They took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out front to where the memorial fountain was.

“So where do you want to go?” Kiz asked.

“Depends on how much there is to talk about.”

“Probably a lot.”

“Last time I worked in Parker Center I was a smoker. When I needed to walk and think I’d go over to Union Station and buy smokes in the shop over there. I liked that place. It’s got those comfortable chairs in the main hall. Or it used to, at least.”

“Sounds good to me.”

They headed that way, taking Los Angeles Street to the north. The first building they passed was the federal office building, and Bosch noticed that the concrete barriers erected in 2001 to keep potential vehicle bombs away from the building were still in place. The threat of danger didn’t seem to bother the people in the line stretching across the front of the building. They were waiting to get into the immigration offices, each clutching paperwork and ready to make a case for citizenship. They waited beneath the tile mosaics on the front façade that depicted people dressed like angels, their eyes skyward, waiting on heaven.

“Why don’t you start, Harry,” Rider said. “Tell me about Robert Verloren.”

Bosch walked a little further before beginning.

“I liked the guy,” he said. “He’s digging himself out of the hole. He cooks a hundred or so breakfasts a day over there. I had a plate and it was pretty good stuff.”

“And I’m sure it beats the hell out of the prices at Pacific Dining Car. What did he give you that’s made you so angry?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You read me, I read you. I know he told you something that’s got you going.”

Bosch nodded. It sure didn’t seem like three years since they had worked together.

“ Irving. Or at least I think he gave me Irving.”

“Tell it.”

Bosch took her through the story Verloren had told him less than an hour before. He finished with Verloren’s description, limited as it was, of the two men with badges who came to his restaurant and threatened him in order to make him back off the racial angle.

“Sounds like Irving to me, too,” Rider said.

“And one of his poodles. Maybe it was McClellan.”

“Maybe. So you think Verloren was straight? He’s been on the Nickel a long time.”

“I think so. He claims to have been sober for three years this time. But you know, grinding over something for seventeen years, pretty soon perceptions become facts. Still, everything he said just seems to fit into the underpinnings of this. I think they pushed this case, Kiz. It was going in one direction and they pushed it the other way. Maybe they knew what was coming, that the city was going to burn. Rodney King wasn’t the gasoline. He was only the match. Things had been building and maybe the powers that be looked at this case and said for the public good, we have to go the other way. They sacrificed justice for Rebecca Verloren.”

They were crossing over the 101 Freeway on the Los Angeles Street overpass. Eight lanes of crawling traffic smoked beneath them. The sun was bright, reflecting off windshields and buildings and concrete. Bosch put on his Ray-Bans.

The traffic was loud, too, and Rider had to raise her voice.

“That’s not like you, Harry.”

“What isn’t?”

“Looking for a good reason for them to have done something so wrong. You usually look for the sinister angle.”

“Are you telling me you found the sinister angle in that PDU file?”

She nodded glumly.

“I think so,” she said.

“And they just let you waltz in there and get it?”

“I got in to see the man first thing this morning. I brought him a cup of coffee from Starbucks-he hates the cafeteria crap. That got me in. Then I told him what we had and what I wanted to do, and the bottom line is he trusts me. So he more or less let me have a look around in Special Archives.”

“The Public Disorder Unit came and went long before he was here. Did he know about it?”

“I’m sure after he took the job he was briefed. Maybe even before he took it.”

“Did you tell him specifically about Mackey and the Chatsworth Eights?”

“Not specifically. I just told him the case we caught was connected to an old PDU investigation and I needed to get into Special Archives to look for a file. He sent Lieutenant Hohman with me. We went in, found the file and I had to look through it while Hohman sat across a table from me. You know what, Harry? There are a hell of a lot of files in Special Archives.”

“Where all the bodies are buried…”

Bosch wanted to say something more but wasn’t sure how to say it. Rider looked at him and read him.

“What, Harry?”

He didn’t say anything at first but she waited him out.

“Kiz, you said the man on six trusts you. Do you trust him?”

She looked him in the eye when she answered.

“Like I trust you, Harry. Okay?”

Bosch looked at her.

“That’s good enough for me.”

Rider made a move to turn down Arcadia but Bosch pointed toward the old pueblo, the place where the City of Angels was founded. He wanted to take the long way and walk through.

“I haven’t been down here in a while. Let’s check this out.”

They cut through the circular courtyard where the padres blessed the animals every Easter and then past the Instituto Cultural Mexicano. They followed the curving arcade of cheap souvenir booths and churro stands. Recorded mariachi music came from unseen speakers, but in counterpoint was the sound of a live guitar.

They found the musician sitting on a bench in front of the Avila Adobe. They stopped and listened as the old man played a Mexican ballad Bosch thought he had heard before but could not identify.

Bosch studied the mud-walled structure behind the musician and wondered if Don Francisco Avila had any idea what he was helping to set in motion when he staked his claim to the spot in 1818. A city would grow tall and wide from this place. A city as great as any other. And just as mean. A destination city, a city of invention and reinvention. A place where the dream seemed as easy to reach as the sign they put up on the hill, but a place where the reality was always something different. The road to that sign on the hill had a locked gate across it.

It was a city full of haves and have-nots, movie stars and extras, drivers and the driven, predators and prey. The fat and the hungry and little room in between. A city that despite all of that still had them lining up and waiting every day behind the bomb barriers to get in and stay in.

Bosch pulled the fold of money from his pocket and dropped a five in the old musician’s basket. He and Rider then cut through the old Cucamonga Winery, its cask rooms converted into galleries and artists’ stalls, and out to Alameda. They crossed the street to the train station, its clock tower rising in front of them. In the front walkway they passed a sundial with an inscription cut into its granite pedestal.

Vision to See

Faith to Believe

Courage to Do

Union Station was designed to mirror the city it served and the way in which it was supposed to work. It was a melting pot of architectural styles-Spanish Colonial, Mission, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco, Southwestern and Moorish design flourishes among them. But unlike the rest of the city, where the pot more often than not boiled over, the styles at the train station blended smoothly into something unique, something beautiful. Bosch loved it for that.

Through the glass doors they came into the cavernous entry hall, and an archway three stories tall led to the immense waiting room beyond. As Bosch took it in he remembered that he used to walk over here not only for cigarettes, but also to renew himself a little bit. Going to Union Station was like paying a visit to church, a cathedral where the graceful lines of design and function and civic pride all intersected. In the central waiting room the voices of travelers rose into its high empty spaces and were transformed into a choir of languid whispers.