD to make the detectives move cautiously.

“Are you aware,” Wu said, “that your ex-wife, Eleanor Wish, died of gunshot wound to the head on fifteenth floor of Chungking Mansions, Kowloon?”

“Yes, I am aware of that.”

“Were you present when this happened”

Bosch looked at Haller and the attorney nodded.

“I was there. I saw it happen.”

“Can you tell us how?”

“We were looking for our daughter. We didn’t find her. We were in the hallway about to leave and two men started to fire at us. Eleanor was hit and she…got killed. And the two men were hit, too. It was self-defense.”

Wu leaned forward.

“Who shot these men?”

“I think you know that.”

“You tell us, please.”

Bosch thought of the gun he had put into Eleanor’s dead hand. He was about to tell the lie when Haller leaned forward.

“I don’t think I’m going to allow Detective Bosch to get into who-shot-whom theories,” he said. “I am sure your fine police department has tremendous forensic capabilities and has already been able to determine through firearm and ballistic analysis the answer to that question.”

Wu moved on.

“Was Sun Yee on the fifteenth floor?”

“Not at that time.”

“Can you give us more detail?”

“About the shooting? No. But I can tell you something about the room where my daughter was held. We found tissue with blood on it. Her blood had been drawn.”

Bosch studied them to see if they reacted to this information. They showed nothing.

There was a file on the table in front of the men from Hong Kong. Wu opened it and took out a document with a paper clip on it. He slid it across the table to Bosch.

“This is statement from Sun Yee. It has been translated into English. Please read and acknowledge for accuracy.”

Haller leaned in next to Bosch and they read the two-page document together. Bosch immediately recognized it as a prop. It was their investigative theory disguised as a statement from Sun. About half of it was correct. The rest was assumption based on interviews and evidence. It attributed the murders of the Peng family to Bosch and Sun Yee.

Harry knew they were either trying to bluff him into telling what really happened or had arrested Sun and forced him to sign his name to the story they preferred, namely that Bosch had been responsible for a bloody rampage across Hong Kong. It would be the best way to explain nine violent deaths on one Sunday. The American did it.

But Bosch remembered what Sun had said to him at the airport. I will handle these things and make no mention of you. This is my promise. No matter what happens, I will leave you and your daughter out of it.

“Gentlemen,” Haller said, completing his read of the document first. “This document is-”

“Total bullshit,” Bosch finished.

He slid the document back across the table. It hit Wu in the chest.

“No, no,” Wu said quickly. “This is very real. This is signed by Sun Yee.”

“Maybe if you held a gun to his head. Is that how you do it over there in Hong Kong?”

“Detective Bosch!” Wu exclaimed. “You will come to Hong Kong and answer these charges.”

“I’m not going anywhere near Hong Kong ever again.”

“You have killed many people. You have used firearms. You placed your daughter above all Chinese citizens and-”

“They were blood-typing her!” Bosch said angrily. “They took her blood. You know when they do that? When they’re trying to match organs.”

He paused and watched the growing discomfort on Wu’s face. Bosch didn’t care about Lo. Wu was the power and if Bosch got to him, he would be safe. Haller had been right. In the back of the Lincoln, he had set the subtle strategy for the interview. Rather than focus on defending Bosch’s actions as self-defense, make clear to the men from Hong Kong what would be brought to the international media stage should they pursue any sort of case against Bosch.

Now was the time to make that play and Haller took over and calmly moved in for the kill.

“Gentlemen, you can hang on to your signed statement there,” he said, a seemingly permanent smile playing on his face. “Let me summarize the facts that are supported by the actual evidence. A thirteen-year-old American girl was abducted in your city. Her mother dutifully called the police to report this crime. The police declined to investigate the crime and then-”

“The girl had run away before,” Lo interjected. “There was no reas-”

Haller held up a finger to cut him off.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, now a tone of contained outrage in his voice and the smile gone. “Your department was told an American girl was missing and chose, for whatever reason, to ignore the report. This forced the girl’s mother to look for her daughter herself. And the first thing she did was call in the girl’s father from Los Angeles.”

Haller gestured to Bosch.

“Detective Bosch arrived and together with his ex-wife and a friend of the family, Mr. Sun Yee, they began the search that the Hong Kong police had determined they would not be involved in. On their own, what they found was evidence that she had been kidnapped for her organs. This American girl, they were going to sell her for her organs!”

His outrage was growing and Bosch believed it was not an act. For a few moments Haller let it float over the table like a thundercloud before continuing.

“Now, as you gentlemen know, people got killed. My client isn’t going to get into the details with you about all of that. Suffice it to say that, left alone in Hong Kong without any help from the government and police, this mother and father trying to find their daughter encountered some very bad people and there were kill-or-be-killed situations. There was provocation!?”

Bosch saw the two Hong Kong detectives physically lean back as Haller shouted the last word. He then continued in a calm and well-modulated courtroom voice.

“Now, we know you want to know what happened and you have reports that need to be filled out and supervisors who need to be informed. But you have to seriously ask yourself, is this the proper course to take?”

Another pause.

“Whatever happened in Hong Kong occurred because your department failed this young American girl and this family. And if you are now going to sit back and analyze what actions Detective Bosch took because your department failed to act properly-if you are looking for a scapegoat to take back with you to Hong Kong-then you won’t find one here. We won’t be cooperating. However, I do have someone here whom you will be able to talk to about all of this. We can start with him.”

Haller pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and slid it across the table to them. Wu picked it up and studied it. Haller had shown it to Bosch earlier. It was the business card of a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

“Jock Meekeevoy,” Lo read. “He has information about this?”

“That’s Jack McEvoy. And he has no information now. But he would be very interested in a story like this.”

This was all part of the plan. Haller bluffing. The truth was, and Bosch knew, that McEvoy had been laid off by the Times six months earlier. Haller had dug the old card out of a stack of business cards he kept wrapped in a rubber band in his Lincoln.

“That’s where it will start,” Haller said calmly. “And I think it will make a great story. Thirteen-year-old American girl kidnapped in China for her organs and the police do nothing. Her parents are forced into action and the mother is killed trying to save her daughter. From there it will go international for sure. Every paper, every news channel in the world will want a part of this story. They’ll make a Hollywood movie out of it. And Oliver Stone will direct it!”

Haller now opened his own file that he had carried into the meeting. It contained the news stories he had printed in the car following his Internet search. He slid a set of printouts across the table to Wu and Lo. They moved closer together to share.

“And finally, what you have there is a package of news articles that I will be providing to Mr. McEvoy and any other journalist who makes an inquiry of me or Detective Bosch. These articles document the recent growth of the black market in human organs in China. The waiting list in China is said to be the longest in the world, with some reports of as many as a million people waiting for an organ at any given time. Doesn’t help that a few years back and under pressure from the rest of the world, the Chinese government banned the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners. That only heightened the demand and value of human organs on the black market. I am sure you will be able to see from those stories from very credible newspapers, including the Beijing Review, where Mr. McEvoy will be going with his story. It’s up to you now to decide if that is what you want to happen here.”

