“We’re going to go check on that pizza,” Bosch said, and he stood up. “We’ll only be a couple of minutes.”
Outside the interview room Bosch checked his anger and said, “My fault. We should have talked more about how we wanted to do it before we heard his story. I like to hear what they have to say first, then ask questions. It was my fault.”
“No problem,” Wish said curtly. “He doesn’t seem that valuable anyway.”
“Maybe.” He thought a moment. “I was thinking of going back in and talking a little more to him, maybe bring an Identikit in. And if he doesn’t get any better at remembering things we could hypnotize him.”
Bosch had no way of knowing what her reaction to the last suggestion would be. He offered it in an offhand manner, half hoping it would slip by unnoticed. California courts had ruled that hypnotizing a witness taints that witness’s later court testimony. If they hypnotized Sharkey, he could never be a witness in any court case that could arise from the Meadows investigation.
Wish frowned.
“I know,” Bosch said. “We’d lose him in court. But we might never get to court with what he’s given us now. You just said yourself he’s not that valuable.”
“I just don’t know whether we should close the door on his usefulness now. So early in the investigation.”
Bosch walked over to the interview room door and looked through the one-way glass at the boy. He was smoking another cigarette. He put it down on the ashtray and stood up. He looked at the door window, but Bosch knew he couldn’t see out. The boy quickly and quietly switched his chair with the one Wish had been using. Bosch smiled and said, “He’s a smart kid. There might be more there that we won’t get unless we put him under. I think it’s worth the chance.”
“I didn’t know you were one of LAPD’s hypnotists. I must have missed that in your file.”
“I’m sure there’s a lot you missed,” Bosch replied. After a few moments, he said, “I guess I’m one of the last around. After the supreme court shot it down the department quit training people. There was only one class of us. I was one of the youngest. Most of the others have retired.”
“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t think we should do it yet. Let’s talk to him some more, maybe wait a couple days before we waste him as a witness.”
“Fine. But in a couple days who knows where a kid like Sharkey will be?”
“Oh, you’re resourceful. You found him this time. You can do it again.”
“You want to take a shot in there?”
“No, you’re doing okay. As long as I can jump in now, whenever I think of something.”
She smiled and he smiled and they went back into the interview room, which smelled of smoke and sweat. Bosch left the door open again to air it out. Wish didn’t have to ask.
“No food?” Sharkey said.
“Still on the way,” Bosch said.
Bosch and Wish took Sharkey through his story two more times, picking up small details along the way. They did it as a team. Partners, exchanging knowing looks, surreptitious nods, even smiles. A few times Bosch noticed Wish slipping in her chair and thought he saw a smile play on Sharkey’s boyish face. When the pizza came he protested the anchovies but still ate three-quarters of the pie and downed two of the Cokes. Bosch and Wish passed.
Sharkey told them the Jeep that Meadows’s body came in was dirty white or beige. He said there was a seal on the side door but he could not describe it. Perhaps this was so it would look like a DWP vehicle, Bosch thought. Maybe it was a DWP vehicle. Now he definitely wanted to hypnotize the boy, but he decided not to bring it up again. He’d wait for Wish to come around, to see that it had to be done.
Sharkey said the one who stayed behind in the Jeep as the body was dragged into the pipe didn’t say a word the whole time the boy watched. This person was smaller than the driver. Sharkey described seeing only a slightly built form, a whisper of a silhouette against what little light there was from the moon above the reservoir perimeter’s thick stand of pine.
“What did this other guy do?” Wish asked.
“Just watched, I guess. Like a lookout. He didn’t even do the driving. I guess he was in charge or something.”
The boy got a better look at the driver but not enough to describe a face, or to make a drawing with the facial templates in the Identikit that Bosch had brought into the interview room. The driver had dark hair and was white. Sharkey couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be any more exact in his description. He had worn matching dark shirt and pants, maybe overalls. Sharkey said that he also wore some kind of equipment belt or carpenter’s apron. Its dark tool pockets hung empty at the hips and flapped like an apron at his waist. This was curious to Bosch, and he asked Sharkey several questions, coming at it from different angles but getting no better description.
