A Darkness More Than Night

Chapter 17

They reconvened fifteen minutes later on The Following Sea. McCaleb got out some Cokes and told Winston to sit on the stuffed chair at the end of the coffee table in the salon. In the parking lot he had told her to bring the plastic owl with her to the boat. He now used two paper towels to remove it from its box and place it on the table in front of her. Winston watched him, her lips tight with annoyance. McCaleb told her he understood her anger at being manipulated on her own case but added that she would be back in control of things as soon as he presented his findings.

“All I can say, Terry, is that this better be fucking good.” He remembered that he had once noted on the inside file flap on the first case he ever worked with her that she was prone to using profanity when under stress. He had also noted that she was smart and intuitive. He hoped now that those characteristics had not changed.

He stepped over to the counter where he had his presentation file waiting. He opened it and took the top sheet over to the coffee table. He pushed the Bird Barrier printout aside and put the sheet down at the base of the plastic owl.

“What do you think, this our bird?”

Winston leaned forward to study the color image he had put down. It was an enlarged detail from the Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights showing the nude man embracing the dark owl with shining black eyes. He had cut it and other details from the Marijnissen book. He watched as Winston’s eyes moved back and forth between the plastic owl and the detail from the painting.

“I’d say it’s a match,” she finally said. “Where’d you get this, the Getty? You should have told me about this yesterday, Terry. What the fuck is going on?”

McCaleb raised his hands in a calming gesture.

“I’ll explain everything. Just let me show you this stuff the way I want to. Then I’ll answer any question you ask.”

She waved a hand, indicating he could go on. He went over to the counter and got the second sheet and brought it over. He put it down in front of her.

“Same painter, different painting.”

She looked. It was a detail from The Last Judgment depicting the sinner bound in the reverse fetal position, waiting to be delivered to hell.

“Don’t do this to me. Who painted these?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

He went back to the counter and the file.

“Is this guy still alive?” she called after him.

He walked the third sheet over and put it down on the table next to the other two.

“He’s been dead about five hundred years.”

“Jesus.”

She picked up the third sheet and looked closely at it. It was the full copy of the Seven Deadly Sins tabletop.

“That’s supposed to be God’s eye seeing all the sins of the world,” McCaleb explained. “You recognize the words in the center, running around the iris?”

“Beware, beware…,” she whispered the translation. “Oh, God, we’ve got a real nut here. Who is this?”

“One more. This one really falls into place now.”

He went back to the file for the fourth time and came back with another reproduction of a painting from the Bosch book. He handed it to her.

“It’s called The Stone Operation. In medieval times it was believed by some that an operation to remove a stone from the brain was a cure for stupidity and deceit. Note the location of the incision.”

“I noted, I noted. Just like our guy. What’s all of this around here?”

She traced the exterior of the circular painting with a finger. In the outer black margin were words that were once ornately painted in gold but which had deteriorated over time and were almost indecipherable.

“The translation is ‘Master, cut out the stone. My name is Lubbert Das.’ The critical literature on the painter who created this piece notes that in his time the name Lubbert was a derisive name applied to those who were perverted or stupid.”

Winston put the sheet down on top of the others and raised her hands, palms out.

“All right, Terry, enough. Who was the painter and who is this suspect you say you’ve come up with?”

McCaleb nodded. It was time.

“The painter’s name was Jerome Van Aiken. He was Netherlandish, considered to be one of the greats of the Northern Renaissance. But his paintings were dark, full of monsters and phantasmic demons. Owls, too. Lots of owls. The literature suggests the owls found in his paintings symbolized everything from evil to doom to the fall of mankind.”

He sorted through the sheets on the coffee table and held up the detail of the man embracing the owl.

“This kind of says it all about him. Man’s embracing of evil – the devil owl, to use Mr. Riddell’s description – leads to the inevitable destiny of hell. Here’s the whole painting.”

