Short Stories

A FINE MIST OF BLOOD

The DNA hits came in the mail, in yellow envelopes from the regional crime lab’s genetics unit. Fingerprint matches were less formal; notification usually came by e-mail. Case-to-case data hits were rare birds and were handled in yet a different manner — direct contact between the synthesizer and the submitting investigator.

Harry Bosch had a day off and was in the waiting area outside the school principal’s office when he got the call. More like a half a day off. His plan was to head downtown to the PAB after dealing with the summons from the school’s high command.

The buzzing of his phone brought an immediate response from the woman behind the gateway desk.

“There’s no cell phones in here,” she said.

“I’m not a student,” Bosch said, stating the obvious as he pulled the offending instrument from his pocket.

“Doesn’t matter. There’s no cell phones in here.”

“I’ll take it outside.”

“I won’t come out to find you. If you miss your appointment then you’ll have to reschedule, and your daughter’s situation won’t be resolved.”

“I’ll risk it. I’ll just be in the hallway, okay?”

He pushed through the door into the hallway as he connected to the call. The hallway was quiet, as it was the middle of the fourth period. The ID on the screen had said simply LAPD data but that had been enough to give Bosch a stirring of excitement.

The call was from a tech named Malek Pran. Bosch had never dealt with him and had to ask him to repeat his name twice. Pran was from Data Evaluation and Theory — known internally as the DEATH squad — which was part of a new effort by the Open-Unsolved Unit to clear cases through what was called data synthesizing.

For the past three years the DEATH squad had been digitizing archived murder books — the hard-copy investigative records — of unsolved cases, creating a massive database of easily accessible and comparable information on unsolved crimes. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions — anything that an investigator thought important enough to note in an investigative record was now digitized and could be compared with other cases.

The project had actually been initiated simply to create space. The city’s records archives were bursting at the seams with acres of files and file boxes. Shifting it all to digital would make room in the cramped department.

Pran said he had a case-to-case hit. A witness listed in a cold case Bosch had submitted for synthesizing had come up in another case, also a homicide, as a witness once again. Her name was Diane Gables. Bosch’s case was from 1999 and the second case was from 2007, which was too recent to fall under the purview of the Open-Unsolved Unit.

“Who submitted the 2007 case?”

“Uh, it was out of Hollywood Division. Detective Jerry Edgar made the submission.”

Bosch almost smiled in the hallway. He went a distance back with Jerry Edgar.

“Have you talked to Edgar yet about the hit?” Bosch asked.

“No. I started with you. Do you want his contact info?”

“I already have it. What’s the vic’s name on that case?”

“Raymond Randolph, DOB six, six, sixty-one — that’s a lot of sixes. DOD July second, 2007.”

“Okay, I’ll get the rest from Edgar. You did good, Pran. This gives me something I can work with.”

Bosch disconnected and went back into the principal’s office. He had not missed his appointment. He checked his watch. He’d give it fifteen minutes, and then he’d have to start moving on the case. His daughter would have to go without her confiscated cell phone until he could get another appointment with the principal.

Before contacting Jerry Edgar at Hollywood Division, Bosch pulled up the files — both hard and digital — on his own case. It involved the murder of a precious-metals swindler named Roy Alan McIntyre. He had sold gold futures by phone and internet. It was the oldest story in the book: There was no gold, or not enough of it. It was a Ponzi scheme through and through and like all of them, it finally collapsed upon itself. The victims lost tens of millions. McIntyre was arrested as the mastermind, but the evidence was tenuous. A good lawyer came to his defense and was able to convince the media that McIntyre was a victim himself, a dupe for organized-crime elements that had pulled the strings on the scheme. The DA started floating a deal that would put McIntyre on probation — provided he cooperated and returned all the money he still had access to. But word leaked about the impending deal, and hundreds of the scam’s victims organized to oppose it. Before the whole thing went to court, McIntyre was murdered in the garage under the Westwood condominium tower where he lived. Shot once between the eyes, his body found on the concrete next to the open door of his car.

