The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane Red eye From FaceOff

2005

As a practice, Harry Bosch did his best to stay out of tunnels, but as he came out of Logan Airport a tunnel was unavoidable — either the Ted Williams or the Sumner, take your pick. The rental car’s GPS chose the Williams, so Harry drove down and deep under Boston Harbor. The traffic backed up at the bottom and then completely stopped as Bosch realized that the timing of his red-eye flight from L.A. had landed him in the heart of morning rush hour.

Of course, the tunnel was much bigger and wider and was well lit in comparison to the tunnels of his past and those of his dreams. He was also not alone in his predicament. The passage was wall to wall with cars and trucks — a river of steel under the river of water, only one of them flowing at the moment. But a tunnel is a tunnel and soon the chest-tightening feeling of claustrophobia took hold. Bosch started to sweat and impatiently honked the horn of his rental in impotent protest. This apparently only served to identify him as an outsider. The locals didn’t honk, they did not rail against that which they could not change.

Eventually, traffic started moving and he finally emerged, lowering his window to let in the fresh air. He made a mental note to find a map and then chart a way back to the airport that did not include going through a tunnel. Too bad the car’s GPS didn’t have a No Tunnels setting. He would have to find his way back to the airport on his own.

The LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit’s travel protocol called for Bosch to check in with the local authorities immediately upon arrival in another city. In this case that would be the District E-13 offices of the Boston Police Department in Jamaica Plain. This was the district that included the address Bosch had for Edward Paisley, the man whose DNA Bosch had come to take — surreptitiously or not.

Bosch, however, often trampled on the official cold case protocol. He usually followed his own protocol, which involved getting the lay of the land first and maybe putting an eye on his quarry — then going in to meet and greet the local constabulary.

Bosch planned to check out Paisley’s address, maybe get a first look at him, and then check into the room at Courtyard by Marriott he had reserved on Expedia. He might even take a short nap after check-in, to make up for the lost sleep on the flight out. In the early afternoon he would go to District E-13 and tell the captain or major in charge that he was in from L.A. on a fifteen-year-old cold case murder. He would then most likely be paired with a divisional detective who had fallen from favor with command staff. Squiring around a visiting detective following a lead on a 1990 cold case was not a choice assignment.

Two nights before, at a bar on Warren Street in Roxbury, Dontelle Howe had asked Patrick Kenzie, “You got kids?”

Patrick half nodded, a bit confused on how to answer. “One on the way.”

“When?”

“Any day now.”

Dontelle Howe smiled. He was a trim black man in his early thirties, with close-cropped dreads and clothes so crisp you could smell the starch from two rooms away. “First?”

Patrick nodded.

“Ain’t you a little old?” Dontelle took another dainty sip from the one brandy he allowed himself every weeknight. Weekends, he’d assured Patrick, he could drink his weight in Henney, but weeknights and Sundays he kept his limit at one because every morning he drove a bus full of forty-five children from their homes all over the city to Dearborn Middle School in Roxbury, about two blocks from the bar where he’d agreed to meet Patrick after work.

“A little old?” Patrick checked himself in the bar mirror — a little grayer, okay, a little heavier, fine, a little less on top than he would have hoped, sure, but not bad for forty. Particularly forty years lived as hard as he’d lived his. Either that, or he was bullshitting himself, which was just as likely. “You don’t look like you’ll be auditioning for any boy bands yourself, Dontelle.”

“But I already got two in grade school. Time they’re in college and me and the woman are kicking it somewhere in Florida? I’ll be your age.”

Patrick chuckled and drank some beer.

Dontelle Howe’s voice grew deeper, more somber. “So no one’s looking for her? Still?”

Patrick made a mezza-mezza motion with his hand. “Police think it’s a custody thing. Father’s a real piece of shit, and no one can find him. No one can find her, either, so they think it’s a case of one plus one equals she’ll turn up.”

“But she’s twelve, man.”

“She” was Chiffon Henderson, a seventh-grader Dontelle Howe picked up every morning from the Bromley-Heath Housing projects in Jamaica Plain and dropped off nine hours later in the same spot. Three nights ago, Chiffon had left her bedroom in the back of the unit she shared with two sisters and her mother. The leaving wasn’t in dispute; the question of whether it had been voluntary was. She’d exited through a window. No signs of struggle or forced entry, though her mother had told police that Chiffon often left her window open on a mild night even though she’d been warned a thousand times not to. The police were focusing on Chiffon’s father, Lonnie Cullen, a deadbeat dad four times over to four different households, who hadn’t checked in with his parole officer this past weekend and couldn’t be found at his last known address. There was also some talk that Chiffon may have started seeing a boy who lived in one of the other buildings in the projects, though no one knew his name or much about him.

