He scanned their faces again. They showed nothing but anger and defiance. Bosch expected nothing less.

“Personally, I wouldn’t mind it going that way, seeing you people get what you got coming. But it will fuck the case – put hair on the cake, taint it beyond repair. So I’m being selfish about it and giving you a chance it makes me sick to give.”

Bosch looked at his watch.

“You’ve got fourteen minutes now.”

With that he turned and started heading back out through the squad room. Rooker called after him.

“Who are you to judge, Bosch? The guy was a dog. He deserved to die like a dog and who gives a shit? You should do the right thing, Bosch. Let it go.”

As if it was his intention all along, Bosch casually turned behind an empty desk and came back up a smaller aisle toward the foursome. He had recognized the phrasing of the words Rooker had used. His demeanor disguised his growing rage. When he got back to the group, he broke their informal circle and leaned over Rooker’s desk, his palms down flat on it.

“Listen to me, Rooker. You call my home again – whether it’s to warn me off or to just tell me the weather – and I’ll come looking for you. You won’t want that.”

Rooker blinked but then raised his hands in surrender.

“Hey, man, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talk – ”

“Save it for somebody you can convince. At least you could’ve been a man and skipped the cellophane. That’s coward shit, boy.”

Bosch had hoped that when he got to Irving’s conference room there would be at least a few minutes for him to look at his notes and put his thoughts together. But Irving was already seated at the round table, his elbows on the polished surface and the fingertips of both hands touching and forming a steeple in front of his chin.

“Detective, have a seat,” he said as Bosch opened the door. “Where are the others?”

“Uh,” Bosch said, putting his briefcase down flat on the table. “They’re still in the field. Chief, I was just going to drop my case off and then run down to get a cup of coffee. Can I get you something?”

“No, and you do not have time for coffee. The media calls are starting. They know it was Elias. Somebody leaked. Probably in the coroner’s office. So it’s about to get crazy. I want to hear what is happening, starting right now. I have to brief the police chief, who will lead a press conference that has been scheduled for eleven. Sit down.”

Bosch took a seat opposite Irving. He had worked a case out of the conference room once before. That seemed like a long time ago but he remembered it as the time he had earned Irving’s respect and probably as much trust as the deputy chief was willing to give to anyone else who carried a badge. His eyes moved across the surface of the table and he saw the old cigarette scar that he had left during the investigation of the Concrete Blonde case. That had been a difficult case but it seemed almost routine beside the investigation he was involved in now.

“When are they coming in?” Irving asked.

He still had his fingers together like a steeple. Bosch had read in an interrogation manual that such body language denoted a feeling of superiority.

“Who?”

“The members of your team, Detective. I told you I wanted them here for the briefing and then the press conference.”

“Well, they’re not. Coming in. They are continuing the investigation. I thought that it didn’t make sense that all seven of us should just drop things to come in here when one of us could easily tell you the status of things.”

Bosch watched angry flares of red explode high on Irving’s cheeks.

“Once again we seem to have either a communication problem or the chain of command remains unclear to you. I specifically told you to have your people here.”

“I must’ve misunderstood, Chief,” Bosch lied. “I thought the important thing was the investigation. I remembered that you wanted to be brought up to date, not that you wanted everybody here. In fact, I doubt there is enough room in here for everybody. I – ”

“The point is I wanted them here. Do your partners have phones?”

“Edgar and Rider?”

“Who else?”

“They have phones but they’re dead. We’ve been running all night. Mine’s dead.”

“Then page them. Get them in here.”

Bosch slowly got up and headed to the phone which was on top of the storage cabinet that ran along one wall of the room. He called Rider and Edgar’s pagers, but when he punched in the return number he added an extra seven at the end. This was a long-standing code they used. The extra seven – as in code seven, the radio call for out of service – meant they should take their time in returning the pages, if they returned them at all.

“Okay, Chief,” Bosch said. “Hopefully, they’ll call in. What about Chastain and his people?”

“Never mind them. I want your team back here by eleven for the press conference.”

Bosch moved back to his seat.

“How come?” he asked, though he knew exactly why. “I thought you said the police chief was going – ”

“The chief will lead it. But we want to have a show of force. We want the public to know we have top-notch investigators on this case.”

“You mean top-notch black investigators, don’t you?”

Bosch and Irving held hard stares for a moment.

“Your job, Detective, is to solve this case and solve it as quickly as you can. You are not to concern yourself with other matters.”

“Well, that’s kind of hard to do, Chief, when you are pulling my people out of the field. Can’t solve anything quickly if they’ve got to be here for every dog and pony show you people cook up.”

“That is enough, Detective.”

“They are top-notch investigators. And that’s what I want to use them for. Not as cannon fodder for the department’s race relations. They don’t want to be used that way, either. That in itself is ra – ”

“Enough, I said! I do not have time to debate racism, institutional or otherwise with you, Detective Bosch. We are talking about public perceptions. Suffice it to say that if we mishandle this case or its perceptions from the outside, this city could be burning again by midnight.”

Irving paused to look at his watch.

“I meet the police chief in twenty minutes. Could you please begin to enlighten me with the accomplishments of the investigation up to this point?”

Bosch reached over and opened his briefcase. Before he could reach for his notebook the phone on the cabinet rang. He got up and went to it.

“Remember,” Irving said, “I want them here by eleven.”

Bosch nodded and picked up the phone. It wasn’t Edgar or Rider and he had not expected that it would be.

“This is Cormier downstairs in the lobby. This Bosch?”

“Yeah.”

“You just got a message here. Guy wouldn’t give a name. He just said to tell you that what you need is in a trash can in the MetroLink station, First and Hill. It’s in a manila envelope. That’s it.”

“Okay, thanks.”

He hung up and looked at Irving.

“It was something else.”

Bosch sat back down and took his notebook out of his briefcase along with the clipboard with the crime scene reports, sketches and evidence receipts attached to it. He didn’t need any of it to summarize the case but he thought it might be reassuring to Irving to see the accumulation of paper the case was engendering.

“I’m waiting, Detective,” the deputy chief said by way of prompting him.

Bosch looked up from the paperwork.

“Where we are is pretty much point zero. We have a good idea what we have. We don’t have much of a handle on the who and why.”

“Then what have we got, Detective?”

“We’re going with Elias being the primary target in what looks like an outright assassination.”

Irving brought his head down so that his clasped hands hid his face.

“I know that’s not what you want to hear, Chief, but if you want the facts, that’s what the facts point to. We have – ”