Michael Connelly: The Overlook

“Harry, you have that monitor?”

He pulled her radiation monitor out of his pocket and held it up in his hand as he leaned into the darkness of the truck’s cargo hold. No alarm sounded. He leaned back out and put the monitor on his belt. He then reached in to the latch and lowered the truck’s rear gate.

The back of the truck was piled with junk. There were empty bottles and cans strewn everywhere, a leather desk chair with a broken leg, scrap pieces of aluminum, an old water cooler and other debris. And there by the raised wheel well on the right side was a lead gray container that looked like a small mop bucket on wheels.

“There,” he said. “Is that the pig?”

“I think it is,” Walling said excitedly. “I think it is!”

There was no warning sticker on it or radiation-alert symbol. They had been peeled off. Bosch leaned into the truck and grabbed one of the handles. He pulled it clear of the debris around it and rolled it to the tailgate. The top was latched in four places.

“Do we open it and make sure the stuff is in there?” he asked.

“No,” Walling said. “We back off and call in the team. They have protection.”

She pulled her phone out again. While she called for the radiation team and backup units Bosch moved to the front of the truck. He looked through the window and into the cab. He saw a half-eaten breakfast burrito sitting on a flattened brown bag on the center console. And he saw more junk on the passenger side. His eyes held on a camera that was sitting on an old briefcase with a broken handle on the passenger seat. The camera didn’t appear broken or dirty. It looked brand-new.

Bosch checked the door and found it unlocked. He realized that Gonzalves had forgotten about his truck and his possessions when the cesium started burning through his body. He had gotten out and stumbled toward the parking lot, seeking help, leaving everything else behind and unlocked.

Bosch opened the driver’s door and reached in with the radiation monitor. Nothing happened. No alert. He stood back up and replaced it on his belt. From his pocket he got out a pair of latex gloves and put them on while listening to Walling talking to someone about finding the pig.

“No, we didn’t open it,” she said. “Do you want us to?”

She listened some before responding.

“I didn’t think so. Just get them here as fast as you can and maybe this will all be over.”

Bosch leaned back into the truck through the driver-side door and picked up the camera. It was a Nikon digital and he remembered that the lens cover found beneath the master bed at the Kent house by the SID team had said Nikon on it. He believed he was holding the camera that had taken the photograph of Alicia Kent. He turned it on and for once he knew what he was doing as he examined a piece of electronic equipment. He had a digital camera that he routinely carried with him when he went to Hong Kong to visit his daughter. He’d bought it when he had taken her to Disneyland China.

His camera wasn’t a Nikon but he was able to quickly determine that the camera he had just found had no photos in its memory because the chip had been removed.

Bosch put the camera down and began looking through the things piled on the passenger seat. In addition to the broken briefcase, there was a child’s lunch box as well as a manual for operating an Apple computer and a poker from a fireplace tool set. Nothing connected and nothing interested him. He noticed a golf putter and a rolled-up poster on the floor in front of the seat.

He moved the brown bag and the burrito out of the way and shifted his weight to one elbow on the armrest between the seats so he could reach over and open the glove compartment. And there, sitting in the otherwise empty space, was a handgun. Bosch lifted it out and turned it in his hand. It was a Smith amp; Wesson.22 caliber revolver.

“I think we’ve got the murder weapon here,” he called out.

There was no response from Walling. She was still at the back of the truck talking on her phone, still issuing orders in an animated voice.

Bosch returned the weapon to the glove box and closed it, deciding to leave the weapon in its place for the Forensics team. He noticed the rolled-up poster again and decided for no reason other than curiosity to take a look at it. Using his elbow on the center armrest for support he unrolled it across all of the junk on the passenger seat. It was a chart depicting twelve yoga positions.

Bosch immediately thought about the discolored space he had seen on the wall in the workout room at the Kent house. He wasn’t sure but he thought the dimensions of the poster would be a close match to that space on the wall. He quickly rerolled the poster and started to back out of the cab so he could show Walling the discovery.

But as he was pulling out he noticed that the armrest between the seats was also a storage compartment. He stopped and opened it.

He froze. There was a cup holder and in it were several steel capsules resembling bullet cartridges closed flat on both ends. The steel was so polished it almost looked like silver. It might even have been mistaken for silver.

Bosch moved the radiation monitor over the capsules in a circular pattern. There was no alarm. He turned the device over in his hand and looked at it. He saw a small switch on its side. With his thumb he pushed it up. A blaring alarm suddenly went off, the frequency of tones so fast that they sounded like one long, eardrum-piercing siren.

Bosch jumped back out of the truck and slammed the door shut. The poster fell to the ground.

“Harry!” Walling yelled. “What?”

She rushed toward him, closing her phone on her hip. Bosch pushed the switch again and turned the monitor off.

“What is it?” she yelled.

Bosch pointed toward the truck’s door.

“The gun’s in the glove box and the cesium’s in the center compartment.”

“What?”

“The cesium is in the compartment under the armrest. He took the capsules out of the pig. That’s why they weren’t in his pocket. They were in the center armrest.”

He touched his right hip, the place where Gonzalves was burned by radiation. The same spot would have been next to the armrest compartment when he was sitting in the truck.

Rachel didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just stared at his face.

“Are you okay?” she finally asked.

Bosch almost laughed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask me in about ten years.”

She hesitated as if she knew something but couldn’t share it.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“Nothing. You should be checked out, though.”

“What are they going to be able to do? Look, I wasn’t in the truck that long. It’s not like Gonzalves, who was sitting in there with it. He was practically eating off of it.”

She didn’t answer. Bosch handed her the monitor.

“It was never on. I thought it was on when you gave it to me.”

She took it and looked at it in her hand.

“I thought it was, too.”

Bosch thought about how he had carried the monitor in his pocket rather than clipped to his belt. He had probably switched it off unknowingly when he had twice put it in and removed it. He looked back at the truck and wondered if he had possibly just hurt or killed himself.

“I need a drink of water,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle in the trunk.”

Bosch walked back to the rear of his car. Using the open trunk lid to shield Walling’s view of him, he leaned his hands down on the bumper for support and tried to decipher the messages his body was sending to his brain. He felt something happening but didn’t know if it was something physiological or if the shakes he felt were just an emotional response to what had just happened. He remembered what the ER doctor had said about Gonzalves and how the most serious damage was internal. Was his own immune system shutting down? Was he circling the drain?