Chiffon’s mother, Ella Henderson, worked two jobs. By day she checked in patients for four ob-gyn partners at Beth Israel; nights she cleaned offices. She was a poster child for the burdens of the working poor — so much time spent trying to feed your kids and keep the lights on that you never spent any time with them until the day they told you it was too late to start trying.

Two days ago, she’d checked in Patrick’s wife, Angie, for her final appointment before their child, expected to enter the world a week from today, would be delivered. As Ella Henderson double-checked the insurance info and verified the parents’ dates of birth, she began to weep. It was weeping without drama or noise, just a steady stream even as her polite smile remained in place and her eyes remained fixed on her computer screen.

Half an hour later, Patrick had agreed to ask around about her daughter. The lead cop on the case, Detective Emily Zebrowski, had a current caseload of twelve open investigations. She told Patrick she welcomed his help, but she saw no evidence of an abduction. She admitted if it were an abduction, Chiffon’s bedroom was the place to do one, though — a tall elm towered over her window and those above her; her building was at the rear of the Heath Street complex and the city was five months behind replacing bulbs in the lamps back there that had been shot out by drunken persons unknown on New Year’s. Emily Zebrowski told Patrick, however, that no one heard a peep that night from Chiffon Henderson’s bedroom. People rarely vanished involuntarily, the detective said; that was more something you saw on TV than encountered in the real world.

“So your operating theory?” he’d asked.

“Her father,” Detective Zebrowski said. “Guy’s got priors the way other guys have nose hair.”

“To what end?”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s a scumbag,” Patrick said, “I get it. But his scumbaggedness makes sense usually, right? There’s motive behind it. He steals one of his kids, he wants to get paid or get the mother off his back for something. But here the mother’s got no money, she’s never sued him for child support or alimony, and what guy with his psychological makeup wants to bring his twelve-year-old daughter back to his spot, have her ragging on him from dawn to dusk?”

Detective Zebrowski shrugged. “You think d-bags like Lonnie Cullen think things through before they do them? If they did, they wouldn’t know the number on their orange jumpsuits better than their own birthdays. He did it because he’s a criminal and he’s an idiot and he has less impulse control than a flea at a livestock auction.”

“And the boyfriend angle?”

“Looking into it.”

Two nights ago Dontelle said to Patrick, “But you don’t believe it?”

Patrick shrugged. “Deadbeat dads dodge their kids, they don’t kidnap ’em, not the ones who’ve been out of the picture as long as Lonnie has. As for the boyfriend theory, she’s, what, shacked up with him for three days, they never go out to grab a bite, call a friend?”

“All I know,” Dontelle said, “is she seemed like a sweet kid. Not one of them typical project girls who’s always frontin’, talkin’ shit. She was quiet but... considerate, you know?”

Patrick took another drink of beer. “No. Tell me.”

“Well, you get a job like mine, you got to do a probation period — ninety days during which they can shitcan you without cause. After that, you with the city, man, gotta fuck up huge and be named Bin Laden for the city be able to get rid of your ass. I hit my ninety a couple weeks ago and not only did Chiffon congratulate me, she gave me a cupcake.”

“No shit?” Patrick smiled.

“Store-bought,” Dontelle said, “but still. How sweet is that?”

“Pretty sweet.” Patrick nodded.

“You’ll see in about twelve years with your kid, they ain’t too into thinking about others at that age. It’s all about what’s going on up here” — he tapped his head — “and down there” — he pointed at his groin.

They drank in silence for a minute.

“Nothing else you remember about that day? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

He shook his head. “Just a day like any other — ‘See you tomorrow, Chiffon,’ and she say, ‘See you tomorrow, Dontelle.’ And off she walk.”

Patrick thanked him and paid for the drinks. He was scooping his change off the bar when he said, “You had a probationary period?”

Dontelle nodded. “Yeah, it’s standard.”

“No, I know, but I guess I was wondering why you started so late in the school year. I mean, it’s May. Means you started in, what, February?”

Another nod. “End of January, yeah.”

“What’d you do before that?”

“Drove a tour bus. Drove from here to Florida, here to Montreal, here to P-Town, all depended on the season. Hours were killing me. Shit, the road was killing me. This job opened up, I jumped.”

“Why’d it open up?”

“Paisley got a duey.”

“Paisley?”

