The Black Box

town of Ripon, and Bosch saw a sign for a motel poking above the thick pink-and-white-flowered bushes that lined the freeway. He took the next exit and worked his way back to the Blu-Lite Motel and Liquor Market. It was an old ranch-style motel right out of the 1950s. Bosch wanted a place that was private, where people would not be around to see his comings and goings. Bosch thought it would be perfect because he saw only one car parked in front of its many rooms.
    He paid for the room at the counter in the liquor store. He went big, paying the top-of-the-line $49 rate for a room with a kitchenette.
    “You don’t have Wi-Fi here by any chance, do you?” he asked the clerk.
    “Not officially,” the clerk said. “But if you give me five bucks, I’ll give you the password on the Wi-Fi from the house behind the motel. You’ll pick up the signal in your efficiency.”
    “Who gets the five bucks?”
    “I split it with the guy who lives back there.”
    Bosch thought about it for a moment.
    “It’s private and secure,” the clerk offered.
    “Okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll take it.”
    He drove over to room 7 and parked in front of the door. Bringing his overnight bag inside, he put it on the bed and looked around. There was a small table in the kitchenette with two chairs. The room would work.
    Before leaving, Bosch changed his shirt, hanging the blue button-down in the closet in case he stayed through Wednesday and needed to wear it again. He opened his bag and selected a black pullover shirt. He got dressed, then locked theplace up and went back to his car. “Over the Rainbow” was playing again as he pulled back out on the road.
    Bosch’s next stop was Manteca, and long before he got there, he could see the water tower that said “Cosgrove Ag” on it. The Cosgrove business enterprise was located on a frontage road running parallel to the freeway. It consisted of an office structure as well as a vast produce storage and trucking facility where dozens of carriers and tank trucks were lined up and ready for transport. Flanking the complex were what seemed to Bosch to be miles and miles of grapevines covering the landscape until it rolled upward toward the ash-colored mountains to the west. Out on the horizon the natural landscape was broken only by the steel giants that were coming down the slopes like invaders from another world. The towering wind turbines that Carl Cosgrove had brought to the Valley.
    After being duly impressed by the expanse of the Cosgrove empire, Bosch went slumming. Following the maps he had printed Saturday, he went to the addresses the DMV held for Francis John Dowler and Reginald Banks. Neither place impressed Bosch beyond the fact that they appeared to be on Cosgrove land.
    Banks lived in a small free-standing home that backed up to the almond groves off Brunswick Road. Checking his map and noting the lack of dedicated roads between Brunswick to the north and Hammett to the south, Bosch believed that it might be possible to enter the grove on foot behind Banks’s home and come out on Hammett—many hours later.
    Banks’s home needed a paint job and its windows needed cleaning. If he was living there with his family, there were no indications of it. The yard was strewn with beer bottles, allwithin easy throwing distance of a porch with an old seam-split couch on it. Banks had not cleaned up after his weekend.
    The last stop before dinner was Dowler’s double-wide mobile home with the TV dish mounted on the roof’s crest line. It was located in a trailer park off the frontage road, and each home had a parking pad equal in length to the home itself for parking the long hauler. The park was where Cosgrove drivers lived.
    While Bosch sat in his rental car looking at the Dowler residence, a door opened on the side under the carport and a woman stepped out and looked suspiciously at him. Bosch waved like he was an old friend, disarming her a bit. She stepped down the driveway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was what Bosch’s old partner Jerry Edgar would have called a 50/50—fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight.
    “You looking for somebody?” she asked.
    “Well, I was hoping to find Frank at home. But I see his truck is gone.”
    Bosch waved toward the empty parking pad.
    “He coming back anytime soon?”
    “He had to take a load of juice up to American Canyon. He might have to wait up there until they have something for him to bring back down. He should be back