“Twenty-five, thirty years. The list of people he’s put in the penitentiary has got to be a yard long. And the ones who have been in and out is probably half the list. It’ll take a fucking year to run all of them down.”

McCaleb nodded.

“And don’t think he didn’t know that.”

She looked up sharply at him. He started pacing again, his head down. After too long a silence he glanced up and saw her staring at him.

“What?”

“You really like Bosch for this, don’t you? You know something else.”

“No, I don’t. I am trying to stay open. All avenues of possibility need to be pursued.”

“Bullshit, you’re driving down one avenue.”

McCaleb didn’t answer. He felt enough guilt about it without Winston having to apply more.

“Okay,” she said. “Then why don’t you step it out for me? And don’t worry, I’m not going to hold it against you when you end up wrong.”

He stopped and looked at her.

“Come on, step it out for me.”

McCaleb shook his head.

“I’m not all the way there yet. All I know is that what we have here is way, way beyond the realm of coincidence. So there has to be an explanation.”

“So tell me the explanation involving Bosch. I know you. You’ve been thinking about it.”

“All right, but remember, it’s all theory at this point.”

“I’ll remember. Go.”

“First of all, you start with Detective Hieronymus Bosch believing – no, make that knowing – that this guy, Edward Gunn, walked on a homicide. Okay, then you have Gunn turn up strangled and looking like a figure out of a picture by the painter Hieronymus Bosch. You throw in one plastic owl and at least a half dozen other connection points between the two Boschs, let alone the name, and there it is.”

“What’s there? Those connections don’t mean it was Bosch who did it. You said it yourself, someone could have set this up for us to find and put on Bosch.”

“I don’t know what it is. Gut instinct, I guess. There’s something about Bosch – something off the page.”

He remembered how Vosskuhler had described the paintings.

“A darkness more than night.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

McCaleb waved off the question. He reached over and picked up the detail of the owl embraced by the man. He held it up in front of her face.

“Look at the darkness there. In the eyes. There’s something about Harry that is the same.”

“Now you’re getting downright spooky, Terry. What are you saying, in a previous life Harry Bosch was a painting? I mean, listen to what you are saying here.”

He put the sheet back down and stepped away from her, shaking his head.

“I don’t know how to say it,” he said. “There’s just something there. A connection of some kind between them that is more than the name.”

He made a motion of waving away the thought.

“All right, then let’s move on,” Winston said. “Why now, Terry? If it is Bosch, why now? And why Gunn? He walked away from him six years ago.”

“It’s interesting that you say walked away from him and not justice.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it. You just like to take -”

“Why now? Who knows? But there was that re-encounter the night before in the drunk tank and before that there was the time in October and it goes further back. Whenever this guy ended up in the can Bosch was there.”

“But on that last night Gunn was too drunk to talk.”

“Says who?”

She nodded. They only had Bosch’s account of the drunk-tank encounter.

“All right, fine. But why Gunn? I mean, I don’t want to put a qualitative judgment on a murderer or his victims but, come on, the guy stabbed a prostitute in a Hollywood hot sheet hotel. We all know that some count more than others and this one couldn’t have counted for much. If you read the book, you saw – her own family didn’t even care about her.”

“Then there’s something missing, something else that we don’t know. Because Harry cared. I don’t think he’s the kind who ever counts one case, one person more important than another, anyway. But there’s something about Gunn we don’t know yet. There has to be – six years ago it was enough for Harry to shove his lieutenant through a window and take a suspension for it. It was enough for him to visit Gunn every time he got hooked up and put in a cell.”

McCaleb nodded to himself.

“We need to find the trigger. The stressor. The thing that forced the action now as opposed to a year ago, two years ago, whenever.”

Winston abruptly stood up.

“Would you stop saying ‘we’? And, you know, there is something you are conveniently missing here. Why would this man, this veteran cop and homicide detective, kill this guy and leave all of these clues leading back to himself? It makes no sense – not with Harry Bosch. He’d be too smart for that.”

“Only from this side of it. These things may only seem obvious now that we have discovered them. And you are forgetting the act of murder itself is evidence of aberrant thinking, of a dissembling personality. If Harry Bosch has veered off the path and crashed into the ditch – into the abyss – then we can’t assume anything about his thinking or planning of a murder. His leaving of these markers could be symptomatic.”

She waved off his explanation.

“That’s the Quantico dance there. Too much mumbo jumbo.”

Winston picked the copy of The Garden of Earthly Delights off the table and studied it.

“I talked to Harry about this case two weeks ago,” she said. “You talked to him yesterday. He wasn’t exactly climbing the walls and foaming at the mouth. And look at this trial he’s riding now. He’s cool, calm and has his shit together. Know what some of the guys in the office call him, the ones who know him? The Marlboro Man.”

“Yeah, well, he stopped smoking. And maybe this Storey case was the stressor. A lot of pressure. It’s gotta come out someplace.”

McCaleb could tell she wasn’t listening. Her eyes had caught on something in the painting. She dropped the sheet and picked up the detail of the dark owl embraced by the nude man.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “If our guy sent the owl directly from that warehouse to our victim, then how the fuck did it get this nice custom paint job?”

McCaleb nodded.

“Good question. He must’ve painted it right there in the apartment. Maybe while watching Gunn try to stay alive.”

“There was no paint like this found in the apartment. And we checked the building’s dumpster, too. I saw no paint.”

“He took it with him, got rid of it somewhere else.”

“Or maybe plans to use it again on the next one.”

She paused and thought for a long moment. McCaleb waited.

“So what do we do?” she finally asked.

“So it’s ‘we’ now?”

“For now. I changed my mind. I can’t take this inside. Too dangerous. If it’s wrong I could kiss everything good-bye.”

McCaleb nodded.

“Do you and your partner have other cases?”

“We’ve got three open files, including this one.”

“Well, put him on one of the others while you work this one – with me. We work on Bosch until we have something solid – one way or the other – that you can take in and make official.”

“And what do I do, call up Harry Bosch and tell him I need to talk to him because he’s a suspect in a murder?”

“I’ll take Bosch first. It will be less obvious if I make the first run. Let me get a feel for him and, who knows, maybe my current instincts will be wrong. Or maybe I’ll find the trigger.”

“That’s easier said than done. We move too close and he’ll know. I don’t want this blowing up in our faces – my face, in particular.”

“That’s where I can be an advantage.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“I’m not a cop. I’ll be able to get closer to him. I need to get inside his house, see how he lives. Meantime, you -”

“Wait a minute. You’re not talking about breaking into his house. I can’t be a party to that.”

“No, nothing illegal.”