Echo Park

27

BOSCH AND WALLING USED Bosch’s Mustang, since it would give them at least a small degree of cover compared with her federal cruiser, which screamed law enforcement. They drove to Echo Park but did not approach the Saxon house at 710 Figueroa Lane. There was a problem. Figueroa Lane was a short turnaround street that extended for a block off the end of Figueroa Terrace and curved up along the ridge below Chavez Ravine. There was no cruising by it without being obvious about it. Even in a Mustang. If Waits was there and watching for law enforcement, he would have the advantage of seeing them first.

Bosch stopped the car at the intersection of Beaudry and Figueroa Terrace and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

“He picked a good place for the secret castle,” he said. “There’s no getting close to it without being picked up on radar. Especially in daylight.”

Rachel nodded.

“Medieval castles were built on hilltops for the same reason.”

Bosch looked to his left, toward downtown, and saw the tall buildings rising over the roofs of the homes on Figueroa Terrace. One of the closest and tallest buildings was the Department of Water and Power headquarters. It was directly across the freeway.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said.

They drove out of the neighborhood and back into downtown. Bosch entered the DWP garage and parked in one of the visitor slots. He popped the trunk and went to the surveillance kit he always kept in the car. He got out a pair of high-powered binoculars, a surveillance camera and a rolled-up sleeping bag.

“What are you going to take pictures of?” Walling asked.

“Nothing. But it’s got a long lens and you might want to look through it while I use the binocs.”

“And the sleeping bag?”

“We might be lying on the roof. I don’t want your fancy federal suit to get dirty.”

“Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself.”

“I’m worried about that girl Waits grabbed. Let’s go.”

They headed across the garage floor toward the elevators.

“Did you notice that you still call him Waits, even though we are now sure his name is Foxworth?” she asked when they were going up.

“Yeah, I have noticed. I think it’s because when we were face-to-face he was Waits. When he started shooting, he was Waits. And it just sort of stuck.”

She nodded and didn’t say anything else about it, though he guessed that she probably had a psychological angle on it.

When they reached the lobby Bosch went to an information desk, showed his badge and credentials and asked to see a security supervisor. He told the desk man that it was urgent.

In less than two minutes a tall black man in gray pants and a navy blazer over his white shirt and tie came through a door and directly toward them. This time Bosch and Walling both showed their creds and the man appeared properly impressed by the federal-local tandem.

“Hieronymus,” he said, reading Bosch’s police ID. “Do you go by Harry?”

“That’s right.”

The man put out his hand and smiled.

“Jason Edgar. I believe you and my cousin were partners once.”

Bosch smiled, not just because of the coincidence but because he knew it meant that he would have this man’s cooperation. He put the sleeping bag under his other arm and shook his hand.

“That’s right. He told me he had a cousin with DWP. You used to get him billing info when we needed it. Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise, man. What do we have here? If the FBI’s involved, are we talking about a terrorism situation?”

Rachel raised a hand in a calming gesture.

“Not quite,” she said.

“Jason, we’re just looking for a place where we can look down on a neighborhood across the freeway in Echo Park. There’s a house we’re interested in and we can’t get close to it without being obvious about it, know what I mean? We were thinking that maybe from one of the offices here or from the roof we could get an angle and just see what’s happening over there.”

“I’ve got just the spot,” Edgar said without hesitation. “Follow me.”

He led them back to the elevators and had to use a key to get the fifteenth-floor button to light. On the way up he explained that the building was going through a floor-by-floor renovation. At the moment the work had moved to the fifteenth floor. The floor had been gutted and was empty, waiting for the contractor to come in to rebuild according to the renovation plan.

“You can have the whole floor to yourselves,” he said. “Pick any angle you want for an OP.”

Bosch nodded. OP, as in observation point. That told him something about Jason Edgar.

“Where’d you serve?” he asked.

“Marines, Desert Storm, the whole shebang. That’s why I didn’t join the PD. Had my fill of war zones. This gig is pretty much nine to five, low stress and just interesting enough, if you know what I mean.”

Bosch didn’t but nodded anyway. The elevator doors opened and they stepped out onto a floor that was wide open from glass exterior to glass exterior. Edgar led them toward the glass wall that would look down on Echo Park.

“What’s the case about, anyway?” Edgar asked as they approached.

Bosch knew it would come to this. He was ready with an answer.

“There’s a place down there we think is being used as a safe house for fugitives. We just want to see if there is anything there to be seen. You know what I mean?”

“Sure do.”

“There’s something else you can do to help us,” Walling said.

Bosch turned to her along with Edgar. He was just as curious.

“What do you need?” Edgar said.

“Could you run the address through your computers and tell us who is paying for utilities?”

“Not a problem. Let me just get you situated here first.”

Bosch nodded to Rachel. It was a good move. It would not only get the inquisitive Edgar out of the way for a while, but it could also provide them with some valuable information about the house on Figueroa Lane.

At the floor-to-ceiling glass wall on the north side of the building, Bosch and Walling looked down and across the 101 Freeway at Echo Park. They were farther from the hillside neighborhood than Bosch had thought they would be, but they still had a good vantage point. He pointed out the geographic markers to Rachel.

“There’s Fig Terrace,” he said. “Those three houses up above it on the curve are on Fig Lane.”

She nodded. Figueroa Lane had only the three houses on it. From this height and distance it looked like an afterthought, a developer’s discovery that he could jam three more houses onto the hillside after the main street grid had already been laid out.

“Which one is seven-ten?” she asked.

“Good question.”

Bosch dropped the sleeping bag and raised the binoculars. He studied the three houses, looking for an address. He finally zeroed in on a black trash can sitting out front of the house in the middle. In large white numerals someone had painted 712 on the can in an effort to safeguard it from theft. Bosch knew the address numbers would rise as the street extended away from downtown.

“The one on the right is seven-ten,” he said.

“Got it,” she said.

“So that’s the address?” Edgar asked. “Seven-ten Fig Lane?”

“Figueroa Lane,” Bosch said.

“Got it. Let me go see what I can find. If anybody comes up here and asks what you are doing, just tell them to call me on three-three-eight. That’s my page.”

“Thanks, Jason.”

“You got it.”

Edgar started walking back to the elevators. Bosch thought of something and called after him.

“Jason, this glass has got film on it, right? Nobody can see us looking out, right?”

“Yeah, no problem. You could stand there naked and nobody would see you from the outside. But don’t try that at night, ’cause it’s a different story. Internal light changes things and you can look right in.”

Bosch nodded.

“Thanks.”

“When I come back, I’ll bring a couple chairs.”

“That would be good.”

After Edgar disappeared into the elevator, Walling said, “Good, at least we’ll be able to sit naked at the window.”

Bosch smiled.

“Sounded like he knew all that from experience,” he said.

“Let’s hope not.”

Bosch raised the binoculars and looked down at the house at 710 Figueroa Lane. It was of similar design to the other two on the street; built high on the hillside with steps leading down to a street-front garage cut into the embankment below the house. It had a red barrel-tile roof and a Spanish motif. But while the other houses on the street were neatly painted and cared for, 710 appeared run-down. Its pink paint had faded. The embankment between the garage and the house was overrun with weeds. The flagpole that stood at the corner of the front porch flew no flag.

Bosch fine-tuned the focus of the field glasses and moved them from window to window, looking for indications of occupancy, hoping to get lucky and see Waits himself looking back out.

Next to him he heard Walling click off a few photos. She was using the camera.

“I don’t think there’s any film in that. It’s not digital.”

“It’s all right. Just force of habit. And I wouldn’t expect a dinosaur like you to have a digital camera.”

Beneath the binoculars, Bosch smiled. He tried to think of a rejoinder but let it go. He focused his attention back on the house. It was of a style commonly seen in the city’s older hillside neighborhoods. While with newer construction the contour of the land dictated design, the houses on the inclined side of Figueroa Lane were of a more conquering design. At street level the embankment was excavated for a garage. Then, above this, the hillside was terraced and a small single-level home had been constructed. The mountains and hillsides all over the city were molded this way in the forties and fifties as the city sprawled through the flats and grew up the hillsides like a rising tide.

Bosch noticed that at the top of the stairs that ran from the side of the garage up to the front porch there was a small metal platform. He checked the stairs again and saw the metal guide rails.

“There’s a lift on the stairs,” he said. “Whoever’s living there now is in a wheelchair.”

He saw no movement behind any window viewable from the angle they had. He dropped his focus down to the garage. It had a pedestrian entrance door and double garage doors that had been painted pink a long time before. The paint, what was left of it, was gray now and the wood was splintering in many places from direct exposure to the afternoon sun. One garage door looked as though it had closed at an uneven angle to the pavement. It didn’t look operational anymore. The pedestrian entrance door had a window, but a shade was pulled down behind it. Across the top panel of each of the garage doors was a row of small square windows, but they were being hit with direct sunlight and the dazzling reflection prevented Bosch from seeing in.

Bosch heard the elevator ding and put the binoculars down for the first time. He checked behind him and saw Jason Edgar carrying two chairs toward them.

“Perfect,” Bosch said.

He took one of the chairs and positioned it near the glass so he could sit on it backwards and prop his elbows on the seat back-classic surveillance form. Rachel positioned her chair so she could sit normally in it.

“Did you get a chance to check with records, Jason?” she asked.

“I did,” Edgar said. “Services to that address are billed to a Janet Saxon and have been for twenty-one years.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem. I take it that’s all you need from me right now?”

Bosch looked up at Edgar.

“Jerry, you-I mean, Jason-you’ve been a great help. We appreciate it. We’ll probably stick around a little bit and then split. You want us to let you know or drop these chairs off somewhere?”

“Uh, just tell the guy in the lobby on your way out. He’ll get a message to me. And leave the chairs. I can take care of that.”

“Will do. Thanks.”

“Good luck. Hope you get your man.”

Everybody shook hands and Edgar returned to the elevator. Bosch and Walling went back to watching the house on Figueroa Lane. Bosch asked Rachel if she would prefer taking shifts and she said no. He asked if she would rather use the binoculars and she said she would stick with the camera. Its long lens actually allowed her a closer focus than the binoculars did.

Twenty minutes went by and no movement at the house was seen. Bosch had spent the time moving back and forth between the house and the garage but was now training his focus on the heavy brush on the ridgeline up above, looking for another possible observation position that would put them closer. Walling spoke excitedly.

“Harry, the garage.”

Bosch lowered his focus and picked up the garage. The sun had moved behind a cloud and the glare had dropped off the line of windows across the top panel of each garage door. Bosch saw Rachel’s discovery. Through the windows of the garage door that appeared to still be functional he could see the back of a white van.

“I heard that a white van was used in the abduction last night,” Walling said.

“That’s what I heard, too. It’s part of the BOLO.”

He was excited. A white van in a house where Raynard Waits had lived.

“That’s it!” he called out. “He has to be in there with the girl. Rachel, we gotta go!”

They got up and hurried to the elevator.

28

THEY DEBATED BACKUP as they sped out of the DWP garage. Walling was for it. Bosch was against.

“Look, all we have is a white van,” he said. “She might be in that house, but he might not be. If we storm in there with the troops, we could lose him. So all I want to do is check it out up close. We can call for backup when we get there. If we need it.”

He believed his view was certainly reasonable, but so was hers.

“And what if he is in there?” she asked. “The two of us could be walking into an ambush. We need at least one team of backup, Harry, to do this correctly and safely.”

“We’ll call them when we get there.”

“That will be too late. I know what you’re doing. You want this guy for yourself and you’re willing to risk that girl-and us-to get it.”

“You want me to drop you off, Rachel?”

“No, I don’t want you to drop me off, Harry.”

“Good. I want you to be there.”

Decision made, they ended the discussion. Figueroa Street ran behind the DWP Building. Bosch took it east under the 101 Freeway, crossed Sunset and then followed it as it jogged north and under the 110 Freeway. Figueroa Street became Figueroa Terrace, and they drove to where it ended and Figueroa Lane curved up to the crest of the hillside. Bosch pulled the car to the curb before driving up it.

“We walk up and then we stay close to the line of garages until we get to seven-ten,” he said. “If we stay in close, he won’t have an angle on us from the house.”

“What if he isn’t in the house? What if he’s in the garage waiting for us?”

“Then we deal with it. We clear the garage first and then go up the stairs to the house.”

“The houses are on the hillside. We still need to cross the street.”

He looked at her across the top of the car as they got out.

“Rachel, are you with me or not?”

“I told you, I’m with you.”

“Then, let’s go.”

Bosch got out and started trotting up the sidewalk leading up the hill. He pulled out his phone and turned it off so it wouldn’t possibly vibrate while they were sneaking the house.

He was huffing by the time he got to the top. Rachel was right behind him and didn’t show the same level of oxygen depletion. Bosch hadn’t smoked in years but the damage of twenty-five years before that had been done.

Their only visual exposure to the pink house at the end of the street came when they got to the top and had to cross over to the garages that lined the east side of the street. They walked it, Bosch casually holding Walling by the arm and whispering in her ear.

“I’m using you to block my face,” he said. “He’s seen me but he’s never seen you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said when they got across. “If he saw us, you can expect he knows what’s happening.”

He ignored the warning and started moving in front of the garages, which were built right along the sidewalk line. They got to 710 quickly and Bosch went to the panel of windows over one of the doors. Cupping his hands against the dirty glass, he looked in and saw that the interior was crowded by the van and stacks of boxes, barrels and other junk. He saw no movement and heard no sound. A door at the back wall of the garage was closed.

