A Darkness More Than Night

her.
    Bosch nodded.
    “From time to time I do. It sticks with me. They all do, I guess.”
    McCaleb nodded.
    “Yeah. So nothing… nobody ever made a claim on her?”
    “Nope. And I tried with Seguin one last time, went up to see him at Q last year, about a week before he got the juice. Tried one more time to find out from him but he just smiled at me. It was like he knew it was the last thing he could hold over me or something. He enjoyed it, I could tell. So I got up to leave and I told him to enjoy himself in hell and know what he said to me? He said, ‘I hear it’s a dry heat.’”
    Bosch shook his head.
    “Fucker. I drove up and back on my day off. Twelve hours in the car and the air-conditioner didn’t work.”
    He looked directly at McCaleb and even through the shades McCaleb again felt the bond he had known so long ago with this man.
    Before he could say anything he heard his phone begin to chirp from the pocket of his windbreaker, which was folded on the bench next to him. He struggled with the jacket to find the pocket and got to the phone before the caller hung up. It was Brass Doran.
    “I have some stuff for you. Not a lot, but maybe a start.”
    “You someplace I can call you back in a few minutes?”
    “Actually, I’m in the central conference room. We’re about to brainstorm a case and I’m the leader. It could be a couple hours before I’m free. You could call me at home tonight if you -”
    “No, hold on.”
    He held the phone down and looked at Bosch.
    “I better take this. I’ll talk to you later if anything comes up, okay?”
    “Sure.”
    Bosch started getting up. He was going to carry his Coke with him.
    “Thanks,” McCaleb said, extending his hand. “Good luck with the trial.”
    Bosch shook his hand.
    “Thanks. We’ll probably need it.”
    McCaleb watched him walk out of the picnic area and to the sidewalk leading back to the courthouse. He brought the phone back up then.
    “Brass?”
    “Here. Okay, you were talking about owls in general, right? You don’t know the specific kind or breed, right?”
    “Right. It’s just a generic owl, I think.”
    “What color is it?”
    “Uh, it’s brown mostly. Like on the back and the wings.”
    As he spoke he took a couple of folded pages of notebook paper and a pen out of his pockets. He shoved his half-eaten chili dog out of the way and got ready to take notes.
    “Okay, modern iconography is what you’d expect. The owl is the symbol of wisdom and truth, denotes knowledge, the view of the greater picture as opposed to the small detail. The owl sees in the night. In other words, seeing through the darkness is seeing the truth. It is learning the truth, therefore, knowledge. And from knowledge comes wisdom. Okay?”
    McCaleb didn’t need to take notes. What Doran had said was obvious. But just to keep his head in it he wrote down a line.
    Seeing in the dark = Wisdom He then underlined the last word.
    “Okay, fine. What else?”
    “That’s basically what I have as far as contemporary application. But when I go backward it gets pretty interesting. Our friend the owl has totally rejuvenated his reputation. He used to be a bad guy.”
    “Tell me, Brass.”
    “Get your pencil out. The owl is seen repeatedly in art and religious iconography from early medieval through late Renaissance periods. It is found often depicted in religious allegorical displays – paintings, church panels and stations of the cross. The owl was -”
    “Okay, Brass, but what did it mean?”
    “I’m getting to that. Its meaning could be different from depiction to depiction and according to species depicted. But essentially its depiction was the symbol of evil.”
    McCaleb wrote the word down.
    “Evil. Okay.”
    “I thought you’d be more excited.”
    “You can’t see me. I’m standing on my hands here. What else you have?”
    “Let me run down the list of hits. These are taken from the extracts, the critical literature of the art of the period. References to depictions of owls come up as the symbol of – and I quote – doom, the enemy of innocence, the Devil himself, heresy, folly, death and misfortune, the bird of darkness, and finally, the torment of the human soul in its inevitable journey to eternal damnation. Nice, huh? I like that last one. I guess they didn’t sell too many bags of potato chips with owls on them back in the fourteen hundreds.”
    McCaleb didn’t answer. He was busy scribbling down the descriptions she had read to