“You’re basing that on him knowing what he had. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe this isn’t what we think it is.”
“There’s got to be a connection, Bosch, between Gonzalves and Nassar and El-Fayed. He probably brought them across the border.”
He almost smiled. He knew she had used his last name as a term of endearment. He remembered how she used to do that.
“And don’t forget about Ramin Samir?” he said.
Walling shook her head.
“I’m still thinking he was a red herring,” she said. “A misdirection.”
“A good one,” Bosch responded. “It took the mighty Captain Done Badly out of the picture.”
She laughed.
“Is that what they call him?”
Bosch nodded.
“Not to his face, of course.”
“And what do they call you? Something tough and hard-headed, I’m sure.”
He glanced over at her and shrugged. He thought about telling her that his Vietnam nickname was Hari Kari but that would require further explanation and there wasn’t the time right now and this wasn’t the place.
He took the ramp up to Cahuenga from Highland. It ran parallel to the freeway and as soon as he checked he saw that he had been right. The traffic over on the freeway was frozen in both directions.
“You know, I still had your number in my cell’s directory,” he said. “I guess I never wanted to delete it.”
“I was wondering about that when you left me that mean message today about the cigarette ash.”
“I don’t suppose you kept mine, Rachel.”
She paused a long moment before answering.
“I think you’re still on my phone, too, Harry.”
This time he had to smile, even though he was back to being Harry with her. There’s hope after all, he thought.
They were approaching Lankershim Boulevard. To the right it dropped down into a tunnel that went beneath the freeway. To the left it ended at a strip shopping center that included the Easy Print franchise from which the call to paramedics had originated. Bosch’s eyes searched the vehicles in the small parking lot, looking for a Toyota.
He glided into the left-turn lane and waited to pull into the lot. He swiveled in his seat and checked the parking along both sides of Cahuenga. A quick glance showed no Toyotas but he knew that there were many different car models and pickup trucks in the brand. If they didn’t find the car in the print shop lot, then they would have to work the curbside parking looking for it.
“Do you have a plate or any description?” Walling asked. “How about a color?”
“No, no and no.”
Bosch remembered then that she had the habit of asking multiple questions at once.
He made the turn on yellow and pulled into the lot. There were no parking spaces available but he wasn’t interested in parking. He cruised slowly, checking each car. There were no Toyotas.
“Where’s a Toyota when you need one?” he said. “It’s got to be in this area somewhere.”
“Maybe we should check the street,” Walling suggested.
He nodded and nosed his car into the alley at the end of the parking lot. He was going to turn left to turn around and go back to the street. But when he checked to see if he was clear on the right he saw an old white pickup truck with a camper shell parked half a block down the alley next to a green trash Dumpster. The truck was facing them and he couldn’t tell what the make of it was.
“Is that a Toyota?” he asked.
Walling turned and looked.
“Bosch, you’re a genius,” she exclaimed.
Bosch turned and drove toward the truck and as he got closer he could see that it was indeed a Toyota. So could Walling. She pulled out her phone but Bosch reached across and put his hand on it.
“Let’s just check it out first. I could be wrong about this.”
“No, Bosch, you’re on a roll.”
But she put the phone away. Bosch pulled slowly past the pickup, giving it a once-over. He then turned around at the end of the block and came back. He stopped his car ten feet behind it. There was no plate on the back. A cardboard LOST TAG sign had been put in its place.
Bosch wished he had brought the keys he had found in Digoberto Gonzalves’s pocket. They got out and approached the truck, coming up on either side of it. When he got close Bosch noticed that the rear window hatch of the camper shell had been left open a couple of inches. He reached forward and pulled it up all the way. An air-pressure hinge held it open. Bosch leaned in close to look into the interior. It was dark because the truck was parked in shadow and the windows on the shell were darkly tinted.
“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 no
thing 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 & 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?
He suddenly thought of his daughter, getting a vision of her at the airport the last time he saw her.
He cursed out loud.
“Harry?”
Bosch looked around the trunk lid. Rachel was walking toward him.
“The teams are headed this way. They’ll be here in five minutes. How do you feel?”
“I think I’m okay.”
“Good. I talked to the head of the team. He thinks the exposure was too short to be anything serious. But you still should go to the ER and get checked out.”
“We’ll see.”
