McCaleb reached down into the box and gently touched her shoulder. She startled like an animal but then calmed. McCaleb then lay down flat on the floor and reached into the box to start removing the blindfold and gag.
“Harry, get an ambulance.”
I stood up and stepped back from the scene. I felt my chest growing tight, a clarity of thought coming over me. In all my years I had spoken for the dead many times. I had avenged the dead. I was at home with the dead. But I had never so clearly had a part in pulling someone away from the outstretched hands of death. And in that moment I knew we had done just that. And I knew that whatever happened afterward and wherever my life took me, I would always have this moment, that it would be a light that could lead me out of the darkest of tunnels.
“Harry, what are you doing? Get an ambulance.”
I looked at him.
“Yeah, right away.”
I stepped closer to the bars and looked in at him.
“You’re running out of time. You’ve exhausted your appeals, you’ve got a governor who needs to show he’s tough on crime. This is it, Victor. A week from today you take the needle.”
I waited for a reaction but there was nothing. He just looked at me and waited for what he knew I would ask.
“Time to come clean. Tell me who she was. Tell me where you took her from.”
He moved closer to the bars, close enough for me to smell the decay in his breath. I didn’t back away.
“All these years, Bosch. All these years and you still need to know. Why is that?”
“I just need to.”
“You and McCaleb.”
“What about him?”
“Oh, he came to see me, too.”
I knew McCaleb was out of the life. The job had taken his heart. He got a transplant and last I’d heard he lived on a boat with a fishing line in the water.
“When did he come?”
“A few months ago. Dropped by for a chat. Said he was in the neighborhood. He wanted to know the same thing. Who was the girl, where did she come from? He told me you even gave her a name back then, during the trial.
“He told you that?”
“Yes, standing right where you are standing.”
“Are you going to tell me or not?”
He smiled and stepped back from the bars. He walked over to the chessboard and looked down at it as if he were considering a move.
“You know, they used to let me keep a cat in here. I miss that cat.”
He picked up one of the game pieces but then hesitated and returned it to the same spot. He turned and looked at me.
“You know what I think? I think that you two can’t stand the thought of that girl not having a name, not coming from a home with a mommy and a daddy and a little baby brother. The idea of no one caring and no one missing her, it leaves you hollow, doesn’t it?”
“I just want to close the case.”
“Oh, but it is closed. You’re not here because of any case. You are here on your own. Admit it, Detective. Just as McCaleb came on his own. The idea of that pretty little girl-and by the way, if you thought she was beautiful in death, then you should have seen her before-the idea of her lying unclaimed in an unmarked grave all this time undercuts everything you do, doesn’t it?”
“It’s a loose end. I don’t like loose ends.”
“It’s more than that, Detective. I know.”
I said nothing. I wanted to leave. The idea I had of getting him to tell me seemed absurd now.
“If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”
He smiled broadly.
“If a girl is murdered in the city and nobody cares, does it matter?”
“I care.”
“Exactly.”
He came back to the bars.
“And you need me to relieve you of that burden by giving you a name, a mommy and daddy who care.”
He was a foot away from me. I could reach through the bars and grab his throat if I wanted to. But that would’ve been what he wanted me to do.
“Well, I won’t release you, Detective. You put me in this cage. I put you in that one.”
He stepped back and pointed at me. I looked down and realized both my hands were tightly gripping the steel bars of the cage. My cage.
I looked back up at him and his smile was back, as guiltless as a baby’s.
“Funny, isn’t it? I remember that day-ten years ago today. Sitting in the back of the car while you cops played hero. So full of yourselves for saving the girl. Bet you never thought it would come to this, did you? You saved one but you lost the other.”
I lowered my head to the bars.
“Seguin, you’re going to burn. You are going to hell.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But I hear it’s a dry heat.”
He laughed loudly and I looked at him.
“Don’t you know, Detective? You have to believe in heaven to believe in hell.”
I abruptly turned from the bars and headed back toward the steel door. Above it I saw the mounted camera. I made an open-the-door gesture with my hand and picked up my speed as I got closer. I needed to get out of there.
I heard Seguin’s voice echoing off the walls behind me.
“I’ll keep her close, Bosch! I’ll keep her right here with me! Eternally together! Eternally mine!”
When I got to the steel door, I hit it with both fists until I heard the electronic lock snap and the guard began to slide it open.
“All right, man, all right. What’s the hurry?”
“Just get me out of here,” I said as I pushed past him.
I could still hear Seguin’s voice echoing from the death house as I crossed back across the open field.
One-Dollar Jackpot
The call came in after the usual killing hours. Bosch checked the clock as he rolled to the side of the bed and sat up. It was 5:45 A.M. and that was late for a murder call.
It was Lieutenant Larry Gandle with the news.
“Harry, you and Ignacio are up. Pacific is turning over a case to us. Female, thirty-eight years of age, name of Tracey Blitzstein. She got shot to death this morning in her car. One in the head. She was parked in her own driveway.”
The name sounded slightly familiar but Bosch couldn’t immediately place it.
“Who is she and why are we getting it?”
“She’s sort of a TV star. She plays poker. Uses the name Tracey Blitz. Her husband plays, too, I’m told. So if you watch that sort of thing on cable, then you’ve probably seen her a few times. She gets profiled. They use her on the commercials. She was good-looking and apparently the best thing the female species had to offer in the arena of professional poker.”
Bosch nodded. He only watched poker on TV when he had insomnia and the World Series of Poker reruns were on ESPN. He knew it was very popular. But all that wasn’t why he knew the name Tracey Blitz. Years earlier the
