A Darkness More Than Night

fast. If it all works out I say we take Tafero in tomorrow night and make the play to him.”
    Bosch looked down at the table with a rueful smile. He slid an empty bottle back and forth between his hands.
    “I met those guys today. The agents.”
    “I heard. You didn’t exactly assure them of your innocence. They came back all hot and bothered.”
    Bosch looked up.
    “So what do you need from me on this?”
    “We need you to sit tight,” Winston said. “We’ll let you know about tomorrow night.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “There is one thing,” McCaleb said. “The exhibits from the trial, do you have access to them?”
    “During court, yeah. Otherwise they stay with the clerk. Why?”
    “Because Storey obviously had existing knowledge of the painter Hieronymus Bosch. He had to have recognized your name during that interview and known what he could do with it. So I’m thinking that book his assistant brought him in jail had to be his own. He told her to bring it to him.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “The picture of the bookcase.”
    McCaleb nodded.
    “You got it.”
    “I’ll let you know.” Bosch looked around the place. “Are we done here?”
    “We’re done,” Winston said. “We’ll be in touch.”
    She slid out of the booth, followed by Bosch and McCaleb. They left two beers and a whiskey rocks untouched on the table. At the door, McCaleb glanced back and saw a couple of the hard-cores moving in on the treasure. From the jukebox John Fogerty was singing, “There’s a bad moon on the rise…”

Chapter 41
    The chill off the water worked its way into McCaleb’s bones. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker and turtled his neck as far down into the collar as he could as he carefully made his way down the ramp to the Cabrillo Marina docks.
    Though his chin was down his eyes were alert and scanning the docks for unusual movement. Nothing caught his attention. He glanced at Buddy Lockridge’s sailboat as he passed. Despite all the junk – surfboards, bikes, gas grill, an ocean kayak and other assorted equipment and debris – crowding the deck, he could see the cabin lights were on. He walked quietly on the wood planking. He decided that whether Buddy was awake or not it was too late and McCaleb was too tired and cold to deal with his supposed partner. Still, as he approached The Following Sea, he couldn’t help but move his mind over the sharp-edged anomaly in his working theory on the case. Back at the bar Bosch had been correct when he deduced that someone from the Storey camp had to have leaked the story of the Gunn investigation to the New Times. McCaleb knew that the only way the current case theory hung together was if Tafero, or maybe Fowkkes or even Storey from jail, had been Jack McEvoy’s source. The problem was that Buddy Lockridge had told McCaleb that he had leaked the investigation to the weekly tabloid.
    Now the only way, at least as it appeared to McCaleb, that this could work would be if both Buddy and someone in Storey’s defense group leaked the same information to the same media source. And this, of course, was a coincidence that even a believer in coincidence would have a difficult time accepting.
    McCaleb tried to put it out of his mind for the moment. He got to the boat, looked around again, and stepped down into the cockpit. He unlocked the slider and went in, turning on the lights. He decided that in the morning he would go over and question Buddy more carefully about what he had done and who he had talked to.
    He locked the door and put his keys and the videotape he’d been carrying down on the chart table. He immediately went to the galley and poured a large glass of orange juice. He then turned the upper deck lights off and took the juice with him down to the lower deck where he went into the head and quickly began his evening pill ritual. As he swallowed the pills and orange juice he looked at himself in the small mirror over the sink. He thought about what Bosch had looked like. The weariness clearly set deep in his eyes. McCaleb wondered if he would get the same look in a few years, after a few more cases.
    When he was finished with his medicine routine he stripped off his clothes and took a quick shower, the water feeling ice cold because the water heater hadn’t been on since he had crossed in the boat the day before.
    Shivering, he went into the master cabin and put on a pair of boxer shorts and a sweatshirt. He was dead tired but once he got into