The crime scene was clean; not even a shell casing from the nine-millimeter bullet that had killed him was recovered. The investigators had no physical evidence and a list of possible suspects that numbered in the hundreds. The killing looked like a hit. It could have been McIntyre’s unsavory backers in the gold scam or it could have been any of the investors who’d gotten ripped off. The only bright spot was that there was a witness. She was Diane Gables, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker who happened to be driving by McIntyre’s condo on her way home from work. She’d reported seeing a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun at his side run from the garage and jump into the passenger seat of a black SUV waiting in front. Panicked by the sight of the gun, she didn’t get an exact make or model of the SUV or its license-plate number. She’d pulled to the side of the road rather than following the vehicle as it sped off.

Bosch had not interviewed Gables when he had reevaluated the case in the Open-Unsolved Unit. He had simply reviewed the file and submitted it to the DEATH squad. Now, of course, he would be talking to her.

He picked the phone up and dialed a number from memory. Jerry Edgar was at his desk.

“It’s me — Bosch. Looks like we’re going to be working together again.”

“Sounds good to me, Harry. What’ve you got?”

Diane Gables’s current address, obtained through the DMV, was in Studio City. Edgar drove while Bosch looked through the file on the 2007 case. It involved the murder of a man who had been awaiting trial for raping a seventeen-year-old girl who had knocked on his door to sell him candy bars as part of a fundraiser for a school trip to Washington, DC.

As Bosch read through the murder book, he remembered the case. It had been in the news because the circumstances suggested it had been a crime of vigilante justice by someone who was not willing to wait for Raymond Randolph to go on trial. Randolph was intending to mount a defense that would acknowledge that he’d had sexual intercourse with the girl but state that it was consensual. He planned to claim that the victim offered him sex in exchange for his buying her whole carton of candy bars.

The forty-six-year-old Randolph was found in the single-car garage behind his bungalow on Orange Grove, south of Sunset. He had been on his knees when he was shot twice in the back of the head.

The crime scene was clean, but it was a hot day in July and a neighbor who had her windows open because of a broken air conditioner heard the two shots, followed by the high-revving and rapid departure of a vehicle in the street. She called 911, which brought a near-immediate response from the police at Hollywood Station three blocks away and also served to peg the time of the murder almost to the minute.

Jerry Edgar was the lead investigator on the case. While obvious suspicion focused on the family and friends of the rape victim, Edgar cast a wide net — Bosch took some pride in seeing that — and in doing so came across Diane Gables. Two blocks from the Randolph home was an intersection controlled by a traffic signal and equipped with a camera that photographed vehicles that ran the red light. The camera took a double photo — one shot of the vehicle’s license plate, and one shot of the person behind the wheel. This was done so that when the traffic citation was sent to the vehicle’s owner, he or she could determine who’d been behind the wheel when the infraction occurred.

Diane Gables was photographed in her Lexus driving through the red light in the same minute as the 911 call reporting the gunshots was made. The photograph and registration was obtained from the DMV the day after the murder and Gables, now thirty-seven, was interviewed by Edgar and his partner, Detective Manuel Soto. She was then dismissed as both a possible suspect and a witness.

“So, how well do you remember this interview?” Bosch asked.

“I remember it because she was a real looker,” Edgar said. “You always remember the lookers.”

“According to the book, you interviewed her and dropped her. How come? Why so fast?”

“She and her story checked out. Keep going. It’s in there.”

Bosch found the interview summary and scanned it. Gables had told Edgar and Soto that she had been cruising through the neighborhood after filling out a crime report at the nearby Hollywood Station on Wilcox. Her Lexus had been damaged by a hit-and-run driver the night before while parked on the street outside a restaurant on Franklin. In order to apply for insurance coverage on the repairs, she had to file a police report. After stopping at the station, she was running late for work and went through the light on what she was thought was a yellow signal. The camera said otherwise.

“So she had filed the report?” Bosch asked.

“She had indeed. She checked out. And that’s what makes me think we’re dealing with just a coincidence here, Harry.”

Bosch nodded but continued to grind it down inside. He didn’t like coincidences. He didn’t believe in them.

“You checked her work too?”

“Soto did. Confirmed her position and that she was indeed late to work on the day of the killing. She had called ahead and said she was running late because she had been at the police station. She called her boss.”

“What about the restaurant? I don’t see it in here.”

“Then I probably didn’t have that information.”

“So you never checked it.”

