Lost Light

10

It was 4:15 by the time I got to the federal building in Westwood. As I was heading through the parking lot toward the security entrance my cell phone rang. It was Keisha Russell.

“Hey, Harry Bosch,” she said. “Wanted to let you know, I printed out everything and put it in the mail. But I was wrong about something.”

“What was that?”

“There was an update on the case. It ran a couple months ago. I was on vacation. You stick around here long enough and they give you four weeks paid vacation. I took it all at once and went to London. While I was gone it was the third anniversary of Martha Gessler’s disappearance. People were poaching on my beat right and left, I tell you. David Ferrell did an update. Nothing new, though. She’s still in the wind.”

“In the wind? That suggests you-or the bureau-think she’s still alive. Before, you said she was presumed dead.”

“Just an expression, mon. I don’t think anybody’s holding their breath for her, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Did you put that update in the clips you’re sending me?”

“It’s all there. And you remember who sent it. Ferrell’s a nice guy but I don’t want you calling him if something you’re doing breaks big.”

“Never happen, Keisha.”

“I know you are up to something. I did my homework on you.”

That made me pause as I was halfway across the building’s front plaza. If she had called the bureau and spoken to Nunez, the agent wasn’t going to be happy about me involving a nosy reporter.

“What do you mean?” I asked calmly. “What did you do?”

“I did more than just check the clips. I called Sacramento. The state licensing board. I found out that you applied for and received a private investigator’s license.”

“Yeah, so? Every cop who retires does that. It’s part of the process of letting go of the badge. You think, Oh, well, I’ll just get a PI ticket and keep on catching the bad guys. My ticket is in a drawer in my house, Keisha. I’m not in business and I’m not working for anybody.”

“Okay, Harry, okay.”

“Thanks for the clips. I’ve gotta go.”

“Bye, Harry.”

I closed the phone and smiled. I liked sparring with her. Ten years covering cops and she seemed no more cynical than the first day I talked to her. That was amazing for a journalist, even more so for a black journalist.

I looked up at the building. It was a concrete monolith that eclipsed the sun from the angle I had. I was thirty feet from the entrance. But I walked over to a row of benches to the right of the entranceway and sat down. I checked my watch and saw that I was very late for my appointment with Nunez. The trouble was I didn’t know what I was walking into up there and that made me reluctant to go through the doors. The federals always had a way of putting you off balance, of making it clear that it was their world and you were only an invited visitor. I assumed that now without a badge I would be treated more like an uninvited visitor.

I opened the phone back up and called the general number for Parker Center, one of the few numbers I still remembered. I asked for Kiz Rider in the chief’s office and was transferred. She picked up immediately.

“Kiz, it’s me, Harry.”

“Hello, Harry.”

I tried to read something in her tone but she had flat-lined her response. I couldn’t tell how much of the morning’s anger and animosity remained.

“How are you doing? You feeling any… uh, better?”

“Did you get my message, Harry?”

“Message? No, what did it say?”

“I called your house a little while ago. I apologized. I shouldn’t have let personal feelings get mixed in with the reason I had come out there. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s okay, Kiz. I apologize, too.”

“Really? For what?”

“I don’t know. For the way I left, I guess. You and Edgar didn’t deserve that. Especially you. I should have talked about it with you guys. That’s what partners do. I guess I wasn’t a very good partner at that moment.”

“Don’t worry about it. That’s what I said on the message. Water under the bridge. Let’s just be friends now.”

“I’d like to. But…”

I waited for her to pick up the invitation.

“But what, Harry?”

“Well, I don’t know how friendly you’ll want to be after this because I’ve got to ask you a question and you’re probably not going to like it.”

She groaned into the phone so loud that I had to hold it away from my ear.

“Harry, you’re killing me. What is it?”

“I’m sitting outside the federal building in Westwood. I’m supposed to go in and see some guy named Nunez. A bureau man. And something’s not feeling right about this. So I was wondering, are these the people you warned me were working the Angella Benton case? A guy named Nunez? Is it connected to Martha Gessler, the agent who disappeared a few years ago?”

There was a long silence on the phone. Too long.

“Kiz?”

“I’m here. Look, Harry, it’s just like I told you at your house. I can’t talk to you about the case. All I can tell you is what I did tell you. It is open and active and you should stay away from it.”

Now it was my turn not to respond. She was like a complete stranger. Less than a year earlier I would have gone into combat with her and trusted her to take my back while I took hers. Now I wasn’t sure I could trust her to tell me if the sun was out, unless she cleared it first with the sixth floor.

“Harry, you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I’m just kind of speechless, Kiz. I thought if there was somebody in the department who would always level with me, it was going to be you. That’s all.”

“Look, Harry, have you done anything illegal while running this little freelance operation of yours?”

“No, but thanks for asking.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about with Nunez. Go in and see what they want. I don’t know anything about Martha Gessler. And that’s all I can tell you.”

“Okay, Kiz, thanks,” I said, putting my voice on a flat line now. “You take care of yourself up there on the sixth floor. And I’ll talk to you later.”

Before she could throw in the last word I closed the phone. I got up from the bench and headed to the building’s entrance. Inside, I had to go through a metal detector, take off my shoes and spread my arms wide for a search with the magic wand. I could barely understand the man with the wand when he told me to raise my arms. He looked more like a terrorist than I did, but I didn’t protest. You have to pick your battles. Finally, I got to the elevator and took it to the twelfth floor, which was really the thirteenth since the elevator didn’t count the lobby. I stepped into a waiting area where there was a large glass and presumably bullet-proof window separating the public area from the bureau’s inner sanctum. I said my name and who I wanted to see into a microphone and the woman on the other side of the glass told me to have a seat.

Instead I walked over to the window and looked down at the veterans cemetery across Wilshire Boulevard. I recalled that I was in the exact same position more than twelve years earlier when I first met the woman who would later become my wife, ex-wife and lasting infatuation.

I turned away from the window and sat down on the plastic couch. There was a magazine with Brenda Barstow’s photo on its cover on a beat-up coffee table. Under the picture the caption read “ Brenda, America ’s Sweetheart.” I was reaching for the magazine when the door to the interior offices opened and a man with a white shirt and tie stepped out.

“Mr. Bosch?”

I stood up and nodded. He reached his right hand forward while he used the left to keep the security door from closing and locking.

“Ken Nunez, thanks for coming in.”

The handshake was quick and then Nunez turned and led the way inside. He said nothing as he walked. He wasn’t what I had expected. On the phone he had sounded like a tired veteran who had seen it all twice. But he was young, just a year or two past thirty. And he didn’t really walk down the hallway. He strode. He was a young go-getter, still out to prove something to himself and others. I wasn’t sure which-old or new agent-I would have preferred.

He opened a door on the left and stepped back to allow me in. When I saw that the door opened outward and that there was a peephole I knew I was going into an interrogation room. And I knew then that this was not going to be a polite little meet-and-greet. More likely, I was about to get my ass kicked-federal style.