“Mr. Delacroix, do you have a cat?” Bosch asked. “Where’s your cat?”

Delacroix peeked his wet eyes through his fingers.

“He’s around. Probably sleepin’ in the bed. Why?”

“Well, we’re going to call Animal Control and they’ll come get him to take care of him. You’re going to have to come with us. We’re going to place you under arrest now. And we’ll talk more at the police station.”

Delacroix dropped his hands and seemed upset.

“No. Animal Control won’t take care of him. They’ll gas him the minute they find out I won’t be coming back.”

“Well, we can’t just leave him here.”

“Mrs. Kresky will take care of him. She’s next door. She can come in and feed him.”

Bosch shook his head. The whole thing was foundering because of a cat.

“We can’t do that. We have to seal this place until we can search it.”

“What do you have to search it for?” Delacroix said, real anger in his voice now. “I’m telling you what you need to know. I killed my son. It was an accident. I hit him too hard, I guess. I…”

Delacroix put his face back into his hands and tearfully mumbled, “God… what did I do?”

Bosch checked Edgar; he was writing. Bosch stood up. He wanted to get Delacroix to the station and into one of the interview rooms. His anxiety was gone now, replaced by a sense of urgency. Attacks of conscience and guilt were ephemeral. He wanted to get Delacroix locked down on tape-video and audio-before he decided to talk to a lawyer and before he realized that he was talking himself into a 9 × 6 room for the rest of his life.

“Okay, we’ll figure out the cat thing later,” he said. “We’ll leave enough food for now. Stand up, Mr. Delacroix, we’re going to go.”

Delacroix stood up.

“Can I change into something nicer? This is just old stuff I was wearing around here.”

“No, don’t worry about that,” Bosch said. “We’ll bring you clothes to wear later on.”

He didn’t bother telling him that those clothes wouldn’t be his. What would happen was that he’d be given a county jail-issued jumpsuit with a number across the back. His jumpsuit would be yellow, the color given to custodies on the high-power floor-the murderers.

“Are you going to handcuff me?” Delacroix asked.

“It’s department policy,” Bosch said. “We have to.”

He came around the coffee table and turned Delacroix so he could cuff his hands behind his back.

“I was an actor, you know. I once played a prisoner in an episode of The Fugitive. The first series, with David Janssen. It was just a small role. I sat on a bench next to Janssen. That’s all I did. I was supposed to be on drugs, I think.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He gently pushed Delacroix toward the trailer’s narrow door.

“I don’t know why I just remembered that,” Delacroix said.

“It’s all right,” Edgar said. “People remember the strangest things at a time like this.”

“Just be careful on these steps,” Bosch said.

They led him out, Edgar in front and Bosch behind him.

“Is there a key?” Bosch asked.

“On the kitchen counter there,” Delacroix said.

Bosch went back inside and found the keys. He then started opening cabinets in the kitchenette until he found the box of cat food. He opened it and dumped it out onto the paper plate under the table. There was not very much food. Bosch knew he would have to do something about the animal later.

When Bosch came out of the trailer Edgar had already put Delacroix into the rear of the slickback. He saw a neighbor watching from the open front door of a nearby trailer. He turned and closed and locked Delacroix’s door.

Chapter 36

BOSCH stuck his head into Lt. Billets’s office. She was turned sideways at her desk and working on a computer at a side table. Her desk had been cleared. She was about to go home for the day.

“Yes?” she said without looking to see who it was.

“Looks like we got lucky,” Bosch said.

She turned from the computer and saw it was Bosch.

“Let me guess. Delacroix invites you in and just sits down and confesses.”

Bosch nodded.

“Just about.”

Her eyes grew wide in surprise.

“You are fucking kidding me.”

“He says he did it. We had to shut him up so we could get him back here on tape. It was like he had been waiting for us to show up.”

Billets asked a few more questions and Bosch ended up recapping the entire visit to the trailer, including the problem they had in not having a working tape recorder with which to take Delacroix’s confession. Billets grew concerned and annoyed, equally with Bosch and Edgar for not being prepared and Bradley of IAD for not returning Bosch’s tape recorder.

“All I can say is that this better not put hair on the cake, Harry,” she said, referring to the possibility of a legal challenge to any confession because Delacroix’s initial words were not on tape. “If we lose this one because of a screwup on our part…”

She didn’t finish but didn’t need to.

“Look, I think we’ll be all right. Edgar got everything he said down verbatim. We stopped as soon as we got enough to hook him up and now we’ll lock it all down with sound and video.”

Billets seemed barely placated.

“And what about Miranda? You’re confident we will not have a Miranda situation,” she said, the last part not a question but an order.

“I don’t see it. He started spouting off before we had a chance to advise him. Then he kept talking afterward. Sometimes it goes like that. You’re ready to go with the battering ram and they just open the door for you. Whoever he gets as a lawyer might have a heart attack and start screaming about it but nothing’s going to come of it. We’re clean, Lieutenant.”

Billets nodded, a sign that Bosch was convincing her.

“I wish they were all this easy,” she said. “What about the DA’s office?”

“I’m calling them next.”

“Okay, which room if I want to take a look?”

“Three.”

“Okay, Harry, go wrap him up.”

She turned back to her computer. Bosch threw a salute at her and was about to duck out of the doorway when he stopped. She sensed he had not left and turned back to him.

“What is it?”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. The whole way in I was thinking about what could have been avoided if we just went to him instead of dancing around him, gathering string.”

“Harry, I know what you’re thinking and there’s no way in the world you could have known that this guy-after twenty-some years-was just waiting for you to knock on his door. You handled it the right way and if you had it to do again you would still do it the same way. You circle the prey. What happened with Officer Brasher had nothing to do with how you ran this case.”

Bosch looked at her for a moment and then nodded. What she said would help ease his conscience.

Billets turned back to her computer.

“Like I said, go wrap him up.”

Bosch went back to the homicide table to call the District Attorney’s Office to advise that an arrest had been made in a murder case and that a confession was being taken. He talked to a supervisor named O’Brien and told her that either he or his partner would be coming in to file charges by the end of the day. O’Brien, who was familiar with the case only through media reports, said she wanted to send a prosecutor to the station to oversee the handling of the confession and the forward movement of the case at this stage.

Bosch knew that with rush hour traffic out of downtown it would still be a minimum of forty-five minutes before the prosecutor got to the station. He told O’Brien the prosecutor was welcome but that he wasn’t going to wait for anyone before taking the suspect’s confession. O’Brien suggested he should.

“Look, this guy wants to talk,” Bosch said. “In forty-five minutes or an hour it could be a different story. We can’t wait. Tell your guy to knock on the door at room three when he gets here. We’ll bring him into it as soon as we can.”