He went back to the file and brought to her the full copy of The Garden of Earthly Delights. He watched her eyes as she studied the images. He saw repulsion as well as fascination. He pointed out the four owls he had found in the painting, including the detail he had already shown her.

She suddenly pulled the sheet aside and looked at him.

“Wait a minute. I know I’ve seen this before. In a book or maybe an art class I took at CSUN. But I never heard of this Van Aiken, I don’t think. He painted this?”

McCaleb nodded.

“The Garden of Earthly Delights. Van Aiken painted it but you never heard of him because he wasn’t known by his real name. He used the Latin version of Jerome and took the name of his hometown for a last name. He was known as Hieronymus Bosch.”

She just looked at him for a long moment as it all clicked together, the images he had shown her, the names on the printout, her knowledge of the Edward Gunn case.

“Bosch,” she said, almost as an expulsion of breath. “Is Hieronymus…?”

She didn’t finish. McCaleb nodded.

“Yeah, that’s Harry’s real name.”

They were both pacing in the salon now, heads down but careful not to collide. Talking in sprints, a bad but fast-moving jazz in their blood.

“This is too far out there, McCaleb. Do you know what you are saying?”

“I know exactly what I’m saying. And don’t think that I didn’t think long and hard about it before I said it. I consider him to be a friend, Jaye. There was… I don’t know, at one time I thought we were a lot alike. But look at this stuff, look at the connections, the parallels. It fits. It all fits.”

He stopped and looked at her. She kept pacing.

“He’s a cop! A homicide cop, for God’s sake.”

“What, are you going to tell me it’s beyond the realm because he’s a cop? This is Los Angeles – the modern Garden of Earthly Delights. With all the same temptations and demons. You don’t even have to go beyond the city limits for examples of cops crossing the line – dealing drugs, robbing banks, even murder.”

“I know, I know. It’s just that…”

She didn’t finish.

“At minimum it fits well enough that you know we have to take a good hard look.”

She stopped and looked back at him.

“We? Forget it, Terry. I asked you to take a look at the book, not run down the leads. You’re out after this.”

“Look, if I didn’t run some of this down you’d have nothing. This owl would still be sitting on top of that guy Rohrshak’s other building.”

“I’ll give you that. And thank you very much. But you’re a civilian. You’re out.”

“I’m not walking away, Jaye. If I’m the one who puts Bosch under the glass, then I’m not walking away from it.”

Winston sat down heavily in the chair.

“All right, can we talk about that when and if we come to it? I’m still not sold on this.”

“Good. I’m not either.”

“Well, you sure made a nice show of giving me the pictures and building your case.”

“All I am saying is that Harry Bosch is connected to this. And that cuts two ways. One, he did it. Two, he’s been set up. He’s been a cop a long time.”

“Twenty-five, thirty years. The list of people he’s put in the penitentiary has got to be a yard long. And the ones who have been in and out is probably half the list. It’ll take a fucking year to run all of them down.”

McCaleb nodded.

“And don’t think he didn’t know that.”

She looked up sharply at him. He started pacing again, his head down. After too long a silence he glanced up and saw her staring at him.

“What?”

“You really like Bosch for this, don’t you? You know something else.”

“No, I don’t. I am trying to stay open. All avenues of possibility need to be pursued.”

“Bullshit, you’re driving down one avenue.”

McCaleb didn’t answer. He felt enough guilt about it without Winston having to apply more.

“Okay,” she said. “Then why don’t you step it out for me? And don’t worry, I’m not going to hold it against you when you end up wrong.”

He stopped and looked at her.

“Come on, step it out for me.”

McCaleb shook his head.

“I’m not all the way there yet. All I know is that what we have here is way, way beyond the realm of coincidence. So there has to be an explanation.”

“So tell me the explanation involving Bosch. I know you. You’ve been thinking about it.”

“All right, but remember, it’s all theory at this point.”

“I’ll remember. Go.”