He stepped over to the garage’s pedestrian door and checked the knob.

“Locked,” he whispered.

He stepped back and looked at the two pull-up doors. Rachel was now standing by the far door and leaning in close to it to listen for sounds from inside. She looked at Bosch and shook her head. Nothing. He looked down and saw that there was a handle at the bottom of each pull-up door but no exterior locking mechanism. He went to the first one, bent down and tried to pull the door open. It came about an inch and then stopped. It was locked from the inside. He tried the second door and encountered the same response. The door gave for a few inches but then stopped. Because of the minimal movement each door allowed, Bosch guessed that they were secured inside by padlocks.

Bosch stood up and looked at Rachel. He shook his head and pointed upward, meaning it was time to go up to the house.

They moved to the concrete stairs and quietly started up. Bosch led the way and stopped four steps from the top. He crouched and tried to catch his breath. He looked at Rachel. He knew they were winging it. He was winging it. There was no way to approach the house but to go directly to the front door.

He turned from her and studied the windows one by one. He saw no movement, but he thought he could hear the sound of a television or radio coming from inside. He pulled his gun-it was a backup he had gotten out of the hallway closet that morning-and went up the final steps, holding the weapon down at his side as he quietly crossed the porch to the front door.

Bosch knew that a search warrant was not at issue here. Waits had abducted a woman, and the life-and-death nature of the situation assuredly pushed them into no-warrant, no-knock territory. He put his hand on the knob and turned. The door was unlocked.

Bosch slowly pushed the door open, noticing that a two-inch ramp had been placed over the threshold to accommodate a wheelchair. As the door came open the sound of the radio became louder. An evangelical station, a man talking about the impending rapture.

They stepped into the house’s entry area. To the right it opened into a living room with a dining area to the back. Directly ahead through an arched opening was the kitchen. A hallway to the left led to the rest of the house. Without looking back at Rachel he pointed to the right, meaning she would go that way while he moved forward and cleared the kitchen before taking the hallway to the left.

As he reached the archway Bosch glanced at Rachel and saw her moving through the living room, weapon up in a two-handed grip. He stepped into the kitchen and saw that it was clean and neat, without a dish in the sink. The radio was on the counter. The speaker was telling his listeners that those who did not believe would be left behind.

There was another archway leading from the kitchen to the dining room. Rachel came through it, pointed her gun up when she saw Bosch and shook her head.

Nothing.

That left the hallway leading to the bedrooms and the rest of the house. Bosch turned and went back through the archway to the entry area. When he turned toward the hallway he was startled to see an old woman sitting in a wheelchair in the threshold to the hallway. On her lap she was holding a long-barrel revolver. It looked like it was too heavy for her frail arm to hold up.

“Who’s there?” she said forcefully.

Her head was turned at an angle. Though her eyes were open they were focused on the floor instead of Bosch. It was her ear that was trained toward him and he knew she was blind.

He raised his gun and pointed it at her.

“Mrs. Saxon? Take it easy. My name is Harry Bosch. I’m just looking for Robert.”

A look of puzzlement played on her features.

“Who?”

“Robert Foxworth. Is he here?”

“You’ve got the wrong place, and how dare you come in here without knocking.”

“I-”

“Bobby uses the garage. I don’t let him use the house. All those chemicals, it smells awful.”

Bosch started edging toward her, his eyes on the gun the whole time.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Saxon. I thought he was up here. Has he been here lately?”

“He comes and goes. He comes up here to give me the rent, that’s all.”

“For the garage?”

He was getting closer.

“That’s what I said. What do you want him for? Are you his friend?”

“I just want to talk to him.”

Bosch reached down and took the gun out of her hand.

“Hey! That’s my protection.”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Saxon. I’ll give it back. I just think it needs to be cleaned up a little. And oiled. This way it will be sure to work in case you ever really need to use it.”

“I need it.”

“I’m going to take it down to the garage and get Bobby to clean it. Then I’ll bring it back.”

“You better.”

Bosch checked the gun. It was loaded and appeared operational. He put it into the waistband at the back of his pants and looked at Rachel. She was standing three feet behind him in the entryway. She made a movement with her hand, pantomiming turning a key. Bosch understood.

“Do you have a key to the garage door, Mrs. Saxon?” he asked.

“No. Bobby came and got the extra key.”

“Okay, Mrs. Saxon. I’ll check with him.”

He moved toward the front door. Rachel joined him and they went out. Halfway down the steps to the garage, Rachel grabbed his arm and whispered.

“We have to call backup. Now!”

“Go ahead and call but I’m going into the garage. If he’s in there with the girl, we can’t wait.”

He shook off her grip and continued down. When he got to the garage he looked once again through the windows on the top panels and saw no movement inside. His eyes focused on the door on the rear wall. It was still closed.

He moved over to the pedestrian door and opened the blade of a small folding knife that was attached to his key ring.

Bosch went to work on the door’s lock and got the blade across the tongue. He nodded to Rachel to be ready and pulled the door open. But it didn’t come. He tried it again and pulled hard. Again the door would not come open.

“There’s an inside lock,” he whispered. “It means he’s in there.”

“No, it doesn’t. He could’ve come out through one of the garage doors.”

He shook his head.

“They’re locked from the inside,” he whispered. “All the doors are locked from the inside.”

Rachel understood and nodded.

“What do we do?” she whispered back.

Bosch thought about things for a moment and then handed her his keys.

“Go back and get the car. When you get up here, park it with the rear end right here. Then pop the trunk.”

“What are you-”

“Just do it. Go!”

She ran down the sidewalk in front of the garages and then crossed the street and dropped from sight down the hill. Bosch moved toward the pull-up door that looked like it had closed awkwardly. It was out of alignment and he knew it would be the better of the two doors to try to breach.

Bosch heard the Mustang’s big engine before he saw his car come over the hill. Rachel drove toward him fast. He stepped back against the garage to give her maximum room to maneuver. She made almost a complete turn in the street and then backed toward the garage. The trunk was popped and Bosch immediately reached in for the rope he kept in the back. It was gone. He then remembered that Osani had taken it after discovering it on the tree in Beachwood Canyon.

“Shit!”

He quickly looked through the trunk and found a shorter length of clothesline he had used once to tie down the trunk lid when he was moving a piece of furniture to the Salvation Army. He quickly tied one end of the cord to a steel towing loop underneath the car’s bumper and then the other end to the handle at the bottom of the garage door. He knew that something would have to give. The door, the handle or the rope. They had a one-in-three shot at getting the door open.

Rachel had gotten out of the car.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Bosch quietly closed the car’s trunk.

“We’re going to pull it open. Get back in the car and go forward. Go slow. A sudden jerk will snap the line. Go ahead, Rachel. Hurry.”

Without a word she got back in the car, dropped it in drive and started moving forward. She watched in the rearview and he rolled a finger to keep her moving. The cord pulled taut and then Bosch could hear the sound of the garage door groaning as the pressure mounted. He stepped back and at the same time drew his gun again.

The garage door gave way all at once and popped up and out three feet.

“Stop!” Bosch yelled, knowing there was no longer any need for whispers.

Rachel stopped pulling but the line remained taut and the garage door was held open. Bosch moved forward quickly and used his momentum to duck and roll beneath it. He came up inside the garage with his gun up and ready. He swept the space but saw no one. Keeping his eyes on the door at the rear wall, he sidestepped over to the van. He jerked one of the side doors open and quickly checked the interior. It was empty.

Bosch moved toward the back wall, making his way around an obstacle course of upright barrels, rolls of plastic, bales of towels, squeegee blades and other window-washing equipment. There was a strong smell of ammonia and other chemicals. Bosch’s eyes were beginning to water.

The hinges on the door at the rear wall were visible and Bosch knew it would swing toward him when he opened it.

“FBI!” Walling yelled from outside. “Coming in!”

“Clear!” Bosch yelled back.

He heard her scrabble under the garage door but kept his attention on the door in the back wall. He moved toward it, listening all the time for any sound.

Taking a position to the side of the door Bosch put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. It was unlocked. He looked back for the first time at Rachel. She was in a combat stance at an angle from the door. She nodded and in one quick move he flung the door open and moved across the threshold.

The room was dark and windowless and he saw no one. He knew he was a target standing in the light in the doorway and quickly sidestepped into the room. He saw a string from an overhead light and reached out and yanked on it. The string snapped in his hand but the light came on, the hanging bulb jumping and swinging in response. He was in a crowded work and storage room that was about ten feet deep. There was no one in the room.

“Clear!”

Rachel entered and they stood there scanning the room. A bench cluttered with old paint cans, household tools and flashlights was on the right. Four old and rusting bikes were stacked against the left wall, along with folding chairs and a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes. The back wall was concrete block. Hung on it was the dusty old flag for the pole up on the front terrace of the house. On the floor in front of it was a stand-up electric fan, its blades caked with dust and crud. It looked like at one time somebody had tried to blow the fetid, damp smell out of the room.

“Shit!” Bosch said.

He lowered his gun, turned and walked past Rachel back into the garage. She followed him.

Bosch shook his head and tried to rub some of the chemical sting out of his eyes. He didn’t understand. Were they too late? Were they following the wrong lead altogether?

“Check the van,” he said. “See if there is any sign of the girl.”

Rachel crossed behind him to the van, and Bosch went to the pedestrian door to check for the flaws in his belief that someone had to be in the garage.

He had to be right. There was a dead bolt on the door, meaning it could only have been locked from the inside. He moved over to the garage doors and stooped down to look at their locking mechanisms. He was right again. Both had padlocks on interior slide locks.

He tried to puzzle it out. All three doors had been locked from the inside. It meant that either someone was inside the garage or there was an exit point he hadn’t identified yet. But this seemed impossible. The garage was dug directly into the hillside embankment. There was no possibility of a rear exit.

He was checking the ceiling, wondering if it was possible that there was a passageway up to the house, when Rachel called from inside the van.

“I’ve got a roll of duct tape,” she said. “I’ve got used strips on the floor with hair.”

It boosted Bosch’s belief that they had the right place. He stepped over to the open side door of the van. He looked in at Rachel while he pulled out his phone. He noticed the wheelchair lift in the van.

“I’ll call for backup and Forensics,” he said. “We missed him.”

He had to turn the phone back on, and while he waited for it to boot up he realized something. The stand-up fan in the back room wasn’t pointed toward the garage doors. If you were going to air the room out, you would point the fan toward the door.

His phone buzzed in his hand and it distracted him. He looked down at the screen. It told him he had a message waiting. He clicked a button to check the call record and saw that he had just missed a call from Jerry Edgar. He’d get to it later. He punched in a number for Communications and told the dispatcher to connect him with the Raynard Waits Fugitive Task Force. An officer identifying himself as Freeman picked up.

“This is Detective Harry Bosch. I have-”

“Harry! Gun!”

It was Rachel who had yelled. Time slowed down. All in a second Bosch looked at her in the van’s doorway, her eyes focused over his shoulder at the back of the garage. Without thinking, he jumped forward and into her, pulling his arms around her and taking her to the floor of the van in a crushing tackle. Four shots came from behind him followed by the instantaneous sound of bullets striking metal and glass breaking. Bosch rolled off Rachel and came up with his gun in hand. He caught a glimpse of a figure ducking into the rear storage room. He fired six shots through the doorway and raking across the wall to its right.

“Rachel, okay?”

“I’m okay. Are you hit?”

“I don’t think so!”

“It was him! Waits!”

They paused and watched the door to the rear room. No one came back through.

“Did you hit him?” Rachel whispered.

“I don’t think so.”

“I thought we cleared that room.”

“I thought we did, too.”

Bosch stood up, keeping his aim on the doorway. He noticed that the light from within was now off.

“I dropped my phone,” he said. “Call for backup.”

He started moving toward the door.

“Harry, wait. He could-”

“Call for backup! And remember to tell them I’m in there.”

He cut to his left and approached the door from an angle that would give him the widest vision of the interior space. But without the overhead light the room was cast in shadows and he could see no movement. He started taking small steps using his right foot first and maintaining a firing position. Behind him he heard Rachel on her phone identifying herself and asking for a transfer to LAPD dispatch.

Bosch got to the threshold and swung the gun across his body to cover the part of the room he had not had an angle on. He stepped in and sidestepped to the right. There was no movement, no sign of Waits. The room was empty.

He looked at the fan and confirmed his mistake. It was pointed toward the flag hanging on the back wall. It had not been used to blow damp air out. The fan had been used to blow air in.

Bosch took two steps toward the flag. He reached forward, grabbed it by the edge and ripped it down.

In the wall, three feet off the ground, was a tunnel entrance. About a dozen concrete blocks had been removed to create an opening four feet square and the excavation into the hillside continued from there.

Bosch crouched to look into the opening from the safety of the right side. The tunnel was deep and dark, but he saw a glimmer of light thirty feet in. He realized that the tunnel made a turn and that there was a source of light around the bend.

Bosch leaned closer and realized he could hear a sound from the tunnel. It was a low whimpering. It was a terrible sound but it was beautiful just the same. It meant that no matter what horrors she had experienced through the night, the woman Waits had abducted was still alive.

Bosch reached back over to the workbench and picked up the shiniest flashlight he saw. He turned it on. It was dead. He tried another and got a weak beam of light. It would have to do.

He flashed the beam into the tunnel and confirmed that the first leg was clear. He took a step toward the tunnel.

“Harry, wait!”

He turned and saw Rachel in the doorway.

