A Darkness More Than Night

with your wit.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “My fault. I should’ve seen it coming. I looked at her and thought she was so beautiful she couldn’t possibly… I just believed her.”
    “I know what you mean.”
    “Last time I trust a face.”
    “You guys still look like you’re in good shape. What else you got coming?”
    Bosch smirked.
    “That’s it. They were going to rest today but decided to wait until the morning so Fowkkes wouldn’t have the night to get ready. But we’ve fired all the bullets in the gun. Starting tomorrow we see what they’ve got.”
    McCaleb watched Bosch take down almost half the bottle in one long pull. He decided he’d better get to the real questions while Bosch was still sharp.
    “So tell me about Rudy Tafero.”
    Bosch shook his shoulders in a gesture of ambivalence.
    “What about him?”
    “I don’t know. How well do you know him? How well did you know him?”
    “Well, I knew him when he was on our team. He worked Hollywood detectives about five years while I was there. Then he pulled the pin, got his twenty-year pension and moved across the street. Started working on getting people we put in the bucket out of the bucket.”
    “When you were both on the same team, both in Hollywood, were you close?”
    “I don’t know what close means. We weren’t friends, we weren’t drinking buddies, he worked burglaries and I worked homicides. What are you asking so much about him for? What’s he got to do with -”
    He stopped and looked at McCaleb, the wheels obviously turning inside. Rod Stewart was now singing “Twisting the Night Away.”
    “Are you fucking kidding me?” Bosch finally asked. “You’re looking at -”
    “Let me just ask some questions,” McCaleb interjected. “Then you can ask yours.”
    Bosch drained his bottle and held it up until the bartender noticed.
    “No table service, guys,” she called over. “Sorry.”
    “Fuck that,” Bosch said.
    He slid out of the booth and went to the bar. He came back with four more Rocks, though McCaleb had barely begun to drink his first one.
    “Ask away,” Bosch said.
    “Why weren’t you two close?”
    Bosch put both elbows on the table and held a fresh bottle with both hands. He looked out of the booth and then at McCaleb.
    “Five, ten years ago there were two groups in the bureau. And to a large extent it was this way in the department, too. It was like the saints and the sinners – two distinct groups.”
    “The born agains and the born againsts?”
    “Something like that.”
    McCaleb remembered. It had become well known in local law enforcement circles a decade earlier that a group within the LAPD known as the “born agains” had members in key positions and was holding sway over promotions and choice assignments. The group’s numbers – several hundred officers of all ranks – were members of a church in the San Fernando Valley where the department’s deputy chief in charge of operations was a lay preacher. Ambitious officers joined the church in droves, in hopes of impressing the deputy chief and enhancing their career prospects. How much spirituality was involved was in question. But when the deputy chief delivered his sermon every Sunday at the 11 o’clock service, the church would be packed to standing room only with off-duty cops casting their eyes fervently on the pulpit. McCaleb had once heard a story about a car alarm going off in the parking lot during an 11 o’clock service. The hapless hype rummaging through the vehicle’s glove compartment soon found himself surrounded by a hundred guns pointed by off-duty cops.
    “I take it you were on the sinners’ team, Harry.”
    Bosch smiled and nodded.
    “Of course.”
    “And Tafero was on the saints’.”
    “Yeah. And so was our lieutenant at the time. A paper pusher named Harvey Pounds. He and Tafero had their little church thing going and so they were tight. I think anybody who was tight with Pounds, whether because of church or not, wasn’t somebody I was going to gravitate toward, if you know what I mean. And they weren’t going to gravitate toward me.”
    McCaleb nodded. He knew more than he was letting on.
    “Pounds was the guy who messed up the Gunn case,” he said. “The one you pushed through the window.”
    “He’s the one.”
    Bosch dropped his head and shook it in self-disgust.
    “Was Tafero there that day?”
    “Tafero? I don’t know, probably.”
    “Well, wasn’t there an IAD investigation with witness