A Darkness More Than Night

Chapter 29

McCaleb stayed up into the early morning hours with the baby. He and Graciela alternated nights on duty so that at least one of them got a decent night of sleep. Cielo seemed to have an almost hourly feed clock. Each time she awoke he would feed her and walk her through the dark house. He would gently pat her back until he heard her burp and then he would put her down again. In an hour the process would begin again.

After each cycle McCaleb would walk through the house and check the doors. It was a nervous habit, his routine. The house, by virtue of being up on the hillside, was fogged in tight. Looking through the rear windows, he couldn’t even see the lights of the pier down below. He wondered if the fog stretched across the bay to the mainland. Harry Bosch’s house was up high. He wondered if he was standing at his window looking into the misty nothingness as well.

In the morning Graciela took the baby and McCaleb, exhausted from the night and everything else, slept until eleven. When he came to he found the house to be quiet. In his T-shirt and boxer shorts he wandered down the hall and found the kitchen and family room empty. Graciela had left a note on the kitchen table saying she had taken the children to St. Catherine’s for the ten o’clock service and then to the market afterward. The note said they’d be back by noon.

McCaleb went to the refrigerator and got out the gallon jug of orange juice. He poured a full glass and then took his keys off the counter and went back into the hallway to the locking cabinet. He opened it up and got out a plastic Ziploc bag containing a morning dose of the drug therapy that kept him alive. The first of every month he and Graciela carefully put together the doses and put them in plastic bags marked with dates and whether they were the A.M. or P.M. dosage. It made it easier than having to open dozens of pill bottles twice a day.

He took the bag back to the kitchen and began taking the pills two and three at a time with gulps of juice. As he followed this routine he looked through the kitchen window and down to the harbor below. The fog had moved out. It was still misty but clear enough for him to see The Following Sea and a skiff tied at its fantail.

He went to one of the kitchen drawers and pulled out the set of binoculars Graciela liked to use when she was watching him on the boat heading in or out of the harbor with a charter party. He went out onto the deck and to the railing. He focused the binoculars. There was no one in the cockpit or up on the bridge of the boat. His view could not penetrate the reflective film on the sliding door of the salon. He moved his focus to the skiff. It was weathered green with a one-and-a-half-horse outboard. He recognized it as being one of the rentals from the concession on the pier.

McCaleb went back inside and left the binoculars on the counter while he swiped the remaining pills into his hand. He took them and the orange juice back to the bedroom. He quickly ingested the pills while he got dressed. He knew Buddy Lockridge would not have rented a boat to get to The Following Sea. Buddy knew which Zodiac was McCaleb’s and would simply have borrowed that.

Somebody else was on his boat.

It took him twenty minutes to walk down to the pier because Graciela had the golf cart. He went to the boat rental booth first to ask who had rented the boat but the window was closed and there was a sign with a clock face that said the operator would not be back until 12:30. McCaleb checked his watch. It was ten after twelve. He couldn’t wait. He went down the ramp to the skiff dock and stepped onto his Zodiac and started the engine.

As McCaleb moved down the fairway toward The Following Sea he studied the side windows of the salon but still could not see any movement or indication that someone was on the boat. He cut the engine on the Zodiac when he was twenty-five yards away and the inflatable skiff glided the rest of the way silently. He unzipped the pocket of his windbreaker and removed the Glock 17, his service weapon from his time with the bureau.

The Zodiac bumped lightly into the fantail next to the rental skiff. McCaleb first looked into the skiff but saw nothing other than a life vest and a flotation cushion, nothing that indicated who had rented the boat. He stepped onto the fantail and while crouched behind the stern wrapped the Zodiac’s line around one of the rear cleats. He looked over the transom and saw only himself in the sliding door. He knew he would have to approach the door not knowing if there would be someone on the other side watching him come in.