Wu turned so he could whisper in rapid-fire Chinese directly into Lo’s ear.

“No need to whisper, gentlemen,” Haller said. “We can’t understand you.”

Wu straightened himself.

“We would like to make private telephone call before continuing the interview,” he said.

“To Hong Kong?” Bosch asked. “It’s going on five in the morning there.”

“This does not matter,” Wu said. “I must make the call, please.”

Gandle stood up.

“You can use my office. You’ll have privacy.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

The Hong Kong investigators stood up to go.

“One last thing, gentlemen,” Haller said.

They looked at him with what now? written on their faces.

“I just want you and whoever it is you are calling to know that we are also very concerned about the disposition of Sun Yee in this matter. We want you to know that we’ll be getting in touch with Mr. Sun and if we can’t reach him or if we learn that he has encountered any sort of impediment to his personal freedom, we plan to bring that issue up before the court of public opinion as well.”

Haller smiled and paused before continuing.

“It’s a package deal, gentlemen. Tell your people that.”

Haller nodded, keeping the smile going the whole time, his demeanor contradicting the obvious threat. Wu and Lo nodded that they understood the message and followed Gandle out of the room.

“What do you think?” Bosch asked Haller when they were alone. “Are we in the clear?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Haller said. “I think this thing just ended. What happens in Hong Kong stays in Hong Kong.”

43

Bosch decided not to wait in the conference room for the Hong Kong detectives to return. He remained bothered by the verbal altercation he’d had with his partner the day before and went into the squad room to try to find Ferras.

But Ferras was gone and Bosch wondered if he had intentionally gone to lunch in order to avoid further confrontation. Harry stepped into his own cubicle to check the desk for interoffice envelopes and other messages. There were none, but he saw a blinking red light on his phone. He had a message. He was still getting used to the practice of having to check his phone line for messages. In the squad room at Parker Center, things were antiquated and there was no personal voice mail. All messages went to a central line, which the squad secretary monitored. She then wrote out message slips that went into mailboxes or were left on desks. If the call was urgent the secretary personally tracked the detective down by pager or cell phone.

Bosch sat down and typed his code into the phone. He had five messages. The first three were routine calls about other cases. He made a few notes on a desk pad and erased the messages. The fourth had been left the night before by Detective Wu of the HKPD. He had just landed and checked into a hotel and wanted to set up an interview. Bosch erased it.

The fifth message was from Teri Sopp in latent prints. It had been left at 9:15 that morning, just about the time Bosch was opening the flat box that contained his daughter’s new computer desk.

“Harry, we did the electrostatic enhancement test on the casing you gave me. We pulled a print off it and everybody around here’s pretty excited. We got a match on the DOJ computer, too. So give me a call as soon as you get this.”

As he called latents, Bosch looked up over the wall of his cubicle and saw Gandle escorting the two HKPD detectives back to the conference room. He waved his arm at Bosch, signaling him to come back as well. Bosch held up a finger, telling him that he needed a minute.

“Latents.”

“Let me speak to Teri, please.”

He waited another ten seconds, excitement growing. Bo-Jing Chang might have been kicked loose and might already be back in Hong Kong for all Bosch knew, but if his fingerprint was on the casing of one of the bullets that killed John Li, then that was a game changer. It was direct evidence linking him to the murder. They could charge him and seek an extradition warrant.

“This is Teri.”

“It’s Harry Bosch. I just got your message.”

“I was wondering where you were. We got a match on your casing.”

“That’s wonderful. Bo-Jing Chang?”

“I’m in the lab. Let me go to my desk. It was a Chinese name but not the one on the print card your partner gave me. Those prints didn’t match. Let me put you on hold.”

She was gone and Bosch felt a fissure suddenly form in his assumptions about the case.

“Harry, are you coming?”

He looked up and out of the cubicle. Gandle had called from the door of the conference room. Bosch pointed to the phone and shook his head. Not satisfied, Gandle stepped out of the conference room and came over to Bosch’s cubicle.

“Look, they are folding on this,” he said urgently. “You need to get in there and finish it off.”

“My lawyer can handle it. I just got the call.”

“What call?”

“The one that changes-”

“Harry?”

It was Sopp back on the line. Bosch covered the mouthpiece.

“I have to take this,” he said to Gandle. Then, dropping his hand and speaking into the phone, he said, “Teri, give me the name.”

Gandle shook his head and went back toward the conference room.

“Okay, it’s not the name you mentioned. It’s Henry Lau, L-A-U. DOB is nine-nine-eighty-two.”

“What’s he in the computer for?”

“He was pulled over on a deuce two years ago in Venice.”

“That’s all he’s got?”

“Yeah. Other than that he’s clean.”

“What about an address?”

“The address on his DL is eighteen Quarterdeck in Venice. Unit eleven.”

Bosch copied the information into his pocket notebook.

“Okay, and this print you pulled, it’s solid, right?”

“No doubt, Harry. It came up glowing like Christmas. This technology is amazing. It’s going to change things.”

“And they want to use this as the test case for California?”

“I wouldn’t jump the gun on that just yet. My supervisor wants to first see how this plays in your case. You know, whether this guy is your shooter and what other evidence there is. We’re looking for a case where the technology is an integral piece in the prosecution.”

“Well, you’ll know it when I know it, Teri. Thanks for this. We’re going to move on it right now.”

“Good luck, Harry.”

Bosch hung up. He first looked over the cubicle wall at the conference room. The blinds were down but open. He could see Haller gesturing toward the two men from Hong Kong. Bosch checked his partner’s cubicle once more but it was still empty. He made a decision and picked up the phone again.

David Chu was in the AGU office and took Bosch’s call. Harry updated him on the latest piece of information to come out of latent prints and told him to run Henry Lau’s name through the triad files. In the meantime, Bosch said, he was heading over to pick Chu up.

“Where are we going?” Chu asked.

“To go find this guy.”

Bosch hung up and headed to the conference room, not to take part in whatever was being discussed, but to inform Gandle of what appeared to be a major breakthrough in the case.

When he opened the door, Gandle put his it’s-about-time look on his face. Bosch signaled him to step out again.

“Harry, these men still have questions for you,” Gandle said.

“They’ll have to wait. We’ve caught a break on the Li case and I need to move on it. Now.”

Gandle got up and started toward the door.

“Harry, I think I can handle this,” Haller said from his seat. “But there’s one question you need to answer.”

Bosch looked at him and Haller nodded, meaning the remaining question was a safe one.

“What?”

“Do you want your ex-wife’s body transported to Los Angeles?”

The question gave Bosch pause. The immediate answer was yes, but the hesitation was in measuring the consequences for his daughter.

“Yes,” he finally said. “Send her to me.”

He let Gandle step out and then closed the door.

“What happened?” Gandle asked.