“Backup’s on the way!” she whispered.

Bosch shook his head.

“She’s in there. She’s alive.”

He turned back to the tunnel and flashed the light in once more. It was still clear up to the turn. He turned the light off to conserve it. He glanced back at Rachel and then stepped into the darkness.

29

BOSCH HESITATED A MOMENT in the mouth of the tunnel to let his eyes adjust. He then started moving. He didn’t have to crawl. The tunnel was large enough for him to move through in a crouch. Flashlight in his right hand and gun up in his left, he kept his eyes on the dim light ahead. The sound of the woman crying grew louder as he moved forward.

Ten feet into the tunnel the musty smell that he had noticed outside turned into the deeper stench of decay. As rancid as it was, it was not something new to him. Almost forty years before, he had been a tunnel rat with the U.S. Army, taking part in more than a hundred missions in the tunnels of Vietnam. The enemy sometimes buried their dead in the clay walls of their tunnels. That hid them from sight but the odor of decay was impossible to hide. Once it got into your nose it was equally impossible to forget.

Bosch knew that he was headed toward something horrific, that the missing victims of Raynard Waits were ahead somewhere in the tunnel. This had been the destination on the night Waits was pulled over in his work van. But Bosch couldn’t help but think that maybe it was his own destination as well. He had come many years and many miles but it seemed to him that he had never really left the tunnels behind, that his life had always been a slow movement through darkness and tight spaces on the way to a flickering light. He knew he was then, now, and forever a tunnel rat.

His thigh muscles burned from the strain of moving in a crouched position. Sweat began to sting his eyes. And as he got closer to the turn in the tunnel Bosch saw the light changing and rechanging and knew that this was caused by the undulation of a flame. Candlelight.

Five feet from the turn Bosch slowed to a stop and rested on his heels as he listened. Behind him, he thought he could hear sirens. Backup on the way. He tried to concentrate on what could be heard from the tunnel ahead but there was only the intermittent sound of the woman crying.

He raised himself up and started forward again. Almost immediately the light ahead went out and the whimpering took on a new energy and urgency.

Bosch froze. He then heard nervous laughter from ahead, followed by the familiar voice of Raynard Waits.

“Is that you, Detective Bosch? Welcome to my foxhole.”

There was more laughter and then it stopped. Bosch let ten seconds go by. Waits said nothing else.

“Waits? Let her go. Send her out to me.”

“No, Bosch. She’s with me now. Anybody comes in here, I’ll kill her on the spot. I’ll save the last bullet for myself.”

“Waits, no. Listen. Just let her come out and I will come in. We’ll trade.”

“No, Bosch. I like the situation the way it is.”

“Then what are we doing? We need to talk and you need to save yourself. There’s not a lot of time. Send the girl out.”

A few seconds went by and then the voice came out of the darkness.

“Save myself from what? For what?”

Bosch’s muscles were on the verge of cramping. He carefully lowered himself to a seated position against the right side of the tunnel. He was sure that the candlelight had been coming ahead from the left. The tunnel turned to the left. He kept his gun up but was now employing a cross-wrists bracing with the flashlight up and ready as well.

“There’s no way out,” he said. “Give it up and come out. Your deal is still in play. You don’t have to die. Neither does the girl.”

“I don’t care about dying, Bosch. That’s why I’m here. Because I don’t fucking care. I just want it to be on my own terms. Not the state’s or anybody else’s. Just mine.”

Bosch noticed that the woman had gone silent. He wondered what had happened. Had Waits silenced her? Had he just…?

“Waits, what’s wrong? Is she all right?”

“She passed out. Too much excitement, I guess.”

He laughed and then was silent. Bosch decided that he needed to keep Waits talking. If he was engaged by Bosch he would be distracted from the woman and what was assuredly being planned outside the tunnel.

“I know who you are,” he said quietly.

Waits didn’t take the bait. Bosch tried again.

“Robert Foxworth. Son of Rosemary Foxworth. Raised by the county. Foster homes, youth halls. You lived here with the Saxons. For a time you lived at the McLaren Youth Hall out in El Monte. So did I, Robert.”

Bosch was met with a long silence. But then the voice came quietly out of the darkness.

“I’m not Robert Foxworth anymore.”

“I understand.”

“I hated that place. McLaren. I hated them all.”

“They closed it down a couple years ago. After some kid died in there.”

“Fuck them and fuck that place. How did you find Robert Foxworth?”

Bosch felt a rhythm building in the conversation. He understood the cue Waits was giving by speaking of Robert Foxworth as someone other than himself. He was Raynard Waits now.

“It wasn’t that hard,” Bosch answered. “We figured it out through the Fitzpatrick case. We found the pawn slip in the records and matched birth dates. What was the heirloom medallion that had been pawned?”

There was a long silence before an answer.

“It was Rosemary’s. It was all he had from her. He had to pawn it and when he went back to get it, that pig Fitzpatrick had already sold it.”

Bosch nodded. He had Waits answering questions but there wasn’t a lot of time. He decided to jump to the present.

“Raynard. Tell me about the setup. Tell me about Olivas and O’Shea.”

There was only silence. Bosch tried again.

“They used you. O’Shea used you and he’s going to just walk away from it. Is that what you want? You die here in this hole and he just walks away?”

Bosch put the flashlight down so he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He then had to feel around on the floor of the tunnel to find it again.

“I can’t give you O’Shea or Olivas,” Waits said in the darkness.

Bosch didn’t get it. Was he wrong? He doubled back in his head and started at the beginning.

“Did you kill Marie Gesto?”

There was a long silence.

“No, I didn’t,” Waits finally said.

“Then how was this set up? How could you know where-”

“Think about it, Bosch. They’re not stupid. They would not directly communicate with me.”

Bosch nodded. He understood.

“Maury Swann,” he said. “He brokered the deal. Tell me about it.”

“What’s to tell? It was a setup, man. He said the whole thing was to make you a believer. He said you were bothering the wrong people and had to be convinced.”

“What people?”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“This is Maury Swann saying this?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t get to him either. This is communication between a lawyer and his client. You can’t touch it. It’s privileged. Besides, it would be my word against his. That won’t go anywhere and you know it.”

Bosch did know it. Maury Swann was a tough lawyer and a respected member of the bar. He was also a media darling. There was no way to go after him with just the words of a criminal client-and a serial killer at that. It had been a masterstroke by O’Shea and Olivas to use him as the go-between.

“I don’t care,” Bosch said. “I want to know how it all went down. Tell me.”

A long silence went by before Waits responded.

“Swann went to them with the idea of making a deal. My clearing the books in exchange for my life. He did this without my knowledge. If he had asked me I would have said, don’t bother. I’d rather take the needle than forty years in a cell. You understand that, Bosch. You’re an eye-for-an-eye guy. I like that about you, believe it or not.”

He ended it there and Bosch had to prompt him again.

“So then what happened?”

“One night in the jail, I was taken to the attorney room and there was Maury. He told me there was a deal on the table. But he said it would only work if I threw in a freebie. Admit to one I didn’t do. He told me that there would be a field trip and I would have to lead a certain detective to the body. This detective had to be convinced, and leading him to the body would be the only way to do it. That detective was you, Bosch.”

“And you said yes.”

“When he said there would be a field trip, I said yes. That was the only reason. It meant daylight. I saw a chance at daylight.”

“And you were led to believe that this offer, this deal-that it came directly from Olivas and O’Shea?”

“Who else would it come from?”

“Did Maury Swann ever use their names in connection with the deal?”

“He said this is what they wanted me to do. He said it came directly from them. They would not make a deal if I didn’t throw in the freebie. I had to throw in Gesto and take you to her or there was no fucking deal. You get it?”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, I got it.”

He felt his face getting hot with anger. He tried to channel it, put it aside so that it was ready to be used, but not at this moment.

“How did you get the details you gave me during the confession?”

“Swann. He got them from them. He said they had the records from the original investigation.”

“And he told you how to find the body up there in the woods?”

“Swann told me there were markers in the woods. He showed me pictures and told me how to lead everybody there. It was easy. The night before my confession I studied up on everything.”

Bosch was silent as he thought about how easily he had been led down the path. He had wanted something so badly and for so long that it had made him blind.

“And what were you supposed to get out of all of this, Raynard?”

“You mean, what was in it for me from their point of view? My life, man. They were offering me my life. Take it or leave it. But the truth is, I didn’t care about that. I told you, man, when Maury said there’d be a field trip, I knew that I might have a chance to get away… and to visit my… my foxhole one last time. That was enough for me. I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t care if I died trying, either.”

Bosch tried to think of what he should do or ask next. He thought about using his cell to call the district attorney or a judge and have Waits confess over the phone. He put the flashlight down again and reached into his pocket but then he remembered he had dropped his phone when he had jumped onto Rachel as the shooting broke out in the garage.

“Are you still there, Detective?”

“I’m here. What about Marie Gesto? Did Swann tell you why you had to confess to the Marie Gesto killing?”

Waits laughed.

“He didn’t have to. It was pretty obvious that the fix was in. Whoever did Gesto was trying to get you off his back.”

“No name was mentioned?”

“No, no name.”

Bosch shook his head. He had nothing. Nothing on O’Shea or Anthony Garland or anybody else. He looked down the tunnel in the direction of the garage. He could see nothing but he knew that there would be people there. They had blacked out that end to prevent backlighting. He knew they would be coming at any moment.

“What about your escape?” he asked in order to keep the dialogue going. “Was that planned or were you just improvising?”

“A little of both. I met with Swann the night before the field trip. He told me how I would lead you to the body. He showed me the photos and told me about the markings in the trees and how they would begin after we came to where there had been a mud slide and we would have to climb down. That’s when I knew. I knew I might have a chance then. So I told him to make them uncuff me if I had to do any climbing. I told him that I wouldn’t follow through on the deal if I had to do any climbing with my hands cuffed to my sides.”

Bosch remembered O’Shea overruling Olivas and telling him to take the cuffs off. Olivas’s reluctance had all been a play for Bosch’s benefit. Everything had been a play for his benefit. Everything was phony and he had been played perfectly.

Bosch heard the sound of men crawling behind him in the tunnel. He turned the flashlight on and saw them. It was the SWAT team. Black Kevlar, automatic rifles, night-vision goggles. They were coming. Any moment they would launch a flash-bang grenade into the tunnel and start coming. He turned the light out. He thought about the woman. He knew Waits would kill her the moment they made the move.

“Were you really at McLaren?” Waits asked.

“I was there. It was before your time but I was there. I was in B dorm. It was closest to the baseball fields so we always got there first at rec time and got the best equipment.”

It was a you-had-to-be-there story, the best Bosch could think of in the moment. He had spent most of his life trying to forget about McLaren.

“Maybe you were there, Bosch.”

“I was.”

“And look at us now. You went your way and I went mine. I guess I fed the wrong dog.”

“What do you mean? What dog?”

“You don’t remember. At McLaren they used to pass around that saying about every man having two dogs inside. One good and one bad. They fight all the time because only one can be the alpha dog, the one in charge.”

“And?”

“And the one that wins is always the dog you chose to feed. I fed the wrong one. You fed the right one.”

Bosch didn’t know what to say. He heard a click from behind him in the tunnel. They were going to launch the grenade. He quickly stood up, hopeful that they would not shoot him in the back.

“Waits, I’m coming in.”

“No, Bosch.”

“I’ll give you my gun. Watch the light. I’ll give you my gun.”

He switched on the flashlight and played its beam on the turn in the tunnel ahead. He moved forward and when he got to the turn extended his left hand into the cone of light. He held his gun by the barrel so Waits could see it was no threat.

“I’m coming in now.”

Bosch took the turn and entered the final chamber of the tunnel. The space was at least twelve feet wide but still not tall enough for him to stand in. He dropped to his knees and swept the chamber with his light. The dim amber beam revealed a ghastly sight of bones and skulls and decaying flesh and hair. The stench was overpowering and Bosch had to hold himself from gagging.

The beam came to the face of the man Bosch had known as Raynard Waits. He was propped against the far wall of his foxhole, sitting on what looked like a throne carved into the rock and clay. To his left the woman he had abducted lay naked and unconscious on a blanket. Waits held the barrel of Freddy Olivas’s gun to her temple.

“Easy now,” Bosch said. “I’ll give you my gun. Just don’t hurt her anymore.”

Waits smiled, knowing he was in complete control of the situation.

“Bosch, you are a fool to the end.”

Bosch lowered his arm and tossed the gun to the right side of the throne. As Waits reached down to grab it he lifted the muzzle of the other gun off the woman. Bosch dropped the flashlight and reached behind him at the same time, his hand finding the grip of the revolver he had taken from the blind woman.

The long barrel made his aim true. He fired twice, hitting Waits in the center of the chest with both rounds.

Waits was knocked back against the wall. Bosch saw his eyes go wide, then they lost that light that separates life from death. His chin dropped and his head tilted forward.

Bosch crawled to the woman and checked her for a pulse. She was still alive. He covered her with the blanket she was lying on. He then called out to the others in the tunnel.

“This is Bosch-RHD! It’s clear! We are clear! Raynard Waits is dead!”

A bright light flashed on around the corner in the entrance tunnel. It was a blinding light and he knew the men with guns would be waiting on the other side of it.

No matter, he felt safe now. He slowly moved toward the light.