“Guy I replaced. Other drivers told me he was a piece of work, man. Show up with forty kids in his charge, eyes all glassy. Even the union wouldn’t protect him after the last time. Drove the bus off the side of the Legion Highway, right?” Dontelle was laughing in disbelief. “Damn near tipped it. Gets out to take a piss. This is at six-thirty in the ante meridiem, feel me? He gets back in, tries to pull back off the shoulder, but now the bus does tip. That’s Lawsuit City there, man. Forty times over.”

“Paisley,” Patrick said.

“Edward Paisley,” Dontelle said, “like the ties.”

Paisley lived on Wyman Street in a gray row house with fading white trim. There was a front porch with an old couch on it. Bosch drove by the place and then circled the block and went by again before finding a parking space at the curb a half block away. By adjusting his side-view mirror he had a bead on the front door and porch. He liked doing one-man surveillances this way. If somebody was looking for a watcher they usually checked windshields. Parking with his back to his target made him harder to see. Edward Paisley may have had nothing to do with the murder of Letitia Williams all those years ago. But if he did, he hadn’t survived the last fifteen years without checking windshields and being cautious.

All Bosch was hoping for, and that he’d be happy with, was to see some activity at the home to confirm that Paisley was at the address. If he got lucky, Paisley would go out and grab a cup of coffee or a bite to eat at lunch. Bosch would be able to get all the DNA he’d need off a discarded cup or a pizza crust. Maybe Paisley was a smoker. A cigarette butt would do the trick as well.

Harry pulled a file out of the locking briefcase he took on trips and opened it to look at the enlargement of the photo he’d pulled the day before from the Massachusetts RMV. It was taken three years earlier. Paisley was white, balding, and then fifty-three years old. He no longer had the driver’s license, thanks to the suspension that followed the DUI arrest six months ago. Paisley tipped a school bus and then blew a point-oh-two on the machine and with it blew his job with the school district and possibly his freedom. The arrest put his fingerprints into the system, where they were waiting for Bosch. Sometimes Harry got lucky that way. If he had pulled the Williams case eleven months earlier and submitted the prints collected at the crime scene for electronic comparison, there would have been no resulting match. But Bosch pulled the case four months ago and here he was in Boston.

Two hours into his surveillance Bosch had seen no sign of Paisley and was growing restless. Perhaps Paisley had left the house for the day before Bosch could set up on the street. Bosch could be wasting his time, watching an empty house. He decided to get out and do a walk-by. He’d seen a convenience store a block past the target address. He could walk by Paisley’s address, eyeball the place up close, then go down and pick up a newspaper and a gallon of milk. Back at the car he would pour the milk into the gutter and keep the jug handy if he had to urinate. It could be a long day watching the house.

The paper would come in handy as well. He’d be able to check the late baseball scores. The Dodgers had gone into extra innings the night before against the hated Giants and Bosch had gotten on the plane not knowing the game’s outcome.

But at the last moment Bosch decided to stay put. He watched a dinged-up Jeep Cherokee pull into a curbside slot directly across the street from his own position. There was a lone man in the car and what made Bosch curious was that he never got out. He stayed slumped a bit in his seat and appeared to be keeping an eye on the same address as Bosch.

Bosch could see he was on a cell phone when he first arrived, but then for the next hour the man remained behind the wheel of his Jeep, simply watching the goings-on on the street. He was too young to be Paisley. Late thirties or early forties, wearing a baseball cap and a thin gray hoodie over a dark blue graphic T. Something about the cap gave Bosch pause until he realized it was the first one he’d seen in a city filled with them that didn’t have a B on it. Instead it had what appeared to be a crooked smiley face on it, though Bosch couldn’t be positive from the other side of the street. It looked to Bosch like the guy was waiting for somebody, possibly the same somebody Bosch was waiting for.

Eventually, Bosch realized he had become a similar object of curiosity for the man across the street, who was now surreptitiously watching Bosch as Bosch was surreptitiously watching him.

They kept at this careful cross-surveillance until a siren split the air and a fire truck trundled down the road between them. Bosch tracked the truck in the side mirror, and when he looked back across the street he saw that the Jeep was empty. The man had either used the distraction of the passing fire truck to slip out, or he was lying down inside.

Bosch assumed it was the former. He sat up straight and checked the street and the sidewalk across from him. No sign of anyone on foot. He turned to check the sidewalk on his own side and there at the passenger window was the guy in the baseball hat. He’d turned the hat backward, the way gang squad guys often did when they were on the move. Bosch could see a silver chain descending from the sides of his neck into his graphic T, figured there was a badge hanging from it. Definitely a gun riding the back of the guy’s right hip, something boxy and bigger than a Glock. The man bent down to put himself at eye level with Bosch. He twirled his finger at Bosch, a request to roll the window down.