Chu was waiting out front of the AGU building when Bosch pulled up. He was holding a briefcase, which made Bosch think that he had found some information on Henry Lau. He hopped in and Bosch took off.

“We’re starting in Venice?” Chu asked.

“That’s right. What did you find on Lau?”

“Nothing?.”

Bosch looked over at him.

“Nothing?”

“As far as we know, he’s clean. I could not find his name anywhere in our intelligence files. I also talked to some people and made some calls. Nothing. By the way, I did print out his DL photo.”

He leaned down and opened his briefcase and pulled out the color printout of Lau’s driver’s license photo. He handed it to Bosch, who stole quick glances at it as he drove. They got on the Broadway entrance to the 101 and took it up to the 110. The freeways were congested downtown.

Lau had smiled at the camera. He had a fresh face and a stylish cut to his hair. It was hard to connect the face with triad work, particularly the cold-blooded murder of a liquor store owner. The address in Venice didn’t fit well either.

“I also checked with ATF. Henry Lau is the registered owner of a nine-millimeter Glock Model Nineteen. Not only did he load it, he owns it.”

“When did he buy it?”

“Six years ago, the day after he turned twenty-one.”

To Bosch that meant they were getting warm. Lau owned the right gun and his purchase of the weapon as soon as he was of legal age most likely indicated that he had had a long-term desire to acquire a weapon. That made him a traveler in the world Bosch knew. His connection to John Li and Bo-Jing Chang would become apparent once they had him in custody and started taking apart his life.

They connected to the 10 and headed west toward the Pacific. Bosch’s phone buzzed and he answered without looking, expecting the caller to be Haller with news about the meeting with the Hong Kong detectives being over.

“Harry, it’s Dr. Hinojos. We’re waiting for you.”

Bosch had forgotten. For more than thirty years he had simply moved with an investigation when it was time to move. He had never had to think about anybody else.

“Oh, Doctor! I’m so sorry. I completely-I’m on my way to pick up a suspect.”

“What do you mean?”

“We got a break and I had to-is there any way that Maddie could stay with you a little while longer”

“Well, this is…I suppose she could stay here. I really just have administrative work the rest of the day. Are you sure this is what you want to do?”

“Look, I know this is bad. It looks bad. She just got here and I left her with you and forgot. But this case is the reason she’s here. I have to ride it out. I’m going to grab this guy if he’s home and come back downtown. I’ll call you then. I’ll come get her then.”

“Okay, Harry. I could use the extra time with her. You and I are also going to need to find time to talk. About Maddie and then about you.”

“Okay, we will. Is she there? Can I speak to her?”

“Hold on.”

After a few moments Maddie got on the line.

“Dad?”

With one word she imparted all of the messages: surprise, disappointment, disbelief, terrible letdown.

“I know, baby. I’m sorry. Something’s come up and I need to go with it. Go with Dr. Hinojos and I will be there as fast as I can.”

“All right.”

A double helping of disappointment. Bosch feared it would not be the last time.

“Okay, Mad. I love you.”

He closed the phone and put it away.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said before Chu could ask a question.

“Okay,” Chu said.

The traffic opened up and they made it into Venice in less than a half hour. Along the way Bosch took another call, this one the expected one from Haller. He told Harry that the Hong Kong police would bother him no further.

“That’s it, then?”

“They’ll be in touch about your ex-wife’s body, but that’s it. They’re dropping any inquiry into your part in this.”

“What about Sun Yee?”

“They claim he is being released from questioning and that he faces no charges. You will need to contact him, of course, to confirm.”

“Don’t worry, I will. Thank you, Mickey.”

“All in a day’s work.”

“Send me the bill.”

“No, we’re even, Harry. Instead of billing you, why don’t you let my daughter meet your daughter? They’re almost the same age, you know.”

Bosch hesitated. He knew that Haller was asking for more than a visit between the two girls. Haller was Bosch’s half brother, though they had never met as adults until they crossed paths on a case just a year before. Hooking up the daughters meant hooking up the fathers, and Bosch wasn’t sure he was ready for that.

“When the time is right we’ll do it,” he said. “Right now, she’s supposed to start school tomorrow and I’ve got to get her settled in here.”

“Sounds good. You be safe, Harry.”

Bosch closed the phone and concentrated on finding Henry Lau’s residence. The streets that made up the neighborhoods at the south end of Venice were gridded in alphabetical order and Quarterdeck was one of the last before the inlet and Marina del Rey.

Venice was a bohemian community with uptown prices. The building where Lau resided was one of the newer glass-and-stucco structures that were slowly crowding out the little weekend bungalows that had once lined the beach. Bosch parked in an alley off Speedway and they walked back.

The building was a condominium complex and there were signs out front advertising two units for sale. They entered through a glass door and stood in a small vestibule with an inner security door and a button panel for calling up to individual units. Bosch didn’t like the idea of pushing the button for unit 11. If Lau knew police were at the building entrance, he could escape through any fire exit in the building.

“What’s the plan?” Chu said.

Bosch started pushing the buttons for the other units. They waited and finally a woman answered one of the calls.

“Yes?”

“Los Angeles police, ma’am,” Bosch said. “Can we speak with you?”

“Speak to me about what?”

Bosch shook his head. There was a time when he would not have been questioned. The door would have been immediately opened.

“It’s about a homicide investigation, ma’am. Can you open the door”

There was a long pause and Bosch wanted to buzz her again but he realized he was not sure which of the buttons he had pushed was the one she had responded to.

“Can you hold your badges to the camera, please?” the woman said.

Bosch had not realized there was a camera and looked around.

“Here.”

Chu pointed to a small aperture located at the top of the panel. They held up their badges and soon the inner door buzzed. Bosch pulled it open.

“I don’t even know what unit she was in,” Bosch said.

The door led to a common area that was open to the sky. There was a small lap pool in the center and the building’s twelve townhomes all had entrances here, four each on the north and south sides and two each on the east and west. Eleven was on the west side, which meant the unit had windows facing the ocean.

Bosch approached the door to number 11 and knocked on it and got no answer. The door to number 12 opened and a woman stood there.

“I thought you said you wanted to speak to me,” she said.

“We’re actually looking for Mr. Lau,” Chu said. “Do you know where he is?”

“He might be at work. But I think he said he was shooting at night this week.”

“Shooting what?” Bosch asked.

“He’s a screenwriter and he’s working on a movie or a TV show. I’m not sure which.”

Just then the door to number 11 cracked open. A man with bleary eyes and unkempt hair peered out. Bosch recognized him from the photo Chu had printed.

“Henry Lau?” Bosch said. “LAPD. We need to ask you some questions.”

44

Henry Lau had a spacious home with a back deck that was ten feet over the boardwalk and had a view of the Pacific across the widest stretch of Venice beach. He invited Bosch and Chu in and asked them to sit down in the living room. Chu sat down but Bosch remained standing, positioning his back to the view so that he would not be distracted during the interview. He wasn’t getting the vibe he was expecting. Lau seemed to take their knocking on his door as routine and expected. Harry hadn’t counted on that.

