Michael Connelly - Lost Light

“Am I getting through to you at all?” Peoples said, his voice calm once again. “You are not a cop. You carry no badge. You have no provenance, no case. You have no standing.”

“It used to be a free country. That used to be enough standing.”

“It’s not the same country it used to be. Things have changed.”

He proffered the file held in his hand.

“The murder of this woman is important. Of course it is. But there are other things at play here. More important matters. You must step back from it, Mr. Bosch. This is the final warning. Stand down. Or we will stand you down. And you won’t like it.”

“I bet I’ll end up back here? Right? With Mouse and the others? The other enemy combatants. Isn’t that what you call them? Does anyone even know about this place, Agent Peoples? Anyone outside your own little BAM squad?”

He seemed momentarily taken aback by my knowledge and use of the term.

“I recognized Mouse when they brought me in. I was window shopping.”

“And from that you think you know what goes on here?”

“You’re working the guy. It’s obvious and that’s fine. But what if he’s the one who killed Angella Benton? What if he killed the bank security man? And what if he killed an FBI agent, too? Don’t you care about what happened to Martha Gessler? She was one of your own. Has the world changed that much? Is a special agent no longer special under these new rules of yours? Or does the line change according to convenience? Am I an enemy combatant, Agent Peoples?”

I could see it hurt. My words opened an old wound if not an old debate. But then a resolve came across his face. He opened the file in his hands and took out the printout I had made at the library. I could see the mugshot of Aziz.

“How did you know about this? How did you make this connection?”

“You people.”

“What are you talking about? No one here would tell you -”

“They didn’t have to. I saw your man tailing me in the library. Make a note of that-he’s not that good. Tell him to try Sports Illustrated next time. I knew something was up so I ran a search through the newspaper files and came up with that. I printed it out because I knew it might flush you people out. And it did. Your kind are very predictable.

“Anyway, then I saw Mouse when they were walking me down the hall and I sort of put things together. Money from my robbery was under the seat of his car when you arrested him. But you don’t care about that or the two and maybe three murders attached to it. You just want to know where that money was going. And you don’t want a little thing like justice for the dead to get in the way of that.”

Peoples slowly slid the printout back into the file. I could see his face changing, growing darker around the eyes. I had stuck my words directly into a nerve.

“You have no idea what the world is like out there or what we are doing about it in here,” he said. “You can sit here and be smug and talk about your ideas of justice. But you have no fucking idea what is out there.”

My response to that was a smile. My words came readily.

“You can save that speech for the politicians who change the rules for you until there are no rules anymore. Until something like justice for a murdered and violated woman adds up to nothing in the equation. That’s what’s going on out there.”

Peoples leaned forward. He was about to spill and he wanted to make damn sure I got it.

“Do you know where Aziz was going with that money? We don’t know but I can tell you where I think he was going with it. To a training camp. A terrorist training camp. And I’m not talking about in Afghanistan. I’m talking about within a hundred miles of our border. A place where they train people to kill us. In our buildings, in our planes. In our sleep. To come across that line and kill us with blind disregard for who we are and what we believe. Are you going to tell me that I’m wrong, that we should not do everything we can to find such a place if it exists? That we should not take whatever measures are necessary with that man to get the information we need from him?”

I leaned back across the mattress until my back was against the wall. If I’d had a cup of coffee I wouldn’t have ignored it the way he was ignoring his.

“I’m not telling you anything,” I said. “Everybody’s got to do what they’ve got to do.”

“Wonderful,” he said sarcastically. “Words of wisdom. I’m going to get a wall plaque for my office and put that right on it.”

“You know, I was in a trial once and the lawyer on the other side said something I always try to remember. She quoted a philosopher whose name I don’t recall offhand-I’ve got it written down at the house. But this guy said that whoever is out there fighting the monsters of our society should make damn sure that they don’t become monsters themselves. See, because then all is lost. Then we don’t have a society. I always thought that was a good line.”

“Nietzsche. And you almost got the quote right.”

“Getting the quote right isn’t what matters. It’s remembering what it means.”

Peoples reached into the pocket of his coat. He pulled out my watch. He threw it to me and I started putting it on. I looked at the face. The hands of the clock were set against a gold detective’s badge with the city hall on it. I noted the time and saw that I had been in the cube longer than I had thought. It was almost dawn.

“Get out of here, Bosch,” he said. “If you cross our field of vision on this again you will find yourself back here faster than you’d think was possible. And no one will know you are here.”

The threat was obvious.

“I’ll be among the disappeared then, huh?”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

Peoples raised his hand over his head so the camera would see it. He twirled a finger in the air and the electronic lock on the door clacked and the door opened a few inches. I stood up.

“Go,” Peoples said. “Somebody will see you out. I’m cutting you a break here, Bosch. Remember that.”

I headed toward the door but hesitated when I was passing him. I looked down at him and the file he still clutched.

“I assume you cleaned me out, took my files. Lawton Cross’s too.”

“You won’t be getting it back.”

“Right, I understand. National security. What I was going to say is look through the photos. Find one of the photos of Angella on the tile. Look at her hands, man.”

I headed toward the open door.

“What about her hands?” he called after me.

“Just look at her hands. The way we found them. You’ll know what I’m talking about then.”

In the hallway Parenting Today was waiting for me.

“This way,” he said curtly and I could tell he was disappointed that I was being cut loose.

On the way up the hallway I looked for Mousouwa Aziz in one of the square windows but didn’t see him. I wondered if by chance I had looked into the face of the killer I was looking for and that it would be my only glimpse, that I would get no closer. I knew that as long as he was in here I would never get to him, literally or legally. He was gone from me. He was among the disappeared. The ultimate dead end.

We went out through two electronic doors and then I was delivered to an elevator alcove. There was no button for me to push. Parenting Today looked up at a camera in the corner of the ceiling and rolled an extended finger in the air. I heard the elevator start coming.

When the doors opened he escorted me on. We went down to the basement but not to a car. He walked me up the ramp after yelling to a garage man to open the roll-up door. As the door went up I was hit with sunlight and had to squint.

“I take it you aren’t giving me a ride back to my car.”