30

AFTER EMERGING FROM THE TUNNEL Bosch was led out of the garage by two SWAT officers wearing gas masks. He was delivered into the hands of the waiting members of the Fugitive Task Force and others associated with the case. Randolph and Osani from OIS were on hand as well as Abel Pratt from the Open-Unsolved Unit. Bosch looked around for Rachel Walling but didn’t see her anywhere on the scene.

Next out of the tunnel was Waits’s last victim. The young woman was carried to a waiting ambulance and immediately transported to County-USC Medical Center for assessment and treatment. Bosch was pretty sure his own imagination couldn’t top the real horrors she had lived through. But he knew the important thing was that she was alive.

The task force leader wanted Bosch to sit in a van and tell his story but Bosch said he didn’t want to be in a closed space. Even out in the open air on Figueroa Lane he couldn’t get the smell of the tunnel out of his nose and he noticed that the task force members who had crowded around him at first had now all taken a step or two back. He saw a garden hose attached to a faucet alongside the stairway of the house next to 710. He went over, turned it on and then bent over as he ran the water through his hair, on his face and down his neck. It pretty much soaked his clothes but he didn’t care. It washed away a good deal of the dirt and sweat and stench and he knew the clothes were trash now anyway.

The task force top was a sergeant named Bob McDonald who had been pulled in from Hollywood Division. Luckily, Bosch knew him from past days in the division and that set the stage for a cordial debriefing. Bosch realized it was just a warmup. He would have to submit to a formal interview with Randolph and the OIS before the end of the day.

“Where’s the FBI agent?” Bosch asked. “Where’s Rachel Walling?”

“She’s being interviewed,” McDonald said. “We’re using a neighbor’s house for her.”

“And the old lady upstairs in the house?”

McDonald nodded.

“She’s fine,” McDonald said. “She’s blind and in a wheelchair. They’re still talking to her but it turns out Waits lived here when he was a kid. It was a foster home and his real name is Robert Foxworth. She can’t get around by herself anymore, so she pretty much stays up there. County assistance brings in her food. Foxworth helped her out financially by renting the garage. He kept supplies for window washing in there. And an old van. It’s got a wheelchair lift in it.”

Bosch nodded. He guessed that Janet Saxon had no idea what else her former foster son used her garage for.

McDonald told Bosch it was time to tell his story, and so he did, giving the step-by-step playback of the moves he had made after discovering the connection between Waits and the pawnbroker Fitzpatrick.

There were no questions. Not yet. Nobody asked why he never called the task force or Randolph or Pratt or anybody else. They listened and simply locked in his story. Bosch was not too concerned. He and Rachel had saved the girl and he had killed the bad guy. He was sure that these two accomplishments would allow him to rise above all transgressions upon protocol and regulations and save his job.

It took him twenty minutes to tell the story, and then McDonald said they should take a break. As the group around him splintered, Bosch saw his boss waiting to get to him. Bosch knew this conversation would not be easy.

Pratt finally saw an opening and walked up. He looked anxious.

“Well, Harry, what did he tell you in there?”

Bosch was surprised Pratt wasn’t jumping all over him for acting on his own, without authority. But he wasn’t going to complain about it. In abbreviated form he outlined what he had learned from Waits about the setup in Beachwood Canyon.

“He told me it was all orchestrated through Swann,” he said. “Swann was the go-between. He took the deal from Olivas and O’Shea to Waits. Waits didn’t kill Gesto but agreed to take the fall for her. It was part of the deal for avoiding the death penalty.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Why would Olivas and O’Shea do this?”

“The oldest reasons in the book. Money and power. And the Garland family has plenty of both.”

“Anthony Garland was the person of interest on Gesto, right? The guy who got the court orders keeping you away.”

“Yeah, until Olivas and O’Shea used Waits to convince me otherwise.”

“You got anything besides what Waits said in there?”

Bosch shook his head.

“Not much. I traced twenty-five thousand in contributions to O’Shea’s campaign back to T. Rex Garland’s lawyers and oil company. But it was all done legally. It proves a connection, nothing else.”

“Twenty-five seems cheap to me.”

“It is. But the twenty-five is all we know about. We do some digging and there’ll probably be more.”

“You tell all of this to McDonald and his crew?”

“Only what Waits told me in there. I didn’t tell them about the contributions. Only what Waits said.”

“You think they’ll go after Maury Swann for this?”

Bosch thought a moment before answering.

“Not a chance. Whatever was said between them was privileged information. Besides that, nobody would go after him based on the word of a dead madman like Waits.”

Pratt kicked the ground. He had nothing else to say or ask.

“Look, Top, I’m sorry about this,” Bosch said. “About not being up-front with you on what I was doing, the home duty and everything.”

Pratt waved it off.

“It’s okay, man. You got lucky. You ended up doing some good and taking out the bad guy. What am I going to say to that?”

Bosch nodded his thanks.

“Besides, I’m coasting,” Pratt continued. “Another three weeks and you’ll be someone else’s problem. He can decide what to do with you.”

Whether Kiz Rider came back or not, Bosch didn’t want to leave the unit. He’d heard that David Lambkin, the new top coming up from RHD, was a good man to work for. Bosch hoped when all of this shook out, he’d still be part of the Open-Unsolved Unit.

“Holy shit!” Pratt whispered.

Bosch followed his eyes to a car that had just parked on the perimeter near where the media trucks were and the reporters were setting up for standups and sound bites. Rick O’Shea was getting out of the passenger side. Bosch felt the bile immediately rise in his throat. He made a move to walk toward the prosecutor but Pratt caught his arm.

“Harry, take it easy.”

“What the fuck is he doing here?”

“It’s his case, man. He can come if he wants. And you better play it cool. Don’t show your hand with him or you might never be able to get to him.”

“And what, meantime he does his dance in front of the cameras and turns this into another campaign commercial? Bullshit. What I ought to do is go over there and kick his ass right in front of the cameras.”

“Yeah, that would be real smart, Harry. Very subtle. That will help the situation a lot.”

Bosch broke free of Pratt’s grasp but simply stepped over and leaned against one of the police cars. He folded his arms and kept his head down until he was calmer. He knew Pratt was right.

“Just keep him away from me.”

“That will be kind of hard because he’s coming right to you.”

Bosch looked up just as O’Shea and the two men that made up his entourage got to him.

“Detective Bosch, are you okay?”

“Never better.”

Bosch kept his arms folded across his chest. He didn’t want one of his hands getting loose and involuntarily taking a swing at O’Shea.

“Thank you for what you have done here today. Thank you for saving the young woman.”

Bosch just nodded while looking down at the ground.

O’Shea turned to the men with him and to Pratt, who had remained nearby in case he had to pull Bosch off the prosecutor.

“Could I speak to Detective Bosch alone?”

O’Shea’s minions walked off. Pratt hesitated until Bosch nodded to him, telling him everything was cool. Bosch and O’Shea were left to themselves.

“Detective, I’ve been briefed on what Waits-or, I should say, Foxworth-revealed to you in the tunnel.”

“Good.”

“I hope you do not give any credence to what an admitted and confirmed serial killer would say about the men who were prosecuting him, especially one who cannot even be here to defend himself?”

Bosch stepped away from the patrol car’s fender and finally dropped his arms to his sides. His hands were balled into fists.

“You’re talking about your pal Olivas?”

“Yes, I am. And I can tell by your posture that you actually believe what Foxworth allegedly told you.”

“Allegedly? What, now I’m the one making it up?”

“Someone is.”

Bosch leaned a few inches toward him and spoke in a low voice.

“O’Shea, get away from me. I might hit you.”

The prosecutor took a step backwards as if he had already been punched.

“You’re wrong, Bosch. He was lying.”

“He was confirming what I already knew before I even went into that tunnel. Olivas was dirty. He put the entry in the murder book that falsely tied Raynard Waits to Gesto. He went out there and marked a trail for Waits to follow and lead us to the body. And he wouldn’t have done any of it without somebody telling him to do it. He wasn’t that kind of guy. He wasn’t smart enough.”

O’Shea stared at him for a long moment. The implication in Bosch’s words was clear.

“I can’t dissuade you from this bullshit, can I?”

Bosch looked at him and then looked away.

“Dissuade? Not a chance. And I don’t care what it does or doesn’t do for the campaign, Mr. Prosecutor. Those are the undisputed facts and I don’t need Foxworth or what he said to prove them.”

“Then, I guess I’ll have to appeal to a higher authority than you.”

Bosch took half a step closer to him. This time he really got into his space.

“You smell that? You smell that on me? That’s the fucking putrid smell of death. I’ve got it all over me, O’Shea. But at least I can wash it off.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Whatever you want it to mean. Who’s your higher authority? You going to call T. Rex Garland up in his shiny office?”

O’Shea took a deep breath and shook his head in confusion.

“Detective, I don’t know what happened to you in that tunnel but you aren’t making much sense.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, well, it will make sense soon enough. Before the election, that’s for sure.”

“Help me out, Bosch. What exactly am I missing here?”

“I don’t think you’re missing anything. You know it all, O’Shea, and before it’s all over, so will the whole wide world. Somehow, some way, I’m going to take down you and the Garlands and everybody else who had a part in this. Count on it.”

Now O’Shea took a step toward Bosch.

“Are you saying that I did this, that I set all of this up, for T. Rex Garland?”

Bosch started laughing. O’Shea was the consummate actor to the end.

“You’re good,” he said. “I’ll give you that. You’re good.”

“T. Rex Garland is a valid contributor to my campaign. Up-front and legal. How you can tie that into-”

“Then, why the fuck didn’t you mention he was a valid and legal contributor when I brought up his son the other day and told you he was my suspect on Gesto?”

“Because it would have complicated things. I have never met or even spoken to either of the Garlands. T. Rex contributed to my campaign. So what? The guy spreads money through every election in the county. For me to bring it up at that point would have been to invite your suspicion. I didn’t want that. Now I see I have it anyway.”

“You are so full of shit. You-”

“Fuck you, Bosch. There is no connection.”

“Then, we’ve got nothing else to say.”

“Yes, we do. I’ve got something to say. Take your best shot with this bullshit and we’ll see who comes out at the end still standing.”

He turned and walked away, barking an order to his men. He wanted a telephone with a secured line. Bosch wondered who the first call would go to, T. Rex Garland or the chief of police.

Bosch made a snap decision. He would call Keisha Russell and turn her loose. He would tell her she was clear to look into those campaign contributions Garland had funneled to O’Shea. He put his hand into his pocket and then remembered that his phone was still somewhere in the garage. He walked that way and stopped at the yellow tape that was strung across the now fully opened door behind the white van.

Cal Cafarelli was in the garage, directing the forensic analysis of the scene. She had a breathing-filter mask down around her neck. Bosch could tell by her face that she had been to the macabre scene at the end of the tunnel. And she would never be the same again. He waved her over.

“How’s it going, Cal?”

“It’s going about as well as you’d expect after seeing something like that.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“We’re going to be here long into the night. What can I do for you, Harry?”

“Have you found a cell phone somewhere in here? I lost my phone when things started happening.”

She pointed to the floor near the front tire of the van.

“Is that it over there?”

Bosch looked over and saw his phone lying on the concrete. The red message light was blinking. He noticed that someone had circled it on the concrete with chalk. That was not good. Bosch didn’t want his phone inventoried as evidence. He might never get it back.

“Can I get it back? I need it.”

“I’m sorry, Harry. Not yet. This place hasn’t been photographed. We’re starting with the tunnel and moving out from there. It will be a while.”

“Then how about if you give it to me and I use it right here and then I give it back when it’s time to take photos. It looks like I’ve got messages waiting.”

“Harry, come on.”

He knew that his suggestion would break about four rules of evidence.

“Okay, just let me know when I can get it back. Hopefully before the battery’s dead.”

“You got it, Harry.”

He turned away from the garage and saw Rachel Walling walking toward the yellow tape that delineated the outside perimeter of the crime scene. There was a federal cruiser there and a man in a suit and sunglasses was waiting for her. She had apparently called for a ride.

Bosch trotted toward the tape, calling her name. She stopped and waited for him.

“Harry,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I am now. How about you, Rachel?”

“I’m fine. What happened to you?”

She indicated his wet clothes with her hand.

“I had to hose off. It was bad. I need about a two-hour shower. Are you leaving?”

“Yes. They’re done with me for the time being.”

Bosch nodded toward the man in the sunglasses ten feet behind her.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know yet. I should be all right. You got the bad guy and saved the girl. How can that be a bad thing?”

“We got the bad guy and saved the girl,” Bosch corrected. “But there are people in every institution and bureaucracy who can find a way to turn something good into shit.”

She looked him in the eyes and nodded.

“I know,” she said.

Her look froze him and he knew they were now different.

“Are you mad at me, Rachel?”

“Mad? No.”

“Then, what?”

“Then, nothing. I have to go.”

“Will you call me, then?”

“When I can. Good-bye, Harry.”

She took two steps toward the waiting car but then stopped and turned back to him.

“That was O’Shea you were talking to out by the car, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful, Harry. If you let your emotions run you the way they did out here today, O’Shea could put you in a world of pain.”

Bosch smiled slightly.

“You know what they say about pain, don’t you?”

“No, what?”

“They say pain is weakness leaving the body.”

She shook her head.

“Well ‘they’ are full of shit. Don’t put it to the test unless you have to. Good-bye, Harry.”

“I’ll see you, Rachel.”

He watched as the man in sunglasses held the tape up for her to duck under. She got into the front passenger seat and Sunglasses drove them off. Bosch knew that something had changed in the way she saw him. His actions in the garage and going into the tunnel had made her change her mind about him. He accepted it and guessed that he might never see her again. He decided that it would be one more thing that he would blame on Rick O’Shea.

