Suicide Run

spoken for the dead many times. I had avenged the dead. I was at home with the dead. But I had never so clearly had a part in pulling someone away from the outstretched hands of death. And in that moment I knew we had done just that. And I knew that whatever happened afterward and wherever my life took me, I would always have this moment, that it would be a light that could lead me out of the darkest of tunnels.
    “Harry, what are you doing? Get an ambulance.”
    I looked at him.
    “Yeah, right away.”

    I stepped closer to the bars and looked in at him.
    “You’re running out of time. You’ve exhausted your appeals, you’ve got a governor who needs to show he’s tough on crime. This is it, Victor. A week from today you take the needle.”
    I waited for a reaction but there was nothing. He just looked at me and waited for what he knew I would ask.
    “Time to come clean. Tell me who she was. Tell me where you took her from.”
    He moved closer to the bars, close enough for me to smell the decay in his breath. I didn’t back away.
    “All these years, Bosch. All these years and you still need to know. Why is that?”
    “I just need to.”
    “You and McCaleb.”
    “What about him?”
    “Oh, he came to see me, too.”
    I knew McCaleb was out of the life. The job had taken his heart. He got a transplant and last I’d heard he lived on a boat with a fishing line in the water.
    “When did he come?”
    “A few months ago. Dropped by for a chat. Said he was in the neighborhood. He wanted to know the same thing. Who was the girl, where did she come from? He told me you even gave her a name back then, during the trial.
Cielo Azul
. That’s really very pretty, Detective Bosch.”
    “He told you that?”
    “Yes, standing right where you are standing.”
    “Are you going to tell me or not?”
    He smiled and stepped back from the bars. He walked over to the chessboard and looked down at it as if he were considering a move.
    “You know, they used to let me keep a cat in here. I miss that cat.”
    He picked up one of the game pieces but then hesitated and returned it to the same spot. He turned and looked at me.
    “You know what I think? I think that you two can’t stand the thought of that girl not having a name, not coming from a home with a mommy and a daddy and a little baby brother. The idea of no one caring and no one missing her, it leaves you hollow, doesn’t it?”
    “I just want to close the case.”
    “Oh, but it is closed. You’re not here because of any case. You are here on your own. Admit it, Detective. Just as McCaleb came on his own. The idea of that pretty little girl—and by the way, if you thought she was beautiful in death, then you should have seen her before—the idea of her lying unclaimed in an unmarked grave all this time undercuts everything you do, doesn’t it?”
    “It’s a loose end. I don’t like loose ends.”
    “It’s more than that, Detective. I know.”
    I said nothing. I wanted to leave. The idea I had of getting him to tell me seemed absurd now.
    “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”
    He smiled broadly.
    “If a girl is murdered in the city and nobody cares, does it matter?”
    “I care.”
    “Exactly.”
    He came back to the bars.
    “And you need me to relieve you of that burden by giving you a name, a mommy and daddy who care.”
    He was a foot away from me. I could reach through the bars and grab his throat if I wanted to. But that would’ve been what he wanted me to do.
    “Well, I won’t release you, Detective. You put me in this cage. I put you in that one.”
    He stepped back and pointed at me. I looked down and realized both my hands were tightly gripping the steel bars of the cage. My cage.
    I looked back up at him and his smile was back, as guiltless as a baby’s.
    “Funny, isn’t it? I remember that day—ten years ago today. Sitting in the back of the car while you cops played hero. So full of yourselves for saving the girl. Bet you never thought it would come to this, did you? You saved one but you lost the other.”
    I lowered my head to the bars.
    “Seguin, you’re going to burn. You are going to hell.”
    “Yes, I suppose so. But I hear it’s a dry heat.”
    He laughed loudly and I looked at him.
    “Don’t you know, Detective? You have to believe in heaven to believe in hell.”
    I abruptly turned from the bars and headed back toward the steel door. Above it I saw the mounted camera. I made