The only rub came when Bosch’s phone sounded loudly in the dining room. He had set the ringer to the loudest position so he would be sure to hear it while driving. He had forgotten to lower it to the usual nonintrusive buzz. His fellow diners frowned at him. One woman went so far as to shake her head in disgust, apparently pegging him as an arrogant bigcity jerk.
Arrogant or not, Bosch took the call because he saw on the ID that it was a 404 area code—Atlanta. As expected, the caller was one of the Charlotte Jacksons he had left a message for. It took him only a few questions to determine that she was the wrong Charlotte Jackson. He thanked her and hung up. He smiled and nodded at the lady who had shaken her head at his rudeness.
He opened the file he had brought into the restaurant and crossed out Charlotte Jackson number four. He was now down to two possibilities—numbers three and seven—and one of them he did not even have a number for.
By the time Harry returned to the parking lot, it was dark out and he was tired from the long day on the road. He thought about sitting in his car and taking a nap for an hour but then dismissed the idea. He had to keep moving.
Standing by the car’s trunk, he looked up into the sky. It was a cloudless and moonless night, but the stars were out in force over the Central Valley. Bosch didn’t like that. He needed it darker. He popped the trunk.
27
Bosch turned the car’s lights off as he cruised past the gated entrance to the Cosgrove estate. There was not another car on Hammett Road. He went another two hundred yards to where the road curved slightly right and then pulled off onto the dirt shoulder.
He had already turned off the interior convenience light, so the car remained dark when he opened the door. He stepped out into the cool air and looked and listened. The night was silent. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded square of paper. He clipped it under the wind-shield. Earlier he had written a note on it. It said:
OUT OF GAS—WILL RETURN SOON
Bosch was wearing the mud boots he had retrieved from one of the boxes in the trunk. He carried a small Mag-Lite that he hoped not to have to use. He stepped down the three-foot embankment and gingerly moved into the water, sending a shimmering ripple across the floor of the almond grove.
Bosch’s plan was to proceed at an angle and make his way back to the entrance road. He would then move parallel to it until he got to the Cosgrove home. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or looking for. He was following his instincts, and they told him Cosgrove, with his money and power, was at the center of things. He felt the need to move in closer to him, to see where and how he lived.
The water was only a few inches deep but the mud sucked at Bosch’s boots and made his progress slow. Several times the wet earth refused to let go of its grip and he almost pulled his foot right out of its boot.
The water floor reflected the starscape above and made Bosch feel as though he was completely exposed in his trespass. Every twenty yards or so he would move in under a tree for cover and so that he could rest for a moment and listen. The grove was deathly quiet, with not even the occasional buzz of insects in the air. The only sound was in the distance, and Bosch didn’t know what was making it. It was a steady
After a while the grove began to feel like a maze to him. The fully mature trees stood thirty feet high and appeared to be exact duplicates of one another. The trees had been planted along astonishingly straight lines. This made every direction in which Bosch looked appear to be the same. He began to fear that he would become lost and wished he had brought something with him to mark the trail.
Finally, after a half hour, he made it to the entrance road. He already felt exhausted, as though his boots were made of concrete. But he decided not to abandon the mission. He proceeded along a parallel, moving from tree to tree in the first row next to the road.
Almost an hour later, Bosch saw the lights of the mansion up ahead through the branches of the last few rows of trees. He plodded on, noting that the whooshing sound was growing louder as he got nearer and nearer to the lights.
When he got to the end of the grove, he crouched on the side of the embankment and studied what lay before him. The mansion was an exotic take on a French chateau. It was only two stories high but had steeply pitched roof angles and turreted corners. Something about it reminded Bosch of a smaller version of the Chateau Marmont back in L.A.
The house was lit from the outside by floodlights angled up from the ground. There was a large turnaround at the front and a tributary drive that wrapped around behind the main structure. Bosch assumed the garage was in the back. There were no vehicles anywhere in sight, and Bosch realized that all of the lights that he had seen through the grove were exterior. The house itself was dark. It looked like nobody was home.
Bosch stood up and climbed the embankment. He started toward the house and soon found himself on a raised concrete pad. The H design painted in the center indicated that it was a helicopter pad. He continued on, moving directly toward the house, when a deviation in his peripheral vision distracted him. He looked to his left toward a slight rise in the landscape.
At first he didn’t see anything. The house was so brightly lit that the stars above were barely visible and the area around the mansion seemed pitch-black. But then he saw the movement again, high up over the hill. He suddenly realized that he was seeing the dark blades of a wind turbine cutting through the air, momentarily blocking the dim light of the stars and rearranging the sky.
The whooshing sound he had been listening to as he moved through the grove was coming from the wind turbine. Cosgrove so believed in the power of the wind that he had built one of his iron giants in his own backyard. Bosch guessed that the lights that bathed the exterior of the chateau were powered by the winds that tirelessly moved across the Valley.
Bosch refocused his attention on the lighted mansion, and almost immediately he was struck with a feeling of hesitation, a second-guessing of his actions. The man who lived inside the walls in front of him was smart enough and powerful enough to harness the wind. He lived behind a wall of money and a phalanx—no, make that an army —of trees. He did not need to run a fence along the edges of his vast property, because he knew the grove would intimidate any intruder who dared to cross it. He lived in a castle with a surrounding moat, and who was Bosch to think he could take him down? Bosch didn’t even know the exact nature of the crime. Anneke Jespersen was dead and Bosch was chasing a hunch. He had no evidence of anything. He had a twenty-year-old coincidence and nothing else.
Suddenly, a wave of mechanical sound and wind broke over him as a helicopter came in over the grove and hovered above. Bosch broke and ran back toward the grove, sliding down the embankment into the mud and water. He looked back and watched the helicopter—a black silhouette against the dark sky—maneuver into position over the landing pad. A spotlight on the craft’s underside came on and lit the targeted H on the pad. Bosch ducked down lower and watched as the craft seemed to struggle against the wind to hold the line of its landing rails. As the helicopter slowly came down and gently met the pad, the light cut off and the high-pitched turbine was shut down.
The rotors free spun for a while and then came to a halt. The pilot’s-side door opened and a figure climbed out. Bosch was at least a hundred feet away and could only see the shape of the person, whom he identified as a male. The pilot moved to the back door and opened it. Bosch expected another person to alight from the rear cabin, but it was a dog that leaped out. The pilot reached in for a backpack, closed the door, and started toward the house.
The dog trotted behind the pilot for a few yards but then suddenly stopped and turned directly toward the spot where Bosch was hiding. It was a big dog, but it was too dark for Bosch to identify a breed. He heard it growl first and then it started running toward him.
Bosch froze as the animal quickly covered the ground between them. He knew there was nowhere he could move. The mud was behind him. He wouldn’t make it two steps. He crouched lower and closer to the embankment, thinking that maybe the angry dog would jump over him and get mired in the mud.
And he pulled his weapon off his belt. If the dog didn’t stop, Bosch would be ready to stop it.
