“McKittrick?”

“No. Claude Eno. He’s dead now. Took his secrets with him. But Mittel was paying him off for twenty-five years.”

“The bank statements?”

“Yeah, in the briefcase. You look, you’ll probably find records somewhere linking Mittel to the payments. Conklin said he didn’t know about them and I believe him…You know, somebody ought to check all the elections Mittel worked on over the years. They’ll probably find out he was a rat fucker that could’ve held his own in the Nixon White House.”

Bosch ground his cigarette out on the side of a trash can next to the table and dropped the butt in. He started to feel very cold and put his jacket back on. It was smudged with dirt and dried blood.

“You look like a mess in that, Harry,” Irving said. “Why don’t you-”

“I’m cold.”

“Okay.”

“You know, he didn’t even scream.”

“What?”

“Mittel. He didn’t even scream when he went down that hill. I can’t figure that out.”

“You don’t have to. It’s just one of those-”

“And I didn’t push him. He jumped me in the brush and when we rolled, he went over. He didn’t even scream.”

“I understand. No one is saying-”

“All I did was start to ask questions about her and people started dying.”

Bosch was staring at an eye chart on the far wall of the room. He could not figure out why they would have such a thing in an emergency room examination suite.

“Christ…Pounds…I-”

“Yes, I know what happened,” Irving interrupted.

Bosch looked over at him.

“You do?”

“We interviewed everyone in the squad. Edgar told me that he made a computer run for you on Fox. My only conclusion is that Pounds either overheard or somehow got wind of it. I think he was monitoring what your close associates were doing after you went on ISL. Then he must’ve taken it a step further and stumbled into Mittel and Vaughn. He ran DMV traces on the parties involved. I think it got back to Mittel. He had the connections that would have warned him.”

Bosch was silent. He wondered if Irving really believed that scenario or if he was signaling to Bosch that he knew what had really happened and was letting it go by. It didn’t matter. Whether or not Irving blamed him or took departmental action against him, Bosch’s own conscience would be the hardest thing to live with.

“Christ,” he said again. “He got killed instead of me.”

His body started shuddering then. As if saying the words out loud had started some kind of exorcism. He threw the ice pack into the trash can and wrapped his arms around himself. But the shuddering wouldn’t stop. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again, that his shaking was not a temporary affliction but a permanent part of him now. He had the warm salty taste of tears in his mouth and he realized then that he was crying. He turned his face away from Irving and tried to tell him to leave but he couldn’t say anything. His jaw was locked as tight as a fist.

“Harry?” he heard Irving say. “Harry, you okay?”

Bosch managed to nod, not understanding how Irving could not see his body shaking. He moved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and pulled it closed around him. He felt something in his left pocket and started absentmindedly pulling it out.

“Look,” Irving was saying, “the doctor said you could get emotional. This knock on the head…they do weird things to you. Don’t wor-Harry, are you sure you’re okay? You’re turning blue, son. I’m gonna-I’ll go get the doctor. I’ll-”

He stopped as Bosch managed to remove the object from his jacket. He held his palm upright. Clasped in his shaking hand was a black eight ball. Much of it was smeared with blood. Irving took it from him, having to practically pry his fingers off it.

“I’ll go get somebody,” was all he said.

Then Bosch was alone in the room, waiting for someone to come and the demon to leave.

Chapter Forty-four

BECAUSE OF THE concussion, Bosch’s pupils were dilated unevenly and purple hemorrhages bulged below them. He had a hell of a headache and a one-hundred-degree temperature. As a precaution, the emergency room physician ordered that he be admitted and monitored, not allowed to sleep until four in the morning. He tried to pass the time by reading the newspaper and watching the talk shows but they only seemed to worsen the pain. Finally, he just stared at the walls until a nurse came in, checked on him and told him he could sleep. After that, nurses kept coming into his room and waking him at two-hour intervals. They checked his eyes and temperature and asked if he was okay. They never gave him anything for the headache. They told him to go back to sleep. If he dreamed of the coyote during the short sleep cycles, or anything else, he didn’t remember it.

Finally, at noon, he got up for good. He was unsteady on his feet at first but equilibrium quickly came back to him. He made his way into the bathroom and studied his image in the mirror. He burst out laughing at what he saw, though it was not that funny. It was just that he seemed to be about to laugh or cry or do both at any given moment.

He had a small shaved spot on his skull where there was an L-shaped seam of stitches. It hurt when he touched the wound but he laughed about that, too. He managed to comb hair over it with his hand, fairly well camouflaging the injury.

The eyes were another matter. Still dilated unevenly and now cracked with red veins, they looked like the bad end of a two-week bender. Below them, deep purple triangles pointed to the corners of the eyes. A double shiner. Bosch didn’t think he’d ever had one before.

Stepping back into the room he saw that his briefcase had been left by Irving next to the bed table. He bent to pick it up and almost lost his balance, grabbing on to the table at the last moment. He got back into bed with the briefcase and began examining its contents. He had no purpose in mind, he just wanted to be doing something.

He leafed through his notebook, finding it hard to concentrate on the words. He then re-read the five-year-old Christmas card from Meredith Roman, now Katherine Register. He realized he needed to call her, that he wanted to tell her what happened before she read about it in the paper or heard it on the news. He found her number in his notebook and dialed on the room’s phone. He got her answering machine and left a message.

“Meredith, uh, Katherine…this is Harry Bosch. I need to talk to you today when you get a minute. Some things have happened and I think you’ll, uh, feel better about things when you hear from me. So, give me a call.”

Bosch left a variety of numbers on the tape, including his mobile, the Mark Twain and the hospital room and then hung up.

He opened the accordion pocket in the lid of the briefcase and slipped out the photo Monte Kim had given him. He studied his mother’s face for a long time. The thought that eventually poked through was a question. Bosch had no doubt from what Conklin had said that he had loved her. But he wondered if she really loved Conklin back. Bosch remembered a time when she had visited him at McClaren. She had promised to get him out. At the time, the legal effort was going slowly and he knew that she had no faith in courts. When she made the promise, he knew she wasn’t thinking about the law, only ways to get around it, to manipulate it. And he believed she would have found a way to do it if her time hadn’t been taken away.

He realized, looking at the photo, that Conklin might simply have been part of the promise, part of the manipulation. Their marriage plan was her way of getting Harry out. From unwed mother with an arrest record to wife of an important man. Conklin would be able to get Harry out, to win back Marjorie Lowe’s custody of her son. Bosch considered that love may have had nothing to do with it on her part, that it was only opportunity. In all the visits to McClaren, she had never spoken of Conklin or any man in particular. If she had truly been in love, wouldn’t she have told him?