“You mean did I check to see if she ate there the night before the murder? No, Harry, I didn’t and that’s a bullshit question. She was —”

“It’s just that if she was setting up a cover story, she could’ve crunched her own car and —”

“Come on, Harry. You’re kidding me, right?”

“I don’t know. We’re still going to talk to her.”

“I know that, Harry. I’ve known that since you called. You’re going to have to see for yourself. Just like always. So just tell me how you want to go in, rattlesnake or cobra?”

Bosch considered for a moment, remembering the code they’d used back when they were partners. A rattlesnake interview was when you shook your tail and hissed. It was confrontational and useful for getting immediate reactions. Going cobra was the quiet approach. You’d slowly move in, get close, and then strike.

“Let’s go cobra.”

“You got it.”

Diane Gables wasn’t home. They had timed their arrival for 5:30 p.m., figuring that with the stock market closing at 1:00 p.m., Gables would easily have finished work for the day.

“What do you want to do?” Edgar said as they stood at the door.

“Go back to the car. Wait awhile.”

Back in the car, they talked about old cases and detective bureau pranks. Edgar revealed that it had been he who had cut ads for penile-enhancement surgery out of the sports pages and slipped them into an officious lieutenant’s jacket pocket while it had been hanging on a rack in his office. The lieutenant had subsequently mounted an investigation focused squarely on Bosch.

“Now you tell me,” Bosch said. “Pounds tried to bust me to burglary for that one.”

Edgar was a clapper. He backed his laughter with his own applause but cut the display short when Bosch pointed through the windshield.

“There she is.”

A late-model Range Rover pulled into the driveway.

Bosch and Edgar got out and crossed the front lawn to meet Gables as she took the stone path from the driveway to her front door. Bosch saw her recognize Edgar, even after five years, and saw her eyes immediately start scanning, going from the front door of her house to the street and the houses of her neighbors. Her head didn’t move, only her eyes, and Bosch recognized it as a tell. Fight or flight. It might have been a natural reaction for a woman with two strange men approaching her, but Bosch didn’t think that was the situation. He had seen the recognition in her eyes when she looked at Edgar. A pulse of electricity began moving in his blood.

“Ms. Gables,” Edgar said. “Jerry Edgar. You remember me?”

As planned, Edgar was taking the lead before passing it off to Bosch.

Gables paused on the path. She was carrying a stylish red leather briefcase. She acted as though she were trying to place Edgar’s face, and then she smiled.

“Of course, Detective. How are you?”

“I’m fine. You must have a very good memory.”

“Well, it’s not every day that you meet a real live detective. Is this coincidence or …”

“Not a coincidence. I’m with Detective Bosch here and we would like to ask you a few questions about the Randolph case, if you don’t mind.”

“It was so long ago.”

“Five years,” Bosch said, asserting himself now. “But it’s still an open case.”

She registered the information and then nodded.

“Well, it’s been a long day. I start at six in the morning, when the market opens. Could we —”

Bosch cut her off. “I start at six too, but not because of the stock market.”

He wasn’t backing down.

“Then fine, you’re welcome to come in,” she said. “But I don’t know what help I can be after so long. I didn’t really think I was much help five years ago. I didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear anything. I just happened to be in the neighborhood after I was at the police station.”

“We’re investigating the case again,” Bosch said. “And we need to talk to everybody we talked to five years ago.”

“Well, like I said, come on in.”

She unlocked the front door and entered first, greeted by the beeping of an alarm warning. She quickly punched a four-digit combination into an alarm-control box on the wall. Bosch and Edgar stepped in behind her and she ushered them into the living room.

“Why don’t you gentlemen have a seat? I’m going to put my things down and be right back out. Would either of you like something to drink?”

“I’ll take a bottle of water if you got it,” Edgar said.

“I’m fine,” Bosch said.

“You know what?” Edgar said quickly. “I’m fine too.”

Gables glanced at Bosch and seemed to register that he was the power in the room. She said she’d be right back.

After she was gone Bosch looked around the room. It was a basic living room setup with a couch and two chairs surrounding a glass-topped coffee table. One wall was made up entirely of built-in bookshelves, all filled with what looked by their titles to be crime novels. He noticed there were no personal displays. No framed photographs anywhere.

They remained standing until Gables came back and pointed them to the couch. She took a chair directly across the table from them.

