The Black Box

tomorrow night prob’ly. Who are you?”
    “Just a friend passing through. I knew him twenty years ago in the Gulf. Will you tell him John Bagnall said hello?”
    “I’ll do that.”
    Bosch couldn’t remember if Dowler’s wife’s name was in the material Chu had put together. If he’d had the name, he would have used it as he said good-bye. She turned andheaded back to the door she had left open. Bosch noticed a motorcycle with a gas tank painted like a bluebottle fly parked under one of the double-wide’s awnings. He guessed that when Dowler wasn’t running grape juice in a big rig, he liked gliding on a Harley.
    Bosch drove out of the park, hoping he had not caused enough suspicion to warrant anything more than curiosity on the woman’s part. And he hoped Dowler wasn’t the sort of husband who called home every night when he was on the road.
    Bosch’s second-to-last stop on his tour of the Central Valley took him to Stockton, where he pulled into the lot of the Steers, the steakhouse where Christopher Henderson met his end in the walk-in cooler.
    But Bosch had to admit to himself that he was doing more than observing the place as a part of the case. He was famished and had been thinking about eating a good steak all day long. It would be hard to beat the steak he had gotten at Craig’s on Saturday night, but he was hungry enough to try.
    Never one to be self-conscious about eating in a restaurant alone, he told the young woman at the greeting station that he’d prefer a table over a seat at the bar. He was led to a two-top next to the glass-paneled wine cooler, and he chose the seat that gave him a full view of the restaurant. It was his habit to do this for safety, but he also always tried to prepare to be lucky. Maybe the man himself, Carl Cosgrove, might enter his own restaurant to eat.
    For the next two hours Bosch saw no one he recognized enter the establishment, but all was not for naught. He had a New York strip with mashed potatoes, and all of it was delicious.He also sipped a glass of Cosgrove merlot that went nicely with the beef.
    The only rub came when Bosch’s phone sounded loudly in the dining room. He had set the ringer to the loudest position so he would be sure to hear it while driving. He had forgotten to lower it to the usual nonintrusive buzz. His fellow diners frowned at him. One woman went so far as to shake her head in disgust, apparently pegging him as an arrogant bigcity jerk.
    Arrogant or not, Bosch took the call because he saw on the ID that it was a 404 area code—Atlanta. As expected, the caller was one of the Charlotte Jacksons he had left a message for. It took him only a few questions to determine that she was the wrong Charlotte Jackson. He thanked her and hung up. He smiled and nodded at the lady who had shaken her head at his rudeness.
    He opened the file he had brought into the restaurant and crossed out Charlotte Jackson number four. He was now down to two possibilities—numbers three and seven—and one of them he did not even have a number for.
    By the time Harry returned to the parking lot, it was dark out and he was tired from the long day on the road. He thought about sitting in his car and taking a nap for an hour but then dismissed the idea. He had to keep moving.
    Standing by the car’s trunk, he looked up into the sky. It was a cloudless and moonless night, but the stars were out in force over the Central Valley. Bosch didn’t like that. He needed it darker. He popped the trunk.

27
    B osch turned the car’s lights off as he cruised past the gated entrance to the Cosgrove estate. There was not another car on Hammett Road. He went another two hundred yards to where the road curved slightly right and then pulled off onto the dirt shoulder.
    He had already turned off the interior convenience light, so the car remained dark when he opened the door. He stepped out into the cool air and looked and listened. The night was silent. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded square of paper. He clipped it under the wind-shield. Earlier he had written a note on it. It said:
    OUT OF GAS—WILL RETURN SOON
    Bosch was wearing the mud boots he had retrieved from one of the boxes in the trunk. He carried a small Mag-Lite that he hoped not to have to use. He stepped down the three-foot embankment and gingerly moved into the water, sending a shimmering ripple across the floor of the almond grove.
    Bosch’s plan was to proceed at an angle