The guy with the Hertz NeverLost GPS jutting off his dashboard looked at Patrick for a long moment but then lowered his window. He looked like he was mid-fifties and in good shape. Wiry. Something about him said cop. The wariness in his eyes for one; cop’s eyes — you could never believe they truly closed. Then there was the way he kept one hand down in his lap so he could go inside the sport coat for the Glock or the Smith if it turned out Patrick was a bad guy. His left hand.

“Nice move,” he said.

“Yeah?” Patrick said.

The guy nodded over his shoulder. “Sending the fire truck down the street. Good distraction. You with District Thirteen?”

A true Bostonian always sounded like he was just getting over a cold. This guy’s voice was clean air; not light exactly but smooth. An out-of-towner. Not a trace of Beantown in that voice. Probably a fed. Minted in Kansas or somewhere, trained down in Quantico and then sent up here. Patrick decided to play along as long as he could. He tried to open the door but it was locked. The guy unlocked it, moved his briefcase to the back seat, and Patrick got in.

“You’re a bit away from Center Plaza, aren’t you?” Patrick said.

“Maybe,” he said. “Except I don’t know where or what Center Plaza is.”

“So you’re not with the Bureau. Who are you with?”

The man hesitated again, kept that left hand in his lap, then nodded like he’d decided to take a flier.

“LAPD,” he said. “I was going to check in with you guys later today.”

“And what brings the LAPD out to JP?”

“JP?”

“Jamaica Plain. Can I see some ID?”

He pulled a badge wallet out and flipped it open so Patrick could study the detective’s badge and the ID. His name was Hieronymus Bosch.

“Some name you’ve got. How do you say that?”

“Harry’s good.”

“Okay. What are you doing here, Harry?”

“How about you? That chain around your neck isn’t attached to a badge.”

“No?”

Bosch shook his head. “I’d have seen the outline of it through your shirt. Crucifix?”

Patrick stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “Wife likes me to wear it.” He held out his hand. “Patrick Kenzie. I’m not a cop. I’m an independent contractor.”

Bosch shook his hand. “You like baseball, Pat?”

“Patrick.”

“You like baseball, Patrick?”

“Big-time. Why?”

“You’re the first guy I’ve seen in this town not wearing a Sox hat.”

Patrick pulled off his hat and considered the front of it as he ran a hand through his hair. “Imagine that. I didn’t even look when I left the house.”

“Is that a rule around here? You’ve all got to represent Red Sox Nation or something?”

“It’s not a rule, per se, more like a guideline.”

Bosch looked at the hat again. “Who’s the crooked smiley-faced guy?”

“Toothface,” Patrick said. “He’s, like, the logo, I guess, of a record store I like.”

“You still buy records?”

“CDs. You?”

“Yeah. Jazz mostly. I hear it’s all going to go away. Records, CDs, the whole way we buy music. MP3s and iPods are the future.”

“Heard that too.” Patrick looked over his shoulder at the street. “We looking at the same guy here, Harry?”

“Don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m looking at a guy for a murder back in nineteen-ninety. I need to get some DNA.”

“What guy?”

“Tell you what, why don’t I go over to District Thirteen and check in with the captain and make this all legit? I’ll identify myself, you identify yourself. A cop and a private eye working together to ease the burden of the Boston PD. Because I don’t want my captain back in L.A. catching a call from—”

“Is it Paisley? Are you watching Edward Paisley?”

He looked at Patrick for a long moment. “Who is Edward Paisley?”

“Bullshit. Tell me about the case from nineteen-ninety.”

“Look, you’re a private dick with no ‘need to know’ that I can see and I’m a cop—”

“Who didn’t follow protocol and check in with the local PD.” He craned his head around the car. “Unless there’s a D-13 liaison on this street who’s really fucking good at keeping his head down. I got a girl missing right now and Edward Paisley’s name popped up in connection to her. Girl’s twelve, Bosch, and she’s been out there three days. So I’d love to hear what happened back in nineteen-ninety. You tell me, I’ll be your best friend and everything.”

“Why is no one looking for your missing girl?”

“Who’s to say they’re not?”

“Because you’re looking and you’re private.”

Patrick got a whiff of something sad coming off the L.A. cop. Not the kind of sad that came from bad news yesterday but from bad news most days. Still, his eyes weren’t dead; they pulsed instead with appetite — maybe even addiction — for the hunt. This wasn’t a house cat who’d checked out, who kept his head down, took his paycheck, and counted the days till his twenty. This was a cop who kicked in doors if he had to, whether he knew what was on the other side or not, and had stayed on after twenty.

Patrick said, “She’s the wrong color, wrong caste, and there’s enough plausible anecdotal shit swirling around her situation to make anyone question whether she was abducted or just walked off.”

