“Great,” I said.

She reached down to her bag and started getting up.

“I’ve gotta go, Harry. Thanks for the coffee.”

“One last thing.”

I took another bite and turned to her and started talking with my mouth full.

“Check out Los Angeles Magazine seven months ago. They did this story on these four guys who own all the hot bars in Hollywood. It called them the kings of the night crawlers. Check it out.”

Her eyes widened.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, check it out.”

She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. She had never done that before, when I carried a badge.

“Thanks, Harry. I’ll call you.”

“I bet you will.”

I watched her glide quickly through the restaurant and out. I turned back to my plate. The egg had been over easy and cutting it up had made a mess of things. But at that moment it tasted like the best thing I had ever eaten.

Finally alone, I considered the question Kiz Rider had raised during the interview about how the style of the Marty Gessler disappearance was so different from the massacre at Nat’s. I was now sure Rider was right. The crimes had been designed, if not carried out, by different perpetrators.

“Dorsey,” I said out loud.

Maybe too loud. A man three stools down turned and looked at me until I turned and stared him back to his coffee cup.

Most of my records and notes were in the house and not attainable. I had the murder book in the Mercedes but it contained nothing from the Gessler case. From memory I worked on the details of the FBI agent’s disappearance. The car left at the airport. The use of her credit card up near the desert to buy more gas than her car could hold. I tried to fit these facts under the new heading of Dorsey. It was hard to make it work. Dorsey had been working crimes from one side of the law for nearly thirty years. He was too smart, he had seen too much, to leave a trail like that.

But by the time I finished my plate I thought I had something. Something that worked. I looked around to make sure the man three stools down and nobody else was looking at me. I poured a little more syrup onto my plate and then dipped my fork into it and ate it. I was about to dip again when the wide hips of the waitress appeared in front of me.

“Finished?”

“Uh, yes, sure. Thank you.”

“More coffee?”

“Can I get a to-go cup?”

“Yes, you may.”

She took the plate and my syrup away. I thought about my next moves until she came back with the coffee and reworked my bill. I left two bucks on the counter and took the bill to the cashier, where I noticed bottles of the restaurant’s syrup were on display and for sale. The cashier noticed my gaze.

“How about a bottle of syrup to go?”

I was tempted but decided to stick with the coffee.

“Nah, I think I’ve had enough sweetness for today. Thanks.”

“You need sweetness. It’s a nasty world out there.”

I agreed with her, paid my bill and left with my cup of harsh black coffee. Back in the car I opened the phone and called Roy Lindell’s cell number.

“This is Roy.”

“This is Bosch. We still talking?”

“What do you want, an apology? Fuck you, you’re not getting one.”

“No, I can live without an apology from you, Roy. So fuck you, too. I want to know if you still want to find her.”

There was no need to use a name.

“What do you think, Bosch?”

“Okay, then.”

I thought for a moment about how to do this.

“Bosch, you still there?”

“Yeah, listen, I’ve got to go see somebody right now. Can you meet me in two hours?”

“Two hours. Where?”

“You know where Bronson Canyon is?”

“Above Hollywood, right?”

“Yeah, Griffith Park. Meet me at the end of Bronson Canyon. Two hours. If you’re not there, I won’t wait.”

“What’s up there? What do you have?”

“Right now just a hunch. You going to meet me?”

There was a pause.

“I’ll be there, Bosch. What should I bring?”

Good question. I tried to think of what we’d need.

“Bring flashlights and a bolt cutter. I guess you better bring a shovel too, Roy.”

That brought another pause before he replied.

“What are you bringing?”

“I guess just my hunch for now.”

“Where are we going up there?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. I’ll show you.”

I closed the phone then.

The garage door at Lawton Cross’s house was closed. The van was parked in the driveway but there were no other vehicles. Kiz Rider hadn’t gotten there yet. Nobody had. I pulled in behind the van and got out and knocked on the front door. It didn’t take too long for Danny Cross to answer it.

“Harry,” she said. “We were just watching it on the TV. Are you all right?”

“Never better.”

“Are they the ones? The ones who did this to Law?”

She had a pleading look in her eyes. I nodded.

“It was them. The one who was in the bar that day, who shot Law, I took his face off with his own shotgun. Does that make you happy, Danny?”

She pressed her lips together in an effort to hold back tears.

“Revenge tastes sweet, doesn’t it? Just like pancake syrup.”

I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder but not to comfort her. I gently pushed her to the side of the doorway and stepped in. Rather than head left toward Lawton Cross’s sitting room I went to the right. I went into the kitchen and found the door to the garage. I went to the file cabinets in front of the Malibu and pulled the file on the Antonio Markwell case, the abduction-murder that had made Cross and Dorsey in the department.

I returned to the house and entered the sitting room. I didn’t know where Danny had gone but her husband was waiting for me.

“Harry, you’re all over the tube,” he said.

I looked up at the television screen. It was a helicopter view of my house. I could see all the official cars and media vans on the street in front. I could see the black tarps covering the bodies in the back. I hit the power button with the side of my fist and the screen went blank. I turned back to Cross and dropped the Markwell file on his lap. He couldn’t move. All he could do was lower his eyes to it and try to read the tab.

“How does it feel? Does it give you a hard-on watching what you did? In your case, a make-believe hard-on?”

“Harry, I -”

“Where is she, Law?”

“Where is who? Harry, I don’t know what -”

“Sure you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You sat there like a puppet but the whole time you were pulling the strings. My strings.”

“Harry, please.”

“Don’t ‘Harry, please’ me. You wanted revenge on them and I was your ticket. Well, you got it, partner. I took care of all of them, just like you thought. Like you hoped. You played me just right.”

He didn’t say anything. His eyes were cast down, away from mine.

“Now there’s one thing I want from you. I want to know where you and Jack hid Marty Gessler. I want to bring her home.”

He remained silent, his eyes away from me. I reached down and took the file off his lap. On the bureau I opened it and started leafing through the documents.

“You know, I didn’t see it until somebody I taught the job to saw it first,” I said as I looked through the file. “She’s the one who said it had to be a cop. It was the only way Gessler could’ve been taken so easily. And she was right. Those four punks didn’t have the steel.”

I gestured toward the empty television screen.

“I mean, look what happened when they came for me.”

I found what I was looking for in the file. A map of Griffith Park. I started unfolding it. Its creases cracked and split. It had been folded in the file for maybe five years. It was marked by the location where Antonio Markwell’s body had been found in Bronson Canyon.

“Once I started in that direction, then I began to see it. The gas had always been a problem. Somebody used her card and they bought more gas than her car could hold. That was a mistake, Law. A big one. Not buying the gas. That was part of the misdirection. But getting so much of it. The bureau thought maybe it was a truck, that they were looking for a trucker. But now I’m thinking Crown Vic. The Police Interceptor model they make for all the departments. The cars with extra-capacity gas tanks so you don’t get caught out there on the hunt without any juice.”