He crouched down again and looked around. He wondered if he should retreat and come back with the harbor patrol boat. After a moment he decided against it. He glanced up the hill at his house and then raised himself and swung his body over the transom. With the gun carried low and hidden behind his hip he walked to the door and looked down at the lock. There was no damage or indication it had been tampered with. He pulled the handle and the door slid open. McCaleb was sure he had locked it the day before when leaving with Raymond.

He stepped inside. The salon was empty, no sign of intruder or burglary. He slid the door closed behind him and listened. The boat was silent. There was the sound of water lapping against the outside surfaces and that was it. His eyes moved toward the steps leading to the lower-deck staterooms and the head. He moved that way, raising the gun in front of him now.

On the second of the four steps down McCaleb hit a cracked board that sighed with his weight. He froze and listened for a response. There was only silence and the relentless sound of water against the sides of the boat. At the bottom of the stairs was a short hallway with three doors. Directly ahead was the forward stateroom, which had been converted into an office and file storage room. To the right was the master stateroom. To the left was the head.

The door to the master stateroom was closed and McCaleb could not remember if it had been that way when he had left the boat twenty-four hours earlier. The door to the head was wide open and hooked on the inside wall so it wouldn’t swing and slam when the boat was moving. The office door was partially open and swaying slightly with the movement of the boat. There was a light on inside the room and McCaleb could tell it was the light over the desk, which was built into the lower berth of a set of bunk beds to the left of the door. McCaleb decided he would check the head first, followed by the office and then the master last. As he approached the head he realized that he smelled cigarette smoke.

The head was empty and too small to be used as a hiding place anyway. As he turned toward the office door and raised his weapon, a voice called out from within.

“Come on in, Terry.”

He recognized the voice. He cautiously stepped forward and used his free hand to push open the door. He kept the gun raised.

The door swung open and there was Harry Bosch sitting at the desk, his body in a relaxed posture, leaning back and looking toward the door. Both his hands were in sight. Both were empty except for the unlit cigarette between two fingers of his right hand. McCaleb slowly moved into the small room, still holding the gun up and aimed at Bosch.

“You going to shoot me? You want to be my accuser and my executioner?”

“This is breaking and entering.”

“Then I guess that makes us even.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That little dance at my place the other night, what do you call that? ‘Harry, I gotta couple more questions about the case.’ Only you never asked any real questions, did you? Instead, you take a look at my wife’s picture and ask about that, and you ask about the picture in the hallway and you drink my beer and, oh, yeah, you tell me all about finding God in your baby daughter’s blue eyes. So what do you call all of that, Terry?”

Bosch casually turned the chair and glanced over his shoulder at the desk. McCaleb looked past him and saw his own laptop computer was open and turned on. On the screen he could see that Bosch had called up the file containing the notes for the profile he was going to compose until everything changed the day before. He wished he had protected it with a password.

“It feels like breaking and entering to me,” Bosch said, his eyes on the screen. “Maybe worse.”

In Bosch’s new posture the leather bomber jacket he was wearing fell open and McCaleb could see the pistol holstered on his hip. He continued to hold his own weapon up and ready.

Bosch looked back at him.

“I didn’t get a chance to look at all of this yet. Looks like a lot of notes and analysis. Probably all first-rate stuff, knowing you. But somehow, someway, you got it wrong, McCaleb. I’m not the guy.”

McCaleb slowly slid back into the lower berth of the opposite set of bunks. He held the gun with a little less precision now. He sensed there was no immediate danger from Bosch. If he had wanted to, he could have ambushed him as he’d come in.

“You shouldn’t be here, Harry. You shouldn’t be talking to me.”

“I know, anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. But who am I going to talk to? You put the bead on me. I want it off.”

“Well, you’re too late. I’m off the case. And you don’t want to know who’s on it.”

Bosch just stared at him and waited.

“The bureau’s civil rights division. You think Internal Affairs has been a pain in your ass? These people live and breathe for one thing, taking scalps. And an LAPD scalp is worth more than Boardwalk and Park Place put together.”

“How’d that happen, the reporter?”