“Now, what can I tell you? Frankly, I forgot the whole incident.”

“But you remembered Detective Edgar. I could tell.”

“Yes, but seeing him out of context, I knew I recognized him but I could not remember from where.”

According to the DMV, Gables was now forty-one years old. And Edgar had been right: She was a looker, attractive in a professional sort of way. A short, no-nonsense cut to her brown hair. Slim, athletic build. She sat straight and looked straight at one or the other of them, no longer scanning because she was inside her comfort zone. Still, there were tells: Bosch knew through his training in interview techniques that normal eye contact between individuals lasted an average of three seconds, yet each time Gables looked at Bosch, she held his eyes a good ten seconds. That was a sign of stress.

“I was rereading the reports,” Bosch said. “They included your explanation for being in the area — you were at the police station filling out a report.”

“That’s right.”

“It didn’t say, though, where your car was when it got damaged the night before.”

“I had been at a restaurant on Franklin. I told them that. And when I came out after, the back taillight was smashed and the paint scraped.”

“You didn’t call the police then?”

“No, I didn’t. No one was there. It was a hit-and-run; they didn’t even leave a note on the car. They just took off and I thought I was out of luck.”

“What was the name of the restaurant?”

“I can’t remember — oh, it was Birds. I love the roasted chicken.”

Bosch nodded. He knew the place and the roasted chicken.

“So what made you come back to Hollywood the next day and file the report on the hit-and-run?”

“I called my insurance company first thing in the morning and they said I needed it if I wanted to file a claim to cover the damages.”

Bosch was covering ground that was already in the reports. He was looking for variations, changes. Stories told five years apart often had inconsistencies and contradictions. But Gables wasn’t changing the narrative at all.

“When you drove by Orange Grove, you heard no shots or anything like that?”

“No, nothing. I had my windows up.”

“And you were driving fast.”

“Yes, I was going to be late for work.”

“Now, when Detective Edgar came to see you, was that unsettling?”

“Unsettling? Well, yes, I guess so, until I realized what he was there for, and of course I knew I had nothing to do with it.”

“Was it the first time you’d ever encountered a detective or the police like that? You know, on a murder case.”

“Yes, it was very unusual. To say the least. Not a normal part of my life.”

She shook her shoulders as if to intimate a shiver, imply that police and murder investigations were foreign to her. Bosch stared at her for a long moment. She had either forgotten about seeing the armed man with a ski mask coming out of the garage where Roy Alan McIntyre was murdered, or she was lying.

Bosch thought the latter. He thought that Diane Gables was a killer.

“How do you pick them?” he asked.

She turned directly toward him, her eyes locking on his.

“Pick what?”

Bosch paused, squeezing the most out of her stare and the moment.

“The stocks you recommend to people,” he said.

She broke her eyes away and looked at Edgar.

“Due diligence,” she said. “Careful analysis and prognostication. Then, I have to say, I throw in my hunches. You gentlemen use hunches, don’t you?”

“Every day,” Bosch said.

They were silent for a while as they drove away. Bosch thought about the carefully worded answers Gables had given. He was feeling stronger about his hunch every minute.

“What do you think?” Edgar finally asked.

“I think it’s her.”

“How can you say that? She didn’t make a single false move in there.”

“Yes, she did. Her eyes gave her away.”

“Oh, come on, Harry. You’re saying you know she’s a stone-cold killer because you can read it in her eyes?”

“Pretty much. She also lied. She didn’t mention the case in 1999 because she thought we didn’t know about it. She didn’t want us going down that path, so she lied and said you were the only detective she’d ever met.”

“At best, that’s a lie by omission. Weak, Harry.”

“A lie is a lie. Nothing weak about it. She was hiding it from us and there’s only one reason to do that. I want to get inside her house. She’s gotta have a place where she studies and plans these things.”

“So you think she’s a pro? A gun for hire?”

“Maybe; I don’t know. Maybe she reads the paper and picks her targets, people she thinks need killing. Maybe she’s on some kind of vigilante trip. Dark justice and all of that.”

“A regular angel of vengeance. Sounds like a comic book, man.”

“If we get inside that place, we’ll know.”

Edgar drove silently while he composed a response. Bosch knew what was coming before he said it.