“First of all, you start with Detective Hieronymus Bosch believing – no, make that knowing – that this guy, Edward Gunn, walked on a homicide. Okay, then you have Gunn turn up strangled and looking like a figure out of a picture by the painter Hieronymus Bosch. You throw in one plastic owl and at least a half dozen other connection points between the two Boschs, let alone the name, and there it is.”

“What’s there? Those connections don’t mean it was Bosch who did it. You said it yourself, someone could have set this up for us to find and put on Bosch.”

“I don’t know what it is. Gut instinct, I guess. There’s something about Bosch – something off the page.”

He remembered how Vosskuhler had described the paintings.

“A darkness more than night.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

McCaleb waved off the question. He reached over and picked up the detail of the owl embraced by the man. He held it up in front of her face.

“Look at the darkness there. In the eyes. There’s something about Harry that is the same.”

“Now you’re getting downright spooky, Terry. What are you saying, in a previous life Harry Bosch was a painting? I mean, listen to what you are saying here.”

He put the sheet back down and stepped away from her, shaking his head.

“I don’t know how to say it,” he said. “There’s just something there. A connection of some kind between them that is more than the name.”

He made a motion of waving away the thought.

“All right, then let’s move on,” Winston said. “Why now, Terry? If it is Bosch, why now? And why Gunn? He walked away from him six years ago.”

“It’s interesting that you say walked away from him and not justice.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it. You just like to take -”

“Why now? Who knows? But there was that re-encounter the night before in the drunk tank and before that there was the time in October and it goes further back. Whenever this guy ended up in the can Bosch was there.”

“But on that last night Gunn was too drunk to talk.”

“Says who?”

She nodded. They only had Bosch’s account of the drunk-tank encounter.

“All right, fine. But why Gunn? I mean, I don’t want to put a qualitative judgment on a murderer or his victims but, come on, the guy stabbed a prostitute in a Hollywood hot sheet hotel. We all know that some count more than others and this one couldn’t have counted for much. If you read the book, you saw – her own family didn’t even care about her.”

“Then there’s something missing, something else that we don’t know. Because Harry cared. I don’t think he’s the kind who ever counts one case, one person more important than another, anyway. But there’s something about Gunn we don’t know yet. There has to be – six years ago it was enough for Harry to shove his lieutenant through a window and take a suspension for it. It was enough for him to visit Gunn every time he got hooked up and put in a cell.”

McCaleb nodded to himself.

“We need to find the trigger. The stressor. The thing that forced the action now as opposed to a year ago, two years ago, whenever.”

Winston abruptly stood up.

“Would you stop saying ‘we’? And, you know, there is something you are conveniently missing here. Why would this man, this veteran cop and homicide detective, kill this guy and leave all of these clues leading back to himself? It makes no sense – not with Harry Bosch. He’d be too smart for that.”

“Only from this side of it. These things may only seem obvious now that we have discovered them. And you are forgetting the act of murder itself is evidence of aberrant thinking, of a dissembling personality. If Harry Bosch has veered off the path and crashed into the ditch – into the abyss – then we can’t assume anything about his thinking or planning of a murder. His leaving of these markers could be symptomatic.”

She waved off his explanation.

“That’s the Quantico dance there. Too much mumbo jumbo.”

Winston picked the copy of The Garden of Earthly Delights off the table and studied it.

“I talked to Harry about this case two weeks ago,” she said. “You talked to him yesterday. He wasn’t exactly climbing the walls and foaming at the mouth. And look at this trial he’s riding now. He’s cool, calm and has his shit together. Know what some of the guys in the office call him, the ones who know him? The Marlboro Man.”

“Yeah, well, he stopped smoking. And maybe this Storey case was the stressor. A lot of pressure. It’s gotta come out someplace.”

McCaleb could tell she wasn’t listening. Her eyes had caught on something in the painting. She dropped the sheet and picked up the detail of the dark owl embraced by the nude man.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “If our guy sent the owl directly from that warehouse to our victim, then how the fuck did it get this nice custom paint job?”

McCaleb nodded.