McCaleb nodded.

“I guess that means he talked to you, too.”

Bosch nodded.

“Tried to. Yesterday.”

Bosch looked around himself, noticed the cigarette in his hand and put it in his mouth.

“You mind if I smoke?”

“You already have been.”

Bosch pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the cigarette. He pulled the trash can out from beneath the desk and next to his seat to be used as an ashtray.

“Can’t seem to quit these.”

“Addictive personality. A good and bad attribute in a detective.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

He took a hit off the cigarette.

“We’ve known each other for what is it, ten, twelve years?”

“More or less.”

“We worked cases and you don’t work a case with somebody without taking some kind of measure. Know what I mean?”

McCaleb didn’t answer. Bosch flicked the cigarette on the side of the trash can.

“And you know what bothers me, even more than the accusation itself? It’s that it came from you. It’s how and why you could think this. You know, what was the measure you took of me that allowed you to make this jump?”

McCaleb gestured with both hands as if to say the answer was obvious.

“People change. If there was anything I learned about people from my job, it’s that any one of us is capable of anything, given the right circumstances, the right pressures, the right motives, the right moment.”

“That’s all psycho-bullshit. It doesn’t…”

Bosch’s sentence trailed off and he didn’t finish. He looked back at the computer and the papers spread across the desk. He pointed the cigarette at the laptop’s screen.

“You talk about darkness… a darkness more than night.”

“What about it?”

“When I was overseas…” He dragged deeply on the cigarette and exhaled, tilting his head back and shooting the smoke toward the ceiling. “… I was put into the tunnels and let me tell you, you want darkness? – that was darkness. Down in there. Sometimes you couldn’t see your fucking hand three inches in front of your face. It was so dark it hurt your eyes from straining to see just anything. Anything at all.”

He took another long hit from the cigarette. McCaleb studied Bosch’s eyes. They were staring blankly at the memory. Then suddenly he was back. He reached down and ground the half-finished cigarette into the inside edge of the can and dropped it in.

“This is my way of trying to quit. I smoke these shitty menthol things and never more than a half at a time. I’m down to about a pack a week.”

“It’s not going to work.”

“I know.”

He looked up at McCaleb and smiled crookedly in a sort of apologetic way. Quickly his eyes changed and he moved back to his story.

“And then sometimes it wasn’t that dark down there. In the tunnels. Somehow there was just enough light to make your way. And the thing is, I never knew where it came from. It was like it was trapped down there with the rest of us. My buddies and me, we called it lost light. It was lost but we found it.”

McCaleb waited but that was all Bosch said.

“What are you telling me, Harry?”

“That you missed something. I don’t know what it is but you missed something.”

He held McCaleb with his dark eyes. He reached back to the desk and picked up the stack of copied documents from Jaye Winston. He tossed them across the small room onto McCaleb’s lap. McCaleb made no move to catch them and they spilled to the floor in a jumble.

“Look again. You missed something and what you did see added up to me. Go back in and find the missing piece. It will change the addition.”

“I told you, man, I’m off it.”

“I’m putting you back on it.”

It was said with a tone of permanence, as if there was no choice for McCaleb.

“You’ve got till Wednesday. That writer’s deadline. You have to stop his story with the truth. You don’t, and you know what J. Reason Fowkkes will do with it.”

They sat in silence for a long moment looking at each other. McCaleb had met and talked with dozens of killers in his time as a profiler. Few of them readily admitted their crimes. So in that Bosch was no different. But the intensity with which he stared unblinkingly at him was something McCaleb had never seen before in any man, guilty or innocent.

“Storey’s killed two women, and those are just the two we know about. He’s the monster you spent your life chasing, McCaleb. And now… and now you’re giving him the key that unlocks the door to the cage. He gets out, he’ll do it again. You know his kind. You know he will.”

McCaleb could not compete with Bosch’s eyes. He looked down at the gun in his hands.

“What made you think I would listen, that I would do this?” he asked.

