"Me, too," said Tammy.

Bosch let them out of the car.

"Just wait here," Rachel called to them. "If you go back to your trailer or go anywhere else you won't get far and it will just make them mad."

They didn't acknowledge this cautioning. Rachel watched them walk up the ramp and into the bar. Bosch got back in and put the car into reverse.

"You sure about this?" he asked. "My guess is that Agent Dei told you to sit still until the reinforcements got here."

"She also said one of the first things she was going to do was send you on your way. You want to wait for that or do you want to go see this trailer?"

"Don't worry, I'll go. I'm not the one with the career to worry about."

"Such as it is."

We followed the dirt road Billings Rett had directed us to, and it ranged west from the settlement of Clear and up a sloping landscape for a mile. The road then leveled off and curved behind a reddish-orange outcropping of rock that was exactly as Rett had described it. It looked like the tail-end of the great passenger ship as it drew upward out of the water at a sixty-degree angle and then plunged downward into the sea. According to the movie, anyway. The rock climber Rett mentioned had climbed to the appropriate spot at the top and had used white paint to scrawl "Titanic" across the rock surface. We didn't stop to appraise the rock or the paintwork. I drove the Mercedes around it and we soon came to a clearing where there was a small trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was a junked car on four flats next to it and an oil drum used to burn trash nearby. On the other side was a large fuel tank and a power generator.

To preserve possible crime scene evidence I stopped just outside the clearing and killed the engine. I noticed that the generator was silent. There was a stillness about the whole scene that seemed ominous in some way. I had a real sense that I had come to the end of the world, a place of darkness. I wondered if this was where Backus had taken his victims, if this was the end of the world for them. Probably, I concluded. It was a place of waiting evil.

Rachel broke the silence.

"Well, are we just going to look at it or are we going to check it out?"

"Just waiting on you to make the move."

She opened her door and then I opened mine. We met at the front of the car. That was when I noticed that the trailer's windows were all open, not what I would expect someone would do if they were leaving their home for a long period of time. After that recognition came the odor.

"You smell that?"

She nodded. Death was in the air. It was much worse, much stronger than at Zzyzx. I instinctively knew that what we would find here would not be the buried secrets of the killer. Not this time. There was a body in that trailer-at least one-that was open to the air and decomposing. "With my last act," Rachel said.

"What?"

"The card. What he wrote on the card."

I nodded. She was thinking suicide.

"You think?"

"I don't know. Let's check."

We walked slowly forward, neither saying a word after that. The smell grew stronger and we both knew that whatever and whoever was dead inside the trailer had been baking in there for a long time.

I broke from her side and walked to a set of windows to the left of the trailer's door. Cupping my hands to the screen I tried to look into the darkness within. My hands hitting the screen set off an alarm of buzzing flies within the trailer. They were bouncing against the screen, looking to get out as if maybe the scene and the smell inside were too much even for them.

There was no curtain across the window but I couldn't see much from the angle I had-at least not a body or an indication of one. It looked like a small sitting area with a couch and a chair. There was a table with two stacks of hardback books on it. Behind the chair was a bookcase with its shelves full of books.

"Nothing," I said.

I stepped back from the window and looked up the length of the trailer. I saw Rachel's eyes focused on the door and then the doorknob. Something came to me then, something that didn't fit.

"Rachel, why did he leave the note for you at the bar?"

"What?" "The note. He left it at the bar. Why there? Why not here?"

"I guess he wanted to make sure I got it."

"If he hadn't left it there you would have still come up here. You would've still found it here."

She shook her head.

"What are you saying? I don't get-"

"Don't try the door, Rachel. Let's wait."

"What are you talking about?"

"I don't like this."

"Why don't you look around the back, see if there is another window you can see in or something."

"Okay, I will. You just wait"

She didn't answer me. I walked around the left side of the trailer, stepped over the hitch and headed toward the other side. But then I stopped and walked out to the trash barrel.

The barrel was one-third full with the charred remains of burned refuse. There was a broom handle on the ground that was charred on one end. I picked it up and dug around in the ashes in the barrel, as I was sure Backus had done while the fire was burning. He had wanted to make sure everything got burned.

It appeared to be mostly paperwork and books that had been burned. There was nothing recognizable until I came across a blackened and melted credit card. There was nothing I recognized on it but I guessed that the forensics experts might be able to connect it to one of the victims. I dug around further and saw pieces of melted black plastic. Then I noticed one book that was burned beyond recognition on the outside but still had some partially intact pages on the inside. With my fin- gers I lifted it out and gingerly opened it. It looked like it was poetry, though it was hard to be sure, since all the pages were partially burned away. Between two of these pages I found a half-burned receipt for the book. At the top it said "Book Car" but the rest was burned away.

"Bosch? Where are you?"

It was Rachel. I was out of her sight. I placed the book back into the barrel and stuck the broom handle in as well. I headed toward the back side of the trailer. I saw another open window.

"Hold on a second."

Rachel waited. She was growing impatient. She was listening for the distant sound of helicopters crossing the desert. She knew as soon as she heard them that her chance would be over. She would be pushed back, possibly even punished for how she had handled Bosch.

She looked back down at the doorknob. She thought about Backus and whether this could be his last play. Was four years here in the desert enough? Did he kill Terry McCaleb and send her the GPS only to lead her eventually to this? She thought about the note he had left, his telling her he had taught her well. An anger welled up inside her, an anger that wanted her to throw open the door and-

"We've got a body!"

It was Bosch, calling from the other side of the trailer.

"What? Where?"

"Come around. I've got a view. There's a bed and I see one body. Two, three days old. I can't see the face." "Okay, anything else?"

She waited. He didn't say anything. She put her hand on the knob. It turned.

"The door's not locked."

"Rachel, don't open it," Bosch called. "I think… I think there is gas. I smell something besides the body. Something besides the obvious. Something underneath."

Rachel hesitated but then turned the knob fully and opened the door an inch.

Nothing happened.

She slowly pulled the door all the way open. Nothing happened. Flies saw the opening and buzzed by her and into the light. She waved them away from her eyes.

"Bosch, I'm going in."

She stepped up into the trailer. More flies. They were everywhere. The smell hit her fully then, invading her and tightening her stomach.