“Next time I get the field.”

“There might not be a next time if we don’t do something this time. Let’s see what we got here.”

They spent the next ninety minutes going through Elias’s files on the Harris case, pointing out specific items to each other when they seemed to warrant attention, other times tossing files back into the box when their importance was not apparent.

Bosch spent his time with the investigative files that Elias had subpoenaed from the LAPD. He had a copy of the entire RHD murder book. Reading the daily investigative summaries turned in by Sheehan and other RHD detectives, Bosch noted that the case seemed initially to be lacking a focus. Stacey Kincaid had been taken from her room in the night, her abductor jimmying the lock on a bedroom window with a screwdriver and then grabbing the girl while she slept. Initially suspecting an inside job, the detectives interviewed the gardeners, the pool man, a local maintenance man, a plumber who had been in the house two weeks earlier, as well as the sanitation men and postal workers who had the route that included the Kincaids’ home in Brentwood. Teachers, janitors and even fellow students from Stacey’s private school in West Hollywood were interviewed. But the wide net being thrown by Sheehan and his cohorts was pulled in after the lab came up with the fingerprint match between the missing girl’s schoolbook and Michael Harris. The case then shifted to a complete focus on locating Harris, taking him into custody and then attempting to make him confess to what he had done with the girl.

The second section of the file also dealt with the crime scene investigation and efforts to connect Harris to the body through scientific analysis and technology. This proved to be a dead end. The girl’s body had been found by two homeless men in a vacant lot. The body was naked and badly decomposed after four days. It had apparently been washed after her death and therefore was lacking any significant microscopic evidence that could be analyzed and connected to Harris’s apartment or car. Though the girl appeared to have been raped, no bodily fluids belonging to her attacker were recovered. Her clothes were never found. The ligature that had been used to strangle her had been cut away by her killer and that, too, was never found. In the end, the only evidence that connected Harris to the crime was his fingerprints on the book in Stacey’s bedroom and the disposal of the body in the vacant lot less than two blocks from his apartment.

Bosch knew that was usually more than enough to win a conviction. He had worked cases in which convictions were won with less evidence. But that was before O.J. Simpson, before juries looked at police in Los Angeles with suspicious and judging eyes.

Bosch was writing a list of things to do and people to be interviewed when Edgar cried out.

“Yahtzee!”

Bosch and Rider looked at him and waited for an explanation.

“Remember the mystery notes?” Edgar said. “The second or third one said license plates prove he’s innocent?”

“Wait a second,” Bosch said.

He opened his briefcase and took out the file containing the notes.

“The third one. ‘License plates prove his innocence.’ Came in April five. Innocence spelled wrong.”

“Okay, here’s Elias’s file on subpoena returns. Got one here dated April fifteen for Hollywood Wax and Shine. That’s where Harris worked before they arrested him. It seeks – quote – ‘copies of all records and receipts of customer orders and billings containing license plate numbers of said customers between the dates of April one and June fifteen of last year.’ It’s gotta be what the note was talking about.”

Bosch leaned back in his chair to think about this.

“This is a subpoena return, right? It was approved.”

“Right.”

“Well, April one and June fifteen, that’s seventy-five days. There – ”

“Seventy-six days,” Rider corrected.

“Seventy-six days. That would be a lot of receipts. We got none here and there weren’t any in the office I saw. There should be boxes of receipts.”

“Maybe he returned them,” Edgar said.

“You said he subpoenaed copies.”

Edgar hiked his shoulders.

“Another thing, why those days?” Bosch asked. “The murder of the girl was July twelve. Why not subpoena the receipts right up until then?”

“Because he knew what he was looking for,” Rider said. “Or knew within the parameters of those dates.”

“Knew what?”

They dropped into silence. Bosch’s mind was running the puzzle but coming up empty. The license plate clue was still as mysterious as the Mistress Regina lead. Then by joining the two mysteries he came up with something.

“Pelfry again,” he said. “We need to talk to him.”

He stood up.

“Jerry, get on the phone. See if you can run down Pelfry and set up an interview for as soon as you can get it. I’m going out back for a few minutes.”

Normally, when Bosch told his partners he was going out back it meant he was going outside the building to have a smoke. As he walked toward the rear doorway, Rider called after him.

“Harry, don’t do it.”

He waved without turning back.

“Don’t worry, I’m not.”

Out in the lot Bosch stood and looked around. He knew he had done some of his best analytical thinking while standing outside smoking. He hoped he could put something together now, without the aid of a smoke. He looked into the sand jar that the station’s smokers used and saw a half-smoked cigarette protruding from the sand. There was lipstick on it. He decided he wasn’t that desperate yet.

He thought about the mystery notes. He knew because of postmarks and the markings made on the notes by Elias that they had numbers two, three and four, but not the first note. The meaning of the fourth note – the warning Elias was carrying with him – was obvious. The third note they now had a line on, thanks to the subpoena return Edgar had come across. But the second note – dot the i humbert humbert – still made no sense to Bosch.

He looked at the cigarette protruding from the sand again but once more dismissed it. He remembered he carried no matches or lighter anyway.

It suddenly occurred to him that the one other piece of the puzzle that seemed to stand out as making no sense, at least so far, was the Mistress Regina connection – whatever that was.

Bosch turned and quickly headed back into the station. Edgar and Rider had their heads down and into the paperwork when he came to the table. Bosch immediately began looking through the stacks of files.

“Who has the Mistress Regina file?”

“Over here,” Edgar said.

He handed over the file and Bosch opened it and took out the photo printout of the dominatrix. He then put it down next to one of the mystery notes and tried to make a comparison between the printing on the note and the printing below the photo – the web page address. It was impossible for him to determine if the same hand had printed both lines. He was no expert and there were no obvious anomalies in the printing to make a comparison easy.

When Bosch took his hand off the printout, its top and bottom edges rose an inch off the desk, telling him that at one time the page had been folded top and bottom, as if to be placed in an envelope.

“I think this is the first note,” he said.

Bosch had often found that when he made a logic breakthrough it was like clearing a clog in a drain. The pipe was open and other breaks soon came. It happened now. He saw what he could have and maybe should have seen all along.

“Jerry, call Elias’s secretary. Right now. Ask her if he had a color printer in the office. We should have seen this – I should have seen it.”

“Seen what?”

“Just make the call.”

Edgar started looking through a notebook for a phone number. Rider got up from her spot and came around next to Bosch. She looked down at the printout. She was now riding on Bosch’s wave. She saw where he was going.