The Black Box

27

Bosch turned the car’s lights off as he cruised past the gated entrance to the Cosgrove estate. There was not another car on Hammett Road. He went another two hundred yards to where the road curved slightly right and then pulled off onto the dirt shoulder.

He had already turned off the interior convenience light, so the car remained dark when he opened the door. He stepped out into the cool air and looked and listened. The night was silent. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded square of paper. He clipped it under the wind-shield. Earlier he had written a note on it. It said:

OUT OF GAS—WILL RETURN SOON

Bosch was wearing the mud boots he had retrieved from one of the boxes in the trunk. He carried a small Mag-Lite that he hoped not to have to use. He stepped down the three-foot embankment and gingerly moved into the water, sending a shimmering ripple across the floor of the almond grove.

Bosch’s plan was to proceed at an angle and make his way back to the entrance road. He would then move parallel to it until he got to the Cosgrove home. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or looking for. He was following his instincts, and they told him Cosgrove, with his money and power, was at the center of things. He felt the need to move in closer to him, to see where and how he lived.

The water was only a few inches deep but the mud sucked at Bosch’s boots and made his progress slow. Several times the wet earth refused to let go of its grip and he almost pulled his foot right out of its boot.

The water floor reflected the starscape above and made Bosch feel as though he was completely exposed in his trespass. Every twenty yards or so he would move in under a tree for cover and so that he could rest for a moment and listen. The grove was deathly quiet, with not even the occasional buzz of insects in the air. The only sound was in the distance, and Bosch didn’t know what was making it. It was a steady whooshing and he thought it might be some sort of irrigation pump keeping water in the grove.

After a while the grove began to feel like a maze to him. The fully mature trees stood thirty feet high and appeared to be exact duplicates of one another. The trees had been planted along astonishingly straight lines. This made every direction in which Bosch looked appear to be the same. He began to fear that he would become lost and wished he had brought something with him to mark the trail.

Finally, after a half hour, he made it to the entrance road. He already felt exhausted, as though his boots were made of concrete. But he decided not to abandon the mission. He proceeded along a parallel, moving from tree to tree in the first row next to the road.

Almost an hour later, Bosch saw the lights of the mansion up ahead through the branches of the last few rows of trees. He plodded on, noting that the whooshing sound was growing louder as he got nearer and nearer to the lights.

When he got to the end of the grove, he crouched on the side of the embankment and studied what lay before him. The mansion was an exotic take on a French château. It was only two stories high but had steeply pitched roof angles and turreted corners. Something about it reminded Bosch of a smaller version of the Château Marmont back in L.A.

The house was lit from the outside by floodlights angled up from the ground. There was a large turnaround at the front and a tributary drive that wrapped around behind the main structure. Bosch assumed the garage was in the back. There were no vehicles anywhere in sight, and Bosch realized that all of the lights that he had seen through the grove were exterior. The house itself was dark. It looked like nobody was home.

Bosch stood up and climbed the embankment. He started toward the house and soon found himself on a raised concrete pad. The H design painted in the center indicated that it was a helicopter pad. He continued on, moving directly toward the house, when a deviation in his peripheral vision distracted him. He looked to his left toward a slight rise in the landscape.

At first he didn’t see anything. The house was so brightly lit that the stars above were barely visible and the area around the mansion seemed pitch-black. But then he saw the movement again, high up over the hill. He suddenly realized that he was seeing the dark blades of a wind turbine cutting through the air, momentarily blocking the dim light of the stars and rearranging the sky.

The whooshing sound he had been listening to as he moved through the grove was coming from the wind turbine. Cosgrove so believed in the power of the wind that he had built one of his iron giants in his own backyard. Bosch guessed that the lights that bathed the exterior of the château were powered by the winds that tirelessly moved across the Valley.

