When he and his old partner were reasonably away from the noise, Harry said, “So what do the techs have?”

“Not a damned thing,” Edgar said. “If it was a gang thing, it’s one of the cleanest I’ve ever seen. Not a single print or partial. The spray can is clean. No weapon. No wits.”

“Sharkey had a crew, used to stay at a motel near the Boulevard until today, but he wasn’t into gangs,” Bosch said. “It’s in the files. He was a scammer. You know, with the Polaroids, rolling homosexuals, stuff like that.”

“You’re saying he’s in the gang files but he isn’t in a gang?”

“Right.”

Edgar nodded and said, “He still could’ve been taken down by somebody who thought he was a gangbanger.”

Wish walked over to them then but said nothing.

“You know this isn’t a gang thing, Jed,” Bosch said.

“I do?”

“Yeah, you do. If it was, there wouldn’t be a full can of paint in there. No gangbanger’s going to leave something like that behind. Also, whoever painted the wall in there didn’t have the touch. The paint ran. Whoever did it, didn’t know about spraying a wall.”

“Come here a sec,” Edgar said.

Bosch looked at Eleanor and nodded that it was okay. He and Edgar walked away a few steps and stood near the crime scene tape.

“What did this kid tell you, and how come he was running around loose if he’s part of the case?” he asked.

Bosch told him the basics of the story, that they didn’t know if Sharkey was important to the case. But somebody apparently did or couldn’t risk waiting to find out. As Bosch spoke he looked up over the hills and saw the first light of dawn outlining the tall palms at the top. Edgar took a step away and tilted his head up that way, too. But he wasn’t looking at the sky. His eyes were closed. He eventually turned back to Bosch.

“Harry, you know what this weekend is?” he said. “It’s Memorial Day weekend. It’s the biggest three-day showing weekend of the year. Start of the summer season. Last year I sold four houses on this weekend, made almost as much as I made all year as a cop.”

Bosch was confused by the sudden departure in the conversation. “What are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is… I’m not going to be busting my ass on this case. It isn’t going to fuck up my weekend like the last one. So, what I’m saying is if you want it, I’ll go to Pounds and tell him you and the FBI want to take it ’cause it goes with the one you are already working. Otherwise, I’m going to work it strictly as a nine-to-five.”

“You tell Pounds whatever you want, Jed. It’s not my call.”

Bosch started back toward Eleanor, and Edgar said, “Just one thing. Who knew you had found the kid?”

Bosch stopped and looked at Eleanor. Without turning around, he said, “We took him off the street. We interviewed him over on Wilcox. The reports went to the bureau. What do you want me to say, Jed?”

“Nothing,” Edgar said. “But, Harry, maybe you and the FBI there should have looked out for your witness a little better. Maybe saved me some time and that boy some life.”

Bosch and Wish walked silently back to the car. Once inside Bosch said, “Who knew?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“What he asked back there, who knew about Sharkey?”

She thought for a moment. Then said, “On my end, Rourke gets the daily summary reports, and he got the memo on hypnosis. The summaries go to records and are copied to the senior special agent. The tape from the interview that you gave me is locked in my desk. Nobody’s heard that. It hasn’t been transcribed. So, I guess anyone could have seen the summaries. But don’t even think about that, Harry. Nobody… It can’t be.”

“Well, they knew we found the kid and he might be important. What’s that tell you? They’ve got to have somebody on the inside.”

“Harry, that’s speculation. It could have been a lot of things. Like you told him, we picked him up on the street. Anybody could have been watching. His own friends, that girl, anybody could have put out the word that we were looking for Sharkey.”

Bosch thought about Lewis and Clarke. They must have seen them pick up Sharkey. What part were they playing? Nothing made sense.

“Sharkey was a tough little bastard,” he said. “You think he just went walking with somebody into that tunnel? I think he didn’t have a choice. And to do that, it maybe took somebody with a badge.”

“Or maybe somebody with money. You know he’d go with somebody if there was money in it.”

She didn’t start the car and they sat in it thinking. Bosch finally said, “Sharkey was a message.”

“What?”

“A message to us. See? They leave my card with him. They call it in on a no-trace line. And they do him in a tunnel. They want us to know they did it. They want us to know they’ve got somebody inside. They’re laughing at us.”

She started the car. “Where to?”

“The bureau.”

“Harry, be careful with that stuff about an inside man. If you go trying to sell that and it’s not true, you could give your enemies all they need to bury you.”

Enemies, Bosch thought. Who are my enemies this time?

“I got that kid killed,” he said. “The least I am going to do is find who did it.”

Bosch looked through the cotton curtains in the waiting room, down at the veterans cemetery, while Eleanor Wish unlocked the door to the bureau offices. The ground fog had not burned off the field of stones yet, and from above it looked like a thousand ghosts rising from their boxes at once. Bosch could see the dark gash dug into the crest of the hill at the north side of the cemetery but still could not make out what it was. It looked almost like a mass grave, a long gouge into the hill, a huge wound. The exposed soil was covered with black plastic sheets.

“You want coffee?” Wish said from behind him.

“Of course,” he said. He pulled himself away from the curtains and followed her in. The bureau was empty. They went into the office kitchen and he watched as she dumped a packet of ground coffee into a filter basket and turned the machine on. They stood there silently, watching the coffee slowly drip into a round glass pot on the heating pad. Bosch lit a cigarette and tried only to think about the coffee that was coming. She waved the smoke away with a hand but didn’t tell him to put it out.

When the coffee was ready, Bosch took it black and it hit his system like a shot. He filled up a second cup and carried both into the squad room. He lit a cigarette off the butt of the first when he got to his temporary desk.

“My last one,” he promised when he saw her looking.

Eleanor poured herself a cup of water from a bottle she took from her file drawer.

“You ever run out of that stuff?” he asked.

She ignored the question. “Harry, we can’t blame ourselves for Sharkey. If we’re to blame, then we might as well offer every person we talk to protection. Should we go up and grab his mother and put her in witness protection? What about the girl in the motel room that knew him? See, it gets crazy. Sharkey was Sharkey. You live by the street, you die by the street.”

Bosch didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “Let me see the names.”

Wish pulled out the files on the WestLand case. She rifled through them and pulled out a computer printout several pages long and folded accordion-style. She tossed it on the desk in front of him.

“That’s the master there,” she said. “Everybody who had a box. There are notes written after some of the names, but they probably are not germane. Most of that was if we thought they were scamming insurance or not.”

Bosch started unfolding the printout and realized it was one long list and five shorter lists marked A through E. He asked what they were, and she came around the desk and looked over his shoulder. He smelled the apple in her hair.