was blocked by a steel gate with a padlock on it. The key to that lock resided with the fire department and the city’s film bureau, but thanks to Lawton Cross I knew better than that.
I got there before Lindell and I was tempted not to wait. It would be a long walk up to the caves on foot, but my anger had forged into resolve and momentum. Sitting at the locked gate was not the way to stoke those fires and keep them burning. I wanted to get up into the hills and get it over with. I pulled out the cell phone and called him to see where he was.
“Right behind you.”
I checked the mirror. He was coming around the last bend in a federal Crown Vic. It made me think about how he would react when he found out the last clue I had put together had been so close all along.
“It’s about time,” I said.
I hung up and got out of the Mercedes. When Lindell pulled up I leaned into his window.
“Did you bring the bolt cutter?”
Lindell looked out the windshield at the gate.
“For that? I’m not going to cut that. They’ll climb all over me if I break their lock.”
“Roy, I thought you were a big-time federal agent. Give me the cutter, I’ll do it.”
“And you can take all the heat. Just tell them you had a hunch.”
I threw him a look, hoping to communicate that I was operating on more than a hunch now. He popped the trunk lid and I went back and pulled out the bolt cutter he had probably checked out of the federal equipment shed. He stayed in the car while I walked over and cut the lock and pushed the gate open.
I walked by his window on the way back to the trunk.
“By any means, Roy,” I said as I passed. “I think I’m getting the idea why you weren’t picked for the squad.”
I threw the tool in the trunk, slammed it and told him to follow me up the hill.
We drove up the winding road, the gravel crunching under our wheels sounding like the rain that was still coming. The road up took a final 180 and terminated in front of the main tunnel entrance, a fifteen-foot-high opening cut into a granite deposit the size of an office building. I parked next to Lindell and met him at the trunk. He’d brought two shovels and two flashlights. As I was reaching in for mine he put his hand on my arm.
“Okay, Bosch, what are we doing?”
“She’s here. We’re going to go in and find her.”
“Confirmed?”
I looked at him and nodded. In my life I have told a lot of people-too many to count-about loved ones they weren’t going to see alive again. I knew Lindell had long ago given up hope for Marty Gessler, but the final confirmation is still never easy to get. Or to give.
“Yes, confirmed. Lawton Cross told me.”
Lindell nodded and turned away from the trunk. He looked up at the crest of the granite mountain. I busied myself with getting the tools from the trunk and checking to see if my cell phone was catching a signal. Over my shoulder I heard him say, “It’s going to rain.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I handed him a light and a shovel and we approached the mouth of the tunnel.
“He’s going to pay for this,” Lindell said.
I nodded. I didn’t bother to tell him that Lawton Cross had already been paying for it every day of his life.
The tunnel was big. Shaquille O’Neal could walk through with Wilt Chamberlain on his shoulders. It was nothing like the stale, claustrophobic systems I had crawled through thirty-five years before. The air inside was fresh. It smelled clean. Ten feet in we put on the lights, and in another fifty feet the channel curved and we were out of sight of the entrance. I remembered Cross’s directions and kept to the right, moving slowly.
We came to a central cavern and stopped. There were three tributary tunnels. I focused my light on the third opening and knew it was the way. I then turned my light off and told Lindell to do the same.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Just turn it off for a second.”
He did and I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. My vision and focus came back and I could pick up the outline of the rock walls and jutting surfaces. I could see the light that had followed us in.
“What is it?” Lindell asked.
“Lost light. I wanted to see the lost light.”
“What?”
“You can always find it. Even in the dark, even underground.”
I snapped my light back on, careful not to hit Lindell in the face with the beam, and headed toward the third tributary tunnel.
This time we needed to duck and proceed in single file as the tunnel grew smaller and more cramped. The channel curved to the right and soon we could see light ahead. An opening. We moved through and came out into an open bowl, a granite stadium chiseled out decades before. The Devil’s Punchbowl.
Over time the bottom of the bowl had filled with a layer of run-off granite debris and dust, a layer just thick enough for brush to put down roots and for a body to be buried. It was here that Dorsey and Cross had been led to the body of Antonio Markwell and where they would come back again with Marty Gessler. I found myself wondering how long she had been alive on that night three years ago. Had she been pushed at gunpoint through the tunnel or dragged, already dead, to her final resting spot?
Neither answer was any comfort. I looked back at Lindell as he came out of the tunnel into the opening. His face was ghostly white and I guessed that he might have been considering the same thing.
“Where?” he asked.
I turned from him and scanned the bottom of the bowl and then I saw it. A tiny white cross rising in the brown-and-yellow brush line by the granite facing.
“There.”
Lindell took the lead and walked quickly to the cross. He lifted it out of the ground without a second thought and tossed it to the side. He was already putting his shovel into the ground when I got there. I looked down at the cross. It was made from an old picket fence. At its center point was a photo of a young boy. A school photo framed with popsicle sticks. Antonio Markwell was long gone from this life and this spot but his family had marked it as a holy ground. Dorsey and Cross had then used it because they knew the ground here would never be disturbed by trespassers.
I leaned down and picked the tiny cross up. I leaned it against the granite wall, and then I went to work with my borrowed shovel.
We didn’t really dig with the shovels. We scraped at the surface, both of us instinctively reluctant to drive the point of the blade down too deeply.
In less than five minutes we found her. One final scrape of Lindell’s shovel revealed a thick plastic tarp. We put the shovels aside and we both squatted to look. The plastic was opaque, like a shower curtain. But through it was the distinct outline of a hand. A small withered hand. A woman’s hand.
“Okay, Roy, we found her. Maybe we should back out of here now. Make the calls.”
“No, I want to do this. I…”
He didn’t finish. He put his hand on my chest and gently pushed me back away. He then crouched over the spot and started digging with his hands, his arms moving quickly, as though he thought he was in a race against time, that he was trying to save her before she suffocated.
“I’m sorry, Roy,” I said to his back but I don’t think he heard me.
In a few minutes he had uncovered most of the plastic. From her face down to her hips. The plastic had apparently slowed but not stopped decay. The air in the bowl took on a musty smell. Moving back closer and peering over Lindell’s shoulder I could see that Agent Martha Gessler had been wrapped and buried fully clothed, with her arms crossed in front of her. Only half of her face was dimly visible through the plastic. The rest was hidden in blackness; blood in the folds of the plastic. I guessed that they had killed her with a head shot.
“Her computer is here,” Lindell said.
I stepped further forward to see. I could make out the outline of a laptop computer. It was wrapped in its own plastic and left on her chest.
“It holds the connection to Simonson,” I said, though that was obvious by now. “It was their edge. They
