“How’d that happen, the reporter?”
McCaleb nodded.
“I guess that means he talked to you, too.”
Bosch nodded.
“Tried to. Yesterday.”
Bosch looked around himself, noticed the cigarette in his hand and put it in his mouth.
“You mind if I smoke?”
“You already have been.”
Bosch pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the cigarette. He pulled the trash can out from beneath the desk and next to his seat to be used as an ashtray.
“Can’t seem to quit these.”
“Addictive personality. A good and bad attribute in a detective.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
He took a hit off the cigarette.
“We’ve known each other for what is it, ten, twelve years?”
“More or less.”
“We worked cases and you don’t work a case with somebody without taking some kind of measure. Know what I mean?”
McCaleb didn’t answer. Bosch flicked the cigarette on the side of the trash can.
“And you know what bothers me, even more than the accusation itself? It’s that it came from you. It’s how and why you could think this. You know, what was the measure you took of me that allowed you to make this jump?”
McCaleb gestured with both hands as if to say the answer was obvious.
“People change. If there was anything I learned about people from my job, it’s that any one of us is capable of anything, given the right circumstances, the right pressures, the right motives, the right moment.”
“That’s all psycho-bullshit. It doesn’t…”
Bosch’s sentence trailed off and he didn’t finish. He looked back at the computer and the papers spread across the desk. He pointed the cigarette at the laptop’s screen.
“You talk about darkness… a darkness more than night.”
“What about it?”
“When I was overseas…” He dragged deeply on the cigarette and exhaled, tilting his head back and shooting the smoke toward the ceiling. “… I was put into the tunnels and let me tell you, you want darkness? – that was darkness. Down in there. Sometimes you couldn’t see your fucking hand three inches in front of your face. It was so dark it hurt your eyes from straining to see just anything. Anything at all.”
He took another long hit from the cigarette. McCaleb studied Bosch’s eyes. They were staring blankly at the memory. Then suddenly he was back. He reached down and ground the half-finished cigarette into the inside edge of the can and dropped it in.
“This is my way of trying to quit. I smoke these shitty menthol things and never more than a half at a time. I’m down to about a pack a week.”
“It’s not going to work.”
“I know.”
He looked up at McCaleb and smiled crookedly in a sort of apologetic way. Quickly his eyes changed and he moved back to his story.
“And then sometimes it wasn’t that dark down there. In the tunnels. Somehow there was just enough light to make your way. And the thing is, I never knew where it came from. It was like it was trapped down there with the rest of us. My buddies and me, we called it lost light. It was lost but we found it.”
McCaleb waited but that was all Bosch said.
“What are you telling me, Harry?”
“That you missed something. I don’t know what it is but you missed something.”
He held McCaleb with his dark eyes. He reached back to the desk and picked up the stack of copied documents from Jaye Winston. He tossed them across the small room onto McCaleb’s lap. McCaleb made no move to catch them and they spilled to the floor in a jumble.
“Look again. You missed something and what you did see added up to me. Go back in and find the missing piece. It will change the addition.”
“I told you, man, I’m off it.”
“I’m putting you back on it.”
It was said with a tone of permanence, as if there was no choice for McCaleb.
“You’ve got till Wednesday. That writer’s deadline. You have to stop his story with the truth. You don’t, and you know what J. Reason Fowkkes will do with it.”
They sat in silence for a long moment looking at each other. McCaleb had met and talked with dozens of killers in his time as a profiler. Few of them readily admitted their crimes. So in that Bosch was no different. But the intensity with which he stared unblinkingly at him was something McCaleb had never seen before in any man, guilty or innocent.
“Storey’s killed two women, and those are just the two we know about. He’s the monster you spent your life chasing, McCaleb. And now… and now you’re giving him the key that unlocks the door to the cage. He gets out, he’ll do it again. You know his kind. You know he will.”
McCaleb could not compete with Bosch’s eyes. He looked down at the gun in his hands.
“What made you think I would listen, that I would do this?” he asked.
“Like I said, you take somebody’s measure. I got yours, McCaleb. You’ll do this. Or the monster you set free will haunt you the rest of your life. If God is really in your daughter’s eyes, how will you be able to look at her again?”
McCaleb unconsciously nodded and immediately wondered what he was doing.
“I remember you once told me something,” Bosch said. “You said if God is in the details, so is the devil. Meaning, the person you are looking for is usually right there in front of us, hiding in the details all the time. I always remember that. It still helps me.”
McCaleb nodded again. He looked down at the documents on the floor.
“Listen, Harry, you should know. I was convinced about this when I took it to Jaye. I’m not sure I can be turned the other way. If you want help, I’m probably the wrong one to go to.”
Bosch shook his head and smiled.
“That’s exactly why you’re the right one. If you can be convinced, the world can be convinced.”
“Yeah, where were you on New Year’s Eve? Why don’t we start with that.”
Bosch shook his shoulders.
“Home.”
“Alone?”
Bosch shook his shoulders again and didn’t answer. He stood up to go. He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He went through the narrow door first and up the steps to the salon. McCaleb followed, now holding the gun at his side.
Bosch slid the door open with his shoulder. As he stepped out onto the cockpit he looked up at the cathedral of the hillside, then he looked at McCaleb.
“So all that talk at my place about finding God’s hand, was that bullshit? Interview technique or something? A statement designed to get a response that could fit into a profile?”
McCaleb shook his head.
“No, no bullshit.”
“Good. I was hoping it wasn’t.”
Bosch climbed over the transom to the fantail. He untied his rental boat and got in and sat down on the rear bench. Before starting the engine he looked once more at McCaleb and pointed to the back of the boat.
“The Following Sea. What’s that mean?”
“My father named the boat. It was his originally. The following sea is the wave that comes up behind you, that hits you before you see it coming. I guess he named the boat as sort of a warning. You know, always watch your back.”
Bosch nodded.
“Overseas we used to tell each other, ‘Watch six.’”
Now McCaleb nodded.
“Same thing.”
They were silent a moment. Bosch put his hand on the boat motor’s pull handle but didn’t start the engine.
“You know the history of this place, Terry? I’m talking about back before the missionaries came.”
“No, do you?”
“A little. I used to read a lot of history books. When I was a kid. Whatever they had in the library. I liked local history. L.A. mostly, and California. I just liked reading it. We took a field trip here from the youth hall once. So I read up on it.”
McCaleb nodded.
“The Indians that lived out here – the Gabrielinos – were sun worshippers,” Bosch said. “The missionaries came and changed all of that – in fact, they were the ones who called them Gabrielinos. They called themselves something else but I don’t remember what it was. But before all that happened they’d been here and they worshipped the sun. It was so important to life on the island I guess they figured it had to be a god.”