Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

“I don’t know yet, Eleanor. I’m working on it. We have a suspect in cust-”

Again she cut him off, this time with another wail. It was the sound of every parent’s worst nightmare come to life. In that moment Bosch realized what he was going to do. He lowered his voice further when he spoke.

“Eleanor, listen to me. I need you to pull yourself together. You need to start making calls. I’m coming over. I’ll be there before dawn Sunday morning. In the meantime, you have to get to her friends. You have to find out who she was with at the mall and where she went. Anything you can find out about what happened. Do you hear me, Eleanor?”

“I’m hanging up and calling the police.”

“No!”

Bosch looked around and saw that his outburst had drawn attention from across the squad room. After the incident in the interview room, he was already the subject of concern across the whole squad. He slid further down into his seat and crouched over his desk so no one could see him.

“What? Harry, we have to-”

“Listen to me first and then you do what you think you need to do. I don’t think you should call the police. Not yet. We can’t take the chance that the people who have her will know. We might never get her back then.”

She didn’t respond. Bosch could hear her crying.

“Eleanor? Listen to me! Do you want to get her back or not? Get your shit together. You were an FBI agent! You can do this. I need you to work it like an agent until I get there. I’m going to have the video analyzed. In the video, she kicked at the camera and it moved. I saw a window. They might be able to work with it. I’m taking a plane tonight and will come directly to you when I land. You have all of that?”

There was a long moment before Eleanor responded. When she did, her voice was calm. She had gotten the message.

“I have it, Harry. I still think we have to call the Hong Kong police.”

“If that’s what you think, then, fine. Do it. Do you know anybody there? Anybody you can trust?”

“No, but they have a Triad Bureau. They’ve come into the casino.”

Almost twenty years removed from her time as an agent, Eleanor was a professional card player. For at least six years she had been living in Hong Kong and working for the Cleopatra Casino in nearby Macau. All the high rollers from the mainland wanted to play against the gweipo -the white woman. She was a draw. She played with house money, got a cut of the winnings and no part of the losses. It was a comfortable life. She and Maddie lived in a high-rise in Happy Valley and the casino sent a helicopter to pick her up on the roof when it was time to go to work.

Comfortable until now.

“Talk to your people at the casino,” Bosch said. “If there is someone you are told you can trust, then make the call. I need to hang up and get moving here. You’ll hear from me before I fly.”

She answered as if in a daze.

“Okay, Harry.”

“If you come up with something, anything at all, you call me.”

“Okay, Harry.”

“And Eleanor?”

“What?”

“See if you can get me a gun. I can’t take my own over.”

“They put you in prison for guns over here.”

“I know that, but you know people from the casino. Get me a gun.”

“I’ll try.”

Bosch hesitated before hanging up. He wished he could reach out and touch her, somehow try to calm her fears. But he knew that was impossible. He couldn’t even calm his own.

“All right, I’m going to go. Try to stay calm, Eleanor. For Maddie. We stay calm and we can do this.”

“We’re going to get her back, right, Harry?”

Bosch nodded to himself before answering.

“That’s right. We’re going to get her back.”

The digital image unit was one of the subgroups of the Scientific Investigation Division and was still located at the old police headquarters at Parker Center. Bosch traversed the two blocks between the old and new buildings like a man running late for a plane. By the time he pushed through the glass doors of the building where he had spent much of his career as a detective he was huffing and there was a shine of sweat on his forehead. He badged his way past the front desk and took the elevator up to the third floor.

SID was in the process of being readied for the move to the PAB. The old desks and work counters remained in place but the equipment, records and personal effects were being boxed up. The process was carefully orchestrated and was slowing the already plodding march of science in crime fighting.

DIU was a two-room suite in the back. Bosch stepped in and saw at least a dozen cardboard boxes in stacks on one side of the first room. There were no pictures or maps on the walls and a lot of the shelves were empty. He found one tech at work in the rear lab.

Barbara Starkey was a veteran who had jumped around among specialties in SID over nearly four decades in the department. Bosch had met her when he was a rookie cop on post guarding the burned-out remains of a house where police had engaged in a major gun battle with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The militant radicals had taken credit for the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Starkey at the time was on the forensics team brought in to determine if the remains of Patty Hearst were amid the debris in the smoking shell of the house. Back then the department had a practice of moving female applicants into positions where physical confrontations and the need to carry a weapon were minimal. Starkey had wanted to be a cop. She ended up in the SID and as such had seen firsthand the explosive growth of technology in the use of crime detection. As she liked to tell the rookie techs, when she started in forensics, DNA were just three letters in the alphabet. Now she was an expert in almost all areas of forensics, and her son, Michael, was in the division as well, working as a blood spatter expert.

Starkey looked up from a twin-screen computer workstation where she was looking at grainy video from a bank robbery. On the screens were double images-one more in focus than the other-of a man pointing a gun at a teller’s window.

“Harry Bosch! The man with the plan.”

Bosch had no time for banter. He approached and got right to the point.

“Barb, I need your help.”

Starkey frowned when she noted the urgency in his voice.

“What’s up, darling?”

Bosch held his phone up.

“I’ve got a video on my phone. I need to blow it up and slow it down to see if I can identify location. It’s an abduction.”

Gesturing toward her screen, Starkey said, “I’m right in the middle of this two eleven in West?-”

“My daughter’s on it, Barbara. I need your help now.”

This time Starkey didn’t hesitate.

“Let me see it.”

Bosch opened the phone and started the video, then handed it to her. She viewed it wordlessly and kept any other nonprofessional response out of her face. If anything, Bosch saw her posture straighten and an aura of professional urgency emerge.

“Okay, can you send this to me?”

“I don’t know. I know how to send it to your phone.”

“Can’t you send e-mail on here with an attachment?”

“I can send e-mail but I don’t know about an attachment. I’ve never tried.”

Starkey walked him through it and he sent Starkey an e-mail with the video as an attachment.

“Okay, now we wait for it to come in.”

Before Bosch could ask how long that would be, there was a chime from her computer.

“There it is.”

Starkey closed her work on the bank robbery, then opened her e-mail and downloaded the video. Soon she had it playing on the left screen. In full-screen size the image was blurred by the pixel spread. Starkey reduced it to half-screen size and it became clearer. Much clearer and harsher than when Bosch had seen the images on his phone. Harry looked at his daughter and tried hard to stay focused.