Lau was wearing blue jeans, sneakers and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a silk-screened image of a long-haired man wearing sunglasses, and a caption that said, the dude abides. If he had been sleeping, he had slept in his clothes.

Bosch pointed him to a square black leather chair with armrests a foot wide.

“Have a seat, Mr. Lau, and we’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” he said.

Lau was small and catlike. He sat down and brought his legs up onto the chair.

“Is this about the shooting?” he asked.

Bosch glanced at Chu and then back at Lau.

“What shooting is that?”

“The one out there on the beach. The robbery.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks back. But I guess that’s not why you’re here if you don’t even know when it was.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Lau. We are investigating a shooting but not that one. Do you mind talking to us?”

Lau hiked his shoulders up.

“I don’t know. I don’t know about any other shootings, Officers.”

“We’re detectives.”

“Detectives. What shooting?”

“Do you know a man named Bo-Jing Chang?”

“Bo-Jing Chang? No, I don’t know that name.”

He looked genuinely surprised by the name. Bosch signaled Chu and he pulled a printout of Chang’s booking photo from his briefcase. He showed it to Lau. While he studied it, Bosch moved to another spot in the room to get another angle on him. He wanted to keep moving. It would help keep Lau off guard.

Lau shook his head after looking at the photo.

“No, don’t know him. What shooting are we talking about here?”

“Let us ask the questions for now,” Bosch said. “Then we’ll get to yours. Your neighbor said you’re a screenwriter?”

“Yes.”

“You write anything I might have seen?”

“Nope.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve never had anything that actually got made until right now. So there’s nothing out there you could’ve seen.”

“Well, then who pays for this nice pad on the beach?”

“I pay for it. I get paid to write. I just haven’t had anything hit the screen yet. It takes time, you know?”

Bosch moved behind Lau and the young man had to turn in his comfortable seat to track him.

“Where did you grow up, Henry?”

“San Francisco. Came down here to go to school and stayed.”

“You were born up there?”

“That’s right.”

“You a Giants or Dodgers man?”

“Giants, baby.”

“That’s too bad. When was the last time you were in South L.A.?”

The question came from left field and Lau had to think before answering. He shook his head.

“I don’t know, five or six years at least. Been a while, though. I wish you could tell me what this is about because then I might be able to help you.”

“So if somebody said they saw you down there last week, they’d be lying?”

Lau smirked like they were playing a game.

“Either that or they were just mistaken. You know what they say?.”

“No, what do they say?”

“That we all look alike.”

Lau smiled brightly and looked to Chu for confirmation. Chu held his ground and just returned a dead-eyed stare.

“What about Monterey Park?” Bosch asked.

“You mean, have I been there?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“Uh, I went out there a couple times for dinner, but it’s really not worth the drive.”

“So you don’t know anyone in Monterey Park?”

“No, not really.”

Bosch had been circling, asking general questions and locking Lau in. It was time to circle closer now.

“Where’s your gun, Mr. Lau?”

Lau put his feet down on the floor. He looked at Chu and then back at Bosch.

“This is about my gun?”

“Six years ago you bought and registered a Glock Model Nineteen. Can you tell us where it is?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s in the lockbox in a drawer next to my bed. Where it always is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Okay, I get it, let me guess. Mr. Asshole in unit eight saw me holding it out there on the deck after the beach shooting and he made a complaint?”

“No, Henry, we haven’t spoken to Mr. Asshole. Are you saying that you had the gun with you after the shooting on the beach?”

“That’s right. I heard shots out there and a scream. I was on my own property and am entitled to protect myself.”

Bosch nodded to Chu. Chu opened the slider and stepped out onto the deck, closing the door behind him. He pulled his phone to make a call about the beach shooting.

“Look, if somebody said I fired it, they are full of shit,” Lau said.

Bosch looked at him for a long moment. He felt like there was something missing, a piece of the conversation he didn’t know about yet.

“As far as I know, nobody’s said that,” he said.

“Then, please, what is this all about?”

“I told you. It’s about your gun. Can you show it to us, Henry?”

“Sure, I’ll go get it.”

He sprang up from the chair and headed toward the stairs.

“Henry,” Bosch said. “Hold it there. We’re going to go with you.”

Lau looked back from the stairs.

“Suit yourself. Let’s get this over with.”

Bosch turned back to the deck. Chu was coming through the door. They followed Lau up the stairs and then down a hallway that cut back to the rear of the unit. Framed photographs, movie posters and diplomas lined both sides. They passed an open door to a bedroom that was used as a writing office and then entered the -master bedroom, a grand room with twelve-foot ceilings and ten-foot windows looking out over the beach.

“I called Pacific Division,” Chu said to Bosch. “The shooting was on the night of the first. They have two suspects in custody on it.”

Bosch flipped back through the calendar in his mind. The first was the Tuesday one week before the killing of John Li.

Lau sat down on the unmade bed next to a two-drawer side table. He opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a steel box with a handle on the top.

“Hold it right there,” Bosch said.

Lau put the box on the bed and stood up, hands up.

“Hey, I wasn’t going to do anything, man. You asked to see it.”

“Why don’t you let my partner open the box,” Bosch said.

“Suit yourself.”

“Detective.”

Bosch pulled a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket and handed them to Chu. He then stepped over to Lau so that he was within arm’s reach if necessary.

“Why’d you buy the gun, Henry?”

“Because I was living in a complete shithole at the time and the bangers were all over the place. But it’s funny. I paid a million fucking dollars for this place and they’re still right out there on the beach, shooting the place up.”

Chu snapped the second glove on and looked at Lau.

“Do you give us permission to open this box?” he asked.

“Sure, go ahead. I don’t know what this is about but why the hell not? Just open it. The key is on a little hook on the back side of the table.”

Chu reached behind the bed table and found the key. He then used it to open the box. A black felt gun bag sat on some folded papers and envelopes. There was a passport and a box of bullets as well. Chu carefully lifted the bag out and opened it, producing a black semiautomatic pistol. He turned it and examined it.

“One box of Cor Bon nine-millimeter bullets, one Glock Model Nineteen. I think this is it, Harry.”

He popped the gun’s magazine and studied the bullets through the slot. He then ejected the round from the chamber.

“Fully loaded and ready to go.”

Lau took a step toward the door but Bosch immediately put his hand on his chest to stop him and then backed him against the wall.

“Look,” Lau said, “I don’t know what this is about but you people are freaking me out here. What the fuck is going on?”

Bosch kept his hand on his chest.

“Just tell me about the gun, Henry. You had it the night of the first. Has it been out of your possession at any time since then?”

“No, I…right there is where I keep it.”

“Where were you last Tuesday, three o’clock in the afternoon?”

“Um, last week I was here. I think I was here, working. We didn’t start shooting until Thursday.”

“You work here alone?”

