Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

The police chief hurried down the hallway to where Bosch waited by the front door. Bosch heard voices from the kitchen but this time it wasn’t Trevino talking. It was Dockweiler.

Valdez spoke before Bosch could tell him about the telephonic warrant he had just procured.

“Trevino broke him,” he whispered excitedly. “He’s going to tell us where she is. Says she’s still alive.”

The news took Bosch by surprise.

“Trevino broke him?”

Valdez nodded.

“It was deny, deny, deny, then ‘okay, you got me.’”

Bosch had to see this. He started down the hallway toward the kitchen, questioning whether it was his own vanity and wounded pride that made him doubt Trevino’s success, or something else.

He entered the kitchen and Dockweiler was still at the table, hands double-cuffed behind his back and to the chair. When he glanced up and saw it was Bosch and not Valdez, a momentary look passed over his face. Bosch wasn’t sure if it was disappointment or some other reaction. He had never seen Dockweiler before the events of this night and had no precursors for facial reads of him. But soon enough he got a translation.

Dockweiler pointed at him with his chin.

“I don’t want him in here,” he said. “I’m not talking if he’s here.”

Trevino turned around and saw it was Bosch, not Valdez, who had upset the suspect.

“Detective Bosch,” he said. “Why don’t you—”

“Why not?” Bosch said over the captain’s voice. “Afraid I’ll know that you’re spinning a line of bullshit?”

“Bosch!” Trevino barked. “Leave the room. Now. We are getting this man’s full cooperation, and if he wants you out, then you’re out.”

Bosch didn’t move. This was ridiculous.

“She’s only got so much air,” Dockweiler said. “If you want to play games, what happens is on you, Bosch.”

Bosch felt Valdez grab his upper arm from behind. He was about to be pulled out of the room. He looked over at Sisto, who was leaning against the counter behind Trevino. He smirked and shook his head like Bosch had become some sort of pitiful nuisance that had to be put up with.

“Harry, let’s walk out,” Valdez said.

Bosch looked at Dockweiler one last time and tried to get a read on him. But his eyes were dead. A psychopath’s eyes. Unreadable. In that moment he knew there was a play here. He just didn’t know what it was.

Now Bosch felt a tug on his arm from Valdez and he finally turned toward the archway. He stepped out of the kitchen and started down the hallway to the front door. Valdez followed him to make sure he didn’t double back.

“Let’s go out,” Valdez said.

They stepped through the front door and Valdez closed it behind them.

“Harry, we have to play it this way,” Valdez said. “The guy’s talking and says he’ll take us to her. We have no choice.”

“That’s a ploy,” Bosch said. “He’ll just be looking for a chance to make a move.”

“We know that. We’re not stupid. We’re not taking him on a field trip in the middle of the night. If he really wants to cooperate and show us where Bella is, then he can draw us a map. But he’s staying in that chair, no question.”

“Look, Chief... there’s something not right here. Things don’t add up with what I’m seeing in his truck and the house and everything. We need—”

“What doesn’t add up?”

“I don’t know yet. If I had been in there and heard what he was saying or if I was asking the questions, then I’d have a handle on it. But—”

“Look, I have to go back in there and watch over this. Just sit tight and when we get what we need from him, I’ll relay it right to you. You can lead the charge and go get Bella.”

“I don’t need to be the hero — that’s not what this is about. I still think it’s bullshit. He’s not going to do this. You read the Screen Cutter profile. It’s all in there. Guys like this don’t ever admit to anything. They have no guilt, so there’s nothing to admit to. They’re manipulators to the end.”

“I can’t keep debating it, Harry. I have to go in. You stay out of the house.”

Valdez turned and went back in through the front door. Bosch stood there for a long moment, thinking and trying to get a read on the look he had seen on Dockweiler’s face.

After a few moments he decided to move around to the back of the house to try to see what was going on in the kitchen. Valdez had instructed him to stay outside the house. He didn’t say where outside.

Bosch quickly moved down the side and into the backyard. The kitchen was at the opposite corner and the table where Dockweiler and Trevino sat facing each other was in an eating nook located in the glass sunroom. The blinds were three-quarters open and the room glowed with the interior lights. Bosch knew that the men inside would only see their own reflections in the glass and not him standing outside.

He could hear what was being said in the room because of the open window over the sink. And almost all of it was coming from Dockweiler. One of his hands had now been uncuffed so that he could use a pencil to draw a map on a large piece of paper spread on the table.

“They call this section the John Ford Forty,” he said. “I think he filmed part of one of his John Wayne epics there and it’s mostly used for westerns and horror stuff — the cabin-in-the-woods screamers they make all the time and go straight to streaming. There’s like sixteen different cabins back in there that can be used for filming.”

“So where is Bella?” Trevino pressed.

“She’s in this one here,” Dockweiler said.

He used the pencil to draw something on the map but his upper torso blocked Bosch’s view from behind him. Dockweiler then put the pencil down on the table and did some tracing on the map with his finger.

“You go in here, tell whoever’s at the gate that you need to get to the Bonney house. They’ll take you up there and that’s where you’ll find her. Everything’s breakaway in these houses. Walls, windows, floors. You know, for filming. Your girl’s in a camera trench under the flooring. It lifts up in one piece.”

“This better not be bullshit, Dockweiler,” Valdez said.

“No bullshit,” Dockweiler said. “I can lead you there if you want.”

Dockweiler gestured as if to say, Why not give me a chance? And when he did so, his elbow hit the pencil and it rolled off the table, bouncing off his thigh to the floor.

“Oops,” he said.

He leaned down and reached to the floor to retrieve the pencil, a maneuver made difficult because his left wrist was still handcuffed behind his back to one of the rungs of the chair.

Through the window behind Dockweiler, Bosch had a unique vantage point on what happened next. It seemed to unfold before him in slow motion. Dockweiler took a swipe at the fallen pencil on the floor, but couldn’t quite reach it because he was bound to the chair in which he sat. However, the momentum of the swing carried his arm up and under the table. He gripped something attached to the underside of the table, then swung his arm out and above it.

He was now pointing a semiautomatic pistol directly across the table at Trevino.

“Nobody fucking move!”

The three men facing Dockweiler froze.

Bosch slowly and quietly pulled his weapon from its holster and put a two-handed aim on Dockweiler’s back. He knew in a legal sense he was clear to shoot and it would be a righteous kill, but he didn’t have a clean shot, with Trevino sitting on the other side of the target.

Dockweiler used the barrel of his gun to point Valdez farther into the kitchen. The police chief complied, holding his hands up in front of his chest.

In front of Dockweiler the kitchen counters created a U where he corralled the three cops. He told Trevino to stand up and back into the U with Valdez and Sisto.