“That’s understa-”

“Remember what I told you the first day? Everybody counts or nobody counts. Well, for a long time she didn’t count. Not with this department, this society, not even with me. I have to admit that, not even with me. Then I opened that file this week and I could see that her death was just put away. It was buried, just like I had buried it. Somebody put the fix in because she didn’t count. They did it because they could. And then when I think about how long I’ve let it go…it makes me want to…I don’t know, just hide my face or something.”

He stopped, unable to put into words what he wanted to say. He looked down and noticed there were no ducks in the butcher shop window.

“You know,” he said, “she might’ve been what she was but sometimes I feel like I didn’t even deserve that…I guess I got what I deserved in life.”

He stayed at the window, not looking at her. It was several moments before Hinojos spoke.

“I guess this is the point where I should tell you that you’re being too hard on yourself, but I don’t think that would help much.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Could you come back here and sit down? Please?”

Bosch did as he was asked. Finally, after he was seated, his eyes met hers. She spoke first.

“What I want to say is that you are mixing things up. Putting the cart before the horse. You can’t take the blame because this case may have been covered up. First of all, you had nothing to do with that, and secondly, you didn’t even realize that until you read through the file this week.”

“But don’t you see? Why didn’t I look at it before? I’m not new here. I’ve been a cop twenty years. I should’ve been there before this. I mean, so what that I didn’t know the details. I knew she was killed and nothing was ever done about it. That was enough.”

“Look, Harry, think about this, okay? On the plane over tonight, just give it some thought. You’ve engaged yourself in a noble pursuit but you have to safeguard against damaging yourself further. The bottom line is that it is not worth that. It’s not worth the toll you may have to pay.”

“Not worth it? There’s a killer out there. He thinks he made it away free. For years, he has thought that. Decades. And I’m going to change that.”

“You’re not understanding what I’m saying. I don’t want any guilty person to get away, especially with murder. But what I am talking about here is you. You are my only concern here. There is a basic rule of nature. No living thing sacrifices itself or hurts itself needlessly. It’s the will of survival and I fear the circumstances of your life may have blunted your own survival skills. You may be throwing it to the wind, not caring what happens to you emotionally, physically, in every way, in this pursuit. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

She took a breather. He said nothing.

“I have to say,” she continued quietly, “I’m very nervous about this. I’ve never had this situation come up before and I’ve counseled a lot of cops in nine years here.”

“Well, I got bad news for you.” He smiled. “I went and crashed a party last night at Mittel’s. I think I may have spooked him. At least, I spooked myself.”

“Shit!”

“Is that some new psychiatric term? I’m not familiar with it.”

“This isn’t funny. Why’d you do that?”

Bosch thought a moment.

“I don’t know. It was kind of a whim type of thing. I was just driving by his house and there was a party. It kind of…it just made me angry for some reason. Him having a party and my mother…”

“Did you speak to him about the case?”

“No. I didn’t even tell him my name. We just kind’ve sparred around for a few minutes but then I left him something. Remember that newspaper clip I showed you Wednesday? I left that for him. I saw him read it. I think it struck a nerve.”

She exhaled loudly.

“Now, step outside yourself and look as an uninvolved observer at what you did. If you can. Was that a smart thing to do, going there like that?”

“I already have thought about it. No, it wasn’t smart. It was a mistake. He’ll probably warn Conklin. They’ll both know somebody’s out there, coming for them. They’ll close ranks.”

“You see, you are proving my point for me. I want you to promise me you won’t do anything foolish like that again.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, then I have to tell you that a patient-doctor relationship can be broken if the therapist believes the patient is endangering himself or others. I told you I was almost powerless to stop you. Not completely.”

“You’d go to Irving?”

“I will if I believe you are being reckless.”

Bosch felt anger as he realized she had ultimate control over him and what he was doing. He swallowed the anger and held up his hands, surrendering.

“All right. I won’t go crashing any parties again.”

“No. I want more than that. I want you to stay away from these men that you think may have been involved.”

“What I’ll promise you is that I won’t go to them until I have the whole thing in the bag.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

“I hope so.”

They were silent for nearly a minute after that. It was a cooling-off period. She turned slightly in her chair, not looking at him, probably thinking what to say next.

“Let’s move on,” she finally said. “You understand that this whole thing, this pursuit of yours, has eclipsed what we’re supposed to be doing here?”

“I know.”

“So we’re prolonging my evaluation.”

“Well, that doesn’t bother me as much anymore. I need the time off the job for this other thing.”

“Well, as long as you are happy,” she said sarcastically. “Okay, then I want to go back to the incident that brought you to me. The other day you were very general and very short in your description of what happened. I understand why. I think we were both feeling each other out at that point. But we are far past that now. I’d like a fuller story. You said the other day that Lieutenant Pounds set things into motion?”

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“First of all, he’s a commander of detectives who has never been a detective himself. Oh, technically, he probably spent a few months on a table somewhere along the line so he’d have it on his résumé, but basically he’s an administrator. He’s what we call a Robocrat. A bureaucrat with a badge. He doesn’t know the first thing about clearing cases. The only thing he knows about it is how to draw a line through the case on this little chart he keeps in his office. He doesn’t know the first thing about the differences between an interview and an interrogation. And that’s fine, the department is full of people like him. I say let them do their job and let me do mine. The problem is Pounds doesn’t realize where he’s good and where he’s bad. It’s led to problems before. Confrontations. It finally led to the incident, as you keep calling it.”

“What did he do?”

“He touched my suspect.”

“Explain what that means.”

“When you’ve got a case and you bring someone in, he’s all yours. Nobody goes near him, understand? The wrong word, the wrong question and it could spoil a case. That’s a cardinal rule; don’t touch somebody else’s suspect. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lieutenant or the damn chief, you stay clear until you check first with the guys with the collar.”

“So what happened?”

“Like I told you the other day, my partner Edgar and I brought in this suspect. A woman had been killed. One of these ones who puts ads in the sex tabs you can buy on the Boulevard. She gets called to one of those shithole motel rooms on Sunset, has sex with the guy and ends up stabbed to death. That’s the short story. The stab wound’s to the upper right chest. The john, he plays it cool, though. He calls the cops and says it was her knife and she tried to rob him with it. He says he turned her arm and put it into her. Self-defense. Okay, so that’s when me and Edgar show up and right away we see some things don’t fit with that story.”