He turned back to the scene, where Randolph and Osani were standing waiting for him. Randolph was putting away his cell phone.

“You two again,” Bosch said.

“Gettin’ to be like déjà vu all over again, isn’t it?” Randolph said.

“Something like that.”

“Detective, we are going to need to take you over to Parker Center and conduct a more formal interview this time around.”

Bosch nodded. He knew the drill. This time it wasn’t about shooting into the trees or the woods. He had killed somebody, so this time it would be different. They would need to nail down every detail.

“I’m ready to go,” he said.

31

BOSCH WAS SEATED in an interview room in the Officer Involved Shooting Unit at Parker Center. Randolph had allowed him to shower in the basement locker room and he’d changed into blue jeans and a black West Coast Choppers sweatshirt, clothing he kept in a locker for the times he was downtown and unexpectedly needed to fly below the radar that a suit would bring. On the way out of the locker room he had dumped his contaminated suit into a trash can. He would now be down to two.

The tape recorder on the table was turned on, and from separate sheets of paper, Osani read to him his constitutional rights as well as the police officer’s bill of rights. The double insulation of protections was designed to safeguard the individual and police office from the unfair assault of the government, but Bosch knew that when push came to shove, in one of these little rooms neither piece of paper would do much to protect him. He had to fend for himself. He said he understood his rights and agreed to be interviewed.

Randolph took over from there. At his request Bosch once more told the story of the shooting of Robert Foxworth, aka Raynard Waits, beginning with the discovery made during the review of records from the Fitzpatrick case and ending with the two bullets he fired into Foxworth’s chest. Randolph asked few questions until Bosch was finished going through the story. Then he asked many detailed questions about the moves Bosch had made in the garage and then the tunnel. More than once he asked Bosch why he didn’t listen to the cautioning words of FBI agent Rachel Walling.

This question told Bosch not only that Rachel had been interviewed by the OIS but also that she had not said things particularly favorable to his case. This disappointed Bosch greatly but he tried to keep his thoughts and feelings about Rachel out of the interview room. To Randolph he repeated as a mantra a sentence that he believed would ultimately win the day for him, no matter what Randolph or Rachel or anyone else thought of his actions and procedures.

“It was a life-or-death situation. A woman was in jeopardy and we had been fired upon. I felt that I could not wait around for backup or anybody else. I did what I had to do. I used as much caution as I could and used deadly force only when necessary.”

Randolph moved on and focused many of the next questions on the actual shooting of Robert Foxworth. He asked Bosch what he was thinking when Foxworth revealed that Bosch had been set up to believe that the Gesto case was solved. He asked Bosch what he was thinking when he saw the remains of Foxworth’s victims positioned in the chamber at the end of the tunnel. He asked Bosch what he was thinking when he pulled the trigger and killed the defiler and murderer of those victims.

Bosch patiently answered each question but finally hit his limit. Something was off-kilter about the interview. It was almost as if Randolph were working from a script.

“What’s going on here?” Bosch asked. “I’m sitting here telling you people everything. What aren’t you telling me?”

Randolph looked at Osani and then back at Bosch. He leaned forward, arms on the table. He had a habit of turning a gold ring on his left hand. Bosch had noticed him doing it last time. He knew it was a USC ring. Big deal. A lot of the department’s ruling class had gone through night school at USC.

Randolph looked back at Osani and reached over to turn the tape recorder off but held his fingers on the buttons.

“Detective Osani, could you go get us a couple bottles of water? All this talking and my voice is about to go. Probably the same with Detective Bosch, too. We’ll hold up until you get back.”

Osani got up to leave and Randolph turned off the recorder. He didn’t speak until the interview room door was closed.

“The thing is, Detective Bosch, we only have your word on what happened in that tunnel. The female was unconscious. There were only you and Foxworth, and he didn’t make it out alive.”

“That’s right. Are you saying my word is not acceptable?”

“I’m saying that your description of events might be perfectly acceptable. But the forensics might come in with an interpretation that varies from your statement. You see? It can get messy very quickly. Things can be left open to interpretation and misinterpretation. Public and political interpretation as well.”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t understand what was happening.

“So what?” he said. “I don’t care what the public or politicians think. Waits pushed the action in that tunnel. It was clearly a kill-or-be-killed situation and I did what I had to do.”

“But there is no witness to your description of events.”

“What about Agent Walling?”

“She didn’t go into the tunnel. She warned you not to go in.”

“You know, there’s a woman over at County-USC who probably wouldn’t be alive right now if I hadn’t gone in. What is going on here, Lieutenant?”

Randolph started playing with his ring again. He looked like a man with a distaste for what his duty called on him to do.

“That’s probably enough for today. You’ve been through a lot. What we’re going to do is keep things open for a few days while we wait for the forensics to come in. You’ll continue on home duty. Once we have everything in order I’ll bring you in to read and sign your statement.”

“I asked what’s going on, Lieutenant.”

“And I told you what’s going on.”

“You didn’t tell me enough.”

Randolph took his hand away from his ring. It had the effect of underlining with importance what he would say next.

“You rescued the hostage and brought a resolution to the case. That’s good. But you were reckless in your actions and got lucky. If we believe your story, then you shot a man who was threatening the lives of you and others. The facts and forensics, however, might just as easily lead to another interpretation, perhaps one that indicates the man you shot was attempting to surrender. So what we’re going to do is take our time with it. In a few days we’ll get it right. And then we’ll let you know.”

Bosch studied him, knowing that he was delivering a message that was not so hidden in his words.

“This is about Olivas, isn’t it? The funeral’s set for tomorrow, the chief is going to be there and you want to keep Olivas a hero killed in the line of duty.”

Randolph went back to turning his ring.

“No, Detective Bosch, you have that wrong. If Olivas was dirty, then nobody is going to bend over backwards to worry about his reputation.”

Bosch nodded. He now had it.

“Then it’s about O’Shea. He reached out to a higher authority. He told me he would. That authority then reached out to you.”

Randolph leaned back in his chair and seemed to search the ceiling for a proper reply.

“There are a great number of people in this department as well as the community who believe Rick O’Shea would make a fine district attorney,” he said. “They also believe he would be a good friend to have on the side of the LAPD.”

Bosch closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Randolph continued.

“His opponent, Gabriel Williams, has allied himself with an anti-law enforcement constituency. It would not be a good day for the LAPD if he were to be elected.”

Bosch opened his eyes and stared at Randolph.

“You’re actually going to do this?” he asked. “You’re going to let this guy skate because you think he could be a friend to the department?”

Randolph shook his head sadly.

“I don’t know what you are talking about, Detective. I’m simply making a political observation. But I do know this. There is no evidence real or imagined of this conspiracy you speak of. If you think that Robert Foxworth’s attorney will do anything other than deny the conversation you have outlined here, then you would be a fool. So don’t be a fool. Be wise. Keep it to yourself.”

Bosch took a moment to compose himself.

“Who made the call on this?”

“Excuse me?”

“How high up did O’Shea reach? It couldn’t have been directly to you. He would have gone higher. Who told you to knock me down?”

Randolph spread his hands and shook his head.

“Detective, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Right. Of course not.”

Bosch stood up.

“Then, I guess you’ll write it up the way you’ve been told and I’ll either sign it or I won’t. Simple as that.”

Randolph nodded but said nothing. Bosch leaned down and put both hands on the table so he could get close to his face.

“You going to Deputy Doolan’s funeral, Lieutenant? It’s right after they put Olivas in the ground. Remember him, the one Waits shot in the face out there? I thought maybe you’d be going to the funeral to explain to his family about how choices had to be made and how the man directly behind that bullet could be a friend to the department and therefore doesn’t need to face the consequences of his actions.”

Randolph stared straight ahead at the wall across the table. He said nothing. Bosch straightened up and pulled open the door, startling Osani, who had been standing just outside. He wasn’t holding any water bottles. Bosch pushed past him and left the squad room.

At the elevator Bosch pushed the up button. He waited and paced and thought about taking his grievance up to the sixth floor. He envisioned himself charging into the chief of police’s suite and demanding to know if he was aware of what was being done in his name and under his command.

But as the elevator opened he dismissed the idea and pushed the 5 button. He knew that the Byzantine levels of bureaucracy and politics in the department were impossible to fully understand. If he didn’t watch himself he could end up complaining about all the bullshit to the very person who created it.

The Open-Unsolved Unit was deserted when he got there. It was just after four and most detectives worked seven-to-four shifts that put them on the road home before rush hour. If something wasn’t breaking, they left at four on the dot. Even a fifteen-minute delay could cost them an hour on the freeways. The only one still around was Abel Pratt, and that was because as a supervisor he had to work eight to five. Company rules. Bosch waved as he walked by the open door of Pratt’s office on the way to his desk.

Bosch dropped into his chair, exhausted by the day’s events and the weight of the departmental fix. He looked down and saw that his desk was littered with pink phone message slips. He started looking through them. Most were from colleagues in different divisions and stations. They were all call-backs. Bosch knew they wanted to say nice shooting or words to that effect. Anytime anybody got a clean kill the phones lit up.

There were several messages from reporters, including Keisha Russell. Bosch knew he owed her a call but would wait until he got home. There was also a message from Irene Gesto, and Bosch guessed that she and her husband wanted to know if there was any update on the investigation. He had called them the night before to tell them that their daughter had been found and the ID confirmed. He put that slip in his pocket. Home duty or not, he would make the call back to them. With the autopsy completed the body would be released and at the very least they could finally, after thirteen years, claim their daughter and take her home. He could not tell them that their daughter’s killer had been brought to justice, but at least he could help them get her home.

There was also a message from Jerry Edgar, and Bosch remembered that his old partner had called his cell right before the shooting had gone down in Echo Park. Whoever had taken the message had written Says it’s important on the slip and underlined it. Bosch checked the time on the slip and noted that this call had come in before the shooting as well. Edgar had not been calling to congratulate him on taking out a bad guy. He assumed that Edgar had heard that Harry had met his cousin and that he wanted to chew the fat about it. At the moment Bosch didn’t feel up for that.

Bosch wasn’t interested in any of the other messages, so he stacked them and put them in a desk drawer. Nothing else to do, he then started straightening the papers and files on his desk. He thought about whether he should call Forensics and see about getting his phone and car back from the Echo Park crime scene.

“I just got the word.”

Bosch looked up. Pratt was standing in the doorway of his office. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie loose at his neck.

“What word?”

“From OIS. You haven’t cleared home duty, Harry. I gotta send you home.”

Bosch looked back down at his desk.

“So what’s new? I’m leaving.”

Pratt paused as he tried to interpret Bosch’s tone of voice.

“Everything okay, Harry?” he asked tentatively.

“Nope, everything’s not okay. The fix is in and when the fix is in, then everything’s not okay. Not by a long shot.”

“What are you talking about? They’re going to cover up Olivas and O’Shea?”

Bosch looked up at him.

“I don’t think I should talk to you about it, Top. It could put you in a spot. You wouldn’t want the blowback.”

“They’re that serious about it, huh?”

Bosch hesitated but then answered.

“Yeah, they’re serious. They’re willing to jam me up if I don’t play the game.”

He stopped there. He didn’t want to be having this conversation with his supervisor. In Pratt’s position loyalties went both up and down the ladder. It didn’t matter if he was only a few weeks from retirement. Pratt had to play the game until the buzzer sounded.

“My cell is back there, part of the crime scene,” he said, reaching for the phone. “I just came in to make a phone call and then I’m out of here.”

“I was wondering about your phone,” Pratt said. “Some of the guys have been trying to call you and they said you weren’t answering.”

“Forensics wouldn’t let me take it from the scene. The phone or my car. What did they want?”

“I think they wanted to take you out for a drink at Nat’s. They might still be heading over there.”

Nat’s was a dive off Hollywood Boulevard. It wasn’t a cop bar but a fair number of off-duty cops passed through there on any given night. Enough for the management to keep The Clash’s hard-edged version of “I Fought the Law” on the jukebox for going on twenty years now. Bosch knew that if he showed up at Nat’s the punk anthem would be in heavy if not inappropriate rotation in salute to the recently dispatched Robert Foxworth, aka Raynard Waits. I fought the law but the law won… Bosch could almost hear them all singing the chorus.

“You going?” he asked Pratt.

“Maybe later. I’ve got something to do first.”

Bosch nodded.

“I don’t think I feel like it,” he said. “I’m going to pass.”

“Suit yourself. They’ll understand.”

Pratt didn’t move from the doorway so Bosch picked up his phone. He called Jerry Edgar’s number just so he could follow through on the lie he had told about having to make a call. But Pratt remained in the doorway, his arm leaning against the jamb as he surveyed the empty squad room. He was really trying to get Bosch out of there. Maybe he had gotten the word from higher up the ladder than Lieutenant Randolph.

Edgar answered the call.

“It’s Bosch, you called?”

“Yeah, man, I called.”

“I’ve been a little busy.”

“I know. I heard. Nice shooting today, partner. You okay?”

“Yeah, fine. What were you calling about?”

“Just something I thought you might want to know. I don’t know if it matters anymore.”

“What was it?” Bosch said impatiently.

“My cousin Jason called me from DWP. He said you saw him today.”

“Yeah, nice guy. He helped a lot.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t checking on how he treated you. I’m trying to tell you that he called me and said there was something you might want to know but you didn’t give him a business card or a number or anything. He said that about five minutes after you and the FBI agent you were with left, another cop came and asked for him. Asked at the lobby desk for the guy who was just helping the cops.”

