He touched his right hip, the place where Gonzalves was burned by radiation. The same spot would have been next to the armrest compartment when he was sitting in the truck.
Rachel didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just stared at his face.
“Are you okay?” she finally asked.
Bosch almost laughed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask me in about ten years.”
She hesitated as if she knew something but couldn’t share it.
“What?” Bosch asked.
“Nothing. You should be checked out, though.”
“What are they going to be able to do? Look, I wasn’t in the truck that long. It’s not like Gonzalves, who was sitting in there with it. He was practically eating off of it.”
She didn’t answer. Bosch handed her the monitor.
“It was never on. I thought it was on when you gave it to me.”
She took it and looked at it in her hand.
“I thought it was, too.”
Bosch thought about how he had carried the monitor in his pocket rather than clipped to his belt. He had probably switched it off unknowingly when he had twice put it in and removed it. He looked back at the truck and wondered if he had possibly just hurt or killed himself.
“I need a drink of water,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle in the trunk.”
Bosch walked back to the rear of his car. Using the open trunk lid to shield Walling’s view of him, he leaned his hands down on the bumper for support and tried to decipher the messages his body was sending to his brain. He felt something happening but didn’t know if it was something physiological or if the shakes he felt were just an emotional response to what had just happened. He remembered what the ER doctor had said about Gonzalves and how the most serious damage was internal. Was his own immune system shutting down? Was he circling the drain?
He suddenly thought of his daughter, getting a vision of her at the airport the last time he saw her.
He cursed out loud.
“Harry?”
Bosch looked around the trunk lid. Rachel was walking toward him.
“The teams are headed this way. They’ll be here in five minutes. How do you feel?”
“I think I’m okay.”
“Good. I talked to the head of the team. He thinks the exposure was too short to be anything serious. But you still should go to the ER and get checked out.”
“We’ll see.”
He reached into the trunk and got a liter bottle of water out of his kit. It was an emergency bottle he kept for surveillances that dragged on longer than expected. He opened it and took two strong pulls. The water wasn’t cold but it felt good going down. His throat was dry.
Bosch recapped the bottle and put it back in the kit. He stepped around the car to Walling. As he walked toward her he looked past her to the south. He realized that the alley they were in extended several blocks past the back of the Easy Print and ran behind all the storefronts and offices on Cahuenga. All the way down to Barham.
In the alley every twenty yards or so was a green Dumpster positioned perpendicular to the rear of the structures. Bosch realized they had been pushed out of spaces between the buildings and fenced corrals. Just like in Silver Lake, it was pickup day and the Dumpsters were waiting for the city trucks to come.
Suddenly it all came to him. Like fusion. Two elements coming together and creating something new. The thing that bothered him about the crime scene photos, the yoga poster, everything. The gamma rays had shot right through him but they had left him enlightened. He knew. He understood.
“He’s a scavenger.”
“Who is?”
“Digoberto Gonzalves,” Bosch said, his eyes looking down the alley. “It’s collection day. The Dumpsters are all pushed out for the city trucks. Gonzalves is a scavenger, a Dumpster diver, and he knew they would be out and this would be a good time to come here.”
He looked at Walling before completing the thought.
“And so did somebody else,” he said.
“You mean he found the cesium in a Dumpster?”
Bosch nodded and pointed down the alley.
“All the way at the end, that’s Barham. Barham takes you up to Lake Hollywood. Lake Hollywood takes you to the overlook. This case never leaves the map page.”
Walling came over and stood in front of him, blocking his view. Bosch could now hear sirens in the distance.
“What are you saying? That Nassar and El-Fayed took the cesium and stashed it in a Dumpster at the bottom of the hill? Then this scavenger comes along and finds it?”
“I’m saying you’ve got the cesium back so now we’re looking at this as a homicide again. You come down from the overlook and you can be in this alley in five minutes.”
“So what? They stole the cesium and killed Kent just so they could come down here and stash it? Is that what you’re saying? Or are you saying they just threw it all away? Why would they do that? I mean, does that make any sense at all? I mean, I don’t see that scaring people in the way we know they want to scare us.”
Bosch noted that she had asked six questions at once this time, possibly a new record.
“Nassar and El-Fayed were never near the cesium,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying.”
He walked over to the truck and picked the rolled poster up off the ground. He handed it to Rachel. The sirens were getting louder.
She unrolled the poster in her hands and looked at it.
“What is this? What does it mean?”
Bosch took it back from her and started rolling it up.
“Gonzalves found that in the same Dumpster where he found the gun and the camera and the lead pig.”
“So? What does it
Two fed cars pulled into the alley a block away and started making their way toward them, weaving around the Dumpsters pushed out for pickup. As they got close Bosch could see that the driver of the lead car was Jack Brenner.
“Do you hear me, Harry? What does it-”
Bosch’s knees suddenly seemed to give out and he fell into her, throwing his arms around her to stop himself from hitting the ground.
“Bosch!”
She grabbed on and held him.
“Uh… I’m not feeling so good,” he mumbled. “I think I better… can you take me to my car?”
She helped him straighten up and then started walking him toward his car. He put his arm over her shoulders. Car doors were slamming behind them as the agents got out.
“Where are the keys?” Walling asked.
He held the key ring out to her just as Brenner ran up to them.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“He was exposed. The cesium is in the center console in the truck cab. Be careful. I’m going to take him to the hospital.”
Brenner stepped back, as if whatever Bosch had were contagious.
“Okay,” he said. “Call me when you can.”
Bosch and Walling kept moving toward the car.
“Come on, Bosch,” Walling said. “Stay with me. Hang in there and we’ll get you taken care of.”
She had called him by his last name again.
