A Darkness More Than Night

want to come here?”
    “No, I was thinking about something more quiet and private.”
    “How come?”
    “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
    “Getting mysterious on me. This isn’t a scam to get the sheriff’s to pay for pancakes again, is it?”
    They both laughed.
    “No scam. Any chance you could come out to Cabrillo and meet me at my boat?”
    “I’ll be there. What time?”
    He made the appointment for three o’clock thinking that would give him plenty of time to prepare a profile and figure out how he would tell her what he had to say. It would also give him enough time to be ready for what he hoped she would allow him to do that night.
    “Anything on the owl?” he asked once they had the meeting arranged.
    “Very little, none of it good. Inside there are manufacturing markings. The plastic mold was made in China. The company ships them to two distributors over here, one in Ohio and one in Tennessee. From there they probably go all over. It’s a long shot and a lot of work.”
    “So you’re going to drop it.”
    “No, I didn’t say that. It’s just not a priority. It’s on my partner’s plate. He’s got calls out. We’ll see what he gets from the distributors, evaluate and decide where to go from there.”
    McCaleb nodded. Prioritizing investigative leads and even investigations themselves was a necessary evil. But it still bothered him. He was sure the owl was a key and knowing everything about it would be useful.
    “Okay, so we’re all set?” she asked.
    “About tomorrow? Yeah, we’re set.”
    “We’ll see you at three.”
    “We?”
    “Kurt and I. My partner. You haven’t met him yet.”
    “Uh, look, tomorrow could it just be me and you? Nothing against your partner but I’d just like to talk to you tomorrow, Jaye.”
    There was a moment of silence before she responded.
    “Terry, what’s going on with you?”
    “I just want to talk to you about this. You brought me in, I want to give what I have to you. If you want to bring your partner in on it after, that’s fine.”
    There was another pause.
    “I’m getting a bad vibe from all of this, Terry.”
    “I’m sorry, but that’s the way I want it. I guess you have to take it or leave it.”
    His ultimatum made her go silent even longer this time. He waited for her.
    “All right, man,” she finally said. “It’s your show. I’ll take it.”
    “Thanks, Jaye. I’ll see you then.”
    They hung up. He looked at the old case file he had pulled and still held in his hand. He put the phone down on the coffee table and leaned back on the couch and opened the file.

Chapter 14
    At first they called it the Little Girl Lost case because the victim had no name. The victim was thought to be about fourteen or fifteen years old; a Latina – probably Mexican – whose body was found in the bushes and among the debris below one of the overlooks off Mulholland Drive. The case belonged to Bosch and his partner at the time, Frankie Sheehan. This was before Bosch worked homicide out of Hollywood Division. He and Sheehan were a Robbery-Homicide team and it had been Bosch who contacted McCaleb at the bureau. McCaleb was newly returned to Los Angeles from Quantico. He was setting up an outpost for the Behavioral Sciences Unit and Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. The Little Girl Lost case was one of the first submitted to him.
    Bosch came to him, bringing the file and the crime scene photos to his tiny office on the thirteenth floor of the federal building in Westwood. He came without Sheehan because the partners had disagreed on whether to bring the bureau in on the case. Cross-agency jealousies at work. But Bosch didn’t care about all of that. He cared about the case. He had haunted eyes. The case was clearly working on him as much as he worked on it.
    The body had been found nude and violated in many ways. The girl had been manually strangled by her killer’s gloved hands. No clothes or purse were found on the hillside. Fingerprints matched no computerized records. The girl matched no description on an active missing persons case anywhere in Los Angeles County or on national crime computer systems. An artist’s rendering of the victim’s face put on the TV news and in the papers brought no calls from a loved one. Sketches faxed to five hundred police agencies across the Southwest and to the State Judicial Police in Mexico drew no response. The victim remained unclaimed and unidentified, her body reposing in the refrigerator at