“But you think Paisley could be involved.”

Patrick nodded.

“Why?”

“He’s got two priors for sexual abuse of minors.”

Bosch shook his head. “No. I checked.”

“You checked domestic. You didn’t know to check Costa Rica and Cuba. Both places where he was arrested, charged, had the shit beat out of him, and ultimately bought his way out. But the arrests are on record over there.”

“How’d you find them?”

“I didn’t. Principal of Dearborn Middle School was getting a bad feeling about Paisley when he drove a bus for them. One girl said this, one boy said that, another girl said such and such. Nothing you could build a case on, but enough for the principal to call Paisley into her office a couple times to discuss it.” Patrick pulled a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket, flipped it open. “Principal told me Paisley would have passed both interviews with flying colors but he mentioned milk one time too many.”

“Milk?”

“Milk.” Patrick looked up from his notes and nodded. “He told the principal during their first meeting — he’d already been working there a year; the principal doesn’t have shit to do with hiring bus drivers, that’s HR downtown — that she should smile more because it made him think of milk. He told her in the second meeting that the sun in Cuba was whiter than milk, which is why he liked Cuba, the white lording over everything and all. It stuck with her.”

“Clearly.”

“But so did the Cuba reference. It takes work to get to Cuba. You gotta fly to Canada or the Caribbean, pretend you banged around there when in fact you hopped a flight to Havana. So when her least favorite bus driver got a DUI while driving her students, she eighty-sixed his ass straightaway, but then started wondering about Cuba. She pulled his résumé and found gaps — six-month unexplained absence in eighty-nine, ten-month absence in ninety-six. Our friendly principal — and remember, Bosch, your principal is your pal — kept digging. Didn’t take long to find out that the six months in eighty-nine were spent in a Costa Rican jail, the ten months in ninety-six were spent in a cell in Havana. Plus, he moved around a lot in general — Phoenix, L.A., Chicago, Philly, and finally Boston. Always drives a bus, and only has one known relative — a sister, Tasha. Both times he was released from foreign jails, he was released into her custody. And I’m willing to bet she walked a bag of cash onto her flight that she didn’t have with her on the flight back home. So now, now he’s here and Chiffon Henderson is not. And you know everything I know, Detective Bosch, but I bet you can’t say the same.”

Bosch leaned back against his seat hard enough to make the leather crackle. He looked over at Patrick Kenzie and told the story of Letitia Williams. She was fourteen years old and stolen from her bedroom in the night. No leads, few clues. The abductor had cut out the screen on her bedroom window. Didn’t remove the screen, frame and all. Cut the screen out of the frame with a razor and then climbed in.

The cut screen put immediate suspicion on the disappearance. The case was not shunted aside as a presumed runaway situation the way Chiffon Henderson’s would be fifteen years later. Detectives from the major crimes unit rolled that morning after the girl was discovered gone. But the abduction scene was clean. No trace evidence of any kind recovered from the girl’s bedroom. The presumption was the abductor or abductors had worn gloves, entered and quickly incapacitated the girl, and just as quickly removed her through the window.

However, there was one piece of presumed evidence gathered outside the house on the morning of the initial investigation. In the alley that ran behind the home where Letitia Williams lived investigators found a flashlight. The first guess was that it had belonged to the abductor and it had inadvertently been dropped while the victim was carried to a waiting vehicle. There were no fingerprints on the flashlight, as it was assumed the perpetrator had worn gloves. But an examination of the inside of the flashlight found two viable latent fingerprints on one of the batteries.

It was thought to be the one mistake that would prove the abductor’s undoing. But the thumb and forefinger prints were compared to those on file with the city and state and no match was found. The prints were then sent on to the FBI for comparison with prints in the Bureau’s vast data banks, but again there was no hit and the lead died on the vine.

In the meantime, the body of Letitia Williams was found exactly one week after her abduction on a hillside in Griffith Park, right below the observatory. It appeared as though the killer had specifically chosen the location because the body would be spotted quickly in daylight hours by someone looking down from the observatory.

The autopsy on the victim determined that she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and then strangled. The case drew heavy attention from the media and the major crimes unit, but eventually it was shelved. No clues, no evidence, no leads. In 1992 Los Angeles was ripped apart by race riots, and cases like the murder of Letitia Williams dropped off the public radar. The file went to archives until the Open-Unsolved Unit was formed after the start of the new century, and eventually Bosch came to the archived case files and the fingerprints that were matched to Edward Paisley in Boston.

“That’s why I’m here,” Bosch said.

“Did you come with a warrant?”