Bosch refocused his attention on the lighted mansion, and almost immediately he was struck with a feeling of hesitation, a second-guessing of his actions. The man who lived inside the walls in front of him was smart enough and powerful enough to harness the wind. He lived behind a wall of money and a phalanx—no, make that an army—of trees. He did not need to run a fence along the edges of his vast property, because he knew the grove would intimidate any intruder who dared to cross it. He lived in a castle with a surrounding moat, and who was Bosch to think he could take him down? Bosch didn’t even know the exact nature of the crime. Anneke Jespersen was dead and Bosch was chasing a hunch. He had no evidence of anything. He had a twenty-year-old coincidence and nothing else.

Suddenly, a wave of mechanical sound and wind broke over him as a helicopter came in over the grove and hovered above. Bosch broke and ran back toward the grove, sliding down the embankment into the mud and water. He looked back and watched the helicopter—a black silhouette against the dark sky—maneuver into position over the landing pad. A spotlight on the craft’s underside came on and lit the targeted H on the pad. Bosch ducked down lower and watched as the craft seemed to struggle against the wind to hold the line of its landing rails. As the helicopter slowly came down and gently met the pad, the light cut off and the high-pitched turbine was shut down.

The rotors free spun for a while and then came to a halt. The pilot’s-side door opened and a figure climbed out. Bosch was at least a hundred feet away and could only see the shape of the person, whom he identified as a male. The pilot moved to the back door and opened it. Bosch expected another person to alight from the rear cabin, but it was a dog that leaped out. The pilot reached in for a backpack, closed the door, and started toward the house.

The dog trotted behind the pilot for a few yards but then suddenly stopped and turned directly toward the spot where Bosch was hiding. It was a big dog, but it was too dark for Bosch to identify a breed. He heard it growl first and then it started running toward him.

Bosch froze as the animal quickly covered the ground between them. He knew there was nowhere he could move. The mud was behind him. He wouldn’t make it two steps. He crouched lower and closer to the embankment, thinking that maybe the angry dog would jump over him and get mired in the mud.

And he pulled his weapon off his belt. If the dog didn’t stop, Bosch would be ready to stop it.

“Cosmo!”

The man had shouted from the pathway to the house. The dog stopped in midstride, its hind legs sliding out from beneath as it struggled to respond to the command.

“Get over here!”

The dog looked back at Bosch, and for a moment Harry thought he saw its eyes glowing red. It then took off, heading back to its master. It was chastised anyway.

“Bad boy! You don’t run off! And no barking!”

The man clapped the dog on the haunch as it ran by him. The dog moved ahead on the path and then crouched into a pose of submission. A moment ago it was going to tear Bosch’s throat out. Now Bosch felt sorry for it.

Harry waited until the man and his dog were inside the château before he headed back into the grove, hoping he would not get lost on the way back to his car.

Bosch got back to the Blu-Lite Motel by eleven. He went straight into the bathroom and stripped off his wet and muddy clothes, throwing them into the bathtub. He was about to step into the tub and turn on the shower when he heard his phone buzzing—he had turned the ringer setting down after the incident at the Steers.

He walked out of the bathroom with a towel as stiff as cardboard wrapped around his waist. The caller ID was blocked. Bosch sat down on the bed and took the call.

“Bosch.”

“Harry, it’s me. Are you all right?”

Chu.

“I’m fine. Why?”

“’Cause I haven’t heard from you and you didn’t respond to my emails.”

“I’ve been on the road all day and haven’t looked at email. I just got to the motel and am not sure about the Wi-Fi yet.”

“Harry, you get email on your phone.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s a pain with the password and all of that. It’s too small and I don’t like doing that. I text.”

“Whatever. You want me to tell you what I sent?”

Bosch was dead tired. The exhaustion of the day and the slog back and forth through the almond grove had set into his bones. The muscles in his thighs ached from what felt like ten thousand steps through the sucking mud. He wanted to take a shower and go to sleep, but he told Chu to go ahead.

“Basically two things,” his partner said. “First, I made a pretty solid connection between two of the names on the list you gave me.”

Bosch looked around for his notebook and realized he had left it in the car. He couldn’t go out for it now.

“Go ahead, what?”

“Well, you know how Drummond is running for Congress?”

“Yeah, I saw one sign today but nothing else.”