“Yes, I work alone. Writing is a solitary pursuit. No, wait! Wait! Last Tuesday I was at Paramount all day. We had a read-through of the script with the cast. I was over there all afternoon.”

“And there will be people who will vouch for you?”

“At least a dozen. Matthew fucking McConaughey will vouch for me. He was there. He’s playing the lead.”

Bosch made a jump then, hitting Lau with a question designed to keep him off balance. It was amazing what fell out of people’s pockets when they were being knocked back and forth by seemingly unrelated questions.

“Are you associated with a triad, Henry?”

Lau burst out laughing.

“What? What the fuck are you-look, I’m out of here.”

He slapped Bosch’s hand away and pushed off the wall in the direction of the door again. It was a move Harry was ready for. He grabbed Lau by the arm and spun him around. He clipped his ankle with a kick and threw him facedown on the bed. He then moved in, kneeling on his back while he cuffed him.

“This is fucking crazy!” Lau yelled. “You can’t do this!”

“Calm down, Henry, just calm down,” Bosch said. “We’re going to go downtown and straighten all of this out.”

“But I’ve got a movie! I have to be on the set in three hours!”

“Fuck the movies, Henry. This is real life and we’re going downtown.”

Bosch pulled him up off the bed and pointed him toward the door.

“Dave, you got all of that secured?”

“Got it.”

“Then, lead the way.”

Chu left the room, carrying the metal box containing the Glock. Bosch followed, keeping Lau in front of him and keeping one hand on the chain between the cuffs. They moved down the hall, but when they got to the top of the stairs, Bosch pulled the cuffs like the reins on a horse and stopped.

“Wait a minute. Back up here.”

He walked Lau backwards to the middle of the hall. Something had caught Bosch’s eye as they had passed but it didn’t register until they got to the stairs. Now he looked at the framed diploma from the University of Southern California. Lau had graduated with a liberal arts degree in 2004.

“You went to SC?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah, the film school. Why?”

Both the school and graduation year matched the diploma Bosch had seen in the back office at Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor. And then there was the Chinese connection as well. Bosch knew that a lot of kids went to USC and several thousand graduated every year, many of them of Chinese descent. But he had never trusted coincidences.

“Did you know a guy at SC named Robert Li-spelled L-I”

Lau nodded.

“Yeah, I knew him. He was my roommate.”

Bosch felt things suddenly begin to crash together with an undeniable force.

“What about Eugene Lam? Did you know him?”

Lau nodded again.

“I still do. He was my roommate back then, too.”

“Where?”

“Like I told you, a shithole down in gangland. Near the campus.”

Bosch knew that USC was an oasis of fine and expensive education surrounded by hardscrabble neighborhoods where personal safety would be an issue. A few years back a football player on the practice field had even been hit with a stray round from a nearby gang shooting.

“Is that why you bought the gun? For protection down there”

“Exactly.”

Chu had realized he had lost them and came hurrying back up the stairs and down the hallway.

“Harry, what’s up?”

Bosch held up his free hand to signal Chu to hang back and be quiet. He spoke to Lau again.

“And those guys knew you bought the gun six years ago?”

“We went together. They helped me pick it out. Why are you-”

“Are you still friends? You stay in touch?”

“Yeah, but what’s this got to do with-”

“When was the last time you saw one of them?”

“I saw them both last week. We play poker almost every week.”

Bosch glanced over at Chu. The case had just broken wide open.

“Where, Henry? Where do you play?”

“Most of the time right here. Robert still lives with his parents and Huge has a tiny place in the Valley. I mean, come on, I’ve got the beach here.”

“What day did you play last week?”

“It was Wednesday.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, because I remember it was the night before my shoot was going to start and I didn’t really want to play. But they showed up and we played for a little bit. It was a short night.”

“And the time before that? When was that?”

“The week before. Wednesday or Thursday, I can’t remember.”

“But it was after the shooting on the beach?”

Lau shrugged.

“Yeah, pretty sure. Why?”

“What about the key to the box? Would one of them have known where the key was?”

“What did they do?”

“Just answer the question, Henry.”

“Yeah, they knew. They used to like to get the gun out sometimes and play around with it.”

Bosch pulled his keys out and uncuffed Lau. The screenwriter turned and started to massage his wrists.

“I always wondered what that felt like,” he said. “So I could write about it. The last time I was too drunk to remember.”

He finally looked up and saw Bosch’s intent stare.

“What’s going on?”

Bosch put a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the stairs.

“Let’s go back down to the living room and talk, Henry. I think there is a lot you can tell us.”

45

They waited for Eugene Lam in the alley behind Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor. There was a small employee lot squeezed between a row of trash bins and the stacks of baled cardboard. It was Thursday, two days after they had visited Henry Lau, and the case had come together. They had used the time to work on evidence gathering and testing, and to prepare a strategy. Bosch had also used the time to enroll his daughter in the school at the bottom of the hill. She had started classes that morning.

They believed Eugene Lam was the shooter but also the weaker of the two suspects. They would bring him in first, then Robert Li second. They were locked and loaded and as Bosch watched the parking lot, he felt certain that the killing of John Li would be understood and resolved by the end of the day.

“Here we go,” Chu said.

He pointed to the mouth of the alley. Lam’s car had just turned in.

They put Lam in the first interview room and let him cook for a while. Time always favored the interviewer, never the suspect. In RHD, they called it “seasoning the roast.” You let the suspect marinate in time. It always made him more tender. Bo-Jing Chang had been the exception to this rule. He hadn’t said a word and had held up like a rock. Innocence gave you that resolve, and that was something Lam didn’t have.

An hour later, after conferring with a prosecutor from the district attorney’s office, Bosch entered the room carrying a cardboard box containing the case evidence and sat down across the table from Lam. The suspect looked up with scared eyes. They always did after a period of isolation. What was just an hour on the outside was an eternity inside. Bosch put the box down on the floor, then folded his arms on the table.

“Eugene, I’m here to explain the facts of life to you,” he said. “So listen closely to what I tell you. You have a big choice to make here. The fact of the matter is that you are going to prison. There’s no doubt about that. But what you are going to decide here in the next few minutes is how long you go for. It can be until you are a very old man or until they stick the needle in your arm and put you down like a dog…

“Or you can leave yourself a chance at getting your freedom back one day. You’re a very young man, Eugene. I hope you make the right choice.”

He paused and waited but Lam didn’t react.

“It’s sort of funny. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve sat across a table like this with a lot of men who have killed. I can’t say they were all bad or evil men. Some had reasons and some were manipulated. They got led down the path.”

Lam shook his head in a show of bravado.

“I told you people, I want a lawyer. I know my rights. You can’t ask me any questions once I ask for a lawyer.”

Bosch nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, you’re right about that, Eugene. Absolutely right. Once you’ve invoked your rights we can’t question you. Not allowed. But, see, that’s why I’m not asking you anything here. I’m just telling you how it is going to be. I’m telling you that you have a choice to make here. Silence is certainly a choice. But if you choose silence, you’ll never see the outside world again.”