Bosch shook his head. “No, no warrant. The prints match is not enough. The flashlight was found in the alley, not in Letitia’s bedroom. There is no direct tie to the crime. I came to get DNA. I was going to follow him and collect it. Wait for him to toss a cup of coffee or a pizza crust or something. I’d take it back with me and see if it matches semen collected from the body. Then I’d be in business. Then I’d come back with a warrant and take him down.”

They sat in the car and stared out at the street and Bosch could feel Kenzie stewing on something. He wasn’t a big man and he had a friendly, boyish face; he dressed in the street clothes of a neighborhood guy, kind of guy would pour your beer or fix your car. On first glance and even on a second, he seemed harmless and sweet, kind of guy you’d be happy for your sister to bring home. But Bosch had spent enough time in his company now to feel a hot wire running in the guy’s blood. Most people probably never tripped it. But God help the ones who did.

Kenzie’s right knee started to jackhammer up and down in such a way that Bosch doubted he was aware of it. He turned on the seat, looked at Harry. “You said in your case the girl’s body was found a week after the abduction.”

“That’s right.”

“But she was dumped there because she would be found almost right away by the people at the observatory.”

“Yeah, the body was left at night and noticed the next morning after daylight.”

“How long had she been dead?”

Bosch reached to the back seat and opened the briefcase. He brought back a thick blue binder full of records from the case. He spoke as he looked through the pages. He had the answers in his head already. He was just looking at the autopsy report for confirmation.

“She had been dead seventy-two hours when found.”

“That’s three days. That meant the guy kept her alive for four days.”

“Right. The indications were that she was repeatedly—”

“This is the fourth day. If this asshole follows any sort of pattern, well, shit, Chiffon Henderson was taken Monday afternoon.” He pointed back down the sidewalk at the gray row house. “We need to get in that house.”

Patrick took the front door while Bosch went around back. Patrick had told the L.A. cop he was reasonably proficient picking a lock, but Paisley’s front door sported a lock Patrick had never seen before. New, too. And expensive by the looks of it — a $500 lock on a $40 door. Patrick tried a series of picks, but none of them could get to first base with the cylinders. It was like trying to pass a plastic stirrer through a rock.

The second time he dropped a pick, he bent to retrieve it and the door opened in front of him.

He looked up at Harry Bosch standing on the threshold, a Glock dangling from his left hand. “I thought you said you could pick a lock.”

“I clearly overestimated my prowess.” He straightened. “How’d you get in?”

“He left a window unlocked.” Bosch shrugged. “People, right?”

Patrick had expected a dump inside, but the house was quite clean and mostly bare. The furniture was modern Scandinavian — lots of bright white and brighter chrome that clashed with the older wainscoting and dark wallpaper. Paisley was renting; the landlord probably had no idea about the lock.

“Something in here he doesn’t want people to see,” Patrick said.

“Gotta be in the basement then,” Bosch said. He jerked a thumb back at the shotgun layout of the apartment — foyer and living room and then a long corridor that went straight back to the kitchen, all the other rooms branching off it. “I cleared this floor.”

“You cleared this floor? How long were you planning to leave me out on the front porch?”

“I figured another half an hour before you snapped and kicked in the door. I didn’t have that kinda time.”

“L.A. sarcasm,” Patrick said as they headed down the hallway. “Who knew?”

Halfway down the hall, on the right, was a door the same dark brown as the wainscoting. Patrick exchanged a look with Bosch and the cop nodded — now would be the time.

Patrick drew the.45 Colt Commander off his hip and flicked the safety off. “You see a bulkhead around back?”

Bosch looked puzzled. “A bulkhead?”

“You know, an entrance to the basement. Double doors, steps down.”

Bosch nodded. “Locked from the inside.” And then, as though further explanation was needed, he said, “We generally don’t have basements in L.A.”

“You don’t have snow or a wind-chill factor either, so, you know, fuck you.” He tossed Bosch a bright, tight smile. “Any basement windows out back?”

Another nod. “Black curtains over them.”

“Well, that’s bad,” Patrick said.

“Why?”

“No one puts curtains over their basement windows around here unless they got a home theater or they’re playing Dead Hooker Storage.” He looked around the apartment. “Edward does not strike me as the home theater type.”

Bosch nodded, his pupils adrenalized to twice their size. “Let’s go back out, call it in legit’.”

“What if he’s down there with her right now?”

That was the dilemma, wasn’t it?

Bosch exhaled a long breath. Patrick did the same. Bosch held his hand over the doorknob and said, “On three?”

Patrick nodded. He wiped his right palm on his jeans and readjusted a two-handed grip on his gun.