“That’s because the election is next year. So it’s not going to get hot and heavy for a while. In fact, he doesn’t even have an opponent yet. The incumbent is retiring and Drummond probably announced early to scare away the competition.”

“Yeah, whatever. What’s the connection?”

“It’s Cosgrove. Cosgrove personally and Cosgrove Agriculture are two of the biggest donors to his campaign. I pulled the initial campaign report that he filed when he announced.”

Bosch nodded. Chu was right, a good solid connection between two members of the conspiracy. Now all he needed was the conspiracy.

“Harry, you there? You’re not falling asleep on me, are you?”

“Just about to. But that was good work, Dave. If he’s backing him now, he probably backed his two runs for sheriff as well.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too, but those records aren’t accessible online. You might be able to pull them from the county clerk’s office up there.”

Bosch shook his head.

“No,” he said. “This is a small town. I do that and word will get back to both of them. I don’t want that yet.”

“I get you. How is it going up there?”

“It’s going. Today was just a recon day. Tomorrow I’m going to start pushing things. What was the other thing? You said two things.”

There was a pause before Chu spoke, so Bosch knew the second bit of news was not going to be good.

“The Tool called me into his office today.”

Of course, Bosch thought. O’Toole.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to know what I was working on, but I could also tell he was worried that you weren’t really on vacation. He asked if I knew where you went, stuff like that. I told him that as far as I knew, you were home painting the house.”

“Painting the house. Okay, I’ll remember that. You warned me about this in an email?”

“Yeah, right after lunch.”

“Don’t put stuff like that in an email. Just call me. Who knows how far O’Toole will go if he’s trying to blow somebody out of the unit.”

“Okay, Harry, I won’t. Sorry.”

Bosch got a call-waiting beep. He looked at his screen and saw it was his daughter.

“Don’t worry about it, Dave, but I gotta go now. My daughter’s calling. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

“Okay, Harry, get some sleep.”

Bosch switched over to his daughter. She spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper.

“How was your day, Dad?”

Bosch thought for a moment about what to say. “Actually, it was kind of boring,” he said. “How was yours?”

“Mine was boring, too. When are you coming home?”

“Well . . . let’s see, I have a little more work up here tomorrow. A couple interviews. So maybe not till Wednesday. Are you in your room?”

“Uh-huh.”

Meaning she was alone and hopefully out of earshot of Hannah. Bosch leaned back on the pillows. They were thin and hard but it felt like the Ritz-Carlton to him.

“So how’s it going with Hannah?” he asked.

“It’s okay, I guess,” she said.

“You sure?”

“She was trying to get me to go to bed early. Like ten o’clock or something.”

Bosch smiled. He knew the score. The inverse law of waking a teenage girl too early was to suggest she go to bed too early.

“I told her before I left to let you do your own thing. I can talk to her again, remind her that you know your own body clock.”

It was the argument she had put to him when he had made the same mistake as Hannah.

“No, it’s okay. I can deal.”

“What about dinner? Don’t tell me you ordered in pizza.”

“No, she made dinner and it was really good.”

“What was it?”

“It was chicken with like a yogurt sauce. And mac and cheese.”

“Gotta have mac and cheese.”

“She made it different from me.”

Meaning Maddie liked her own better. Bosch could feel himself falling off. He tried to rally.

“Yeah, well, the chef gets to choose. If you do the cooking, then you make it your way.”

“I know. I told her I’d cook tomorrow if I don’t have much homework.”

“Good, and maybe I’ll cook Wednesday.”

That made him smile and he guessed she was smiling, too.

“Yeah, ramen noodles. Oh boy, can’t wait.”

“Me neither. I gotta go to sleep now, baby. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah, Dad. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

She disconnected and Bosch heard the three beeps as the line went dead. He lay there, unable to get up. The lights were still on but he closed his eyes. In seconds he was asleep.

Bosch dreamed of an endless march through the mud. But the almond trees were gone and replaced by burned-off stumps with jagged black branches reaching out to him like hands. In the distance, there was the sound of an angry dog barking. And no matter how quickly Bosch moved, the dog was getting closer.