Lam shook his head and looked down at the table.

“Please leave me alone.”

“Maybe it would help you if I summarized things and gave you a clearer picture of where you’re at here. You see, I am perfectly willing to share with you, man. I’ll show you my whole hand because, you know what? It’s a royal flush. You play poker, right? You know that’s the hand that can’t be beat. And that’s what I’ve got here. A royal fucking flush.”

Bosch paused. He could see curiosity in Lam’s eyes. He couldn’t help but wonder what they had on him.

“We know you did the dirty work on this thing, Eugene. You went into that store and you shot Mr. Li dead in cold blood. But we’re pretty sure it wasn’t your idea. It was Robert who sent you in there to kill his father. And he’s the one we want. I’ve got a deputy district attorney sitting in the other room and he’s ready to make you a deal-fifteen to life if you give us Robert. You’ll do the fifteen for sure, but after that, you get a shot at freedom. You convince a parole board you were just a victim, that you got manipulated by a master, and you walk free…

“It could happen. But if you go the other way, you roll the dice. If you lose, you’re done. You’re talking about dying in prison in fifty years-if the jury doesn’t decide to stick the needle in your arm first.”

Lam quietly said, “I want a lawyer.”

Bosch nodded and responded with resignation in his voice.

“Okay, man, that’s your choice. We’ll get you a lawyer.”

He looked up at the ceiling where the camera was located and raised an imaginary phone to his ear.

He then looked back at Lam and knew he wasn’t going to be convinced by words alone. It was show-and-tell time.

“All right, they’re making the call. If you don’t mind, while we’re waiting here I’m going to tell you a few things. You can share them with your lawyer when he gets here.”

“Whatever,” Lam said. “I don’t care what you say as long as I get the attorney.”

“Okay, then, let’s start with the crime scene. You know, there were a few things about it that bothered me from the beginning. One was that Mr. Li had the gun right there under the counter and never got the chance to pull it. Another was that there were no head wounds. Mr. Li was shot three times in the chest and that was it. No shot to the face.”

“Very interesting,” Lam said sarcastically.

Bosch ignored it.

“And you know what all of that told me? That said that Li probably knew his killer and hadn’t felt threatened. And that this was a piece of business. This wasn’t revenge, this wasn’t personal. This was purely a piece of business.”

Bosch reached down to the box and removed the lid. He reached in for the plastic evidence bag that held the bullet casing taken from the victim’s throat. He tossed it on the table in front of Lam.

“There it is, Eugene. You remember looking for that? Coming around the counter, moving the body, wondering what the fuck happened to that casing? Well, there it is. There’s the one mistake that brought it all down on you.”

He paused while Lam stared at the casing, fear permanently lodging in his eyes.

“You never leave a soldier behind. Isn’t that the shooter’s rule? But you did, man. You left that soldier behind and it brought us right to your door.”

Bosch picked up the bag and held it up between them.

“There was a fingerprint on the casing, Eugene. We raised it with something called electrostatic enhancement. EE, for short. It’s a new science for us. And the print we got belonged to your old roommate Henry Lau. Yeah, it led us to Henry and he was very cooperative. He told us the last time he fired and then reloaded his gun was at a range about eight months ago. His fingerprint was sitting on that shell all that time.”

Harry reached down to the box and removed Henry Lau’s gun, still in its black felt bag. He took it out of the bag and put the weapon down on the table.

“We went to Henry and he gave us the weapon. We had it checked out by ballistics yesterday, and sure enough, it’s our murder weapon, all right. This is the gun that killed John Li at Fortune Liquors on September eighth. The problem was that Henry Lau has a solid alibi for the time of the shooting. He was in a room with thirteen other people. He’s even got Matthew McConaughey as an alibi witness. And then on top of that, he told us he hadn’t given his gun out to anybody to borrow.”

Bosch leaned back and scratched his chin with his hand, as if he were still trying to figure out how the gun ended up being used to kill John Li.

“Damn, this was a big problem, Eugene. But then, of course, we got lucky. The good guys often get lucky. You made us lucky, Eugene.”

He paused for effect and then brought down the hammer.

“You see, whoever used Henry’s gun to kill John Li cleaned it up after and then reloaded it so Henry wouldn’t ever know his gun had been borrowed and used to kill a man. It was a pretty good plan, but he made one mistake.”

Bosch leaned forward across the table and looked at Lam eye to eye. He turned the gun on the table so that its barrel was pointing at the suspect’s chest.

“One of the bullets that were replaced in the magazine had a nice readable thumbprint on it. Your thumbprint, Eugene. We matched it to the print they took when you traded in your New York driver’s license for a California DL.”

Lam’s eyes slowly dropped away from Bosch’s and down to the table.

“All of this, it means nothing,” he said.

There was little conviction in his voice.

“Yeah?” Bosch responded. “Really? I don’t know about that. I happen to think it means a lot, Eugene. And the prosecutor on the other side of that camera is thinking the same thing. He says it sounds like a prison door slamming, with you standing there on the wrong side of it.”

Bosch picked up the gun and the bag with the casing in it and put them back in the box. He grabbed the box with both hands and stood up.

“So that’s where we’re at, Eugene. You think about all of that while you’re waiting for your lawyer.”

Bosch slowly moved toward the door. He hoped Lam would tell him to stop and come back, that he wanted to make the deal. But the suspect said nothing. Harry put the box under one arm, opened the door and walked out.

Bosch carried the evidence box back to his cubicle and dropped it heavily on his desk. He looked over at his partner’s cubicle to make sure it was still empty. Ferras had been left behind in the Valley to keep an eyeball on Robert Li. If he figured out that Lam was in police custody and possibly talking, he might make a move. Ferras hadn’t liked the babysitting assignment but Bosch didn’t really care. Ferras had moved himself to the periphery of the investigation and that was where he was going to stay.

Soon Chu and Gandle, who had been watching Bosch’s play with Lam from the other side of the camera in the AV room, came to the cubicle.

“I told you it was a weak play,” Gandle said. “We know he’s a smart kid. He had to have been wearing gloves when he reloaded the gun. Once he knew you were playing him, you lost.”

“Yeah, well,” Bosch said. “I thought it was the best we had.”

“I agree,” Chu said, showing his support for Bosch.

“We’re still going to have to kick him loose,” Gandle said. “We know he had the opportunity to take the gun but we have no proof that he actually did. Opportunity is not enough. You can’t go to court with just that.”

“Is that what Cook said?”

“That’s what he was thinking.”

Abner Cook was the deputy DA who had come over from the CCB to observe in the AV room.

“Where is he, anyway?”

As if to answer for himself, Cook called Bosch’s name from across the squad room.

“Get back here!”

Bosch straightened up and looked over the cubicle partition. Cook was frantically waving from the door of the AV room. Harry got up and started walking toward him.

“He’s calling for you,” Cook said. “Get back in there!”