“Harry, I’m just not seeing it. I respect your hunch, man, I have seen that come through more than once. But there ain’t enough here. And if I don’t see it, then there’s no judge that’s going to give you a warrant to go back in there.”

Bosch took his time answering. He was grinding things down, coming up with a plan.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he finally said.

Two days later at 9:00 a.m., Bosch pulled up to Diane Gables’s house. The Range Rover was not in the driveway. He got out and went to the front door. After two loud knocks went unanswered he walked around the house to the back door.

He knocked again. When there was no reply, he removed a set of lock picks that he kept behind his badge in his leather wallet and went to work on the dead bolt. It took him six minutes to open the door. He was greeted by the beeping of the burglar alarm. He located the box on the wall to the left of the back door and punched in the four numbers he had seen Gables enter at the front door two evenings before. The beeping stopped. Bosch was in. He left the door open and started looking around the house.

It was a post — World War II ranch house. Bosch had been in a thousand of them over the years and all the investigations. After a quick survey of the entire house he started his search in a bedroom that had been converted to a home office. There was a desk and a row of file cabinets along the wall where a bed would have been. There was a line of windows over the cabinets.

There was also a metal locker with a padlock on it. Bosch opened the venetian blinds over the file cabinets, and light came into the room. He moved to the metal locker and started there, pulling his picks out once again.

He knelt on the floor so he could see the lock closely. It turned out to be a three-pin breeze, taking less than a minute for him to open. A moment after the hasp snapped free he heard a voice come from behind him.

“Detective, don’t move.”

Bosch froze for a moment. He recognized the voice. Diane Gables. She had known he would come back. He slowly started to raise his hands, holding his fingers close together so he could hide the picks between them.

“Easy,” Gables commanded. “If you attempt to reach for your weapon I will put two bullets into your skull. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Can I stand up? My knees aren’t what they once were.”

“Slowly. Your hands always in my sight line.”

“Absolutely.”

Bosch started to get up slowly, turning toward her at the same time. She was pointing a handgun with a suppressor attached to the barrel.

“Easy,” he said. “Just take it easy here.”

“No, you take it easy. I could shoot you where you stand and be within my rights.”

Bosch shook his head.

“No, that’s not true. You know I’m a cop.”

“Yeah, a rogue cop. What did you think you were going to find here?”

“Evidence.”

“Of what?”

“Randolph and McIntyre. Maybe others. You killed them.”

“And, what, you thought I’d just keep the evidence around? Hide it in a locker in my home?”

“Something like that. Can I sit down?”

“The chair behind the desk. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Bosch slowly sat down. She was still standing in the doorway. He now had 60 percent of his body shielded by the desk. He had his back to the file cabinets. The light was coming in from behind and above him. He noticed she had now lowered the muzzle to point at his chest. This was good, though from this range he doubted the Kevlar would completely stop a bullet from a nine-millimeter, even with the suppressor slowing it down. He kept his hands up and close to his face.

“So now what?” he asked.

“So now you tell me what you think you’ve got on me.”

Bosch shook his head as if to say Not much. “You lied. The other day. You didn’t mention the McIntyre case. You didn’t want us linking the cases through you. The trouble is we already had.”

“And that’s it? Are you kidding me?”

“That’s it. Till now.”

He nodded at her weapon. It seemed to confirm all hunches.

“So, without a real case and the search warrant to go with it, of course you decided to break in here to see what you could find.”

“Not exactly.”

“We have a problem, Detective Bosch.”

“No, you have the problem. You’re a killer and I’m onto you. Put the weapon down. You’re under arrest.”

She laughed and waggled the gun in her hand.

“You forget one thing. I have the gun.”

“But you won’t use it. You don’t kill people like me. You kill the abusers, the predators.”

“I could make an exception. You’ve broken the law by breaking in here. There are no gray areas. Who knows, maybe you came to plant evidence here, not find it. Maybe you are like them.”

Bosch started lowering his hands to the desktop.

“Be careful, Detective.”

“I’m tired of holding them up. And I know you’re not going to shoot me. It’s not part of your program.”

“I told you, programs change.”

“How do you pick them?”

She stared at him a long time, then finally answered.

“They pick themselves. They deserve what they get.”

“No judge, no jury. Just you.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t wished you could do the same thing.”

