would check the head first, followed by the office and then the master last. As he approached the head he realized that he smelled cigarette smoke.
The head was empty and too small to be used as a hiding place anyway. As he turned toward the office door and raised his weapon, a voice called out from within.
“Come on in, Terry.”
He recognized the voice. He cautiously stepped forward and used his free hand to push open the door. He kept the gun raised.
The door swung open and there was Harry Bosch sitting at the desk, his body in a relaxed posture, leaning back and looking toward the door. Both his hands were in sight. Both were empty except for the unlit cigarette between two fingers of his right hand. McCaleb slowly moved into the small room, still holding the gun up and aimed at Bosch.
“You going to shoot me? You want to be my accuser and my executioner?”
“This is breaking and entering.”
“Then I guess that makes us even.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That little dance at my place the other night, what do you call that? ‘Harry, I gotta couple more questions about the case.’ Only you never asked any real questions, did you? Instead, you take a look at my wife’s picture and ask about that, and you ask about the picture in the hallway and you drink my beer and, oh, yeah, you tell me all about finding God in your baby daughter’s blue eyes. So what do you call all of that, Terry?”
Bosch casually turned the chair and glanced over his shoulder at the desk. McCaleb looked past him and saw his own laptop computer was open and turned on. On the screen he could see that Bosch had called up the file containing the notes for the profile he was going to compose until everything changed the day before. He wished he had protected it with a password.
“It feels like breaking and entering to me,” Bosch said, his eyes on the screen. “Maybe worse.”
In Bosch’s new posture the leather bomber jacket he was wearing fell open and McCaleb could see the pistol holstered on his hip. He continued to hold his own weapon up and ready.
Bosch looked back at him.
“I didn’t get a chance to look at all of this yet. Looks like a lot of notes and analysis. Probably all first-rate stuff, knowing you. But somehow, someway, you got it wrong, McCaleb. I’m not the guy.”
McCaleb slowly slid back into the lower berth of the opposite set of bunks. He held the gun with a little less precision now. He sensed there was no immediate danger from Bosch. If he had wanted to, he could have ambushed him as he’d come in.
“You shouldn’t be here, Harry. You shouldn’t be talking to me.”
“I know, anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. But who am I going to talk to? You put the bead on me. I want it off.”
“Well, you’re too late. I’m off the case. And you don’t want to know who’s on it.”
Bosch just stared at him and waited.
“The bureau’s civil rights division. You think Internal Affairs has been a pain in your ass? These people live and breathe for one thing, taking scalps. And an LAPD scalp is worth more than Boardwalk and Park Place put together.”
“How’d that happen, the reporter?”
McCaleb nodded.
“I guess that means he talked to you, too.”
Bosch nodded.
“Tried to. Yesterday.”
Bosch looked around himself, noticed the cigarette in his hand and put it in his mouth.
“You mind if I smoke?”
“You already have been.”
Bosch pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the cigarette. He pulled the trash can out from beneath the desk and next to his seat to be used as an ashtray.
“Can’t seem to quit these.”
“Addictive personality. A good and bad attribute in a detective.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
He took a hit off the cigarette.
“We’ve known each other for what is it, ten, twelve years?”
“More or less.”
“We worked cases and you don’t work a case with somebody without taking some kind of measure. Know what I mean?”
McCaleb didn’t answer. Bosch flicked the cigarette on the side of the trash can.
“And you know what bothers me, even more than the accusation itself? It’s that it came from you. It’s how and why you could think this. You know, what was the measure you took of me that allowed you to make this jump?”
McCaleb gestured with both hands as if to say the answer was obvious.
“People change. If there was anything I learned about people from my job, it’s that any one of us is capable of anything, given the right circumstances, the right pressures, the right motives, the right moment.”
“That’s all psycho-bullshit. It doesn’t…”
Bosch’s sentence trailed off and he didn’t finish. He looked back at the computer and the papers spread across the desk. He pointed the cigarette at the laptop’s screen.
“You talk about darkness… a darkness more than night.”
“What about it?”
“When I was overseas…” He dragged deeply on the cigarette and exhaled, tilting his head back and shooting the smoke toward the ceiling. “… I was put into the tunnels and let me tell you, you want darkness? – that was darkness. Down in there. Sometimes you couldn’t see your fucking hand three inches in front of your face. It was so dark it hurt your eyes from straining to see just anything. Anything at all.”
He took another long hit from the cigarette. McCaleb studied Bosch’s eyes. They were staring blankly at the memory. Then suddenly he was back. He reached down and ground the half-finished cigarette into the inside edge of the can and dropped it in.
“This is my way of trying to quit. I smoke these shitty menthol things and never more than a half at a time. I’m down to about a pack a week.”
“It’s not going to work.”
“I know.”
He looked up at McCaleb and smiled crookedly in a sort of apologetic way. Quickly his eyes changed and he moved back to his story.
“And then sometimes it wasn’t that dark down there. In the tunnels. Somehow there was just enough light to make your way. And the thing is, I never knew where it came from. It was like it was trapped down there with the rest of us. My buddies and me, we called it lost light. It was lost but we found it.”
McCaleb waited but that was all Bosch said.
“What are you telling me, Harry?”
“That you missed something. I don’t know what it is but you missed something.”
He held McCaleb with his dark eyes. He reached back to the desk and picked up the stack of copied documents from Jaye Winston. He tossed them across the small room onto McCaleb’s lap. McCaleb made no move to catch them and they spilled to the floor in a jumble.
“Look again. You missed something and what you did see added up to me. Go back in and find the missing piece. It will change the addition.”
“I told you, man, I’m off it.”
“I’m putting you back on it.”
It was said with a tone of permanence, as if there was no choice for McCaleb.
“You’ve got till Wednesday. That writer’s deadline. You have to stop his story with the truth. You don’t, and you know what J. Reason Fowkkes will do with it.”