Bosch picked up speed as he moved toward the interview room door, then he slowed and composed himself before opening the door and calmly stepping back in.

“What is it?” he said. “We called your lawyer and he’s on the way.”

“What about the deal? Is it still good?”

“For the moment. The DA’s about to leave.”

“Bring him in. I want the deal.”

Bosch stepped all the way in and closed the door.

“What are you giving us, Eugene? If you want the deal, I’ve got to know what you’re going to give me. I’ll bring in the DA when I know what’s on the table.”

Lam nodded.

“I’ll give you Robert Li…and his sister. The whole thing was their plan. The old man was stubborn and wouldn’t change. They needed to close that store and open another in the Valley. One that made money. But he said no. He always said no and finally Rob couldn’t take it anymore.”

Bosch slid back into his seat, trying to hide his surprise about Mia’s involvement.

“And the sister was part of this?”

“She was the one who planned it. Except…”

“Except what?”

“She wanted me to hit them both. The mother and father. She wanted me to show up early and hit ’em both. But Robert told me no. He didn’t want his mother hurt.”

“Whose idea was it to make it look like a triad hit?”

“That was her idea and then Robert sort of planned it. They knew the police would go for it.”

Bosch nodded. He hardly knew Mia but knew enough about her story to feel sad about the whole thing.

He glanced up at the overhead camera, hoping his stare would send the message to Gandle that he needed to put somebody on locating Mia Li so arrest teams could move in simultaneously.

Bosch brought his eyes back down to Lam. He was staring down dejectedly at the table.

“What about you, Eugene? Why’d you get involved in this?”

Lam shook his head. Bosch could read the regret in his face.

“I don’t know. Robert said he was going to lay me off because his father’s store was losing too much money. He told me I could save my job…and that when they opened the second store in the Valley it would be mine to run.”

It was no more pitiful an answer than any other Bosch had heard over the years. There were no surprises left when it came to motivations for murder.

He tried to think of any loose ends he should try to cover before Abner Cook came in and sealed the deal.

“What about Henry Lau? Did he give you the gun or did you take it without him knowing?”

“We took it-I took it. We were playing poker one night at his place and I said I had to go to the bathroom. I went into the bedroom and got it. I knew where he kept the key to the box. I took it and then I put it back afterward-the next time we played. It was part of the plan. We didn’t think he’d ever know.”

That seemed entirely plausible to Bosch. But Harry knew that once the deal was formally struck and signed off on by Cook and Lam, he would be able to question Lam in more detail about all things pertaining to the case. He just had one last aspect to cover before bringing Cook in.

“What about Hong Kong?” he asked.

Lam looked confused by the question.

“Hong Kong?” he asked. “What about it?”

“Which one of you had the connection over there?”

Lam shook his head in bewilderment. It seemed real to Bosch.

“I don’t know what you mean. My family is in New York, not Hong Kong. I have no connection there and as far as I know, neither does Robert or Mia. Hong Kong wasn’t mentioned.”

Bosch thought about this. Now he was confused. Something didn’t connect here.

“You’re saying that as far as you know, neither Robert nor Mia made any calls to anyone over there about the case or any of the investigators involved?”

“Not as far as I know. I really don’t think they know anybody.”

“What about Monterey Park? The triad Mr. Li was paying off.”

“We knew about them and Robert knew when Chang came to collect every week. That’s how he planned it. I waited and when I saw Chang leave the store I went in. Robert told me to take the disc out of the machine but to leave the other discs there. He knew one had Chang on it and the police would see it as a clue.”

A nice bit of manipulation on Robert’s part, Bosch thought. And he had gone for it, just as planned.

“What did you two tell Chang when he came to the store the other night?”

“That was part of the plan, too. Robert knew he would come to collect from him.”

He looked down and away from Bosch’s eyes. He seemed embarrassed.

“So what did you say to him?” Bosch prompted.

“Robert told him that the police had shown us his photo and that they told us that he committed the murder. He told him the police were looking for him and would arrest him. We thought that would make him run. He would leave town and it would look like he had done the crime. If he went back to China and disappeared, it would help us.”

Bosch stared at Lam as the meaning and ramifications of the statement slowly sank into the dark blood in his heart. He had been totally manipulated every step of the way.

“Who called me?” he asked. “Who called and told me to back off the case?”

Lam slowly nodded.

“That was me,” he said. “Robert wrote a script for me and I made that call from a pay phone downtown. I’m sorry, Detective Bosch. I didn’t want to scare you but I had to do what Robert told me to do.”

Bosch nodded. He was sorry too, but not for the same reasons.

46

An hour later Bosch and Cook emerged from the interview room with a full confession and agreement of cooperation from Eugene Lam. Cook said he would be filing charges immediately against the young killer as well as Robert and Mia Li. Cook said there was more than enough evidence to proceed with arrests of the sister and brother.

Bosch gathered with Chu, Gandle and four other detectives in the conference room to discuss the arrest procedures. Ferras was still watching Robert Li but Gandle said that a detective sent to the Li home in the Wilshire District had reported back that the family car was gone and there appeared to be no one home.

“Do we wait for Mia to show up or do we take Robert down now, before he starts wondering about Lam?” Gandle asked.

“I think we’ve got to move,” Bosch said. “He already has to be wondering where Lam is. If he starts getting suspicious, he might run.”

Gandle looked around the room for objections. There were none.

“Okay, then let’s mount up,” he said. “We take down Robert in the store and then we go find Mia. I want these people booked before the end of the day. Harry, check with your partner and confirm Robert’s location. Tell him we’re on the way. I’ll ride up with you and Chu.”

It was unusual for the lieutenant to want to leave the office. But the case had transcended routine. He apparently wanted to be there when it was closed by arrest.

Everybody stood up and started to file out of the conference room. Bosch and Gandle lagged behind. Harry pulled his phone and hit a speed dial button for Ferras. At last check-in, he was still in his car, watching Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor from across the street.

“You know what I still don’t get, Harry” Gandle asked.

“No, what don’t you get?”

“Who took your daughter? Lam claims he doesn’t know anything about it. And at this point he has no reason to lie. Do you still think it was Chang’s people, even though we now know he was clear on the killing”

The call was answered before Bosch could respond to Gandle.

“Ferras.”

“It’s me,” Bosch said. “Where’s Li?”

He held a finger up to Gandle, holding him while he took the call.

“He’s in the store,” Ferras said. “You know, we need to talk, Harry.”

Bosch could tell by the tension in his partner’s voice that it wasn’t Robert Li that Ferras wanted to talk about. While he was sitting there in his car alone all morning, something was festering in his brain.

“We’ll talk later. Right now we have to move. We turned Lam. He gave us everything. Robert and his sister. She was part of this. Is she in the store?”

“Not that I saw. She dropped off the mother but then she drove off.”

“When was this?”

“About an hour ago.”

Tired of waiting and needing to get ready to join the arrest teams, Gandle headed off toward his office and Bosch was left thinking that he was safe for the time being from having to answer the lieutenant’s question. Now he just had to deal with Ferras.

