“Yes, he is,” she said, without looking up. “I just talked to him.”

She now looked up and Bosch saw her eyes go to the cut on his cheek. He’d taken the butterfly bandages off before his shower that morning but the wound was still quite noticeable.

“It’s not going to happen for an hour or so. Delacroix has a public defender. That looks like it hurts.”

“Only when I smile. Can I use your phone?”

“Until the judge comes out.”

Bosch picked up the phone and called the DA’s Office, which was three floors above. He asked for Portugal and was transferred.

“Yeah, it’s Bosch. All right if I come up? We’ve gotta talk.”

“I’m here until I’m called down to arraignments.”

“See you in five.”

On the way out Bosch told the bailiff that if a detective named Edgar checked in he should be sent up to the DA’s Office. The bailiff said no problem.

The hallway outside the courtroom was teeming with lawyers and citizens, all with some business with the courts. Everybody seemed to be on a cell phone. The marble floor and high ceiling took all of the voices and multiplied them into a fierce cacophony of white noise. Bosch ducked into the little snack bar and had to wait more than five minutes in line just to buy a coffee. After he was out, he legged it up the fire exit stairs because he didn’t want to lose another five minutes waiting for one of the horribly slow elevators.

When he stepped into Portugal’s small office Edgar was already there.

“We were beginning to wonder where you were,” Portugal said.

“What the hell happened to you?” Edgar added after seeing Bosch’s cheek.

“It’s a long story. And I’m about to tell it.”

He took the other chair in front of Portugal’s desk and put his coffee down on the floor next to him. He realized he should have brought cups for Portugal and Edgar, so he decided not to drink in front of them.

He opened his briefcase on his lap and took out a folded section of the Los Angeles Times. He closed the briefcase and put it on the floor.

“So what’s going on?” Portugal said, clearly anxious about the reason Bosch had called the meeting.

Bosch started unfolding the newspaper.

“What’s going on is we charged the wrong guy and we better fix it before he gets arraigned.”

“Whoa, shit. I knew you were going to say something like that,” Portugal said. “I don’t know if I want to hear this. You are messing up a good thing, Bosch.”

“I don’t care what I’m doing. If the guy didn’t do it, he didn’t do it.”

“But he told us he did it. Several times.”

“Look,” Edgar said to Portugal. “Let Harry say what he wants to say. We don’t want to fuck this up.”

“It may be too late with Mr. Can’t-Leave-A-Good-Thing-Alone here.”

“Harry, just go on. What’s wrong?”

Bosch told them about taking the dummy up to Wonderland Avenue and re-creating Delacroix’s supposed trek up the steep hillside.

“I made it-just barely,” he said, gently touching his cheek. “But the point is, Del-”

“Yeah, you made it,” Portugal said. “You made it, so Delacroix could have made it. What’s the problem with that?”

“The problem is that I was sober when I did it and he says he wasn’t. I also knew where I was going. I knew it leveled off up there. He didn’t.”

“This is all minor bullshit.”

“No, what’s bullshit is Delacroix’s story. Nobody dragged that kid’s body up there. He was alive when he was up there. Somebody killed him up there.”

Portugal shook his head in frustration.

“This is all wild conjecture, Detective Bosch. I’m not going to stop this whole process because-”

“It’s conjecture. Not wild conjecture.”

Bosch looked over at Edgar but his partner didn’t look back at him. He had a glum look on his face. Bosch looked back at Portugal.

“Look, I’m not done. There’s more. After I got home last night I remembered Delacroix’s cat. We left it in his trailer and told him we’d take care of it but we forgot. So I went back.”

Bosch could hear Edgar breathing heavily and he knew what the problem was. Edgar had been left out of the loop by his own partner. It was embarrassing for him to be getting this information at the same time as Portugal. In a perfect world Bosch would have told him what he had before going to the prosecutor. But there hadn’t been time for that.

“All I was going to do was feed the cat. But when I got there somebody was already in the trailer. It was his daughter.”

“Sheila?” Edgar said. “What was she doing there?”

The news was apparently surprising enough for Edgar to no longer care if Portugal knew he was out of the latest investigative moves.

“She was searching the place. She claimed she was there for the cat, too, but she was searching the place when I got there.”

“For what?” Edgar said.

“She wouldn’t tell me. She claimed she wasn’t looking for anything. But after she left I stayed. I found some things.”

Bosch held up the newspaper.

“This is Sunday’s Metro section. It has a pretty big story on the case, mostly a generic feature about forensics on cases like this. But there’s a lot of detail about our case from an unnamed source. Mostly about the crime scene.”

Bosch thought after reading the article the first time in Delacroix’s trailer the night before that the source was probably Teresa Corazon, since she was quoted by name in the article in regard to generic information about bone cases. He was aware of the trading that went on between reporters and sources; direct attribution for some information, no attribution for other information. But the identity of the source wasn’t important to the present discussion and he didn’t bring it up.

“So there was an article,” Portugal asked. “What does it mean?”

“Well, it reveals that the bones were in a shallow grave and that it appeared that the body was not buried with the use of any tools. It also says that a knapsack had been buried along with the body. A lot of other details. Also details left out, like no mention of the kid’s skateboard.”

“Your point being?” Portugal asked with a bored tone in his voice.

“That if you were going to put together a false confession, a lot of what you’d need is right here.”

“Oh, come on, Detective. Delacroix gave us much more than the crime scene details. He gave us the killing itself, the driving around with the body, all of that.”

“All of that was easy. It can’t be proved or disproved. There were no witnesses. We’ll never find the car because it’s been squashed to the size of a mailbox in some junkyard in the Valley. All we have is his story. And the only place where his story meets the physical evidence is the crime scene. And every marker he gave us he could have gotten from this.”

He tossed the newspaper onto Portugal’s desk but the prosecutor didn’t even look at it. He leaned his elbows on the desk and brought his hands flat against each other and spread his fingers wide. Bosch could see his muscles flexing under his shirtsleeves and realized he was doing some kind of an at-your-desk exercise. Portugal spoke while his hands pushed against each other.

“I work out the tension this way.”

He finally stopped, releasing his breath loudly and leaning back in his seat.

“Okay, he had the ability to concoct a confession if he wanted to do it. Why would he want to do it? We’re talking about his own son. Why would he say he killed his own son if he didn’t?”

“Because of these,” Bosch said.

He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out an envelope that was folded in half. He leaned forward and gently put it down on top of the newspaper on Portugal’s desk.

As Portugal picked up the envelope and started to open it, Bosch said, “I think that was what Sheila was looking for in the trailer last night. I found it in the night table next to her father’s bed. It was underneath the bottom drawer. A hiding place there. You had to take the drawer out to find it. She didn’t do that.”