A Darkness More Than Night

Chapter 31

McCaleb sat on the old couch in the salon thinking about his encounter with Bosch for a long time. It was the first time in all of his experiences as an investigator that a murder suspect had come to him to enlist his aid. He had to decide if it had been the act of a desperate or a sincere man. Or, possibly, something else. What if McCaleb had not noticed the rental skiff and come to the boat. Would Bosch have waited for him?

He went down to the front stateroom and looked at the documents spread on the floor. He wondered if Bosch had intentionally tossed them so that they would fall to the floor and become mixed up. Had he taken something?

He went to the desk and studied his laptop. It was not attached to the printer but he knew that didn’t mean anything. He closed the file that was on the screen and opened the print manager window. He clicked the jobs file and saw that two files had been printed that day – the scene and suspect profiles. Bosch had taken them.

McCaleb imagined Bosch riding on the Express ferry back across, sitting by himself and reading what McCaleb had written about him. It made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t think any suspect he had ever profiled had read the report McCaleb had put together on him.

He shook it off and decided to occupy his mind with something else. He slid off the chair to his knees and began picking up the murder book reports, putting them into a neat pile first before worrying about putting them back in order.

Once he had the mess cleaned up he sat down at the desk, the reports in a squared-off pile in front of him. McCaleb took a blank page of typing paper out of a drawer and wrote on it with the thick black marker he used for labeling cardboard boxes containing his files.

YOU MISSED SOMETHING

He took a piece of tape off a dispenser on the desk and taped the page to the wall behind the desk. He looked at it for a long time. Everything Bosch had said to him came down to that one line. He now had to decide if it was true, if it was possible. Or if it was the last manipulation of a desperate man.

He heard his cell phone begin to chirp. It was in the pocket of his jacket, which he had left on the couch in the salon. He hustled up the stairs and grabbed the jacket. When he reached into the pocket his hand closed around his gun. He then tried the other pocket and got the phone. It was Graciela.

“We’re home,” she said. “I thought you’d be here. I thought maybe we could all go down to lunch at El Encanto.”

“Um…”

McCaleb didn’t want to leave the office or his thoughts about Bosch. But the last week had strained things with Graciela. He needed to talk to her about that, about how he saw things changing.

“Tell you what,” he finally said. “I’m just finishing some stuff here. Why don’t you take the kids down and I’ll meet you there.”

He looked at his watch. It was quarter of one.

“Is one-thirty too late?”

“Fine,” she said abruptly. “What stuff?”

“Oh, just… I’m sort of wrapping up this thing for Jaye.”

“I thought you told me you were off it.”

“I am but I have all the reports and I wanted to write up my final… you know, just wrap it up.”

“Don’t be late, Terry.”

She said it with a tone that implied that he would miss more than his lunch if he was.

“I won’t. I’ll see you there.”

He closed the phone and went back down to the office. He looked at his watch again. He had about a half hour before he’d have to get on the skiff and go back to the pier. The El Encanto was about a five-minute walk from there. It was one of the few restaurants that remained open on the island during the winter months.

He sat down and started putting the stack of investigative documents in order. It was not a difficult task. Each page had a date stamp on the upper right-hand corner. But McCaleb stopped almost as soon as he started. He looked up at the message he had taped on the wall. He decided that if he was going to look for something he had not noticed before, that he had missed, he should come at the information from another angle. He decided not to put the documents in their correct order. Instead, he would read them in the random order they were now in. Doing it this way he would avoid thinking about the flow of the investigation and how one step followed the other. He would simply have each report to consider as a single piece of the puzzle. It was a simple mind trick but he had done it before on cases with the bureau. Sometimes it shook something new out, something he had previously missed.

He checked his watch again and began with the first document on the pile. It was the autopsy protocol.