“Sure, on occasion. But there are rules. We don’t live by them, then where does it all go?”

“Right here, I guess. What am I going to do about you?”

“Nothing. You kill me and you know it’s over. You’ll be like one of them — the abusers and the predators. Put the gun down.”

She took two steps into the room. The muzzle came up toward his face. Bosch saw that deadly black eye rising in slow motion.

“You’re wearing a vest, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“I could see it in your eyes. The fear comes up when the gun comes up.”

Bosch shook his head.

“I’m not afraid. You won’t shoot me.”

“I still see fear.”

“Not for me. It’s for you. How many have there been?”

She paused, maybe to decide what to tell him, or maybe just to decide what to do. Or maybe she was stuck on his answer about the fear.

“More than you’ll ever know. More than anybody will ever know. Look, I’m sorry, you know?”

“About what?”

“About there being only one real way out of this. For me.”

The muzzle steadied, its aim at his eyes.

“Before you pull that trigger, can I show you something?”

“It won’t matter.”

“I think it will. It’s in my inside jacket pocket.”

She frowned, then made a signal with the gun.

“Show me your wrists. Where’s your watch?”

Bosch raised his hands and his jacket sleeves came down, showing his watch on his right wrist. He was left-handed.

“Okay, take out whatever it is you need to show me with your right hand. Slowly, Detective, slowly.”

“You got it.”

Bosch reached in and with great deliberation pulled out the folded document. He handed it across the desk to her.

“Just put it down and then lean away.”

He followed her instructions. She waited for him to move back and then picked up the document. With one hand she unfolded it and took a glance, taking her eyes off Bosch for no more than a millisecond.

“I’m not going to be able to read it. What is it?”

“It’s a no-knock search warrant. I have broken no law by being here. I’m not one of them.”

She stared at him for a silent thirty seconds and then finally smirked.

“You have to be kidding me. What judge would sign such a search warrant? You had zero probable cause.”

“I had your lies and your proximity to two murders. And I had Judge Oscar Ortiz — you remember him?”

“Who is he?”

“Back in 1999 he had the McIntyre case. But you took it away from him when you executed McIntyre. Getting him to sign this search warrant wasn’t hard once I reminded him about the case.”

Anger worked into her face. The muzzle started to come up again.

“All I have to say is one word,” Bosch said. “A one-syllable word.”

“And what?”

“And you’re dead.”

She froze, and slowly her eyes rose from Bosch’s face to the windows over the file cabinets.

“You opened the blinds,” she said.

“Yes.”

Bosch studied the two red laser dots that had played on her face since she had entered the room, one high on her forehead, the other on her chin. Bosch knew that the lasers did not account for bullet drop, but the SWAT sharpshooters on the roof of the house across the street did. The chin dot was the heart shot.

Gables seemed frozen, unable to choose whether to live or die.

“There’s a lot you could tell us,” he said. “We could learn from you. Why don’t you just put the gun down and we can get started.”

He slowly started to lean forward, raising his left hand to take the gun.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

She brought the muzzle up but he didn’t say the word. He didn’t think she’d shoot.

There were three sounds in immediate succession: The breaking of glass as the bullet passed through the window. A sound like an ice cream cone dropping on the sidewalk as the bullet passed through her chest. And then the thock of the slug hitting the door frame behind her.

A fine mist of blood started to fill the room.

Gables took a step backward and looked down at her chest as her arms dropped to her sides. The gun made a dull sound when it hit the carpet.

She glanced up at Bosch with a confused look. In a strained voice she asked her last question.

“What was the word?”

She then dropped to the floor.

Staying below the level of the file cabinets, Bosch left the desk and came around to her on the floor. He slid the gun out of reach and looked down at her eyes. He knew there was nothing he could do. The bullet had exploded her heart.

“You bastards!” he yelled. “I didn’t say it! I didn’t say the word!”

Gables closed her eyes and Bosch thought she was gone.

“We’re clear!” he said. “Suspect is ten-seven. Repeat, suspect is ten-seven. Weapons, stand down.”

He started to get up but saw that Gables had opened her eyes.

“Nine,” she whispered, blood coming up on her lips.

Bosch leaned down to her.

“What?”

“I killed nine.”

She nodded and then closed her eyes again. He knew that this time she was gone, but he nodded anyway.