A Darkness More Than Night

the three men at his door and the explanation Bosch gave for their visit. Nevertheless he invited them in. As Bosch and Sheehan calmly asked questions McCaleb sat on a couch and studied the clean and neat furnishings of the apartment. Within five minutes he knew they had the right man and nodded to Bosch – their prearranged signal.
    Victor Seguin was informed of his rights and arrested. He was placed in the detectives’ car and his small home under the landing zone of Burbank Airport was sealed until a search warrant could be obtained. Two hours later, when they reentered with the search warrant, they found a sixteen-year-old girl bound and gagged but alive in a soundproof coffin-like crawl space constructed by the stage builder beneath a trap door hidden under his bed.
    Only after the excitement and adrenaline high of having broken a case and saved a life began to subside did Bosch finally ask McCaleb how he knew they had their man. McCaleb walked the detective over to the living room bookcase, where he pointed out a well-worn copy of a book called The Collector, a novel about a man who abducts several women.
    Seguin was charged with the unidentified girl’s murder and the kidnapping and rape of the young woman the investigators rescued. He denied any guilt in the murder and pressed for a deal by which he would plead guilty to the kidnapping and rape of the survivor only. The DA’s office declined any deal and proceeded to trial with what they had – the survivor’s gut-wrenching testimony and the license plate impression on the dead girl’s hip.
    The jury convicted on all counts after less than four hours’ deliberation. The DA’s office then floated a possible deal to Seguin; a promise not to go for the death penalty during the second phase of the trial if the killer agreed to tell investigators who his first victim was and from where he had abducted her. To take the deal Seguin would have to drop his pose of innocence. He passed. The DA went for the death penalty and got it. Bosch never learned who the dead girl was and McCaleb knew it haunted him that no one apparently cared enough to come forward.
    It haunted McCaleb, too. On the day he came to the penalty phase of the trial to testify, he had lunch with Bosch and noticed that a name had been written on the tabs of his files on the case.
    “What’s that?” McCaleb asked excitedly. “You ID’d her?”
    Bosch looked down and saw the name on the tabs and turned the files over.
    “No, no ID yet.”
    “Well, what’s that?”
    “Just a name. I sort of gave her a name, I guess.”
    Bosch looked embarrassed. McCaleb reached over and turned the files back over to read the name.
    “Cielo Azul?”
    “Yeah, she was Spanish, I gave her a Spanish name.”
    “It means blue sky, right?”
    “Yeah, blue sky. I, uh…”
    McCaleb waited. Nothing.
    “What?”
    “Well…, I’m not that religious, you know what I mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “But I sort of figured if nobody down here wanted to claim her, then hopefully… maybe there’s somebody up there that will.”
    Bosch shrugged his shoulders and looked away. McCaleb could see his face turning red in the upper cheeks.
    “It’s hard to find God’s hand in what we do. What we see.”
    Bosch just nodded and they didn’t speak about the name again.

    ***

    McCaleb lifted the last page of the file marked Cielo Azul and looked at the inside rear flap of the manila folder. It had become his habit over time at the bureau to jot notes on the back flap, where they would not readily be seen because of the attached file pages. These were notes he made about the investigators who submitted the cases for profiling. McCaleb had come to realize that insights about the investigator were sometimes as important as the information in the case file. For it was through the investigator’s eyes that McCaleb first viewed many aspects of the crime.
    His case with Bosch had come up more than ten years earlier, before he began his more extensive profiling of the investigators as well as the cases. On this file he had written Bosch’s name and just four words beneath it.
    Thorough – Smart – M. M. – A. A.
    He looked at the last two notations now. It had been part of his routine to use abbreviations and shorthand when making notes that needed to be kept confidential. The last two notations were his reading on what motivated Bosch. He had come to believe that homicide detectives, a breed of cop unto themselves, called upon