“Fully loaded and ready to go.”

Lau took a step toward the door but Bosch immediately put his hand on his chest to stop him and then backed him against the wall.

“Look,” Lau said, “I don’t know what this is about but you people are freaking me out here. What the fuck is going on?”

Bosch kept his hand on his chest.

“Just tell me about the gun, Henry. You had it the night of the first. Has it been out of your possession at any time since then?”

“No, I…right there is where I keep it.”

“Where were you last Tuesday, three o’clock in the afternoon?”

“Um, last week I was here. I think I was here, working. We didn’t start shooting until Thursday.”

“You work here alone?”

“Yes, I work alone. Writing is a solitary pursuit. No, wait! Wait! Last Tuesday I was at Paramount all day. We had a read-through of the script with the cast. I was over there all afternoon.”

“And there will be people who will vouch for you?”

“At least a dozen. Matthew fucking McConaughey will vouch for me. He was there. He’s playing the lead.”

Bosch made a jump then, hitting Lau with a question designed to keep him off balance. It was amazing what fell out of people’s pockets when they were being knocked back and forth by seemingly unrelated questions.

“Are you associated with a triad, Henry?”

Lau burst out laughing.

“What? What the fuck are you-look, I’m out of here.”

He slapped Bosch’s hand away and pushed off the wall in the direction of the door again. It was a move Harry was ready for. He grabbed Lau by the arm and spun him around. He clipped his ankle with a kick and threw him facedown on the bed. He then moved in, kneeling on his back while he cuffed him.

“This is fucking crazy!” Lau yelled. “You can’t do this!”

“Calm down, Henry, just calm down,” Bosch said. “We’re going to go downtown and straighten all of this out.”

“But I’ve got a movie! I have to be on the set in three hours!”

“Fuck the movies, Henry. This is real life and we’re going downtown.”

Bosch pulled him up off the bed and pointed him toward the door.

“Dave, you got all of that secured?”

“Got it.”

“Then, lead the way.”

Chu left the room, carrying the metal box containing the Glock. Bosch followed, keeping Lau in front of him and keeping one hand on the chain between the cuffs. They moved down the hall, but when they got to the top of the stairs, Bosch pulled the cuffs like the reins on a horse and stopped.

“Wait a minute. Back up here.”

He walked Lau backwards to the middle of the hall. Something had caught Bosch’s eye as they had passed but it didn’t register until they got to the stairs. Now he looked at the framed diploma from the University of Southern California. Lau had graduated with a liberal arts degree in 2004.

“You went to SC?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah, the film school. Why?”

Both the school and graduation year matched the diploma Bosch had seen in the back office at Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor. And then there was the Chinese connection as well. Bosch knew that a lot of kids went to USC and several thousand graduated every year, many of them of Chinese descent. But he had never trusted coincidences.

“Did you know a guy at SC named Robert Li-spelled L-I”

Lau nodded.

“Yeah, I knew him. He was my roommate.”

Bosch felt things suddenly begin to crash together with an undeniable force.

“What about Eugene Lam? Did you know him?”

Lau nodded again.

“I still do. He was my roommate back then, too.”

“Where?”

“Like I told you, a shithole down in gangland. Near the campus.”

Bosch knew that USC was an oasis of fine and expensive education surrounded by hardscrabble neighborhoods where personal safety would be an issue. A few years back a football player on the practice field had even been hit with a stray round from a nearby gang shooting.

“Is that why you bought the gun? For protection down there”

“Exactly.”

Chu had realized he had lost them and came hurrying back up the stairs and down the hallway.

“Harry, what’s up?”

Bosch held up his free hand to signal Chu to hang back and be quiet. He spoke to Lau again.

“And those guys knew you bought the gun six years ago?”

“We went together. They helped me pick it out. Why are you-”

“Are you still friends? You stay in touch?”

“Yeah, but what’s this got to do with-”

“When was the last time you saw one of them?”

“I saw them both last week. We play poker almost every week.”

Bosch glanced over at Chu. The case had just broken wide open.

“Where, Henry? Where do you play?”

“Most of the time right here. Robert still lives with his parents and Huge has a tiny place in the Valley. I mean, come on, I’ve got the beach here.”

“What day did you play last week?”

“It was Wednesday.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, because I remember it was the night before my shoot was going to start and I didn’t really want to play. But they showed up and we played for a little bit. It was a short night.”

“And the time before that? When was that?”

“The week before. Wednesday or Thursday, I can’t remember.”

“But it was after the shooting on the beach?”

Lau shrugged.

“Yeah, pretty sure. Why?”

“What about the key to the box? Would one of them have known where the key was?”

“What did they do?”

“Just answer the question, Henry.”

“Yeah, they knew. They used to like to get the gun out sometimes and play around with it.”

Bosch pulled his keys out and uncuffed Lau. The screenwriter turned and started to massage his wrists.

“I always wondered what that felt like,” he said. “So I could write about it. The last time I was too drunk to remember.”

He finally looked up and saw Bosch’s intent stare.

“What’s going on?”

Bosch put a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the stairs.

“Let’s go back down to the living room and talk, Henry. I think there is a lot you can tell us.”

45

They waited for Eugene Lam in the alley behind Fortune Fine Foods & Liquor. There was a small employee lot squeezed between a row of trash bins and the stacks of baled cardboard. It was Thursday, two days after they had visited Henry Lau, and the case had come together. They had used the time to work on evidence gathering and testing, and to prepare a strategy. Bosch had also used the time to enroll his daughter in the school at the bottom of the hill. She had started classes that morning.

They believed Eugene Lam was the shooter but also the weaker of the two suspects. They would bring him in first, then Robert Li second. They were locked and loaded and as Bosch watched the parking lot, he felt certain that the killing of John Li would be understood and resolved by the end of the day.

“Here we go,” Chu said.

He pointed to the mouth of the alley. Lam’s car had just turned in.

They put Lam in the first interview room and let him cook for a while. Time always favored the interviewer, never the suspect. In RHD, they called it “seasoning the roast.” You let the suspect marinate in time. It always made him more tender. Bo-Jing Chang had been the exception to this rule. He hadn’t said a word and had held up like a rock. Innocence gave you that resolve, and that was something Lam didn’t have.

An hour later, after conferring with a prosecutor from the district attorney’s office, Bosch entered the room carrying a cardboard box containing the case evidence and sat down across the table from Lam. The suspect looked up with scared eyes. They always did after a period of isolation. What was just an hour on the outside was an eternity inside. Bosch put the box down on the floor, then folded his arms on the table.

“Eugene, I’m here to explain the facts of life to you,” he said. “So listen closely to what I tell you. You have a big choice to make here. The fact of the matter is that you are going to prison. There’s no doubt about that. But what you are going to decide here in the next few minutes is how long you go for. It can be until you are a very old man or until they stick the needle in your arm and put you down like a dog…