After an hour they were finished. They left Sharkey in the smoky room while they conferred outside again. Wish said, “All we have to do now is find a Jeep with a blanket in the back. Do a microanalysis and match hairs. Only must be a couple million white or beige Jeeps in the state. You want me to put out a BOLO, or you want to handle it?”
“Look. Two hours ago we had nothing. Now we’ve got a lot. If you want, let me hypnotize the kid. Who knows, we might get a license plate, a better description of the driver, maybe he’ll remember a name spoken or be able to describe the seal on the door.”
Bosch held his hands out palms up. His offer was out, but she had already turned it down. And she did again.
“Not yet, Bosch. Let me talk to Rourke. Maybe tomorrow. I don’t want to rush into that and possibly have it come back on us as a mistake. Okay?”
He nodded and dropped his hands.
“So what now?” she said.
“Well, the kid’s eaten. Why don’t we get him squared away and then you and I get something to eat? There’s a place-”
“I can’t,” she said.
“-on Overland I know.”
“I already have plans for tonight. I’m sorry. Maybe we can make it another night.”
“Sure.” He walked over to the interview room door and looked through the glass. Anything to avoid showing his face to her. He felt foolish for trying to move so quickly with her. He said, “If you have to get going, go ahead. I’ll get him in a shelter or something for the night. We don’t both have to waste our time with it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’ll take care of him. I’ll get a patrol unit to take us. We’ll get his bike on the way. I’ll have ’em drop me by my car.”
“That’s nice. I mean about you getting his bike and taking care of him.”
“Well, we made a deal with him, remember?”
“I remember. But you care about him. I watched how you handled him. You see some of yourself there?”
He turned away from the glass to look at her.
“No, not especially,” he said. “He’s just another wit that has to be interviewed. You think he’s a little bastard now, wait another year, wait till he’s nineteen or twenty, if he makes it. He’ll be a monster then. Preying on people. This isn’t the last time he’ll be sitting in that room. He’ll be in and out of there his whole life till he kills somebody or they kill him. It’s Darwin’s rules; survival of the fittest, and he’s fit to survive. So no, I don’t care about him. I’m putting him in a shelter because I want to know where he is in case we need him again. That’s all.”
“Nice speech, but I don’t think so. I know a little bit about you, Bosch. You care, all right. The way you got him dinner and asked him-”
“Look, I don’t care how many times you read my file. You think that means you know about me? I told you, that’s bullshit.”
He had come up close to her, until his face was only a foot from hers. But she looked away from him, down at her notebook, as if what she had written there might have something to do with what he was saying.
“Look,” he said, “we can work this together, maybe even find out who killed Meadows if we get a few more breaks like the one with the kid today. But we won’t really be partners and we won’t really know each other. So maybe we shouldn’t act like we do. Don’t tell me about your little brother with a crew cut and how he looks the way I did, because you don’t know how I was. A bunch of papers and pictures in a file don’t say anything about me.”
She closed the notebook and put it in her purse. Then she finally looked up at him. There was a knocking from inside the interview room. Sharkey was looking at himself in the mirrored window of the door. But they both ignored him and Wish just drilled Bosch with her eyes.
“You always get this way when a woman turns you down for dinner?” she asked calmly.
“That’s got nothing to do with it and you know it.”
“Sure. I know it.” She started to walk away, then said, “Let’s say nineA.M., we meet at the bureau again?”
He didn’t answer and then she did walk away, toward the squad room door. Sharkey pounded on his door again, and Bosch looked over and saw the boy picking the acne on his face in the door’s mirror. Wish turned once more before she was out of the room.
“I wasn’t talking about my little brother,” she said. “He was my big brother, actually. And I was talking about a long time ago. About the way he looked when I was a little girl and he was going away for a while, to Vietnam.”
Bosch didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. He realized what was coming.
“I remember how he looked then,” she said, “because it was the last time I saw him. It sticks with you. He was one of the ones that didn’t come back.”
She walked out.