“One. Two. Three.”

Bosch opened the door.

The first thing they noticed was the padding on the inside of the door — at least six inches thick of premium leather soundproofing. The kind one found only in recording studios. The next thing they noticed was the dark. The scant light to find the stairs came from the hall behind them. The rest of the cellar was pitch-black. Patrick pointed at the light switch just past Bosch’s ear, raised his eyebrows.

Bosch shrugged.

Patrick shrugged.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Bosch flicked on the lights.

The staircase split the cellar like a spine, straight down the center, and they went down it fast. A black heating oil tank stood at the bottom, quite old, rust fringing the bottom of it.

Without a word, Bosch went left and Patrick went right.

The element of surprise was no longer an option for them.

Only for him.

On the side of the cellar that Patrick chose — the front — the framing was old and mostly unfinished. The first “room” he came upon contained a washer, a dryer, and a sink with a cake of grimy brown soap stuck to the top of it. The next room had once been a workshop. A long wood table abutted the wall, an old vise still fastened to the table. Nothing else in there but dust and mice droppings. The last room along the wall was finished, however. The framing was filled in with drywall on one side and brick on the other, a door in the middle. Heavy door. And thick. The frame around it was solid too. Try and kick in a door like that and you’d finish your day getting fitted for an ankle cast.

Patrick removed his left hand from his.45 and rubbed it on his jeans. He flexed the fingers and reached for the doorknob, holding the.45 cocked awkwardly at about mid-chest level. It didn’t look pretty, he was sure, but if he had to pull the trigger, he had a fair chance of hitting center mass on anyone but a dwarf or a giant.

The doorknob squeaked when it turned, proving something a cop had told him years ago — you always made the most noise when you were trying to be quiet. He threw open the door and dropped to his knees at the same time, gun pointing up a bit now, left hand coming back on the grip, sweeping the room from left to right, sweeping back right to left even as he processed what he saw—

Edward Paisley’s man cave.

Patrick edged his way through the doorway onto an Arizona Cardinals rug, drew a bead on a BarcaLounger trimmed in Sun Devils colors. A Phoenix Suns pennant shared space with one from the Phoenix Coyotes, and Patrick had to peer at the latter to realize the Coyotes played in the NHL.

If he learned nothing else from this day, he now knew Arizona had a professional hockey team.

He found baseball bats signed by Troy Glaus, Carlos Baerga, and Tony Womack. Baseballs signed by Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, framed photos of Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner, Shawn Marion and Joe Johnson, Plexiglas-encased footballs, basketballs, and pucks, Patrick again thinking, They have a hockey team?

He picked up a bat signed by Shea Hillenbrand, who’d broken into the Bigs with the Sox back in 2001 but got shipped to Arizona before the Sox won the Series last year. He wondered if that stung or if being able to lie out in the Arizona sun in January made up for it.

He’d guess it didn’t.

He was putting the bat back against the wall when he heard someone moving through the cellar. Moving fast. Running, actually.

And not away from something, but toward it.

Harry had worked his way along the back of the cellar, finding nothing but wall and rocky, jagged flooring until he reached a tight space where an ancient water heater met a prehistoric oil heater. The space reeked of oil and mold and fossilized vermin. Had Bosch not been searching for an adolescent in possible mortal danger, he might have missed the corridor on the other side of the heaters. But his penlight picked up the hole in the darkness on the other side of a series of pipes and ducts that were half hanging, half falling from the ceiling.

Bosch worked his way past the heaters and entered a long thin space barely wide enough to accommodate any mammal with shoulders, never mind a full-grown adult male.

As soon as you entered a tunnel, the first problem you noticed was that there was no left, no right, and no place to hide. You went into an entrance and you headed toward an exit. And should anyone who wished you ill pop up at either point Alpha or point Zeta, while you were passing between those points, your fate was in their hands.

When Bosch reached the end of the passageway, he was bathed in sweat. He stepped out into a wide unlit room of dark brick and a stone floor with a drain in the center. He swept the room with his penlight and saw nothing but a metal crate. It was the kind used to house large dogs on family trips. A blue painter’s tarp covered it, held to the frame by nine bungee cords.

And it was moving.

Bosch got down on his knees and pulled at the tarp, but the bungee cords were wrapped tight — three of them crossing the crate lengthwise and six crossing it widthwise. The cords were clasped down at the base of the crate and stretched taut so that separating the clasps with one hand was not an option. Bosch placed his Glock by his foot as the crate continued to rock and he picked up the sound of someone mewling desperately from under all that tarp.

