“Mr. Bosch, we are going to need you to come with us,” said Parenting Today.

“Well, I’m kind of busy at the moment. I’m trying to get this garage in shape.”

The agent looked over my shoulder at Danny Cross.

“Ma’am, could you return inside and close the door? We’ll be out of your hair in a few moments.”

“This is my garage, my house,” Danny responded.

I knew her protest was useless but I liked that she’d made it just the same.

“Ma’am, this is FBI business. It does not concern you. Please step inside.”

“If it is in my garage it concerns me.”

“Ma’am, I won’t ask you again.”

There was a pause. I kept my eyes on the agent. I heard the door close behind me and knew my witness was gone. In the same moment the agent to my right made his move. He raised both hands and charged me, pushing me into the side of the Malibu. My elbow slid across the roof and hit a box, sending it over the other side of the car and crashing to the floor. It sounded like it had glassware in it.

The agent was well practiced and I offered no resistance. I knew that would be a mistake. That would be what he wanted. He roughly pushed my chest against the car and pulled my arms behind my back. I felt the handcuffs cinch tightly around my wrists, then his hands patted me down for weapons and invaded my pockets in a routine search.

“What are you doing? What is going on?”

It was Danny. She had heard the crash.

“Ma’am,” Parenting Today said sternly, “go back inside and close the door.”

The other agent twirled me away from the car and pushed me out of the garage toward the second car. I looked back at Danny Cross just as she was closing the door. The look of disapproval I was so used to was gone. There was a look of concern on her face now. I also saw that her bathrobe had been retied.

The silent agent opened the back door of the second car and started pushing me in.

“Watch your head,” he said just as he put his hand on my neck and pushed my head sharply into the door frame. I went sprawling across the backseat. He slammed the door, narrowly missing my ankle with it. I could almost hear a groan of disappointment from him through the glass.

He knocked his fist on the roof of the car and the driver dropped the transmission into reverse and hit the gas. The car jerked backwards and the sudden motion threw me off the seat onto the floor. I was unable to break my fall and the side of my face hit hard on the sticky floor. With my hands behind me I struggled to push myself back onto the seat. But I did it quickly, my struggle fueled by my anger and embarrassment. I sat up as the car jerked forward and I was thrown back into the seat. The car sped away from the house and through the rear window I saw Parenting Today standing in the garage and staring back at me. He held Lawton Cross’s file down at his side.

I breathed heavily and watched the agent grow small in the window. I could feel crud from the floor mat on my face and could do nothing about it. My face burned. Not with pain and no longer with anger and embarrassment. It was pure helplessness that burned me now.

Halfway to Westwood I stopped talking to them. It was useless and I knew it but I had spent twenty minutes hitting them with questions, then veiled threats, and no matter what I said there was no response. When we finally got to the federal building the bureau car was driven down into a subterranean garage and I was pulled out and shoved into an elevator marked “Security Transport Only.” One of the agents put a card key into a slot on the control panel and punched the 9 button. As the stainless steel cube rose I thought about how far I had fallen from the badge. I had no juice with these men. They were agents and I was nothing. They could do with me what they wanted and we all knew it.

“I can’t feel my fingers,” I said. “The cuffs are too tight.”

“That’s nice,” one of the agents said, his first words of the evening to me.

The doors opened and each one of them took an arm and pushed me into the hallway. We came to a door one of them opened with the card key, then we went down a hallway to another door, this one with a combination lock.

“Turn away,” an agent said.

“What?”

“Turn away from the door.”

I followed instructions and was turned away when the other agent tapped in the combination. We then went through and I was led into a dimly lit hallway of doors with small square windows head high. At first I thought they were interview rooms but then I realized there were too many. These were cells. I turned my head to look through some of the windows as we passed and through two of them I saw men looking back out at me. They were dark skinned and of Middle Eastern descent. They wore unkempt beards. Through a third window I saw a short man looking out, his eyes barely at the bottom level of the small window. He had bleached blond hair that had a quarter inch of black at its roots. I recognized him from the photo I had seen on the computer at the library. Mousouwa Aziz.

We stopped in front of a door marked “ 29,” and it was popped open electronically by some unseen hand. One of the agents stepped behind me and I heard him working a key into the handcuffs. I was beyond being able to feel it. Soon my wrists were free and I brought my hands around so that I could rub them and get the circulation going again. They were as white as soap, and a deep red welt ran around the circumference of each wrist. I had always believed that cuffing a suspect too tightly was a bullshit thing to do. Same with hitting a custody’s head on the frame of the car door. Easy to do, easy to get away with. But always a bullshit move. A bully’s move. The kind of thing a boy who enjoyed teasing the younger kids in the schoolyard would grow up to do.

As the tingling feeling started to work its way into my hands a burning sense of anger started building behind my eyes, edging my vision with a velvet blackness. In that darkness was a voice urging me to retaliate. I managed to ignore it. It’s all about power and when to use it. These guys didn’t know that yet.

A hand pushed me toward the cell and I involuntarily braced myself. I didn’t want to go in there. Then a sharp kick hit me behind my left knee and my leg buckled and I was hurled forward with a stiff-arm shove from behind. I crossed the small square cell to the opposite wall and put my hands up to stop my forward momentum.

“Make yourself at home, asshole,” the agent said to my back.

The door was slammed before I could get back to it. I stood there looking at the square of glass, realizing that the other prisoners I had seen in the hallway had been looking at themselves. The glass was mirrored.

Instinctively I knew the agent that had kicked and shoved me was on the other side looking at me. I nodded to him, sending the message that I would not forget him. He was probably on the other side laughing back at me.

The light in the room stayed on. I eventually stepped away from the door and looked around. There was a one-inch-thick mattress on a shelflike outcropping from the wall. Built into the opposite wall was a sink-and-toilet combination. There was nothing else except a steel box in one of the upper corners with a two-inch-square window behind which I could see a camera lens. I was being watched. Even if I used the toilet I was being watched.

I checked my watch but there was no watch. They had somehow taken it, probably when they took off the cuffs and my wrists were so numb I could not feel the theft.

I spent what I thought was the first hour of my incarceration pacing in the small space and trying to keep my anger sharp but controlled. I walked without pattern other than that I used the entire space, and when I came to the corner where the camera was located I raised the middle finger of my left hand to the lens. Every time.