“No, no and no.”
Bosch remembered then that she had the habit of asking multiple questions at once.
He made the turn on yellow and pulled into the lot. There were no parking spaces available but he wasn’t interested in parking. He cruised slowly, checking each car. There were no Toyotas.
“Where’s a Toyota when you need one?” he said. “It’s got to be in this area somewhere.”
“Maybe we should check the street,” Walling suggested.
He nodded and nosed his car into the alley at the end of the parking lot. He was going to turn left to turn around and go back to the street. But when he checked to see if he was clear on the right he saw an old white pickup truck with a camper shell parked half a block down the alley next to a green trash Dumpster. The truck was facing them and he couldn’t tell what the make of it was.
“Is that a Toyota?” he asked.
Walling turned and looked.
“Bosch, you’re a genius,” she exclaimed.
Bosch turned and drove toward the truck and as he got closer he could see that it was indeed a Toyota. So could Walling. She pulled out her phone but Bosch reached across and put his hand on it.
“Let’s just check it out first. I could be wrong about this.”
“No, Bosch, you’re on a roll.”
But she put the phone away. Bosch pulled slowly past the pickup, giving it a once-over. He then turned around at the end of the block and came back. He stopped his car ten feet behind it. There was no plate on the back. A cardboard LOST TAG sign had been put in its place.
Bosch wished he had brought the keys he had found in Digoberto Gonzalves’s pocket. They got out and approached the truck, coming up on either side of it. When he got close Bosch noticed that the rear window hatch of the camper shell had been left open a couple of inches. He reached forward and pulled it up all the way. An air-pressure hinge held it open. Bosch leaned in close to look into the interior. It was dark because the truck was parked in shadow and the windows on the shell were darkly tinted.
“Harry, you have that monitor?”
He pulled her radiation monitor out of his pocket and held it up in his hand as he leaned into the darkness of the truck’s cargo hold. No alarm sounded. He leaned back out and put the monitor on his belt. He then reached in to the latch and lowered the truck’s rear gate.
The back of the truck was piled with junk. There were empty bottles and cans strewn everywhere, a leather desk chair with a broken leg, scrap pieces of aluminum, an old water cooler and other debris. And there by the raised wheel well on the right side was a lead gray container that looked like a small mop bucket on wheels.
“There,” he said. “Is that the pig?”
“I think it is,” Walling said excitedly. “I think it is!”
There was no warning sticker on it or radiation-alert symbol. They had been peeled off. Bosch leaned into the truck and grabbed one of the handles. He pulled it clear of the debris around it and rolled it to the tailgate. The top was latched in four places.
“Do we open it and make sure the stuff is in there?” he asked.
“No,” Walling said. “We back off and call in the team. They have protection.”
She pulled her phone out again. While she called for the radiation team and backup units Bosch moved to the front of the truck. He looked through the window and into the cab. He saw a half-eaten breakfast burrito sitting on a flattened brown bag on the center console. And he saw more junk on the passenger side. His eyes held on a camera that was sitting on an old briefcase with a broken handle on the passenger seat. The camera didn’t appear broken or dirty. It looked brand-new.
Bosch checked the door and found it unlocked. He realized that Gonzalves had forgotten about his truck and his possessions when the cesium started burning through his body. He had gotten out and stumbled toward the parking lot, seeking help, leaving everything else behind and unlocked.
Bosch opened the driver’s door and reached in with the radiation monitor. Nothing happened. No alert. He stood back up and replaced it on his belt. From his pocket he got out a pair of latex gloves and put them on while listening to Walling talking to someone about finding the pig.
“No, we didn’t open it,” she said. “Do you want us to?”
She listened some before responding.
“I didn’t think so. Just get them here as fast as you can and maybe this will all be over.”
Bosch leaned back into the truck through the driver-side door and picked up the camera. It was a Nikon digital and he remembered that the lens cover found beneath the master bed at the Kent house by the SID team had said Nikon on it. He believed he was holding the camera that had taken the photograph of Alicia Kent. He turned it on and for once he knew what he was doing as he examined a piece of electronic equipment. He had a digital camera that he routinely carried with him when he went to Hong Kong to visit his daughter. He’d bought it when he had taken her to Disneyland China.
His camera wasn’t a Nikon but he was able to quickly determine that the camera he had just found had no photos in its memory because the chip had been removed.
Bosch put the camera down and began looking through the things piled on the passenger seat. In addition to the broken briefcase, there was a child’s lunch box as well as a manual for operating an Apple computer and a poker from a fireplace tool set. Nothing connected and nothing interested him. He noticed a golf putter and a rolled-up poster on the floor in front of the seat.
He moved the brown bag and the burrito out of the way and shifted his weight to one elbow on the armrest between the seats so he could reach over and open the glove compartment. And there, sitting in the otherwise empty space, was a handgun. Bosch lifted it out and turned it in his hand. It was a Smith amp; Wesson.22 caliber revolver.
“I think we’ve got the murder weapon here,” he called out.
There was no response from Walling. She was still at the back of the truck talking on her phone, still issuing orders in an animated voice.
Bosch returned the weapon to the glove box and closed it, deciding to leave the weapon in its place for the Forensics team. He noticed the rolled-up poster again and decided for no reason other than curiosity to take a look at it. Using his elbow on the center armrest for support he unrolled it across all of the junk on the passenger seat. It was a chart depicting twelve yoga positions.
Bosch immediately thought about the discolored space he had seen on the wall in the workout room at the Kent house. He wasn’t sure but he thought the dimensions of the poster would be a close match to that space on the wall. He quickly rerolled the poster and started to back out of the cab so he could show Walling the discovery.
But as he was pulling out he noticed that the armrest between the seats was also a storage compartment. He stopped and opened it.
He froze. There was a cup holder and in it were several steel capsules resembling bullet cartridges closed flat on both ends. The steel was so polished it almost looked like silver. It might even have been mistaken for silver.
Bosch moved the radiation monitor over the capsules in a circular pattern. There was no alarm. He turned the device over in his hand and looked at it. He saw a small switch on its side. With his thumb he pushed it up. A blaring alarm suddenly went off, the frequency of tones so fast that they sounded like one long, eardrum-piercing siren.
Bosch jumped back out of the truck and slammed the door shut. The poster fell to the ground.
“Harry!” Walling yelled. “What?”
She rushed toward him, closing her phone on her hip. Bosch pushed the switch again and turned the monitor off.
“What is it?” she yelled.
Bosch pointed toward the truck’s door.
“The gun’s in the glove box and the cesium’s in the center compartment.”
“What?”
“The cesium is in the compartment under the armrest. He took the capsules out of the pig. That’s why they weren’t in his pocket. They were in the center armrest.”