“Good question. He must’ve painted it right there in the apartment. Maybe while watching Gunn try to stay alive.”

“There was no paint like this found in the apartment. And we checked the building’s dumpster, too. I saw no paint.”

“He took it with him, got rid of it somewhere else.”

“Or maybe plans to use it again on the next one.”

She paused and thought for a long moment. McCaleb waited.

“So what do we do?” she finally asked.

“So it’s ‘we’ now?”

“For now. I changed my mind. I can’t take this inside. Too dangerous. If it’s wrong I could kiss everything good-bye.”

McCaleb nodded.

“Do you and your partner have other cases?”

“We’ve got three open files, including this one.”

“Well, put him on one of the others while you work this one – with me. We work on Bosch until we have something solid – one way or the other – that you can take in and make official.”

“And what do I do, call up Harry Bosch and tell him I need to talk to him because he’s a suspect in a murder?”

“I’ll take Bosch first. It will be less obvious if I make the first run. Let me get a feel for him and, who knows, maybe my current instincts will be wrong. Or maybe I’ll find the trigger.”

“That’s easier said than done. We move too close and he’ll know. I don’t want this blowing up in our faces – my face, in particular.”

“That’s where I can be an advantage.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“I’m not a cop. I’ll be able to get closer to him. I need to get inside his house, see how he lives. Meantime, you -”

“Wait a minute. You’re not talking about breaking into his house. I can’t be a party to that.”

“No, nothing illegal.”

“Then how are you going to get in?”

“Knock on the door.”

“Good luck. What were you going to say? Meantime, I do what?”

“You work the outside line, the obvious stuff. Trace down the money order for the owl. Find out more about Gunn and the murder six years ago. Find out about the incident between Harry and his old lieutenant – and find out about the lieutenant. Harry said the guy went out one night and ended up dead in a tunnel.”

“Damn, I remember that. That was related to Gunn?”

“I don’t know. But Bosch made some kind of elliptical reference to it yesterday.”

“I can pull stuff on it and I can ask questions about the other stuff. But any one of these moves could get back to Bosch.”

McCaleb nodded. He thought it was a risk that had to be taken.

“You know anybody who knows him?” he said.

She shook her head in annoyance.

“Look, don’t you remember? Cops are paranoid people. The minute I ask one question about Harry Bosch, people are going to know what we are doing.”

“Not necessarily. Use the Storey case. It’s high profile. Maybe you’ve been watching the guy on TV and he doesn’t look so good. ‘Is he all right? What’s going on with him?’ Like that. Make it like you’re gossiping.”

She didn’t look mollified. She stepped over to the sliding door and looked out across the marina. She leaned her forehead against the glass.

“I know his former partner,” she said. “There’s an informal group of women who get together once a month. We all work homicide from all the local departments. About a dozen of us. Harry’s old partner Kiz Rider just got moved from Hollywood to Robbery-Homicide. The big time. But I think they were close. He was kind of a mentor. I might be able to hit on her. If I use a little finesse.”

McCaleb nodded and thought of something.

“Harry told me he was divorced. I don’t know how long ago but you could ask Rider about him like, you know, you’re interested and what’s he like, that sort of thing. You ask like that and she might give you the real lowdown.”

Winston looked away from the slider and back at McCaleb.

“Yeah, that will make us good friends when she finds out it was all bullshit and I was setting up on her ex-partner – her mentor.”

“If she’s a good cop she’ll understand. You had to either clear him or bag him and either way you wanted to do it as quietly as possible.”

Winston looked back out the door.

“I’m going to need deniability on this.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning if we do this and you go in there and it all blows up, I need to be able to walk away.”

McCaleb nodded. He wished she hadn’t said it but he could see her need to protect herself.

“I’m just telling you up front, Terry. If it all goes to hell it’s going to look like you overstepped, that I asked you to take a look at the book and you went off on your own. I’m sorry but I have to protect myself here.”

“I understand, Jaye. I can live with it. I’ll take my chances.”