“Like I said, you take somebody’s measure. I got yours, McCaleb. You’ll do this. Or the monster you set free will haunt you the rest of your life. If God is really in your daughter’s eyes, how will you be able to look at her again?”

McCaleb unconsciously nodded and immediately wondered what he was doing.

“I remember you once told me something,” Bosch said. “You said if God is in the details, so is the devil. Meaning, the person you are looking for is usually right there in front of us, hiding in the details all the time. I always remember that. It still helps me.”

McCaleb nodded again. He looked down at the documents on the floor.

“Listen, Harry, you should know. I was convinced about this when I took it to Jaye. I’m not sure I can be turned the other way. If you want help, I’m probably the wrong one to go to.”

Bosch shook his head and smiled.

“That’s exactly why you’re the right one. If you can be convinced, the world can be convinced.”

“Yeah, where were you on New Year’s Eve? Why don’t we start with that.”

Bosch shook his shoulders.

“Home.”

“Alone?”

Bosch shook his shoulders again and didn’t answer. He stood up to go. He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He went through the narrow door first and up the steps to the salon. McCaleb followed, now holding the gun at his side.

Bosch slid the door open with his shoulder. As he stepped out onto the cockpit he looked up at the cathedral of the hillside, then he looked at McCaleb.

“So all that talk at my place about finding God’s hand, was that bullshit? Interview technique or something? A statement designed to get a response that could fit into a profile?”

McCaleb shook his head.

“No, no bullshit.”

“Good. I was hoping it wasn’t.”

Bosch climbed over the transom to the fantail. He untied his rental boat and got in and sat down on the rear bench. Before starting the engine he looked once more at McCaleb and pointed to the back of the boat.

“The Following Sea. What’s that mean?”

“My father named the boat. It was his originally. The following sea is the wave that comes up behind you, that hits you before you see it coming. I guess he named the boat as sort of a warning. You know, always watch your back.”

Bosch nodded.

“Overseas we used to tell each other, ‘Watch six.’”

Now McCaleb nodded.

“Same thing.”

They were silent a moment. Bosch put his hand on the boat motor’s pull handle but didn’t start the engine.

“You know the history of this place, Terry? I’m talking about back before the missionaries came.”

“No, do you?”

“A little. I used to read a lot of history books. When I was a kid. Whatever they had in the library. I liked local history. L.A. mostly, and California. I just liked reading it. We took a field trip here from the youth hall once. So I read up on it.”

McCaleb nodded.

“The Indians that lived out here – the Gabrielinos – were sun worshippers,” Bosch said. “The missionaries came and changed all of that – in fact, they were the ones who called them Gabrielinos. They called themselves something else but I don’t remember what it was. But before all that happened they’d been here and they worshipped the sun. It was so important to life on the island I guess they figured it had to be a god.”

McCaleb watched Bosch’s dark eyes scan across the harbor.

“And the mainland Indians thought of the ones out here as these fierce wizards who could control weather and waves through worship and sacrifices to their God. I mean, they had to be fierce and strong to be able to cross the bay so they could trade their pottery and sealskins on the mainland.”

McCaleb studied Bosch, trying to get a bead on the message he was sure the detective was trying to convey.

“What are you saying, Harry?”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m saying that people find God where they need Him to be. In the sun, in a new baby’s eyes… in a new heart.”

He looked at McCaleb, his eyes as dark and as unreadable as the painted owl’s.

“And some people,” McCaleb began, “find their salvation in truth, in justice, in that which is righteous.”

Now Bosch nodded and offered his crooked smile again.

“That sounds good.”

He turned and started the engine with one pull. He then mock saluted McCaleb and pulled away, angling the rental boat back toward the pier. Not knowing the etiquette of the harbor, he cut across the fairway and between unused mooring buoys. He didn’t look back. McCaleb watched him all the way. A man all alone on the water in an old wooden boat. And in that thought came a question. Was he thinking about Bosch or himself?