Lost Light
say?”
“I called your house a little while ago. I apologized. I shouldn’t have let personal feelings get mixed in with the reason I had come out there. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, it’s okay, Kiz. I apologize, too.”
“Really? For what?”
“I don’t know. For the way I left, I guess. You and Edgar didn’t deserve that. Especially you. I should have talked about it with you guys. That’s what partners do. I guess I wasn’t a very good partner at that moment.”
“Don’t worry about it. That’s what I said on the message. Water under the bridge. Let’s just be friends now.”
“I’d like to. But…”
I waited for her to pick up the invitation.
“But what, Harry?”
“Well, I don’t know how friendly you’ll want to be after this because I’ve got to ask you a question and you’re probably not going to like it.”
She groaned into the phone so loud that I had to hold it away from my ear.
“Harry, you’re killing me. What is it?”
“I’m sitting outside the federal building in Westwood. I’m supposed to go in and see some guy named Nunez. A bureau man. And something’s not feeling right about this. So I was wondering, are these the people you warned me were working the Angella Benton case? A guy named Nunez? Is it connected to Martha Gessler, the agent who disappeared a few years ago?”
There was a long silence on the phone. Too long.
“Kiz?”
“I’m here. Look, Harry, it’s just like I told you at your house. I can’t talk to you about the case. All I can tell you is what I did tell you. It is open and active and you should stay away from it.”
Now it was my turn not to respond. She was like a complete stranger. Less than a year earlier I would have gone into combat with her and trusted her to take my back while I took hers. Now I wasn’t sure I could trust her to tell me if the sun was out, unless she cleared it first with the sixth floor.
“Harry, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I’m just kind of speechless, Kiz. I thought if there was somebody in the department who would always level with me, it was going to be you. That’s all.”
“Look, Harry, have you done anything illegal while running this little freelance operation of yours?”
“No, but thanks for asking.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about with Nunez. Go in and see what they want. I don’t know anything about Martha Gessler. And that’s all I can tell you.”
“Okay, Kiz, thanks,” I said, putting my voice on a flat line now. “You take care of yourself up there on the sixth floor. And I’ll talk to you later.”
Before she could throw in the last word I closed the phone. I got up from the bench and headed to the building’s entrance. Inside, I had to go through a metal detector, take off my shoes and spread my arms wide for a search with the magic wand. I could barely understand the man with the wand when he told me to raise my arms. He looked more like a terrorist than I did, but I didn’t protest. You have to pick your battles. Finally, I got to the elevator and took it to the twelfth floor, which was really the thirteenth since the elevator didn’t count the lobby. I stepped into a waiting area where there was a large glass and presumably bullet-proof window separating the public area from the bureau’s inner sanctum. I said my name and who I wanted to see into a microphone and the woman on the other side of the glass told me to have a seat.
Instead I walked over to the window and looked down at the veterans cemetery across Wilshire Boulevard. I recalled that I was in the exact same position more than twelve years earlier when I first met the woman who would later become my wife, ex-wife and lasting infatuation.
I turned away from the window and sat down on the plastic couch. There was a magazine with Brenda Barstow’s photo on its cover on a beat-up coffee table. Under the picture the caption read “ Brenda, America ’s Sweetheart.” I was reaching for the magazine when the door to the interior offices opened and a man with a white shirt and tie stepped out.
“Mr. Bosch?”
I stood up and nodded. He reached his right hand forward while he used the left to keep the security door from closing and locking.
“Ken Nunez, thanks for coming in.”
The handshake was quick and then Nunez turned and led the way inside. He said nothing as he walked. He wasn’t what I had expected. On the phone he had sounded like a tired veteran who had seen it all twice. But he was
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