“You still going to be able to see her now that you’re on the job?”

“Doesn’t matter, she’s not there.”

“Well, where is she?”

“Her mother took her to Hong Kong for a year.”

“Hong Kong? What’s in Hong Kong?”

“A job. She signed a year contract.”

“She didn’t consult you about it?”

“I don’t know if ‘consulted’ is the right word. She told me she was going. I talked to a lawyer about it and there wasn’t much I could do.”

“That’s not fair, Harry.”

“I’m all right. I talk to her once a week. As soon as I earn up some vacation I’ll go over there.”

“I’m not talking about it being unfair to you. I’m talking about her. A girl should be close to her father.”

Bosch nodded because that was all he could do. A few minutes later Landreth finished the sketch work, opened a case and took out a jar of Hollywood tattoo ink along with a penlike applicator.

“This is Bic blue,” she said. “It’s what most of them use in the jails. I won’t be perforating the skin so it should come off in a couple weeks.”

“Should?”

“Most times. There was one actor I worked with, though. I put an ace of spades on his arm. And the funny thing was that it wouldn’t come off. Not all the way. So he just ended up having a real tattoo put over my piece. He wasn’t too happy about it.”

“Just like I’m not going to be happy if I have lightning bolts on my neck for the rest of my life. Before you start putting that stuff on me, Vicki, is there -”

He stopped when he realized she was laughing at him.

“Just kidding, Bosch. It’s Hollywood magic. It comes off with a couple of good scrubs, okay?”

“Okay, then.”

“Then hold still and let’s get this done.”

She went to work applying the dark blue ink to the pencil drawing on his skin. She blotted it regularly with a cloth and repeatedly told him to stop breathing, which he told her he couldn’t do. She was finished in under a half hour. She gave him a hand mirror and he studied his neck. It looked good in that it looked real to him. It also looked strange to see such displays of hate on his own skin.

“Can I put my shirt on now?”

“Give it a few more minutes.”

She touched the scar on his shoulder once again.

“Is that from when you got shot in that tunnel downtown?”

“Yes.”

“Poor Harry.”

“More like Lucky Harry.”

She started packing up her equipment while he sat there with his shirt off and feeling awkward about it.

“So what’s the assignment tonight?” he asked, just to be saying something.

“For me? Nothing. I’m out of here.”

“You’re done?”

“Yeah, we worked a day shift today. Working girls invading the hotel by the Kodak Center. Can’t have that in the new Hollywood, can we? So we bagged four of them.”

“I’m sorry, Vicki. I didn’t know I was holding you up. I would’ve come in sooner. Hell, I was downstairs shooting the shit with Edgar before coming up. You should’ve told me you’d be waiting on me.”

“It’s all right. It was good to see you. And I wanted to tell you I’m glad you’re back on the job.”

Bosch suddenly thought of something.

“Hey, you want to hit Musso’s for dinner or are you going up to the Sportsmen’s Lodge?”

“Forget the Sportsmen’s Lodge. Those things remind me too much of wrap parties. I didn’t like them either.”

“Then what do you think?”

“I don’t know if I want to be seen in that place with such an obvious racist pig.”

This time Bosch knew she was kidding. He smiled and she smiled and she said dinner was a go.

“I’ll go on one condition,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You put your shirt back on.”

WITHOUT NEED OF an alarm, Bosch awoke at five-thirty the next morning. This was not unusual for him. He knew that this was what happened when you surfed into the tube on a case. Waking hours overpowered the sleeping hours. You did all you could to stay up on that board and in the pipeline. Though not scheduled to begin work for more than twelve hours, he knew this would be the pivotal day in the case. He could not sleep anymore.

In darkness and unfamiliar surroundings he got dressed and made his way to the kitchen, where he found a pad for writing down needed grocery items. He wrote a note and left it in front of the automatic coffeemaker, which he had watched Vicki Landreth set the night before to begin brewing at 7 a.m. The note said very little other than thank you for the evening and good-bye. There were no promises or see-you-laters. Bosch knew she would not be expecting any. They both knew that little had changed in the twenty years between their liaisons. They liked each other fine but that wasn’t enough to build a house on.

The streets between Vicki Landreth’s Los Feliz home and the Cahuenga Pass were misted and gray. People drove with their lights on, either because they had been driving through the night or because they thought it might help wake up the world. Bosch knew the dawn had nothing on the dusk. Dawn always came up ugly, as if the sun was clumsy and in a hurry. The dusk was smoother, the moon more graceful. Maybe it was because the moon was more patient. In life and nature, Bosch thought, darkness always waits.

He tried to push thoughts of the night before out of his mind so that he could focus only on the case. He knew the others would be moving into position now on Mariano Street in Woodland Hills and in the ListenTech sound room in the City of Industry. While Roland Mackey slept, the forces of justice were quietly closing in on him. That’s how Bosch looked at it. That was what put the wire in his blood. He still believed it was unlikely that Mackey had been the one to pull the trigger on Rebecca Verloren. But Bosch felt no doubt that Mackey provided the gun and would lead them on this day to the triggerman, whether it would be William Burkhart or someone else.

Bosch pulled into the parking lot in front of the Poquito Mas at the bottom of the hill from his house. He left the Mercedes running and got out and went to the row of newspaper boxes. He saw the face of Rebecca Verloren staring out at him through the smeared plastic window of the box. He felt a little catch in his rhythm. It didn’t matter what the story said, they were now in play.

He dropped the coins into the box and took a paper out. He repeated the process, taking a second paper. One for the files and one for Mackey. He didn’t bother reading the story until he had driven up the hill to his house. He put a pot of coffee on and read the story while standing in the kitchen. The window photo was a shot of Muriel Verloren sitting on her daughter’s bed. The room was neat and the bed perfectly made, right down to the ruffle skirting the floor. There was an inset photograph of Rebecca in the top corner. It turned out that the Daily News archives had held the same shot as the yearbook. A headline above the photo said A MOTHER’S LONG VIGIL.

The bedroom photograph was credited to Emerson Ward, the photographer apparently using her given name. Below it was a caption that read: “Muriel Verloren sits in her daughter’s bedroom. The room, like Mrs. Verloren’s grief, has been untouched by time.”

Beneath the photo and above the body of the story was what a reporter had once told Bosch was a deck headline-a fuller description of the story. It read: “HAUNTED: Muriel Verloren has waited 17 years to learn who took her daughter’s life. In a renewed effort the LAPD may be close to finding out.”

Bosch thought the deck was perfect. If and when Mackey saw it, he would feel the cold finger of fear poke him in the chest. Bosch anxiously read the story.

By McKenzie Ward, Staff Writer

Seventeen years ago this summer, a young and beautiful high-school girl named Rebecca Verloren was stolen away from her Chatsworth home and brutally murdered on Oat Mountain. The case was never solved, leaving in its wake a splintered family, haunted police officers and a community with no sense of closure from the crime.