Bosch leaned forward at his desk. He was suddenly very interested in what Edgar was telling him.

“He said this guy showed a badge and said he was monitoring your investigation and he asked Jason what you and the agent had wanted. My cousin took him up to the floor you people had gone to and walked this guy out to the window. They were standing there looking down on the house in Echo Park when you and the lady agent showed up down there. They watched you go into the garage.”

“Then what happened?”

“The guy ran out of there. Grabbed an elevator and went down.”

“Did your cousin get a name off this guy?”

“Yeah, the guy said his name was Detective Smith. When he held up his ID he sort of had his fingers over the part with his name.”

It was an old ploy, Bosch knew, used mostly when detectives were going off the reservation and didn’t want their real name out in circulation. Bosch had used it himself on occasion.

“What about a description?” he asked.

“Yeah, he gave me all that. He said white guy, about six feet and one-eighty. The guy had silver-gray hair he kept cut short. Let’s see, midfifties and he was wearing a blue suit, white shirt and a striped tie. He had an American flag on the lapel.”

The description matched about fifty thousand men in the immediate vicinity of downtown. And Bosch was looking at one of them. Abel Pratt was still standing in his office doorway. He was staring at Bosch with eyebrows raised in question. He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket but Bosch could see it on a hook on the door behind him. There was an American flag pinned to the lapel.

Bosch looked back down at his desk.

“How late does he work to?” he asked quietly.

“Normally, I think he stays till five. But there’s a bunch of people hanging up there, watching the scene in Echo Park.”

“Okay, thanks for the tip. I’ll call you later.”

Bosch hung up before Edgar could say anything else. He looked up and Pratt was still staring at him.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Oh, just something on the Matarese case. The one we filed this week. It looks like we might have a witness after all. It will help at trial.”

Bosch said it as nonchalantly as he could. He stood up and looked at his boss.

“But don’t worry. It will hold until I get back from home duty.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.”

32

BOSCH WALKED TOWARD PRATT. He came too close to him, invading his personal space, which caused Pratt to back into his office and move back to his desk. This was what Bosch wanted. He said good-bye and have a good weekend. He then headed toward the door of the squad room.

The Open-Unsolved Unit had three cars assigned to its eight detectives and one supervisor. The cars were used on a first-come first-served basis and the keys hung on hooks next to the squad room door. The procedure was for a detective taking a car to write his or her name and the estimated time of return on an erasable white board that hung below the keys. When Bosch got to the door he opened it wide to block the view from Pratt’s office of the key hooks. There were two sets of keys on the hooks. Bosch grabbed one and left.

A few minutes later he pulled out of the garage behind Parker Center and headed toward the DWP Building. The mad rush to empty downtown by sunset was only just beginning and he made it the seven blocks in quick time. He parked illegally in front of the fountain at the entrance to the building and jumped out of his car. He checked his watch as he approached the front door. It was twenty minutes to five.

A uniformed security guard came through the doors, waving at him.

“You can’t park-”

“I know.”

Bosch showed him his badge and pointed to the radio on the man’s belt.

“Can you get Jason Edgar on that thing?”

“Edgar? Yeah. What’s this-”

“Get him on there and tell him Detective Bosch is waiting out front. I need to see him as soon as possible. Do it now, please.”

Bosch turned and headed back to his car. He got in and waited five minutes before he saw Jason Edgar come through the glass doors. When he got to the car he opened the passenger door to look in, not get in.

“What’s up, Harry?”

“I got your message. Get in.”

Edgar reluctantly got in the car. Bosch pulled away from the curb as he was closing his door.

“Wait a minute. Where are we going? I can’t just leave.”

“This should only take a few minutes.”

“Where are we going?”

“Parker Center. We won’t even get out of the car.”

“I have to let them know.”

Edgar took a small two-way off his belt. He called in at the DWP security center and said he would be off-location on a police matter for a half hour. He received a 10-4 and put the radio back on his belt.

“You should’ve asked me first,” he said to Bosch. “My cousin said you had a habit of acting first and asking questions later.”

“He said that, huh?”

“Yeah, he did. What are we doing at Parker Center?”

“Making an ID of the cop who talked to you after I left today.”

Traffic had already gotten worse. A lot of nine-to-fivers getting an early jump on the commute home. Friday afternoons were particularly brutal. Bosch finally pulled back into the police garage at ten to five and hoped they wouldn’t be too late. He found a parking space in the first row. The garage was an open-air structure and the space afforded them a view of San Pedro Street, which ran between Parker Center and the garage.

“You have a cell phone?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah.”

Bosch gave him the general number for Parker Center and told him to call it and ask for the Open-Unsolved Unit. Calls transferred from the main number did not carry forward caller ID. Edgar’s name and number would not show up on the OU lines.

“I just want to see if somebody answers,” Bosch said. “If somebody does, just ask for Rick Jackson. When you’re told that he’s not there, don’t leave a message. Just say you’ll get him on his cell and hang up.”

Edgar’s call was answered and he went through the routine Bosch had outlined. When he was finished he looked over at Bosch.

“Somebody named Pratt answered.”

“Good. He’s still there.”

“So what’s that mean?”

“I wanted to make sure he hadn’t left. He’ll leave at five, and when he does he’ll cross the street right over there. I want to see if he’s the guy who told you he was monitoring my investigation.”

“Is he IAD?”

“No. He’s my boss.”

Bosch slapped the visor down as a precaution against being seen. They were parked a good thirty yards from the crosswalk Pratt would use to get to the garage but he didn’t know which way Pratt would go once he was inside the structure. As a squad supervisor he had the perk of being able to park a personal car in the police garage, and most of those assigned spaces were on the second level. There were two sets of stairs and the ramp up. If Pratt walked up the ramp he would come right by Bosch’s position.

Edgar asked questions about the Echo Park shooting and Bosch answered them in short sentences. He didn’t want to talk about it but he had just yanked the guy off post and had to respond in some way. It was only being courteous. Finally, at 5:01 he saw Pratt come through the back doors of Parker Center and down the ramp by the jail’s intake doors. He walked out to San Pedro and started to cross with a group of four other detective supervisors who were heading home as well.

“Okay,” Bosch said, cutting Edgar off in the middle of a question. “See those guys crossing the street. Which one came to DWP today?”

Edgar studied the pack crossing the street. He had an unobstructed view of Pratt, who was walking next to another man at the back of the group.

“Yeah, the last guy,” Edgar said without hesitation. “The one puttin’ on the shades.”

Bosch looked over. Pratt had just put on his Ray-Bans. Bosch felt a deep pressure in his chest, like the worst case of heartburn he’d ever had. He kept his eyes on Pratt and watched him turn away from their position once he crossed the street. He was heading toward the far stairwell.

“Now what? You going to follow him?”

Bosch remembered Pratt saying he had something to do after work.

“I want to but I can’t. I’ve got to shoot you back to DWP.”

“Don’t worry about it, man. I can walk it. Probably be faster with this traffic, anyway.”

Edgar cracked his door and turned to get out. He looked back at Bosch.

“I don’t know what’s going on but good luck, Harry. I hope you get who you’re looking for.”

“Thanks, Jason. Hope to see you again.”

After Edgar was clear Bosch backed out and left the garage. He took San Pedro over to Temple because he assumed that Pratt would take that route on his way to the freeway. Whether he was going home or not, the freeway was the likely choice.

Bosch crossed Temple and pulled to the curb in a red zone. It gave him a good angle on the exit to the police garage.

In two minutes a silver SUV came out of the garage and headed toward Temple. It was a Jeep Commander with a retro boxy design. Bosch identified Pratt behind the wheel. He immediately fit the dimensions and color of the Commander to those of the mystery SUV he had seen take off from the street near his house the night before.

Bosch leaned down across the seat as the Commander approached Temple. He heard it make the turn and after a few seconds he got back up behind the wheel. Pratt was on Temple up at the light at Los Angeles Street and he was turning right. Bosch waited until he completed the turn and then took off to follow.

Pratt entered the crowded northbound lanes of the 101 Freeway and joined the crawl of rush-hour traffic. Bosch came down the ramp and pushed into the line of cars about six vehicles behind the Jeep. He got lucky in that Pratt’s vehicle had a white ball with a face on it atop the radio antenna. It was a giveaway promotion from a fast-food chain. It allowed Bosch to track the Jeep without having to get too close. He was in an unmarked Crown Vic which might as well have had a neon sign on its roof that flashed POLICE!

Slowly but surely Pratt made his way north with Bosch following at a distance. When the freeway cut past Echo Park he looked up to the ridgeline and saw that the crime scene and media soirée on Figueroa Lane was still in full swing. He counted two media choppers still circling overhead. He wondered if his car would be towed from the scene or if he would be able to go back and retrieve it later.

As he drove, Bosch tried to piece together what he had on Pratt. There was little doubt that Pratt had been following him while he was on home duty. His SUV matched the SUV that had been on his street the night before, and Pratt had been IDed by Jason Edgar as the cop who had followed him into the DWP Building. It was not feasible to think that he had been following Bosch simply to see if he was abiding by the rules of home duty. There had to be another reason and Bosch could think of only one thing.

The case.

Once he’d made this assumption, other things quickly came together and they served to only stoke the fire that was burning in Bosch’s chest. Pratt had told the story about Maury Swann earlier in the week, and that made it clear they knew each other. While he had relayed a negative story about the defense attorney, that could have been a cover or an attempt to distance himself from someone he was actually close to and possibly working with.

Also obvious to Bosch was the fact that Pratt was intimately aware that Bosch had regarded Anthony Garland as a person of interest in the Gesto case. Bosch had routinely informed Pratt of his activities in reopening the case. Pratt was also notified when Garland’s lawyers successfully reacquired a court order restraining Bosch from talking to Garland without one of his lawyers present.

Last, and perhaps most important, Pratt had access to the Gesto murder book. It sat most of the time on Bosch’s desk. It could have been Pratt who put in the phony connection to Robert Saxon, aka Raynard Waits. He could have planted the connection long before the book was given to Olivas. He could have planted it so Olivas would discover it.

Bosch realized that the whole plan for Raynard Waits to confess to the murder of Marie Gesto and to lead investigators to the body could have completely originated with Abel Pratt. He was in a perfect position as a go-between who could monitor Bosch as well as all the other parties involved.

And he realized that with Swann part of the plan, Pratt wouldn’t need Olivas or O’Shea. The more people in a conspiracy, the more likely it is that it will fail or fall apart. All Swann had to do was tell Waits that the prosecutor and investigator were behind it and he would have planted a false trail for someone like Bosch to follow.

Bosch felt the hot flash of guilt start to burn at the back of his neck. He realized that he could be wrong about everything he had been thinking until a half hour before. Totally wrong. Olivas might not be dirty after all. Maybe he had been used as skillfully as Bosch had been used himself, and maybe O’Shea was guilty of nothing more than political maneuvering-taking credit where it was not due him, redirecting blame away from where it was due. O’Shea could have called for the department fix simply to contain Bosch’s accusations because they would be politically damaging, not because they were true.

Bosch thought this new theory through again and it held up. He found no air in the brake lines, no sand in the gas tank. It was a car that could drive. The only thing missing was motive. Why would a guy who banked twenty-five years with the department and was looking at retiring at fifty risk it all on a scheme like this? How could a guy who had spent twenty-five years chasing bad guys let a killer go free?

Bosch knew from working a thousand murders that motive was often the most elusive component of crime. Obviously, money could motivate, and the disintegration of a marriage could play a part. But those were unfortunate common denominators in many people’s lives. They could not readily explain why Abel Pratt had broken across the line.

Bosch banged the palm of his hand hard on the steering wheel. The question of motive aside, he was embarrassed and angry with himself. Pratt had played him perfectly and the betrayal was deep and painful. Pratt was his boss. They had eaten together, worked cases together, told jokes and talked about their kids together. Pratt was heading toward a retirement that no one in the department believed was anything other than well-earned and well-deserved. It was time to double-dip, collect a department pension and grab a lucrative security job in the islands where the pay was high and the hours low. Everybody was shooting for that and no one would begrudge it. It was blue heaven, the policeman’s dream.

But now Bosch saw through all of that.

“It’s all bullshit,” he said out loud in the car.

33

THIRTY MINUTES INTO THE DRIVE Pratt exited the freeway in the Cahuenga Pass. He took Barham Boulevard northeast into Burbank. The traffic was still thick and Bosch had no trouble following and maintaining his distance and cover. Pratt drove past the back entrance to Universal and the front entrance to Warner Bros. He then made a few quick turns and pulled to the curb in front of a row of town houses on Catalina near Verdugo. Bosch drove on by quickly, took his first right and then another and then another. He killed his lights before taking one more right and coming up on the town houses again. He pulled to the curb a half block behind Pratt’s SUV and slid down in his seat.

Almost immediately Bosch saw Pratt standing in the street, looking both ways before crossing. But he was taking too long to do it. The street was clear but Pratt kept looking back and forth. He was looking for someone or checking to see if he had been followed. Bosch knew that the hardest thing in the world to do was to follow a cop who was looking for it. He slouched down lower in the car.

Finally, Pratt started across the street, still looking back and forth continuously, and when he got to the other curb he turned and stepped up onto it backwards. He took a few steps back, surveying the area in both directions. When his scan came to Bosch’s car his eyes held on it for a long moment.