He pulled apart the clasps on the first of the three lengthwise cords and still couldn’t get a clear view inside. He put the penlight in his mouth and went to work on the second and that’s when the room turned white.

It was as if someone had hung the sun a foot above his head or lit up a ballpark.

He was blind. He got his hand on his Glock, but all he could see was white. He couldn’t tell where the wall was. He couldn’t even see the crate anymore and he was kneeling in front of it.

He heard something scrabble to his left and he turned his gun that way and then the scrabbling broke right, coming around his weak side, and he turned with the Glock crossing his body, his eyes adjusting enough to pick up a shadow. Then he heard the thump of something very hard turn something less hard into something soft.

Someone let out a dull yelp and fell to the floor in all that blinding light.

“Bosch,” Patrick said, “it’s me. Close your eyes a sec’.”

Bosch closed his eyes and heard the sound of glass breaking — popping, actually — and the heat left his face in degrees.

“I think we’re good,” Patrick said.

When Bosch opened his eyes, he blinked several times and saw the lights high on the wall, all the bulbs shattered. Had to be in the 700-watt range, if not higher. Huge black cones behind them. Eight lights total. Patrick had pulled back the curtain on the small window at the top of the wall, and the soft early-afternoon light entered the room like an answered prayer.

Bosch looked at Paisley lying on the floor to his right, gurgling, the back of his head sporting a fresh dent, pink blood leaking from his nose, red blood streaming from his mouth, a carving knife lying beneath his twitching right hand.

Patrick Kenzie brandished a baseball bat. He raised his eyebrows up and down and twirled it. “Signed by Shea Hillenbrand.”

“I don’t even know who that is.”

“Right,” Patrick said. “Dodgers fan.”

Bosch went to work on the bungee cords and Patrick joined him and they pulled back the tarp and there she was, Chiffon Henderson. She was curled fetal in the crate because there was no room to stretch into any other position. Patrick struggled with the door until Bosch just took the roof off the crate.

Chiffon Henderson had electrical tape wrapped around her mouth, wrists, and ankles. They could tell it hurt her to stretch her limbs, but Bosch took that as a good sign — Paisley had kept her caged but possibly unmolested. Bosch guessed that was supposed to commence today, an appetizer to the murder.

They bickered as they removed the tape from her mouth, Bosch telling Patrick to be careful of her hair, Patrick telling him to watch he didn’t tear at her lips.

When the tape came free and they went to work on her wrists, Bosch asked, “What’s your name?”

“Chiffon Henderson. Who’re you?”

“I’m Patrick Kenzie. And this other guy? He was never here, okay, Chiffon?”

Bosch cocked his head.

Patrick said, “You’re a cop. From out of town. I can barely get away with this shit, but you? They’ll take your badge, man. Unless you got a no-knock warrant in your pocket I can’t see.”

Bosch worked it through in his head.

“He touch you, Chiffon?”

She was weeping, shaking, and she gave that a half nod, half head shake. “A little but not, you know. He said that was coming. He told me all sorts of things were coming.”

Patrick looked at Paisley huffing into the cement, eyes rolled back into his head, blood beginning to pool.

“Only thing coming for this shithead is the strokes that follow the coma.”

When her hands were free, Patrick knelt to get at the tape on her ankles and Bosch was surprised when the girl hugged him tight, her tears finding his shirt. He surprised himself when he kissed the top of her head.

“No more monster,” he said. “Not tonight.”

Patrick finished with the tape. He tossed the wad of it behind him and produced his cell. “I gotta call this in. I’d rather be bullshitting my way free of an attempted murder charge than an actual homicide rap, if you know what I mean, and he’s turning a funny shade.”

Bosch looked at the man lying at his feet. Looked like an aging nerd. Kinda guy did your taxes out of a strip mall storefront. Another little man with soiled desires and furious nightmares. Funny how the monsters always turned out to be little more than men. But Patrick was right — he’d die soon without attention.

Patrick dialed 911 but didn’t hit Send. Instead he held out his hand to Bosch. “If I’m ever in L.A.”

Bosch shook his hand. “Funny. I can’t picture you in L.A.”

Patrick said, “And I can’t picture you out of it, even though you’re standing right here. Take care, Harry.”

“You too. And thanks” — Bosch looked down at Paisley, on his way to critical care, minimum — “for, um, that.”

“Pleasure.”

Bosch headed toward the door, a door only accessible from the front of the cellar, not the back. Beat the hell out of the way he’d entered the room. He was reaching for the doorknob when he turned back.

“One last thing.”

Patrick had the phone to his ear and his free arm wrapped tight around Chiffon’s shoulders. “What’s that?”

“Is there a way to get back to the airport without going through that tunnel?”