Michael Connelly: Suicide Run: Three Harry Bosch Stories

I signaled Seguin to stand up.

“Mr. Seguin, I need you to stand up for me. I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of murder.”

Seguin slowly came to his feet and then made a sudden move toward the door. But Sheehan was ready for it and was all over him and had his face down in the carpet before he had gotten three feet. Frankie pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed them. I then helped him pull Seguin to his feet and we walked him out to the car, leaving McCaleb behind.

Frankie stayed with the suspect. As soon as I could, I came back inside. I found McCaleb still sitting in the chair.

“What was it?”

McCaleb reached out his arm to the nearest bookshelf.

“This is his reading chair,” he said.

He pulled a book off the shelf.

“And this is his favorite book.”

The book was badly worn, its spine cracked and its pages weathered by repeated readings. As McCaleb thumbed the pages, I could see paragraphs and sentences had been underlined by hand. I reached over and closed the book so I could read the cover. It was called The Collector .

“Ever read it?” McCaleb asked.

“No. What is it?”

“It’s about a guy who abducts women. He collects them. Keeps them in his house, in the basement.”

I nodded.

“Terry, we need to back out of here and get a search warrant. I want to do this right.”

“So do I.”

Seguin was sitting on the bed in his cell, staring at a chessboard set up on the toilet. He didn’t look up when I came to the bars, though I could tell my shadow had fallen across the game board.

“Who are you playing?” I asked.

“Somebody who died sixty-five years ago. They put his best moment-this game-in a book. And he lives on. He’s eternal.”

He looked up at me then, his eyes still the same-cold, green killer’s eyes-in a body turned pasty and weak from ten years in small, windowless rooms.

“Detective Bosch. I wasn’t expecting you until next week.”

I shook my head.

“I’m not coming next week.”

“You don’t want to see the show? To see the glory of the righteous?”

“Doesn’t do it for me. Back when they used the gas, maybe that’d be worth seeing. But watching some asshole on a massage table get the needle and then drift off to never-never land? Nah. I’m going to go see the Dodgers play the Giants.”

Seguin stood up and approached the bars. I remembered the hours we had spent in the interrogation room, close like this. The body was worn but not the eyes. They were unchanged. Those eyes were the signature of all the evil I had ever known.

“Then, what is it that brings you to me here today, Detective?”

He smiled at me, his teeth yellowed, his gums as gray as the walls. I knew then that the trip had been a mistake. I knew then that he would not give me what I wanted.

Two hours after we put Seguin in the car, two other detectives from RHD arrived with a signed search warrant for the house and car. Because we were in the city of Burbank, I had routinely notified the local authorities of our presence and a Burbank detective team and two patrol officers arrived on scene. While the patrol officers kept a vigil on Seguin, the rest of us began the search.

We spread out. The house had no basement. McCaleb and I took the master bedroom and Terry immediately noticed wheels had been attached to the legs of the bed. He dropped to his knees, pushed the bed aside and there was a trapdoor in the wood floor. There was a padlock on it.

While McCaleb left the room to look for the key, I took my picks out of my wallet and worked the lock. I was alone in the room. As I fumbled with the lock, I banged it against the metal hasp and I thought I heard a noise from beyond the door in response. It was far away and muffled but to me it was the sound of terror in someone’s voice. My insides seized with my own terror and hope.

I worked the lock with all my skill and in another thirty seconds it came open.

“Got it! Terry, I got it!”

McCaleb came rushing back into the room and we pulled open the door, revealing a sheet of plywood below with finger latches at the four corners. We raised this next, and there beneath the floor was a young girl. She was blindfolded and gagged and her hands were shackled behind her back. She was naked beneath a dirty pink blanket.

But she was alive. She turned and pushed herself into the soundproofing padding that lined the coffinlike box. It was as if she were trying to get away. I realized then that she thought the opening of the door meant he was coming back to her. Seguin.

“It’s okay,” McCaleb said. “We’re here to help.”

McCaleb reached down into the box and gently touched her shoulder. She startled like an animal but then calmed. McCaleb then lay down flat on the floor and reached into the box to start removing the blindfold and gag.

“Harry, get an ambulance.”

I stood up and stepped back from the scene. I felt my chest growing tight, a clarity of thought coming over me. In all my years I had spoken for the dead many times. I had avenged the dead. I was at home with the dead. But I had never so clearly had a part in pulling someone away from the outstretched hands of death. And in that moment I knew we had done just that. And I knew that whatever happened afterward and wherever my life took me, I would always have this moment, that it would be a light that could lead me out of the darkest of tunnels.

“Harry, what are you doing? Get an ambulance.”

I looked at him.

“Yeah, right away.”

I stepped closer to the bars and looked in at him.

“You’re running out of time. You’ve exhausted your appeals, you’ve got a governor who needs to show he’s tough on crime. This is it, Victor. A week from today you take the needle.”

I waited for a reaction but there was nothing. He just looked at me and waited for what he knew I would ask.

“Time to come clean. Tell me who she was. Tell me where you took her from.”

He moved closer to the bars, close enough for me to smell the decay in his breath. I didn’t back away.

“All these years, Bosch. All these years and you still need to know. Why is that?”

“I just need to.”

“You and McCaleb.”

“What about him?”

“Oh, he came to see me, too.”

I knew McCaleb was out of the life. The job had taken his heart. He got a transplant and last I’d heard he lived on a boat with a fishing line in the water.

“When did he come?”

“A few months ago. Dropped by for a chat. Said he was in the neighborhood. He wanted to know the same thing. Who was the girl, where did she come from? He told me you even gave her a name back then, during the trial. Cielo Azul . That’s really very pretty, Detective Bosch.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes, standing right where you are standing.”

“Are you going to tell me or not?”

He smiled and stepped back from the bars. He walked over to the chessboard and looked down at it as if he were considering a move.

“You know, they used to let me keep a cat in here. I miss that cat.”

He picked up one of the game pieces but then hesitated and returned it to the same spot. He turned and looked at me.

“You know what I think? I think that you two can’t stand the thought of that girl not having a name, not coming from a home with a mommy and a daddy and a little baby brother. The idea of no one caring and no one missing her, it leaves you hollow, doesn’t it?”

“I just want to close the case.”

“Oh, but it is closed. You’re not here because of any case. You are here on your own. Admit it, Detective. Just as McCaleb came on his own. The idea of that pretty little girl-and by the way, if you thought she was beautiful in death, then you should have seen her before-the idea of her lying unclaimed in an unmarked grave all this time undercuts everything you do, doesn’t it?”