He reached into the trunk and got a liter bottle of water out of his kit. It was an emergency bottle he kept for surveillances that dragged on longer than expected. He opened it and took two strong pulls. The water wasn’t cold but it felt good going down. His throat was dry.
Bosch recapped the bottle and put it back in the kit. He stepped around the car to Walling. As he walked toward her he looked past her to the south. He realized that the alley they were in extended several blocks past the back of the Easy Print and ran behind all the storefronts and offices on Cahuenga. All the way down to Barham.
In the alley every twenty yards or so was a green Dumpster positioned perpendicular to the rear of the structures. Bosch realized they had been pushed out of spaces between the buildings and fenced corrals. Just like in Silver Lake, it was pickup day and the Dumpsters were waiting for the city trucks to come.
Suddenly it all came to him. Like fusion. Two elements coming together and creating something new. The thing that bothered him about the crime scene photos, the yoga poster, everything. The gamma rays had shot right through him but they had left him enlightened. He knew. He understood.
“He’s a scavenger.”
“Who is?”
“Digoberto Gonzalves,” Bosch said, his eyes looking down the alley. “It’s collection day. The Dumpsters are all pushed out for the city trucks. Gonzalves is a scavenger, a Dumpster diver, and he knew they would be out and this would be a good time to come here.”
He looked at Walling before completing the thought.
“And so did somebody else,” he said.
“You mean he found the cesium in a Dumpster?”
Bosch nodded and pointed down the alley.
“All the way at the end, that’s Barham. Barham takes you up to Lake Hollywood. Lake Hollywood takes you to the overlook. This case never leaves the map page.”
Walling came over and stood in front of him, blocking his view. Bosch could now hear sirens in the distance.
“What are you saying? That Nassar and El-Fayed took the cesium and stashed it in a Dumpster at the bottom of the hill? Then this scavenger comes along and finds it?”
“I’m saying you’ve got the cesium back so now we’re looking at this as a homicide again. You come down from the overlook and you can be in this alley in five minutes.”
“So what? They stole the cesium and killed Kent just so they could come down here and stash it? Is that what you’re saying? Or are you saying they just threw it all away? Why would they do that? I mean, does that make any sense at all? I mean, I don’t see that scaring people in the way we know they want to scare us.”
Bosch noted that she had asked six questions at once this time, possibly a new record.
“Nassar and El-Fayed were never near the cesium,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying.”
He walked over to the truck and picked the rolled poster up off the ground. He handed it to Rache
l. The sirens were getting louder.
She unrolled the poster in her hands and looked at it.
“What is this? What does it mean?”
Bosch took it back from her and started rolling it up.
“Gonzalves found that in the same Dumpster where he found the gun and the camera and the lead pig.”
“So? What does it mean, Harry?”
Two fed cars pulled into the alley a block away and started making their way toward them, weaving around the Dumpsters pushed out for pickup. As they got close Bosch could see that the driver of the lead car was Jack Brenner.
“Do you hear me, Harry? What does it—”
Bosch’s knees suddenly seemed to give out and he fell into her, throwing his arms around her to stop himself from hitting the ground.
“Bosch!”
She grabbed on and held him.
“Uh . . . I’m not feeling so good,” he mumbled. “I think I better . . . can you take me to my car?”
She helped him straighten up and then started walking him toward his car. He put his arm over her shoulders. Car doors were slamming behind them as the agents got out.
“Where are the keys?” Walling asked.
He held the key ring out to her just as Brenner ran up to them.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“He was exposed. The cesium is in the center console in the truck cab. Be careful. I’m going to take him to the hospital.”
Brenner stepped back, as if whatever Bosch had were contagious.
“Okay,” he said. “Call me when you can.”
Bosch and Walling kept moving toward the car.
“Come on, Bosch,” Walling said. “Stay with me. Hang in there and we’ll get you taken care of.”
She had called him by his last name again.
EIGHTEEN
T HE CAR JERKED FORWARD as Walling pulled out of the alley and into southbound traffic on Cahuenga.
“I’m taking you back to Queen of Angels so Dr. Garner can take a look at you,” she said. “Just hang in there for me, Bosch.”
He knew it was likely that the last-name endearments were about to come to an end. He pointed toward the left-turn lane that led onto Barham Boulevard.