9 Dragons

to get her back or not? Get your shit together. You were an FBI agent! You can do this. I need you to work it like an agent until I get there. I’m going to have the video analyzed. In the video, she kicked at the camera and it moved. I saw a window. They might be able to work with it. I’m taking a plane tonight and will come directly to you when I land. You have all of that?”
    There was a long moment before Eleanor responded. When she did, her voice was calm. She had gotten the message.
    “I have it, Harry. I still think we have to call the Hong Kong police.”
    “If that’s what you think, then, fine. Do it. Do you know anybody there? Anybody you can trust?”
    “No, but they have a Triad Bureau. They’ve come into the casino.”
    Almost twenty years removed from her time as an agent, Eleanor was a professional card player. For at least six years she had been living in Hong Kong and working for the Cleopatra Casino in nearby Macau. All the high rollers from the mainland wanted to play against the
gweipo
-the white woman. She was a draw. She played with house money, got a cut of the winnings and no part of the losses. It was a comfortable life. She and Maddie lived in a high-rise in Happy Valley and the casino sent a helicopter to pick her up on the roof when it was time to go to work.
    Comfortable until now.
    “Talk to your people at the casino,” Bosch said. “If there is someone you are told you can trust, then make the call. I need to hang up and get moving here. You’ll hear from me before I fly.”
    She answered as if in a daze.
    “Okay, Harry.”
    “If you come up with something, anything at all, you call me.”
    “Okay, Harry.”
    “And Eleanor?”
    “What?”
    “See if you can get me a gun. I can’t take my own over.”
    “They put you in prison for guns over here.”
    “I know that, but you know people from the casino. Get me a gun.”
    “I’ll try.”
    Bosch hesitated before hanging up. He wished he could reach out and touch her, somehow try to calm her fears. But he knew that was impossible. He couldn’t even calm his own.
    “All right, I’m going to go. Try to stay calm, Eleanor. For Maddie. We stay calm and we can do this.”
    “We’re going to get her back, right, Harry?”
    Bosch nodded to himself before answering.
    “That’s right. We’re going to get her back.”

19
    T he digital image unit was one of the subgroups of the Scientific Investigation Division and was still located at the old police headquarters at Parker Center. Bosch traversed the two blocks between the old and new buildings like a man running late for a plane. By the time he pushed through the glass doors of the building where he had spent much of his career as a detective he was huffing and there was a shine of sweat on his forehead. He badged his way past the front desk and took the elevator up to the third floor.
    SID was in the process of being readied for the move to the PAB. The old desks and work counters remained in place but the equipment, records and personal effects were being boxed up. The process was carefully orchestrated and was slowing the already plodding march of science in crime fighting.
    DIU was a two-room suite in the back. Bosch stepped in and saw at least a dozen cardboard boxes in stacks on one side of the first room. There were no pictures or maps on the walls and a lot of the shelves were empty. He found one tech at work in the rear lab.
    Barbara Starkey was a veteran who had jumped around among specialties in SID over nearly four decades in the department. Bosch had met her when he was a rookie cop on post guarding the burned-out remains of a house where police had engaged in a major gun battle with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The militant radicals had taken credit for the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Starkey at the time was on the forensics team brought in to determine if the remains of Patty Hearst were amid the debris in the smoking shell of the house. Back then the department had a practice of moving female applicants into positions where physical confrontations and the need to carry a weapon were minimal. Starkey had wanted to be a cop. She ended up in the SID and as such had seen firsthand the explosive growth of technology in the use of crime detection. As she liked to tell the rookie techs, when she started in forensics, DNA were just three letters in the alphabet. Now she was an expert in almost all areas of forensics, and her son,