Michael Connelly - A Darkness More Than Night

Bosch looked perplexed.

“My turn at what?”

“At making good luck.”

McCaleb slid the picture of Tafero across the table and nodded toward the bartender. Bosch slid out and took the photo to the bar.

“We’re still just dancing around the edges,” Winston said as they both watched Bosch question the bartender about the photo. “We’ve got little pieces but that’s it.”

“I know,” McCaleb said. He couldn’t hear what was being said at the bar. The music was too loud, Van Morrison singing, “The wild night is coming.”

Bosch nodded to the bartender and came back to the booth.

“She recognizes him – drinks Kahlúa and cream of all things. She can’t put him here with Gunn, though.”

McCaleb shrugged his shoulders in a no-big-deal gesture.

“It was worth the shot.”

“You know where this is going, don’t you?” Bosch said, his eyes shifting from McCaleb’s to Winston’s and then back. “You’re going to have to make a play. It’s going to be the only way. And it’s gotta be a damn good play because my ass is on the line.”

McCaleb nodded.

“We know,” he said.

“When? I’m running out of time.”

McCaleb looked at Winston. It was her call.

“Soon,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow. I haven’t gone into the office with this yet. I have to finesse my captain on it because last he knew, Terry here was banished and I was working with the bureau on you. I also have to get a DA involved because when we make the move we’ll have to move fast. If it all works out I say we take Tafero in tomorrow night and make the play to him.”

Bosch looked down at the table with a rueful smile. He slid an empty bottle back and forth between his hands.

“I met those guys today. The agents.”

“I heard. You didn’t exactly assure them of your innocence. They came back all hot and bothered.”

Bosch looked up.

“So what do you need from me on this?”

“We need you to sit tight,” Winston said. “We’ll let you know about tomorrow night.”

Bosch nodded.

“There is one thing,” McCaleb said. “The exhibits from the trial, do you have access to them?”

“During court, yeah. Otherwise they stay with the clerk. Why?”

“Because Storey obviously had existing knowledge of the painter Hieronymus Bosch. He had to have recognized your name during that interview and known what he could do with it. So I’m thinking that book his assistant brought him in jail had to be his own. He told her to bring it to him.”

Bosch nodded.

“The picture of the bookcase.”

McCaleb nodded.

“You got it.”

“I’ll let you know.” Bosch looked around the place. “Are we done here?”

“We’re done,” Winston said. “We’ll be in touch.”

She slid out of the booth, followed by Bosch and McCaleb. They left two beers and a whiskey rocks untouched on the table. At the door, McCaleb glanced back and saw a couple of the hard-cores moving in on the treasure. From the jukebox John Fogerty was singing, “There’s a bad moon on the rise…”

The chill off the water worked its way into McCaleb’s bones. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker and turtled his neck as far down into the collar as he could as he carefully made his way down the ramp to the Cabrillo Marina docks.

Though his chin was down his eyes were alert and scanning the docks for unusual movement. Nothing caught his attention. He glanced at Buddy Lockridge’s sailboat as he passed. Despite all the junk – surfboards, bikes, gas grill, an ocean kayak and other assorted equipment and debris – crowding the deck, he could see the cabin lights were on. He walked quietly on the wood planking. He decided that whether Buddy was awake or not it was too late and McCaleb was too tired and cold to deal with his supposed partner. Still, as he approached The Following Sea, he couldn’t help but move his mind over the sharp-edged anomaly in his working theory on the case. Back at the bar Bosch had been correct when he deduced that someone from the Storey camp had to have leaked the story of the Gunn investigation to the New Times. McCaleb knew that the only way the current case theory hung together was if Tafero, or maybe Fowkkes or even Storey from jail, had been Jack McEvoy’s source. The problem was that Buddy Lockridge had told McCaleb that he had leaked the investigation to the weekly tabloid.

Now the only way, at least as it appeared to McCaleb, that this could work would be if both Buddy and someone in Storey’s defense group leaked the same information to the same media source. And this, of course, was a coincidence that even a believer in coincidence would have a difficult time accepting.

McCaleb tried to put it out of his mind for the moment. He got to the boat, looked around again, and stepped down into the cockpit. He unlocked the slider and went in, turning on the lights. He decided that in the morning he would go over and question Buddy more carefully about what he had done and who he had talked to.

He locked the door and put his keys and the videotape he’d been carrying down on the chart table. He immediately went to the galley and poured a large glass of orange juice. He then turned the upper deck lights off and took the juice with him down to the lower deck where he went into the head and quickly began his evening pill ritual. As he swallowed the pills and orange juice he looked at himself in the small mirror over the sink. He thought about what Bosch had looked like. The weariness clearly set deep in his eyes. McCaleb wondered if he would get the same look in a few years, after a few more cases.

When he was finished with his medicine routine he stripped off his clothes and took a quick shower, the water feeling ice cold because the water heater hadn’t been on since he had crossed in the boat the day before.

Shivering, he went into the master cabin and put on a pair of boxer shorts and a sweatshirt. He was dead tired but once he got into the bed he decided he should write a few notes about his thoughts on how Jaye Winston should run the play with Tafero. He reached down to the nightstand’s drawer, where he kept pens and scratch pads. When he opened it he found a folded newspaper crammed into the small drawer space. He pulled it out, unfolded it and found it was the previous week’s issue of New Times. The pages had been folded backward so that the rear advertising section was at the front. McCaleb was looking at a page full of matchbook-sized ads under a heading that said OUTCALL MASSAGE.

McCaleb got up quickly and went to his windbreaker, which he had tossed onto a chair. He pulled the cell phone out of the pocket and went back to the bed with it. Though McCaleb had been carrying the phone with him in recent days, it usually stayed in its charger on the boat. It was paid for out of charter funds and was carried as a business expense. It was used by clients during charter trips and by Buddy Lockridge while confirming reservations and running credit card authorizations.

The phone had a small digital screen with a menu he scrolled through. He opened the call log program and began scrolling through the last hundred numbers the phone had been used to call. Most of the numbers he quickly identified and eliminated. But every time he did not recognize a number he compared it to the phone numbers at the bottom of the ads on the massage page. The fourth unrecognized number he compared to the ads was a match. The number was for a woman who advertised herself as an “Exotic Japanese-Hawaiian Beauty” named Leilani. Her ad said she specialized in “full-service relaxation” and was not associated with any massage agency.

McCaleb closed the phone and got off the bed again. He started pulling on a pair of sweatpants as he tried to recall exactly what had been said when he had accused Buddy Lockridge of leaking the case information to the New Times.