“Okay, sit tight,” he said. “And let me know if anything changes.”

“You know what, Harry?”

“What, Ignacio?” he responded impatiently.

“You didn’t give me a chance, man.”

There was a whining tone in his voice that set Bosch on edge.

“What chance? What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you telling the lieutenant you wanted a new partner. You should’ve given me another chance. He’s trying to move me to autos, you know. He said I’m not dependable, so I’m the one who has to go.”

“Look, Ignacio, it’s been two years, okay? I’ve given you two years of chances. But now’s not the time to talk about this. We’ll do it later, okay? In the meantime, just sit tight. We’re on our way.”

“No, you sit tight, Harry.”

Bosch paused for a moment.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, I’ll handle Li.”

“Ignacio, listen to me. You’re by yourself. You don’t go in that store until you have an arrest team with you. You understand? You want to put the cuffs on him, fine, you can do that. But you wait until we get there.”

“I don’t need a team and I don’t need you, Harry.”

Ferras disconnected. Bosch hit redial as he started moving toward the lieutenant’s office.

Ferras didn’t pick up and the call went direct to voice mail. When Bosch entered Gandle’s office, the lieutenant was buttoning his shirt over a Kevlar vest he had donned for the field trip.

“We’ve got to move,” Bosch said. “Ferras is going off the map.”

47

After returning from the funeral, Bosch took off his tie and grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator. He went out on the deck, sat back on the lounge chair and closed his eyes. He thought about putting on some music, maybe a little Art Pepper to bounce him out of the blues.

But he found himself unable to move. He just kept his eyes closed and tried to forget as much as he could about the two weeks that had just passed. He knew this was an unattainable task but it was worth a try and the beer would help, if only on a temporary basis. It had been the last one in the refrigerator and he had vowed that it would be the last one for him as well. He had his daughter to raise now and he would need to be the best he could be with her.

As if thoughts of her conjured her presence, he heard the sliding door open.

“Hey, Mads.”

“Dad.”

In only the one word her voice sounded different, troubled. He opened his eyes and squinted in the afternoon sunlight. She had already changed out of her dress and was wearing blue jeans and a shirt that had come from the bag her mother had packed for her. Bosch had noticed she wore more of the few things her mother had put into the backpack in Hong Kong than all of the clothes they had shopped for together.

“What’s up?”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

“I’m really sorry about your partner.”

“Me, too. He made a bad mistake and paid for it. But I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like the punishment fit the crime, you know?”

Bosch’s mind momentarily shifted to the ghastly scene he’d encountered inside the manager’s office of Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor. Ferras facedown on the floor, shot four times in the back. Robert Li cowering in the corner, shaking and moaning, staring at his sister’s body near the door. After killing Ferras she had turned the gun on herself. Mrs. Li, the matriarch of this family of killers and victims, was standing stoically in the doorway when Bosch got there.

Ignacio had not seen Mia coming. She had dropped her mother off at the store and then driven away. But something made her come back, sneaking down the alley in her car and parking in the back lot. It was speculated afterward in the squad room that she had spotted Ferras on his surveillance and knew that the police were about to close in. She had driven home, retrieved the gun her murdered father had kept below the front counter at his store, and then gone back to the store in the Valley. It was unclear and would always remain a mystery what her plan was. Perhaps she was looking for Lam or her mother. Or maybe she was just waiting for the police. But she returned to the store and came in through the employee entrance in the back at approximately the same time Ferras entered through the front door to single-handedly attempt to arrest Robert. She watched Ferras enter her brother’s office and then came up behind him.

Bosch wondered what Ignacio’s final thoughts were as the bullets ripped through his body. He wondered if his young partner was amazed that lightning could strike twice, the second time finishing the job.

Bosch pushed the vision and the thoughts away. He sat up and looked at his daughter. He saw the burden in her eyes and knew what was coming.

“Dad?”

“What is it, baby?”

“I made a bad mistake, too. Only I’m not the one who paid for it.”

“What do you mean, sweetheart?”

“When I was talking to Dr. Hinojos, she said I have to unburden. I have to tell what’s bothering me.”

Tears started to flow now. Bosch sat sideways on the lounge chair and took his daughter by the hand and guided her to a seat right next to him. He put his arm across her shoulders.

“You can tell me anything, Madeline.”

She closed her eyes and held a hand over them. She squeezed his hand with the other.

“I got Mom killed,” she said. “I got her killed and it should’ve been me.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re not respons-”

“No, wait, listen to me. Listen to me. Yes, I am. I did it, Dad, and I need to go to jail.”

Bosch pulled her into a crushing hug and kissed the top of her head.

“You listen to me, Mads. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here with me. I know what happened but it doesn’t make you responsible for what other people did. I don’t want you thinking that.”

She pulled back and looked at him.

“You know? You know what I did?”

“I think you trusted the wrong person…and the rest, all the rest, is on him.”

She shook her head.

“No, no. The whole thing was my idea. I knew you would come and I thought maybe you’d make her let me go with you back here.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?” she demanded.

Bosch shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that you couldn’t have known what Quick would do, that he would take your plan and make it his.”

She bowed her head.

“Doesn’t matter. I killed my mother.”

“Madeline, no. If anybody is responsible, it’s me. She got killed in something that had nothing to do with you. It was a robbery and it happened because I was stupid, because I showed my money in a place I should never have shown it. Okay? It’s on me, not you. I made the mistake.”

She could not be calmed or consoled. She shook her head violently and the force threw tears into Bosch’s face.

“You wouldn’t have even been there, Dad, if we didn’t send that video. I did that! I knew what it would do! That you would be on the very next plane! I was going to escape before you landed. You would get there and everything would be all right but you would tell Mom it wasn’t safe for me there and you would take me back with you.”

Bosch just nodded. He had put roughly the same scenario together a few days before, when he realized Bo-Jing Chang had nothing to do with the murder of John Li.

“But now Mom is dead! And they’re dead! And everybody’s dead and it’s all my fault!”

Bosch grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her in toward him.

“How much of this did you tell Dr. Hinojos?”

“None.”

“Okay.”

“I wanted to tell you first. You have to take me to jail now.”

Bosch pulled her into another hug and held her head against his chest.

“No, baby, you’re staying here with me.”

He gently caressed her hair and spoke calmly.

“We all make mistakes. Everybody. Sometimes, like with my partner, you make a mistake and you can’t make up for it. You don’t get the chance. But sometimes you do. We can make up for our mistakes here. Both of us.”

Her tears had slowed. He heard her sniffle. He thought maybe this was why she had come to him. For a way out.

“We can maybe do some good and make up for the things we did wrong. We’ll make up for everything.”

“How?” she said in a small voice.

“I’ll show you the way. I’ll show you and you’ll see that we can make up for this.”

Bosch nodded to himself. He hugged his daughter tightly and wished he never had to let her go.