A Darkness More Than Night

what’s he like, that sort of thing. You ask like that and she might give you the real lowdown.”
    Winston looked away from the slider and back at McCaleb.
    “Yeah, that will make us good friends when she finds out it was all bullshit and I was setting up on her ex-partner – her mentor.”
    “If she’s a good cop she’ll understand. You had to either clear him or bag him and either way you wanted to do it as quietly as possible.”
    Winston looked back out the door.
    “I’m going to need deniability on this.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning if we do this and you go in there and it all blows up, I need to be able to walk away.”
    McCaleb nodded. He wished she hadn’t said it but he could see her need to protect herself.
    “I’m just telling you up front, Terry. If it all goes to hell it’s going to look like you overstepped, that I asked you to take a look at the book and you went off on your own. I’m sorry but I have to protect myself here.”
    “I understand, Jaye. I can live with it. I’ll take my chances.”

Chapter 18
    Winston was silent for a long time while she stared out the salon’s door. McCaleb sensed that she was building up to something and just waited.
    “I’ll tell you a story about Harry Bosch,” she finally said. “The first time I ever met him was about four years ago. It was a joint case. Two kidnap-murders. The one in Hollywood was his, the one in West Hollywood was mine. Young women, girls really. Physical evidence tied the cases together. We were basically working them separately but would meet for lunch every Wednesday to compare notes.”
    “Did you profile it?”
    “Yeah. This was when Maggie Griffin was still out here at the bureau. She worked something up for us. The usual. Anyway, things heated up when a third one disappeared. A seventeen-year-old this time. The evidence from the first two indicated the doer was keeping them alive four or five days before he got tired of them and killed them. So we had a big clock on us. We got reinforcements and we were running down common denominators.”
    McCaleb nodded. It sounded as though they were going by the book on tracking a serial.
    “A long shot came up,” she said. “All three of the victims used the same dry cleaner on Santa Monica near La Cienega. The latest – the girl – had a summer job at Universal and took her uniforms in for dry cleaning. Anyway, before we even went in there to the management we went into the employee parking lot and took down tags to run, just in case we got something before we had to go in and announce ourselves. And we got a hit. The manager himself. He’d gotten popped about ten years before on a public indecency. We pulled the jacket and it was a garden-variety flasher case. He pulled up in a car next to a bus stop and opened the door so the woman on the bench could get a look at his johnson. Turned out she was an undercover – they knew a wagger was working the neighborhood and put out decoys. Anyway, he got probation and counseling. He lied about it on his application at the job and over the years worked his way up to manager of the shop.”
    “Higher job, higher stress, higher level of offense.”
    “That’s what we thought. But we didn’t have any evidence. So Bosch had an idea. He said all of us – me, him and our partners – would go see this guy, his name was Hagen, at his home. He said an FBI agent once told him to always brace a suspect at home if you get the chance because sometimes you get more from the surroundings than you get from their mouths.”
    McCaleb suppressed a smile. It had been a lesson Bosch learned on the Cielo Azul case.
    “So we followed Hagen home. He lived over in Los Feliz in a big old rundown house off Franklin. This was the fourth day of the third woman’s disappearance, so we knew we were running out of time. We knocked on his door and the plan was to act like we didn’t know about his record and that we were just there to enlist his help in checking out employees in the shop. You know, to see how he reacted or if he made a slip.”
    “Right.”
    “Well, we were in there in this guy’s living room and I was doing most of the talking because Bosch wanted to see how the guy took it. You know, a woman in control. And we weren’t there but five minutes when Bosch suddenly stood up and said, ‘It’s him. She’s here somewhere.’ And when he said that, Hagen up and bolted for the door. He didn’t get far.”
    “Was it a bluff or part of