“Looks like nobody got Saturday’s mail,” Bosch said. “I think Peng and his family have split.”

They returned to the car and Sun said he wanted to move it to a less noticeable spot now that they were back in it. He drove up the street, turned around and then parked by a containment wall that surrounded the trash bins for the building across the street and down one. They still had a view of the sixth-floor walkway and the door to Peng’s apartment.

“I think we’re wasting our time,” Bosch said. “They’re not coming back.”

“One hour, Harry. Please.”

Bosch noted it was the first time Sun had called him by his name. It didn’t placate him.

“You’re giving him another hour’s lead time, that’s all.”

Bosch pulled the box out of his jacket pocket. He opened it up and looked at the phone.

“You watch the place,” he said. “I’m going to work on this.”

The plastic hinges on the phone had melted and Bosch struggled to open it. Finally, it broke in two when he applied too much pressure. The LCD screen was cracked and partially melted. Bosch put that part aside and concentrated on the other half. The battery compartment cover was melted, its seams fused together. He opened his door and leaned out. He struck the phone on the curb three times, harder each time, until the impacts finally cracked the seams and the compartment cover fell off.

He pulled back in and closed the door. The phone’s battery appeared to be intact but again the deformed plastic made it difficult to remove. This time he pulled his badge case and removed one of his picks. He used it to pry the battery out. Beneath it was the cradle for the phone’s memory card.

It was empty.

“Shit!”

Bosch threw the phone down into the foot well. Another dead end.

He looked at his watch. It had only been twenty minutes since he had agreed to give Sun the hour. But Bosch couldn’t remain still. All of his instincts told him he had to get into that apartment. His daughter could be in there.

“Sorry, Sun Yee,” he said. “You can wait here, but I can’t. I’m going in.”

He leaned forward and pulled the gun out of his waistband. He wanted to leave it outside the Mercedes in case they were caught in the apartment and the police connected them with the car. He wrapped the gun in his daughter’s blanket, opened the door and got out. He walked through an opening in the containment wall and put the bundle on top of one of the overfull trash bins. He would easily be able to retrieve it when he got back.

When he stepped out of the containment area, he found Sun out of the car and waiting

“Okay,” Sun said. “We go.”

They started back to Peng’s building.

“Let me ask you something, Sun Yee. Do you ever take those shades off”

Sun’s answer came without explanation.

“No.”

Once again the security guard in the lobby never looked up. The building was big enough that there was always somebody with a key waiting for an elevator. In five minutes they were back in front of Peng’s door. While Sun stood at the railing as a lookout and visual block, Bosch went down to one knee and worked the lock. It took him longer than expected-almost four minutes-but he got it open.

“Okay,” he said.

Sun turned away from the railing and followed Bosch into the apartment.

Before he had even closed the door Bosch knew they would find death in the apartment. There was no overpowering odor, no blood on the walls, no physical indication at all in the first room. But after attending more than five hundred murder scenes over the years as a cop, he had developed what he considered a sense for blood. He had no scientific backing to his theory, but Bosch believed that spilled blood changed the composition of air in an enclosed environment. And he sensed that change now. The fact that it could be his own daughter’s blood made the recognition dreadful.

He held up his hand to stop Sun from entering further into the apartment.

“You feel that, Sun Yee?”

“No. Feel what?”

“Somebody’s dead. Don’t touch anything, and follow in my steps if you can.”

The apartment layout was the same as the unit next door. A two-room dwelling, this one shared by a mother with her two teenage children. There was no sign of any disturbance or danger in the first room. There was a sofa that had a sleeping pillow and sheet haphazardly tossed on it and Bosch assumed the boy slept on the couch while the sister and mother took the bedroom.

Bosch moved across the room and into the bedroom. A curtain was drawn across the window and the room was dark. With his elbow Bosch pushed up the wall switch and a ceiling light over the bed came on. The bed was unmade but empty. There was no sign of struggle or disturbance or death. Bosch looked to his right. There were two more doors. He guessed one led to a closet and the other led to a bathroom.

He always carried latex gloves in his coat pocket. He pulled a pair out and put a glove on his left hand. He opened the door on the right first. It was a closet that was packed tightly with clothes on hangers and in stacks on the floor. The overhead shelving was crowded as well with boxes that had Chinese writing on them. Bosch backed up and moved to the second door. He opened it without hesitation.

The small bathroom was awash in dried blood. It had been splashed over the sink, the toilet and the tiled floor. There were spatter and drip lines on the back wall and on the dirty white plastic shower curtain with flowers on it.

It was impossible to step into the room without stepping on one of the blood trails. But Bosch didn’t worry about it. He had to get to the shower curtain. He had to know.

He quickly moved across the room and yanked the plastic back.

The shower stall was tiny by American standards. It was no bigger than the old phone booths outside Du-Par’s in the Farmers Market. But somehow someone had managed to pile three bodies on top of one another in there.

Bosch held his breath as he leaned over and in to try to identify the victims. They were fully clothed. The boy, who was the biggest, was on top. He was facedown atop a woman of about forty-his mother-who was sitting slouched against a wall. Their positioning suggested some sort of Oedipal fantasy that probably was not the killer’s intention. Both of their throats had been savagely cut from ear to ear.

Behind and partially underneath the mother-as if hiding-was the body of a young girl. Her long dark hair was covering her face.

“Ah, God,” Bosch called out. “Sun Yee!”

Soon Sun came in behind him and he heard the sharp intake of his breath. Bosch started putting on the second glove.

“There’s a girl on the bottom and I can’t tell if it’s Maddie,” he said. “Put these on.”

He pulled another pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them to Sun, who quickly snapped them on. Together they pulled the body of the dead boy out of the shower stall and lowered it to the floor beneath the sink. Bosch then gently moved the mother’s body until he could see the face of the girl on the tile beneath. She, too, had been slashed across the throat. Her eyes were open and looked fearfully at death. It tore Bosch’s heart to see that look, but it wasn’t his daughter’s face.

“It’s not her,” he said. “It’s gotta be her friend. He.”

Harry turned away from the carnage and squeezed past Sun. He went out to the bedroom and sat down on the bed. He heard a bumping sound from the bathroom and guessed that Sun was putting the bodies back as they had found them.

Bosch exhaled loudly and leaned forward, arms folded across his chest. He was thinking about the girl’s frightened eyes. He almost fell forward off the bed.

“What happened here?” he asked in a whisper.

Sun stepped out of the bathroom and adopted his bodyguard stance. He said nothing. Harry noticed that there was blood on his gloved hands.