Bosch froze. He didn’t think Pratt had seen him-he was slouched too far down-but he might have recognized the car as either an unmarked police cruiser or one of the cars specifically assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit. If he walked down the street to check it out Bosch knew he would be caught without much of an explanation. And without a gun. Randolph had routinely confiscated his backup weapon for a ballistics analysis in regard to the shooting of Robert Foxworth.

Pratt started walking toward Bosch’s car. Bosch grabbed the door handle. If he needed to, he would bail out of the car and run toward Verdugo, where there would be traffic and people.

But suddenly Pratt stopped, his attention drawn to something behind him. He turned around and looked up the steps of the town house he had been standing in front of. Bosch tracked his eyes and saw the front door of the town house was partially open and a woman was looking out and calling to Pratt while smiling. She was hiding behind the door but one of her bare shoulders was exposed. Her expression changed as Pratt said something and signaled her back inside. She put a pout on her face and stuck her tongue out at him. She disappeared from the door, leaving it open six inches.

Bosch wished he had his camera but it was back in his car in Echo Park. However, he didn’t need photographic evidence to know that he recognized the woman in the doorway and that she was not Pratt’s wife-Bosch had met his wife at the recent squad room party when he had announced his retirement.

Pratt looked toward Bosch’s car again, hesitated but then turned back to the town house. He strode up the stairs, went through the open door and shut it behind him. Bosch waited and, as he expected, saw Pratt pull back a curtain and look out at the street. Bosch stayed down as Pratt’s eyes lingered on the Crown Vic. There was no doubt that the car had drawn Pratt’s suspicion but Bosch guessed that the lure of illicit sex had overpowered his instinct to check the car out.

There was a commotion as Pratt was grabbed from behind and he turned away from the window, and the curtain fell back into place.

Bosch immediately sat up, started the car and made a U-turn away from the curb. He took a right on Verdugo and headed toward Hollywood Way. No doubt the Crown Vic had been blown. Pratt would be actively looking for it when he came back out of the town house. But the Burbank Airport was close. Bosch figured he could dump the Crown Vic at the airport, pick up a rental car and be back to the town house in less than a half hour.

As he drove he tried to place the woman he had seen looking out the door of the town house. He used a few mind-relaxation drills he had employed back when hypnotizing witnesses was accepted by the courts. Soon he was keying in on the woman’s nose and mouth, the parts of her that had triggered his recognition center. And soon after that he had it. She was an attractive, young civilian employee of the department who worked in the office down the hall from Open-Unsolved. It was a personnel office, known by the rank and file as Hiring amp; Firing because it was the place where both things happened.

Pratt was fishing off the company dock, waiting out the rush hour in a Burbank shack-up spot. Not bad work if you could get it and get away with it. Bosch wondered if Mrs. Pratt knew of her husband’s extracurricular activities.

He pulled into the airport and entered the valet parking lanes, thinking that that would be fastest. The man in the red coat who took the Crown Vic from him asked when he would be returning.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said, not having considered it.

“I need to write something on the ticket,” the man said.

“Tomorrow,” Bosch said. “If I’m lucky.”

34

BOSCH GOT BACK to Catalina Street in thirty-five minutes. He drove his rented Taurus past the row of town houses and spotted Pratt’s Jeep still at the curb. This time he found a spot on the north side of the town house and parked there. While he slouched down in the car and watched for activity, he turned on the cell phone he had rented with the car. He called Rachel Walling’s cell number but got her voice mail. He ended the call without leaving a message.

Pratt didn’t come out until it was full-on dark outside. He stood in front of the complex beneath a streetlight and Bosch noticed he was wearing different clothes now. He had on blue jeans and a dark, long-sleeved pullover shirt. The change of attire told Bosch that the liaison with the woman from Hiring amp; Firing was probably more than a casual shack-up. Pratt kept clothes at her place.

Pratt once again looked up and down the street, his eyes lingering longest on the south side where earlier the Crown Vic had drawn his attention. Apparently satisfied that the car was gone and he wasn’t being watched, Pratt went to his Commander and soon pulled away from the curb. He made a U-turn and headed south to Verdugo. He then turned right.

Bosch knew that if Pratt was looking for a tail he would slow on Verdugo and watch his rearview mirror for any vehicle turning off Catalina in his direction. So he U-turned from the curb and went north a block to Clark Avenue. He turned left and gunned the car’s weak engine. He drove five blocks to California Street and took a quick left. At the end of the block he would come to Verdugo. It was a risky move. Pratt could be long gone but Bosch was playing a hunch. Seeing the Crown Vic had spooked his boss. He would be on full alert.

Bosch had called it right. Just as he got to Verdugo he saw Pratt’s silver Commander go by in front of him. He had obviously delayed on Verdugo, watching for a follower. Bosch let him get some distance and then turned right to follow.

Pratt made no evasive moves after that first effort to smoke out a tail. He stayed on Verdugo into North Hollywood and then turned south on Cahuenga. Bosch almost lost him at the turn but he went through the light on red. It was clear to him now that Pratt was not going home-Bosch knew that he lived in the opposite direction in the northern valley.

Pratt was heading toward Hollywood, and Bosch guessed that he was simply planning to join the other members of the squad at Nat’s. But halfway through the Cahuenga Pass he turned right onto Woodrow Wilson Drive and Bosch felt his pulse kick up a notch. Pratt was now heading toward Bosch’s own house.

Woodrow Wilson wound up the side of the Santa Monica Mountains, one deep curve after another. It was a lonely street and the only way to follow a vehicle was to do it without headlights and to keep at least one curve behind the brake lights of the lead car.

Bosch knew the curves intimately. He had lived on Woodrow Wilson for more than fifteen years and could make the drive half asleep-which he had done on occasion. But following Pratt, a police officer wary of a tail, was a unique difficulty. Bosch tried to stay two curves back. This meant he lost sight of the lights on Pratt’s car from time to time but never for very long.

When he was two curves away from his house, Bosch started to coast and the rental car eventually came to a stop before the final bend. Bosch got out, quietly closed the door and trotted up the curve. He stayed close to the hedge that guarded the home and studio of a famous painter who lived on the block. He edged around it until he could see Pratt’s SUV up ahead. He had pulled to the curb two houses before Bosch’s house. Pratt’s lights were now off and he seemed to be just sitting there and watching the house.

Bosch looked up at his house and saw lights on behind the kitchen and dining room windows. He could see the tail end of a car protruding from his carport. He recognized the Lexus and knew that Rachel Walling was in his home. Even as he was buoyed by the prospect of her being there waiting for him, Bosch was concerned about what Pratt was up to.

It appeared that he was doing exactly what he had been doing the night before, just watching and possibly trying to determine if Bosch was home.

Bosch heard a car coming behind him. He turned and started walking back toward his car as if he were on an evening walk. The car drove by slowly and Bosch then turned and headed back to the hedge. As the car came up behind Pratt’s Jeep, rather than pull to the side, Pratt took off again, the lights of his SUV coming on as he sped away.

Bosch turned and ran back toward his rental car. He jumped in and pulled away from the curb. As he drove he hit redial on the rental phone and soon Rachel’s line was ringing. This time she answered.

“Yes?”

“Rachel, it’s Harry. Are you in my house?”

“Yes, I’ve been wait-”

“Come outside. I’m going to pick you up. Hurry.”

“Harry, what is-”

“Just come out and bring your gun. Right now.”

He clicked off and pulled to a stop in front of his house. He could see the glow of brake lights disappearing around the curve ahead. But he knew those belonged to the car that had spooked Pratt. Pratt was farther ahead.

Bosch turned and looked at his front door, ready to hit the horn, but Rachel was coming out.

“Close the door,” Bosch yelled through the open passenger window.

Rachel pulled the door closed and hurried out to the car.

“Get in. Hurry!”

She jumped into the car and Bosch took off before she had the door closed.

“What is going on?”

He gave her the shorthand as he sped through the curves on the way up to Mulholland. He told her that his boss, Abel Pratt, was the setup man, that what had happened in Beachwood Canyon had been his plan. He told her that for the second night in a row he had been outside Bosch’s home.

“How do you know all of this?”

“I just know. I’ll be able to prove it all later. For now, it’s a fact.”

“What was he doing outside?”

“I don’t know. Trying to see if I was home, I think.”

“Your phone rang.”

“When?”

“Right before you called my cell. I didn’t answer it.”

“It was probably him. Something’s going on.”

They came around the last bend, and the four-way stop at Mulholland was ahead. Bosch saw the taillights of a large vehicle just as they disappeared to the right. Another car moved up to the stop. It was the car that had made Pratt move on. It went straight through the intersection.

“The first one must have been Pratt. He turned right.”

Bosch got to the stop and also turned right. Mulholland was the winding snake that followed the crest line of the mountains across the city. Its curves were smoother and not as deep as Woodrow Wilson’s. It was also a busier street, with plenty of night cruisers. He would be able to follow Pratt without causing much suspicion.

They quickly caught up to the vehicle that had turned and confirmed that it was Pratt’s Commander. Bosch then dropped back and for the next ten minutes tailed Pratt along the crest line. The sparkling lights of the Valley sprawled below on the north side. It was a clear night and they could see all the way to the shadowy mountains on the far side of the sprawl. They stayed on Mulholland through the intersection with Laurel Canyon Boulevard and continued west.

“I was waiting at your house to say good-bye,” Rachel suddenly said.

After a moment of silence, Bosch responded.

“I know. I understand.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“You didn’t like the way I was today, the way I went after Waits. I’m not the man you thought I was. I’ve heard it before, Rachel.”

“It’s not that, Harry. Nobody is ever the man you think they are. I can live with that. But a woman has to feel safe with a man. And that includes when they are not together. How can I feel safe when I’ve seen firsthand how you work? It doesn’t matter whether it is the way I would do it or not. I’m not talking about us cop to cop. What I’m talking about is that I could never feel comfortable and safe. I’d wonder every night if it’s the night you won’t be coming home. I can’t do that.”

Bosch realized he was giving the car too much gas. Her words had made him unconsciously press the pedal down harder. He was getting too close to Pratt. He slowed down and pulled back from the taillights a hundred yards.

“It’s a dangerous job,” he said. “I thought you more than anybody would know that.”

“I do. I do. But what I saw out there today with you was recklessness. I don’t want to have to worry about someone who is reckless. There’s enough to worry about out there without that.”

Bosch blew out his breath. He gestured toward the red lights moving in front of them.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk about it later. Let’s just concentrate on this for tonight.”

As if on cue, Pratt hooked a hard left onto Coldwater Canyon Drive and started dropping down toward Beverly Hills. Bosch delayed as long as he believed he could and made the same turn.

“Well, I’m still glad I’ve got you with me,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because if he ends up in Beverly Hills I won’t need to call the locals because I’m with a fed.”

“Glad I could do something.”

“You have your gun with you?”

“Always. You don’t have yours?”

“It was part of the crime scene. I don’t know when I’ll get it back. And that’s the second gun they’ve taken from me this week. It’s gotta be a record of some kind. Most guns lost during reckless gunplay.”

He looked over to see if he was getting under her skin. She showed nothing.

“He’s turning,” she said.

Bosch snapped his attention back to the road and saw the left-turn signal on the Commander blinking. Pratt made the turn and Bosch went on by. Rachel bent down so she could see out the window and up at the street sign.

“Gloaming Drive,” she said. “Are we still in the city?”

“Yeah. Gloaming goes way back in there but there’s no way out. I’ve been in there before.”

The next street down was Stuart Lane. Bosch used it to turn around in and headed back up to Gloaming.

“Do you know where he could be going?” Rachel asked.

“No idea. Another girlfriend’s place, for all I know.”

Gloaming was another curving mountain road. But that’s where the similarity to Woodrow Wilson Drive ended. The homes here ran a minimum seven figures, easy, and all had nicely manicured lawns and hedges with not so much as a leaf out of place. Bosch drove it slowly, looking for the silver Jeep Commander.

“There,” Rachel said.

She pointed out her window at a Jeep parked in the turnaround of a mansion with a French provincial design. Bosch drove by and parked two houses away. They got out and walked back.

“West Coast Choppers?”

She hadn’t been able to see the front of his shirt while he was driving.

“It helped me blend in on a case once.”

“Nice.”

“My daughter saw me in this one time. I told her it was from my dentist.”

The gate to the driveway was open. The cast-iron mailbox had no name on it. Bosch opened it and looked inside. They were in luck. There was mail, a small stack held together with a rubber band. He pulled it out and angled the top envelope toward a nearby streetlight in order to read it.

“‘Maurice’-it’s Maury Swann’s place,” he said.

“Nice,” Rachel said. “I guess I should’ve been a defense attorney.”

“You’d’ve been good working with criminals.”

“Fuck you, Bosch.”

The banter ended with a loud voice coming from behind a tall hedge that ran along the far side of the turnaround and on the left side of the house.

“I said get in there!”

There was a splash and Bosch and Walling headed toward the sound.

35

BOSCH SEARCHED THE HEDGE with his eyes, looking for an opening. There didn’t appear to be one from the front. When they got close he wordlessly signaled Rachel to follow the hedge to the right while he went left. He noticed that she was carrying her weapon down at her side.

The hedge was at least ten feet high and so thick that Bosch could see no light from the pool or house through it. But as he moved along it he heard the sound of splashing and voices, one of which he recognized as belonging to Abel Pratt. The voices were close.

“Please, I can’t swim. I can’t touch the bottom!”

