“Okay, we’re with him.”

A few minutes later Mackey came out of the fast food restaurant carrying a large soda cup with a straw sticking out. They followed him to Reseda Boulevard and Parthenia Street, where a Toyota with the front end caved in had been pushed off the road. Another tow truck was just jacking up the other car, a large SUV that had its back end realigned by the accident. Mackey spoke briefly with the other tow truck driver-a professional courtesy-and went to work on the Toyota. An LAPD patrol car was sitting in the parking lot of the corner plaza and the officer inside was writing up a report. Bosch saw no drivers. He thought this meant that they might have all been transported to an emergency room because of injuries.

Mackey towed the Toyota to a dealership all the way over on Van Nuys Boulevard. While he was there, letting the wreck down in the service drive, Bosch got another call. Robinson told him that Mackey had been summoned again. This time to the Northridge Fashion Center, where an employee of the Borders bookstore needed a battery jump.

“This guy isn’t going to have time to read the paper if he stays busy like this,” Rider said after Bosch reported on the phone call.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m wondering if he can even read.”

“You mean the dyslexia?”

“Yeah, but not just that. I haven’t seen him do any reading or writing. He told me to fill in the forms for the tow. Then he either didn’t want to or couldn’t fill out a receipt at the end. And then there was this note on the desk for him.”

“What note?”

“He picked it up and stared at it for a long time but I wasn’t really sure he knew what it said.”

“Could you read it? What did it say?”

“It was a note from the dayshift people. Visa had called to confirm his employment on an application he had made, I guess.”

Rider wrinkled her brow.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“Just seems weird, him applying for a credit card. That would make him findable, which I thought he was trying to avoid.”

“Maybe he’s starting to feel safe.”

Mackey went from the Toyota dealership straight to the shopping mall, where he jump-started a woman’s car. He then turned his truck toward the home base. It was almost ten o’clock by the time he pulled back into the station. Bosch’s sagging hopes were buoyed when he looked through the binoculars from the plaza across the street and saw Mackey walking from the truck to the office.

“We might still be in play,” he said to Rider. “He’s carrying the paper with him.”

It was hard to keep track of Mackey inside the station. The front office was glass on two sides and that was not a problem. But the garage doors were now closed and oftentimes it seemed that Mackey would disappear into these areas, where Bosch could not see him.

“You want me to be the eyes for a while?” Rider asked.

Bosch lowered the binoculars and looked at her. He could barely read her face in the darkness of the car.

“Nah, I’m okay. You’re doing all the driving anyway. Why don’t you rest? I woke you up early today.”

He raised the binoculars back up.

“I’m fine,” Rider said. “But anytime you need a break…”

“Besides,” Bosch said, “I sort of feel responsible for this guy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. This whole thing. I mean, we could’ve just pulled Mackey in and sweated him in the box, tried to break him. Instead we went this way, and it’s my plan. I’m responsible.”

“We can still sweat him. If this doesn’t work, then that’s probably what we’ll need to do.”

Bosch’s phone began to chirp.

“Maybe this is what we’re waiting for,” he said as he answered.

It was Nord.

“I thought you told us this guy got his general education degree, Harry.”

“He did. What’s going on?”

“He just had to call someone to read the story to him out of the paper.”

Bosch sat up a little straighter. They were in play. It didn’t matter how the story was communicated to Mackey, the important thing was that he wanted to know what it said.

“Who did he call?”

“A woman named Michelle Murphy. Sounded like an old girlfriend. He asked if she still got the paper every day, like he wasn’t sure anymore. She said yeah and he asked her to read the story to him.”

“Did they talk about it after she read it?”

“Yeah. She asked him if he knew the girl the story was about. He said no, but then he said, ‘I knew the gun.’ Just like that. Then she said she didn’t want to know anything else and that was it. They hung up.”

Bosch thought about all of this. The play earlier in the day had worked. It had kicked over a rock that had not been moved in seventeen years. He was excited, and he could feel the charge building in his blood.

“Can you pipe the recording over the line to us here?” he asked. “I want to hear it.”

“I think we can,” Nord said. “Let me get one of the techs who are floating around here to-hey, Harry, I gotta call you back. Mackey’s making a call.”

“Call me back.”

Bosch quickly closed the phone so Nord could get back to her monitor. He excitedly recounted for Rider the report on Mackey’s phone call to Michelle Murphy. He could tell Rider caught the charge as well.

“We might be in business, Harry.”

Bosch was looking through the binoculars at Mackey. He was sitting behind the desk in the office and talking on his cell phone.

“Come on, Mackey,” Bosch whispered. “Spill it. Tell us the story.”

But then Mackey closed the phone. Bosch knew the call was too short.

Ten seconds later Nord called Bosch back.

“He just called Billy Blitzkrieg.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I might be in trouble’ and ‘I might need to make a move,’ and then Burkhart cut him off and said, ‘I don’t care what it is, don’t talk about it on the phone.’ So they agreed to meet after Mackey gets off work.”

“Where?”

“Sounded like at the house. Mackey said, ‘You’ll be up?’ and Burkhart said he would be. Mackey then said, ‘What about Belinda, she still there?’ and Burkhart said she’d be asleep and not to worry about her. They ended it like that.”

Bosch immediately felt a crushing blow to his hopes of breaking the case that night. If Mackey met Burkhart inside the house, they would not hear what transpired inside. They’d be locked out of the confession they had set up the surveillance to get.

“Call me if he makes any other calls,” he said quickly and then hung up.

He looked at Rider, who was waiting expectantly in the dark.

“Not good?” she asked. She had obviously read something in his tone to Nord.

“Not good.”

He told her about the calls and the obstacle they would face if Mackey met with Burkhart to discuss his “trouble” behind closed doors.

“It’s not all bad, Harry,” she said after hearing everything. “He made a solid admission to the Murphy woman and a lesser admission to Burkhart. But we’re getting close so don’t get depressed. Let’s figure this out. What can we do to make them meet outside of the house? Like at a Starbucks or something.”

“Yeah, right. Mackey ordering a latte.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Even if we roust them out of the house, how are we going to get close? We can’t. We need this to be a phone call. It’s the blind spot-my blind spot-to this whole thing.”

“We just need to sit tight and see what happens. It’s all we can do right now. Look, it would be good to have an ear on this but maybe it’s not the end of the world. We already have Mackey on the phone saying he might have to make a move. If he does, if he runs, then that could be seen by a jury as a shading of guilt. And if you take that and what we already have on tape it might be enough to squeeze more out of him when we finally bring him in. So all is not lost here, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You want me to call it in to Abel? He’d want to know.”

“Yeah. Fine, call it in. There’s nothing to call in, but go ahead.”