“Sit down, Harry. I don’t have to tell you not to smoke. Have a good Christmas?”

Bosch just looked at him. He was uncomfortable with this guy calling him Harry and asking him about Christmas. He hesitantly sat down.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Let’s not get hostile, Harry. I’m the one who should be hostile. I just heard you spent a good part of Christmas night at that dump motel, the Hideaway, where nobody in this world would want to be and where Robbery-Homicide happened to be conducting an investigation.”

“I was on call,” Bosch said. “And I should have been called out to the scene. I went by to see what was going on. Turned out, Irving needed me, anyway.”

“That’s fine, Harry, if you leave it at that. I have been told to tell you not to get any ideas about the Moore case.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what it sounds like it means.”

“Look, if you-”

“Never mind, never mind.” Pounds raised his hands in a calming gesture, then pinched the bridge of his nose, signifying the onset of a headache. He opened the center drawer of his desk and took out a small tin of aspirin. He took two without water.

“Enough said, okay?” Pounds said. “I’m not-I don’t need to get into-”

Pounds made a choking sound and jumped up from his desk. He moved past Bosch and out of the box to the water fountain near the entrance to the bureau. Bosch didn’t even watch him. He just sat in his chair. Pounds was back in a few moments and continued.

“Excuse me. Anyway, what I was saying was that I don’t need an argument with you every time I bring you in here. I really think you have to work through this problem you have with dealing with the command structure of this department. You take it to extremes.”

Bosch could still see chalky white aspirin caking at the corners of his mouth. Pounds cleared his throat again.

“I was just passing on an aside in your best-”

“Why doesn’t Irving pass it on himself?”

“I didn’t say-look, Bosch, forget it. Just forget it. You’ve been told and that’s that. If you have any ideas about last night, about Moore, drop them. It’s being handled.”

“I am sure it is.”

The warning delivered, Bosch stood up. He wanted to throw this guy through his glass wall but would settle for a cigarette out behind the drunk tank.

“Siddown,” Pounds said. “That’s not why I brought you in.”

Bosch sat down again and quietly waited. He watched Pounds try to compose himself. He opened the drawer again and pulled out a wood ruler, which he absentmindedly manipulated in his hands while he began to talk.

“Harry, you know how many homicides we’ve caught in the division this year?”

The question came from left field. Harry wondered what Pounds was up to. He knew he had handled eleven cases himself, but he had been out of the rotation for six weeks during the summer while in Mexico recovering from the bullet wound. He figured the homicide squad for about seventy cases in the year. He said, “I have no idea.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Pounds said. “Right now we are at sixty-six homicides for the year to date. And, of course, we’ve still got five days to go. Probably, we’ll pick up another. I’m thinking, at least one. New Year’s Eve is always trouble. We’ll pro-”

“So what about it? I remember we had fifty-nine last year. Murder is going up. What else is new?”

“What is new is that the number of cases we have cleared is going down. It is less than half that number. Thirty-two out of sixty-six cases have been cleared. Now, a good number of those cases have been cleared by you. I have you with eleven cases. Seven have been cleared by arrest or other. We have warrants out on two others. Of the two you have open, one is idle pending developments and you are actively pursuing the James Kappalanni matter. Correct?”

Bosch nodded. He didn’t like the way this was going but wasn’t sure why.

“The problem is the overall record,” Pounds said. “When taken in its entirety,… well, it’s a pitiful record of success.”

Pounds slapped the ruler hard into his palm and shook his head. An idea was forming in Harry’s mind about what this was about, but still there was a part missing. He wasn’t sure exactly what Pounds was up to.

“Think of it,” Pounds continued. “All those victims-and their families!-for whom justice eludes. And then, and then, think how badly the public’s confidence in us, in this department, will erode when theL.A. Times trumpets across their Metro page that more than half the killers in Hollywood Division walk away from their crimes?”

“I don’t think we have to worry about public confidence going down,” Bosch said. “I don’t think it can.”

Pounds rubbed the bridge of his nose again and quietly said, “This is not the time for your unique cynical view of the job, Bosch. Don’t bring your arrogance in here. I can take you off that table and put you on autos or maybe juvies any time I want to make the move. Get me? I’d gladly take the heat when you took a beef to the union.”

“Then where’s your homicide clearance rate going to be? What’s it going to say in the Metro section then? Two thirds of the killers in Hollywood walk?”

Pounds put the ruler back in the drawer and closed it. Bosch thought there was a thin smile on his face and he began to believe he had just talked his way into a trap. Pounds then opened another drawer and brought a blue binder up onto the desk. It was the type used to keep record of a murder investigation but Bosch saw few pages inside it.

“Point well taken,” Pounds said. “Which brings us to the point of this meeting. See, we’re talking about statistics, Harry. We clear one more case and we’re at the halfway mark. Instead of saying more than half get away, we can say half of the killers are caught. If we clear two more, we can saymore than half are cleared. Get me?”

Pounds nodded when Bosch said nothing. He made a show of straightening the binder on his desk, then he looked directly at Bosch.

“Lucius Porter won’t be back,” he said. “Talked to him this morning. He is going stress-related. Said he is getting a doctor lined up.”

Pounds reached into the drawer and pulled up another blue murder book. Then another. Bosch could see what was happening now.

“And I hope he has a good one lined up,” Pounds was saying as he added the fifth and sixth binders to the pile. “Because last I checked this department doesn’t consider cirrhosis of the liver a stress-related malady. Porter’s a lush, simple as that. And it’s not fair that he claim a stress disability and take early retirement because he can’t handle his booze. We’re going to bust him at the administrative hearing. I don’t care if he has Mother Theresa as his lawyer. We’ll bust him.”

He tapped his finger on top of the pile of blue binders. “I’ve looked through these cases-he has eight open cases-and it’s just pathetic. I’ve copied the chronologies and I’m going to verify them. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts they are replete with fraudulent entries. He was sitting on a stool somewhere, his head on the bar, when he says he was interviewing wits or doing the legwork.”

Pounds shook his head sadly.

“You know, we lost our checks and balances when we stopped partnering our investigators. There was nobody to watch this guy. Now I’m sitting here with eight open investigations that were as slipshod as anything I’ve ever seen. For all I know, each one could’ve been cleared.”

And whose idea was it to make detectives work solo, Bosch wanted to say but didn’t. Instead, he said, “You ever hear the story about when Porter was in uniform about ten years back? He and his partner stopped one time to write up a citation for some shitbag they saw sitting on a curb drinking in public. Porter was driving. It was routine-just a misdee writeup-so he stayed behind the wheel. He’s sitting there when the shitbag stands up and caps his partner in the face. Standing there, both hands on his cite book, takes it right between the eyes and Porter sat there watching.”