Page 63
“That’s to be expected. Have you seen any blood in your urine?”
“No.”
“Have you urinated this morning?”
“Yes, like fifteen minutes ago.”
“And it was clean?”
“Yes, clean.”
“Very good. Please call me if anything changes. This is my cell number.”
“Will do. Thanks for checking on me.”
“Of course.”
They disconnected and Bosch went back to weighing his options. The coffee was ready in the kitchen and he poured a cup, then went out on the back deck to savor the first cup of the morning before heading into the nastiness of the day. Rather than look out at the view, he turned and looked back at the house. It was a flat-roofed structure cantilevered over the canyon. He realized that all an intruder needed was a twelve-foot ladder to scale the front of the house, and then he could cross the roof to the rear, drop down to the deck, and enter through the unlocked slider.
Solving the how of it brought little resolution. He moved to the railing to think about how he would tell Cavanaugh about what had happened. With elbows on the wood rail, he looked down on the freeway and the procession of lemmings moving slowly toward the spires of downtown. He would soon be joining them. He had spent his entire life in the city, and yet even after more than seventy-five years, he still felt like an outsider looking in.
He considered whether to call the police to report the break-in. Filing a report could lead to a follow-up investigation and that could in turn compromise the federal investigation.
A light reflection caught his eye and drew his focus down to the wooded slope below his house. He scanned the greenery and wildflowers and saw the object that had reflected the rising sun: a small silver rectangle.
It was a laptop. His laptop.
It had to be. For a reason Bosch couldn’t fathom, the thief who had taken it from the house had thrown it off the deck. Was it because he had found it to be password-protected? Or was it because the printed report was all he needed? It revealed Bosch’s entire investigation of the Charles Lamb murder and its possible connection to Nikolai Novak.
Bosch had lived in the house for nearly forty years. As a younger man, he had gone down to where the pilings that held the house aloft and level were bored into the igneous bedrock. But that was not terrain he could easily traverse now.
Bosch left the coffee cup on the railing and went back through the house to the front door. He stepped out, looked right and left on Woodrow Wilson Boulevard, and spotted a beat-up Toyota pickup parked at the curb two houses up the hill. Its bed was crammed with lawn-maintenance equipment, and he saw the silhouettes of two men in the truck’s cab. They were probably waiting for the clock to hit seven a.m. so they could go to work with their leaf blowers and lawn mowers.
Bosch made his way up the hill and tapped on the driver’s window with his knuckles. The man behind the wheel turned and looked at him with terrified eyes. Bosch quickly realized why and raised his hands, palms out.
“I’m not ICE,” he said. “I just have a question for you.”
Bosch signaled him to lower the window and the man reluctantly complied.
“Speak English?”
“Yes.”
“I live two doors down from here and I’m wondering if I could get you to do something for me. I’ll pay you — either one of you guys.”
“Do what?”
“I dropped something off the back deck and I’ve got a new knee and can’t climb down there to get it.”
Bosch pointed to his knee as if it were convincing proof of his story.
“What did you drop?”
“A computer — a laptop.”
Now Bosch pantomimed typing on a keyboard and immediately realized he was insulting the man. He seemed to understand English perfectly.
“I’ll pay you,” he said. “It will take ten minutes.”
