Michael Connelly - A Darkness More Than Night

“I’m off the case because Buddy leaked it to a reporter.”

“What?”

“We came up – I came up – with a suspect. A cop. Buddy overheard me telling Jaye Winston about my findings. He turned around and told a reporter. The reporter turned around and started making calls. Jaye and her captain think I was the leak.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Why would Buddy do that?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say. Actually, he did say. He said he didn’t think I’d care or that it mattered. Words to that effect. That was today on the boat.”

He gestured toward Raymond, meaning this was the tense conversation he had caught part of and told Graciela about.

“Well, did you call Jaye and tell her it was him?”

“No, it doesn’t matter. It came through me. I was dumb enough to let him on the boat. Can we talk about something else? I’m tired of thinking and talking about this.”

“Fine, Terry, what else do you want to talk about?”

He was silent. She was silent. After a long moment he started to laugh.

“I can’t think of anything right now.”

Graciela finished eating a bite of her sandwich. McCaleb looked over at Cielo, who was looking at a blue-and-white ball that was suspended over her on a wire attached to the side of her bouncer seat. She was trying to reach for it with her tiny hands but couldn’t quite make it. McCaleb could see her getting frustrated and he understood the feeling.

“Raymond, tell your father what you saw today in the gardens,” Graciela said.

She had recently begun referring to McCaleb as Raymond’s father. They had adopted him but McCaleb didn’t want to put any pressure on the boy to think of or refer to him as his father. Raymond usually called him Terry.

“We saw a Channel Islands fox,” he said now. “It was hunting in the canyon.”

“I thought foxes hunted at night and slept during the day.”

“Well, somebody woke him up then because we saw him. He was big.”

Graciela nodded, confirming the sighting.

“Pretty cool,” McCaleb said. “Too bad you didn’t get a picture.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Graciela used her napkin to clean spittle off the baby’s chin.

“Anyway,” McCaleb said, “I’m sure you’re happy that I’m off it and things will be normal around here again.”

Graciela looked at him.

“I want you to be safe. I want the whole family to be together and safe. That’s what makes me happy, Terry.”

He nodded and finished his sandwich. She continued.

“I want you to be happy but if that means working these cases, then that is a conflict with your personal well-being as far as your health is concerned and the well-being of this family.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. I don’t think anybody will come calling on me again after this.”

He got up to clear the table. But before picking up plates he leaned over his daughter’s chair and bent the wire so that the blue-and-white ball would be within her reach.

“It’s not supposed to be like that,” Graciela said.

McCaleb looked at her.

“Yes, it is.”

McCaleb stayed up into the early morning hours with the baby. He and Graciela alternated nights on duty so that at least one of them got a decent night of sleep. Cielo seemed to have an almost hourly feed clock. Each time she awoke he would feed her and walk her through the dark house. He would gently pat her back until he heard her burp and then he would put her down again. In an hour the process would begin again.

After each cycle McCaleb would walk through the house and check the doors. It was a nervous habit, his routine. The house, by virtue of being up on the hillside, was fogged in tight. Looking through the rear windows, he couldn’t even see the lights of the pier down below. He wondered if the fog stretched across the bay to the mainland. Harry Bosch’s house was up high. He wondered if he was standing at his window looking into the misty nothingness as well.

In the morning Graciela took the baby and McCaleb, exhausted from the night and everything else, slept until eleven. When he came to he found the house to be quiet. In his T-shirt and boxer shorts he wandered down the hall and found the kitchen and family room empty. Graciela had left a note on the kitchen table saying she had taken the children to St. Catherine’s for the ten o’clock service and then to the market afterward. The note said they’d be back by noon.

McCaleb went to the refrigerator and got out the gallon jug of orange juice. He poured a full glass and then took his keys off the counter and went back into the hallway to the locking cabinet. He opened it up and got out a plastic Ziploc bag containing a morning dose of the drug therapy that kept him alive. The first of every month he and Graciela carefully put together the doses and put them in plastic bags marked with dates and whether they were the A.M. or P.M. dosage. It made it easier than having to open dozens of pill bottles twice a day.

He took the bag back to the kitchen and began taking the pills two and three at a time with gulps of juice. As he followed this routine he looked through the kitchen window and down to the harbor below. The fog had moved out. It was still misty but clear enough for him to see The Following Sea and a skiff tied at its fantail.

He went to one of the kitchen drawers and pulled out the set of binoculars Graciela liked to use when she was watching him on the boat heading in or out of the harbor with a charter party. He went out onto the deck and to the railing. He focused the binoculars. There was no one in the cockpit or up on the bridge of the boat. His view could not penetrate the reflective film on the sliding door of the salon. He moved his focus to the skiff. It was weathered green with a one-and-a-half-horse outboard. He recognized it as being one of the rentals from the concession on the pier.

McCaleb went back inside and left the binoculars on the counter while he swiped the remaining pills into his hand. He took them and the orange juice back to the bedroom. He quickly ingested the pills while he got dressed. He knew Buddy Lockridge would not have rented a boat to get to The Following Sea. Buddy knew which Zodiac was McCaleb’s and would simply have borrowed that.

Somebody else was on his boat.

It took him twenty minutes to walk down to the pier because Graciela had the golf cart. He went to the boat rental booth first to ask who had rented the boat but the window was closed and there was a sign with a clock face that said the operator would not be back until 12:30. McCaleb checked his watch. It was ten after twelve. He couldn’t wait. He went down the ramp to the skiff dock and stepped onto his Zodiac and started the engine.

As McCaleb moved down the fairway toward The Following Sea he studied the side windows of the salon but still could not see any movement or indication that someone was on the boat. He cut the engine on the Zodiac when he was twenty-five yards away and the inflatable skiff glided the rest of the way silently. He unzipped the pocket of his windbreaker and removed the Glock 17, his service weapon from his time with the bureau.

The Zodiac bumped lightly into the fantail next to the rental skiff. McCaleb first looked into the skiff but saw nothing other than a life vest and a flotation cushion, nothing that indicated who had rented the boat. He stepped onto the fantail and while crouched behind the stern wrapped the Zodiac’s line around one of the rear cleats. He looked over the transom and saw only himself in the sliding door. He knew he would have to approach the door not knowing if there would be someone on the other side watching him come in.