Bosch hung the phone up and then pulled his cell from his pocket. He had known that the Hong Kong cops would eventually come, and he had already made a plan for what to do.

The first call he made was to Sun Yee. He knew it was late in Hong Kong but he couldn’t wait. The phone rang eight times and then went to message.

“It’s Bosch. Call me when you get this.”

Bosch hung up and stared at his phone for a long moment. He was concerned. It was one-thirty in the morning in Hong Kong, not a time when he would have expected Sun Yee to be away from his phone. Unless it wasn’t by his choice.

He next scrolled through the contact list on his phone and found a number he had not used in at least a year.

He called the number now and this time got an immediate answer.

“Mickey Haller.”

“It’s Bosch.”

“Harry? I didn’t think I’d-”

“I think I need a lawyer.”

There was a pause.

“Okay, when?”

“Right now.”

42

Gandle came charging out of his office the moment he saw Bosch enter the squad room.

“Bosch, I told you to get in here forthwith. Why haven’t you been answering your-”

He stopped when he saw who entered behind Bosch. Mickey Haller was a well-known defense attorney. There wasn’t a detective in the RHD who didn’t know him on sight.

“This is your lawyer?” Gandle said with disgust. “I told you to bring your daughter, not your lawyer.”

“Lieutenant,” Bosch said, “let’s get something straight from the start. My daughter is not part of this equation. Mr. Haller is here to advise me and help me explain to the men from Hong Kong that I committed no crimes while I was in their city. Now, do you want to introduce me to them or should I do it myself?”

Gandle hesitated and then relented.

“This way.”

Gandle led them to the conference room off Captain Dodds’s office. Waiting there were the two men from Hong Kong. They stood up upon Bosch’s arrival and handed him business cards. Alfred Lo and Clifford Wu. They both were from HKPD’s Triad Bureau.

Bosch introduced Haller and handed the cards to him.

“Do we need a translator, gentlemen?” Haller asked.

“That is not necessary,” Wu said.

“Well, that’s a start,” Haller said. “Why don’t we sit down and hash this big old thing around.”

Everyone, including Gandle, took a seat around the conference table. Haller spoke first.

“Let me start things off here by saying that my client, Detective Bosch, is not waiving any of his constitutionally guaranteed rights at this time. We are on American soil here and that means he doesn’t have to speak to you gentlemen. However, he is also a detective and he knows what you two men are up against on a daily basis. Against my advice he is willing to talk to you. So the way we will work this is that you can ask him questions and he’ll try to answer them if I think he should. There will be no recording of this session but you can take notes if you like. We hope to end this conversation with you two fellows leaving with a greater understanding of the events of this past weekend in Hong Kong. But one thing that is for certain is that you will not be leaving with Detective Bosch. His cooperation in this matter ends when this meeting ends.”

Haller punctuated his opening salvo with a smile.

Before coming into the PAB, Bosch had met with Haller for nearly an hour in the back of Haller’s Lincoln Town Car. They were parked at the dog park near Franklin Canyon and were able to watch Harry’s daughter walk around and pet the sociable dogs while they talked. After they were finished, they took Maddie to her meeting with Dr. Hinojos and then drove over to the PAB.

They were not operating in complete agreement but had forged a strategy. A quick Internet search on Haller’s laptop had even provided some backup material. They had come in ready to make Bosch’s case to the men from Hong Kong.

Being a detective, Bosch was walking a thin line. He wanted his colleagues from across the Pacific to know what had happened, but he wasn’t going to put himself, his daughter or Sun Yee in jeopardy. He believed that all his actions in Hong Kong were justified. He told Haller he had been in kill-or-be-killed situations initiated by others. And that included his encounter with the hotel manager at Chung-king Mansions. In each case he had emerged victorious. There was no crime in that. Not in his book.

Lo took out a pen and notebook and Wu asked the first question, revealing that he was the lead man.

“First, we would ask, why did you go to Hong Kong on such short trip”

Bosch shrugged like the answer was obvious.

“To get my daughter and bring her back here.”

“On Saturday morning your former wife, she report the daughter missing to police,” Wu said.

Bosch stared at him for a long moment.

“Is that a question?”

“Was she missing?”

“My understanding is that she was indeed missing but on Saturday morning I was thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific. I can’t speak to what my ex-wife was doing then.”

“We believe your daughter was taken by someone named Peng Qingcai. Do you know him?”

“Never met him.”

“Peng is dead,” Lo said.

Bosch nodded.

“That doesn’t make me unhappy.”

“Mr. Peng’s neighbor, Mrs. Fengyi Mai, she recall speaking with you at her home Sunday,” Wu said. “You and Mr. Sun Yee.”

“Yes, we knocked on her door. She wasn’t much help.”

“Why is this”

“I guess because she didn’t know anything. She didn’t know where Peng was.”

Wu leaned forward, his body language easy to read. He thought he was zeroing in on Bosch.

“Did you go to Peng’s apartment?”

“We knocked on the door but nobody answered. After a while we left.”

Wu leaned back, disappointed.

“You acknowledge that you were with Sun Yee?” he asked.

“Sure. I was with him.”

“How do you know this man?”

“Through my ex-wife. They met me at the airport Sunday morning and informed me that they were looking for my daughter because the police department there did not believe she had been abducted.”

Bosch studied the two men for a moment before continuing.

“You see, your police department dropped the ball. I hope you will include that in your reports. Because if I’m dragged into this, I certainly will. I’ll call every newspaper in Hong Kong-doesn’t matter what language-and tell them my story.”

The plan was to use the threat of international embarrassment to the HKPD to make the detectives move cautiously.

“Are you aware,” Wu said, “that your ex-wife, Eleanor Wish, died of gunshot wound to the head on fifteenth floor of Chungking Mansions, Kowloon?”

“Yes, I am aware of that.”

“Were you present when this happened”

Bosch looked at Haller and the attorney nodded.

“I was there. I saw it happen.”

“Can you tell us how?”

“We were looking for our daughter. We didn’t find her. We were in the hallway about to leave and two men started to fire at us. Eleanor was hit and she…got killed. And the two men were hit, too. It was self-defense.”

Wu leaned forward.

“Who shot these men?”

“I think you know that.”

“You tell us, please.”

Bosch thought of the gun he had put into Eleanor’s dead hand. He was about to tell the lie when Haller leaned forward.

“I don’t think I’m going to allow Detective Bosch to get into who-shot-whom theories,” he said. “I am sure your fine police department has tremendous forensic capabilities and has already been able to determine through firearm and ballistic analysis the answer to that question.”

Wu moved on.

“Was Sun Yee on the fifteenth floor?”

“Not at that time.”

“Can you give us more detail?”

“About the shooting? No. But I can tell you something about the room where my daughter was held. We found tissue with blood on it. Her blood had been drawn.”