broken up by the tire stores and auto repair and parts shops. The street was almost like one-stop shopping: buy a junker here and get it fixed up over there. Grab a fish taco at the
Just as he spotted the entrance ramp to CA-99, he also saw his first “Drummond for Congress” sign. It was 4 ? 6 and posted on a safety fence that crossed the overpass. The sign, which had Drummond’s smiling face on it, could be seen by all who headed north on the freeway below. Bosch noticed that someone had drawn a Hitler mustache on the candidate’s upper lip.
As he came down the ramp to the freeway, Bosch checked the rearview and thought he saw the blue compact coming down behind him. Once he merged into traffic, he checked again, but traffic now obscured his view. He dismissed the sighting as paranoia.
He headed north again, and just a few miles outside Modesto, he saw the exit for Hammett Road. He left the freeway again and followed Hammett west and deep into a grove of almond trees planted in perfect lines, their dark trunks rising from the flooded irrigation plain. The water was so still that it looked like the trees were growing out of a vast mirror.
There was no way that he could have missed the entrance to the Cosgrove estate. The turnoff was wide and guarded by a brick wall and black-iron gate. There was an overhead camera and a call box for those who wished to enter. The letters
Bosch used the wide expanse of asphalt at the entrance to turn the car around as though he were a lost traveler. As he headed back on Hammett in the direction of the 99, he noted that the security was all about the entrance road to the estate. No one could drive on without obtaining permission and having the gate opened. But walking on was another story. There was no wall or fence prohibiting access. Anyone willing to get their feet wet could make their way in by slogging through the almond grove. Unless there were hidden cameras and motion sensors in the grove, it was a classic deficiency in security. All show and no go.
As soon as he got back on the northbound 99 he passed the sign announcing his welcome to San Joaquin County. The next three exits were for the town of Ripon, and Bosch saw a sign for a motel poking above the thick pink-and-white-flowered bushes that lined the freeway. He took the next exit and worked his way back to the Blu- Lite Motel and Liquor Market. It was an old ranch-style motel right out of the 1950s. Bosch wanted a place that was private, where people would not be around to see his comings and goings. Bosch thought it would be perfect because he saw only one car parked in front of its many rooms.
He paid for the room at the counter in the liquor store. He went big, paying the top-of-the-line $49 rate for a room with a kitchenette.
“You don’t have Wi-Fi here by any chance, do you?” he asked the clerk.
“Not officially,” the clerk said. “But if you give me five bucks, I’ll give you the password on the Wi-Fi from the house behind the motel. You’ll pick up the signal in your efficiency.”
“Who gets the five bucks?”
“I split it with the guy who lives back there.”
Bosch thought about it for a moment.
“It’s private and secure,” the clerk offered.
“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll take it.”
He drove over to room 7 and parked in front of the door. Bringing his overnight bag inside, he put it on the bed and looked around. There was a small table in the kitchenette with two chairs. The room would work.
Before leaving, Bosch changed his shirt, hanging the blue button-down in the closet in case he stayed through Wednesday and needed to wear it again. He opened his bag and selected a black pullover shirt. He got dressed, then locked the place up and went back to his car. “Over the Rainbow” was playing again as he pulled back out on the road.
Bosch’s next stop was Manteca, and long before he got there, he could see the water tower that said “Cosgrove Ag” on it. The Cosgrove business enterprise was located on a frontage road running parallel to the freeway. It consisted of an office structure as well as a vast produce storage and trucking facility where dozens of carriers and tank trucks were lined up and ready for transport. Flanking the complex were what seemed to Bosch to be miles and miles of grapevines covering the landscape until it rolled upward toward the ash-colored mountains to the west. Out on the horizon the natural landscape was broken only by the steel giants that were coming down the slopes like invaders from another world. The towering wind turbines that Carl Cosgrove had brought to the Valley.
After being duly impressed by the expanse of the Cosgrove empire, Bosch went slumming. Following the maps he had printed Saturday, he went to the addresses the DMV held for Francis John Dowler and Reginald Banks. Neither place impressed Bosch beyond the fact that they appeared to be on Cosgrove land.
Banks lived in a small free-standing home that backed up to the almond groves off Brunswick Road. Checking his map and noting the lack of dedicated roads between Brunswick to the north and Hammett to the south, Bosch believed that it might be possible to enter the grove on foot behind Banks’s home and come out on Hammett—many hours later.
Banks’s home needed a paint job and its windows needed cleaning. If he was living there with his family, there were no indications of it. The yard was strewn with beer bottles, all within easy throwing distance of a porch with an old seam-split couch on it. Banks had not cleaned up after his weekend.
The last stop before dinner was Dowler’s double-wide mobile home with the TV dish mounted on the roof’s crest line. It was located in a trailer park off the frontage road, and each home had a parking pad equal in length to the home itself for parking the long hauler. The park was where Cosgrove drivers lived.
While Bosch sat in his rental car looking at the Dowler residence, a door opened on the side under the carport and a woman stepped out and looked suspiciously at him. Bosch waved like he was an old friend, disarming her a bit. She stepped down the driveway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was what Bosch’s old partner Jerry Edgar would have called a 50/50—fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight.
“You looking for somebody?” she asked.
“Well, I was hoping to find Frank at home. But I see his truck is gone.”
Bosch waved toward the empty parking pad.
“He coming back anytime soon?”
“He had to take a load of juice up to American Canyon. He might have to wait up there until they have something for him to bring back down. He should be back tomorrow night prob’ly. Who are you?”
“Just a friend passing through. I knew him twenty years ago in the Gulf. Will you tell him John Bagnall said hello?”
“I’ll do that.”
Bosch couldn’t remember if Dowler’s wife’s name was in the material Chu had put together. If he’d had the name, he would have used it as he said good-bye. She turned and headed back to the door she had left open. Bosch noticed a motorcycle with a gas tank painted like a bluebottle fly parked under one of the double-wide’s awnings. He guessed that when Dowler wasn’t running grape juice in a big rig, he liked gliding on a Harley.
Bosch drove out of the park, hoping he had not caused enough suspicion to warrant anything more than curiosity on the woman’s part. And he hoped Dowler wasn’t the sort of husband who called home every night when he was on the road.
Bosch’s second-to-last stop on his tour of the Central Valley took him to Stockton, where he pulled into the lot of the Steers, the steakhouse where Christopher Henderson met his end in the walk-in cooler.
But Bosch had to admit to himself that he was doing more than observing the place as a part of the case. He was famished and had been thinking about eating a good steak all day long. It would be hard to beat the steak he had gotten at Craig’s on Saturday night, but he was hungry enough to try.
Never one to be self-conscious about eating in a restaurant alone, he told the young woman at the greeting station that he’d prefer a table over a seat at the bar. He was led to a two-top next to the glass-paneled wine cooler, and he chose the seat that gave him a full view of the restaurant. It was his habit to do this for safety, but he also always tried to prepare to be lucky. Maybe the man himself, Carl Cosgrove, might enter his own restaurant to eat.
For the next two hours Bosch saw no one he recognized enter the establishment, but all was not for naught. He had a New York strip with mashed potatoes, and all of it was delicious. He also sipped a glass of Cosgrove merlot that went nicely with the beef.