“Then what d’you have a swimming pool for? Keep paddling.”

“Please! I’m not going to-why would I tell a soul about -”

“You’re a lawyer, and lawyers like to play the angles.”

“Please.”

“I’m telling you, if I get even a hint that you’re playing an angle on me, then next time it won’t be a pool. It will be the fucking Pacific Ocean. You understand that?”

Bosch came to an alcove where the pool’s filter pump and heater were located on a concrete pad. There was also a small opening in the hedge for a pool maintenance man to squeeze through. He slipped into the opening and stepped onto the tile surrounding a large oval pool. He was twenty feet behind Pratt, who was standing at the edge, looking down at a man in the water. Pratt held a long blue pole with a curved extension. It was for pulling people in trouble to the side but Pratt was holding it just out of reach of the man. He grabbed at it desperately but each time Pratt jerked it away.

It was hard to identify the man in the water as Maury Swann. The pool was dark with the lights off. Swann’s glasses were gone and his hair looked like it had slipped off his scalp to the back of his head like a mud slide. On his gleaming bald dome was a strip of tape for holding his hairpiece in place.

The sound of the pool filter gave Bosch cover. He was able to walk unnoticed to within six feet of Pratt before speaking.

“What’s happening, Top?”

Pratt quickly lowered the pole so that Swann could grab the hook.

“Hang on, Maury!” Pratt yelled. “You’re all right.”

Swann grabbed on and Pratt started pulling him toward the side of the pool.

“I gotcha, Maury,” Pratt said. “Don’t worry.”

“You don’t have to bother with the lifeguard act,” Bosch said. “I heard it all.”

Pratt paused and looked down at Swann in the water. He was three feet from the side.

“In that case,” Pratt said.

He let go of the pole and whipped his right hand behind his back to the belt line.

“Don’t!”

It was Walling. She had found her own way through the hedge. She was on the other side of the pool, pointing her weapon at Pratt.

Pratt froze and seemed to be making a decision about whether to draw or not. Bosch moved in behind him and yanked the gun out of his pants.

“Harry!” Rachel called. “I’ve got him. Get the lawyer.”

Swann was sinking. The blue pole was going down with him. Bosch quickly went to the pool’s edge and grabbed it. He pulled Swann to the surface. The lawyer started coughing and spitting water. He held tight to the pole and Bosch walked him down to the shallow end. Rachel came around to Pratt and ordered him to put his wrists behind his head.

Maury Swann was naked. He came up the steps in the shallow end cupping his shriveled balls with one hand and trying to pull his toupee back on with the other. Giving up on the hairpiece, he tore it all the way off and threw it down on the tile, where it landed with a splat. He went directly to a pile of clothes by a bench and started getting dressed while still soaking wet.

“So what was going on here, Maury?” Bosch asked.

“Nothing that concerns you.”

Bosch nodded.

“I get it. A guy comes here to put you in the pool and watch you drown, maybe make it look like suicide or an accident, and you don’t want anybody concerned about it.”

“It was a disagreement, that’s all. He was scaring me, not drowning me.”

“Does that mean you and he had an agreement before you then had this disagreement?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“Why was he scaring you?”

“I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”

“Then maybe we should back on out of here and leave you two to finish your disagreement. Maybe that would be the best thing to do here.”

“Do what you want.”

“You know what I think? I think that with your client Raynard Waits dead, there’s only one person who can link Detective Pratt to the Garlands. I think your partner over there was getting rid of that link because he was getting scared. You’d be at the bottom of that pool if we hadn’t happened by here.”

“You can do and think what you want. But what I am telling you is that we had a disagreement. He happened by while I was taking my nightly swim and we disagreed about something.”

“I thought you didn’t know how to swim, Maury. Isn’t that what you said?”

“I’m finished talking to you, Detective. You can leave my property now.”

“Not yet, Maury. Why don’t you finish getting dressed and join us at the deep end.”

Bosch left him there as he struggled to get his wet legs into a pair of silk pants. At the other end of the pool Pratt was now handcuffed and sitting on a concrete bench.

“I’m not saying anything until I talk to a lawyer,” he said.

“Well, there’s one over there putting his clothes on,” Bosch said. “Maybe you can hire him.”

“I’m not talking, Bosch,” Pratt repeated.

“Good decision,” Swann called from the far end. “Rule number one: Never talk to the cops.”

Bosch looked at Rachel and almost laughed.

“Can you believe this? Two minutes ago he was trying to drown the guy, and now the guy’s giving him free legal advice.”

“Sound legal advice,” Swann said.

Swann walked over to where the others were waiting. Bosch noticed that his clothes were sticking to his wet body.

“I wasn’t trying to drown him,” Pratt said. “I was trying to help him. But that’s all I’m going to say.”

Bosch looked at Swann.

“Pull your zipper up, Maury, and sit down over here.”

Bosch pointed to a spot on the bench next to Pratt.

“No, I don’t think I will,” Swann replied.

He took a step toward the house but Bosch took two steps and cut him off. He redirected him to the bench.

“Sit down,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

“For what?” Swann said indignantly.

“Double murder. Both of you are under arrest.”

Swann laughed as though he were dealing with a child. Now that he had his clothes on he was recovering some of his swagger.

“And what murders would these be?”

“Detective Fred Olivas and Deputy Derek Doolan.”

Now Swann shook his head, the smile intact on his face.

“I’m assuming these charges fall under the felony-homicide rule, since there is ample evidence that we did not actually pull the trigger that fired the bullets that killed Olivas and Doolan.”

“It’s always good to deal with a lawyer. I hate having to explain the law all the time.”

“It’s a pity you need the law explained to you, Detective Bosch. The felony-homicide rule comes into play only when someone is killed during the commission of a serious crime. If that threshold is satisfied, then co-conspirators in the criminal enterprise may be charged with murder.”

Bosch nodded.

“I got that,” he said. “And I’ve got you.”

“Then be so kind as to tell me what the threshold crime is that I have conspired to commit.”

Bosch thought for a moment before answering.

“How about suborning perjury and obstruction of justice? We could start there and move up to corruption of a public official, maybe aiding and abetting an escape from lawful custody.”

“And we could end there as well,” Swann said. “I was representing my client. I committed none of those crimes and you have not a shred of evidence that I did. If you arrest me, it will simply prove your own undoing and embarrassment.”

He stood up.

“Good evening to you all.”

Bosch stepped over and put his hand on Swann’s shoulder. He drove him back down onto the bench.

“Sit the fuck down. You are under arrest. I’ll leave it to the prosecutors to decide about threshold crimes. I don’t give a shit about that. As far as I’m concerned, two cops are dead and my partner is going to end her career because of you, Maury. So fuck you.”

Bosch looked over at Pratt, who sat with a slight smile on his face.

“It’s good to have a lawyer in the house, Harry,” he said. “I think Maury makes a good point. Maybe you should think about this before doing anything rash.”

Bosch shook his head.

“You aren’t walking away from this,” he said. “Not by a long shot.”

He waited a moment but Pratt said nothing.

“I know you’re the setup man,” Bosch said. “The whole thing up in Beachwood Canyon was yours. It was you who made the deal with the Garlands, then you went to Maury here, who took it to Waits. You doctored the murder book after Waits gave you an alias to stick in it. Maury might have a point about the felony-murder rap but there’s more than enough there for obstruction, and if I get that, then I’ve got you. That means no island and no pension, Top. That means you go down in flames.”

Pratt’s eyes dropped from Bosch to the dark waters of the pool.

“I want the Garlands, and you can give them to me,” Bosch said.

Pratt shook his head without turning his eyes from the water.

“Then, have it your way,” Bosch said. “Let’s go.”

He signaled Pratt and Swann to stand up. They complied. Bosch turned Swann around so he could cuff him. As he did so he looked over the lawyer’s shoulder at Pratt.

“After we book you, who’re you going to call about bail, your wife or the girl from Hiring and Firing?”

Pratt immediately sat back down as if hit by a sucker punch. Bosch had been saving it for his last shot. He kept the pressure on.

“Which one was going to go with you to the island? To your sugar plantation? My guess is it was what’s-her-name.”

“Her name is Jessie Templeton. And I made you on the tail at her place tonight.”

“Yeah, and I made you making me. But tell me, how much does Jessie Templeton know, and is she going to be as strong as you when I go see her after I book you?”

“Bosch, she doesn’t know anything. Leave her out of it. Leave my wife and kids out of it, too.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Doesn’t work that way. You know that. We’re going to turn everything upside down and shake it to see what falls out. I’m going to find the money the Garlands paid you and I’ll tie it back to you, to Maury Swann, everybody. I just hope you didn’t use your girlfriend to hide it. Because if you did, she goes down, too.”

Pratt leaned forward on the bench. Bosch got the impression that if his hands hadn’t been cuffed behind his back, he’d have been using them at that moment to hold his head and hide his face from the world. Bosch had kept at him like a man with an axe chopping at a tree. It was barely standing now. It needed one little push and it would go down.

Bosch walked Swann over to Rachel, who took him by one of his arms. Bosch then turned back to Pratt.

“You fed the wrong dog,” Bosch said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Everybody’s got choices and you made the wrong one. Problem is, we don’t pay for our mistakes alone. We take people down with us.”

Bosch walked to the edge of the pool and looked down into the water. It shimmered on top but was impenetrably dark beneath the surface. He waited but it didn’t take long for the tree to fall.

“Jessie doesn’t need to be part of this and my wife doesn’t need to know about her,” Pratt said.

It was an opening offer. Pratt was going to talk. Bosch kicked his foot on the tile edging and turned back to face him.

“I’m not a prosecutor but I’ll bet something could be worked out.”

“Pratt, you are making a big mistake!” Swann said urgently.

Bosch reached down to Pratt and patted his pockets until he located the keys to the Commander and pulled them out.

“Rachel, take Mr. Swann to Detective Pratt’s car. It will be better for transporting him. We’ll be right there.”

He threw her the keys and she started walking Swann to the opening in the hedge she had come through. Swann had to be pushed. He looked over his shoulder as he went and called back to Pratt.

“Do not talk to that man,” he yelled. “Do you hear me? Do not talk to anyone! You will talk us all into prison!”

Swann kept yelling legal advice through the hedge. Bosch waited until he heard the car door close on his voice. He then stood in front of Pratt and noticed that sweat was dripping from his hairline and down his face.

“I don’t want Jessie or my family involved,” Pratt said. “And I want a deal. No jail time, I’m allowed to retire and I get to keep my pension.”

“You want a lot for somebody who got two people killed.”

Bosch started to pace, trying to figure out a way of making it all work for both of them. Rachel came back through the hedge. Bosch looked at her and was about to ask why she had left Swann unattended.

“Child-proof locks,” she said. “He can’t get out.”

Bosch nodded and gave his attention back to Pratt.

“Like I said, you want a lot,” he said. “What are you giving back?”

“I can give you the Garlands, easy,” Pratt said desperately. “Anthony took me up there two weeks ago and led me to the girl’s body. And Maury Swann, I can give you him on a platter. The guy’s as dirty as…”

He didn’t finish.

“You?”

Pratt lowered his eyes and slowly nodded his head.

Bosch tried to put everything aside so that he could think clearly about Pratt’s offer. The blood of Freddy Olivas and Deputy Doolan was on Pratt’s hands. Bosch didn’t know whether he’d be able to sell the deal to a prosecutor. He didn’t know if he could even sell it to himself. But in that moment, he was willing to try if it meant he would finally get to the man who killed Marie Gesto.

“No promises,” he said. “We’ll go see a prosecutor.”

Bosch moved to the last important question.

“What about O’Shea and Olivas?”

Pratt shook his head once.

“They were clean on this.”

“Garland funneled at least twenty-five grand to O’Shea’s campaign. That’s documented.”

“He was just covering his bets. If O’Shea got suspicious, T. Rex could keep him in line because it would look like a payoff.”

Bosch nodded. He felt the burn of humiliation over what he had thought about O’Shea and said to him.

“That wasn’t the only thing you got wrong,” Pratt said.

“Yeah, what else?”

“You said I went to the Garlands with this thing. I didn’t. They came to me, Harry.”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t believe Pratt for the simple reason that if the Garlands had had the idea to buy off a cop, their first overture would have been to the source of their problem: Bosch. That never happened and that made Bosch feel confident that the scheme had been hatched by Pratt as he tried to juggle retirement, a possible divorce, a mistress and whatever other secrets his life held. He had gone to the Garlands with it. He had gone to Maury Swann, too.

“Tell it to the prosecutor,” Bosch said. “Maybe he’ll care.”

He looked at Rachel and she nodded.

“Rachel, you take the Jeep with Swann. I’ll take Detective Pratt in my car. I want to keep them separated.”

“Good idea.”

Bosch signaled Pratt up.

“Let’s go.”

Pratt stood up again and came face-to-face with Bosch.

“Harry, you’ve got to know something first.”

“What’s that?”

“Nobody was supposed to get hurt, okay? It was a perfect plan with nobody getting hurt. It was Waits-he turned it all to shit out there in the woods. If he had just done what he’d been told, everybody would still be alive and everybody’d be happy. Even you. You would’ve solved the Gesto case. End of story. That’s how it was supposed to be.”

Bosch had to work to hold back his anger.

“Nice fairy tale,” he said. “Except for the part of the story where the princess never wakes up and the real killer walks, everybody lives happily ever after. Keep telling yourself that one. You might actually be able to live with it someday.”

Bosch roughly took him by the arm and led him toward the opening in the hedge.