The Black Box

and make his way back to the entrance road. He would then move parallel to it until he got to the Cosgrove home. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or looking for. He was following his instincts, and they told him Cosgrove, with his money and power, was at the center of things. He felt the need to move in closer to him, to see where and how he lived.
    The water was only a few inches deep but the mud sucked at Bosch’s boots and made his progress slow. Several times the wet earth refused to let go of its grip and he almost pulled his foot right out of its boot.
    The water floor reflected the starscape above and made Bosch feel as though he was completely exposed in his trespass. Every twenty yards or so he would move in under a tree for cover and so that he could rest for a moment and listen. The grove was deathly quiet, with not even the occasional buzz of insects in the air. The only sound was in the distance, and Bosch didn’t know what was making it. It was a steady whooshing and he thought it might be some sort of irrigation pump keeping water in the grove.
    After a while the grove began to feel like a maze to him. The fully mature trees stood thirty feet high and appeared to be exact duplicates of one another. The trees had been planted along astonishingly straight lines. This made every direction in which Bosch looked appear to be the same. He began to fear that he would become lost and wished he had brought something with him to mark the trail.
    Finally, after a half hour, he made it to the entrance road. He already felt exhausted, as though his boots were made of concrete. But he decided not to abandon the mission. He proceededalong a parallel, moving from tree to tree in the first row next to the road.
    Almost an hour later, Bosch saw the lights of the mansion up ahead through the branches of the last few rows of trees. He plodded on, noting that the whooshing sound was growing louder as he got nearer and nearer to the lights.
    When he got to the end of the grove, he crouched on the side of the embankment and studied what lay before him. The mansion was an exotic take on a French château. It was only two stories high but had steeply pitched roof angles and turreted corners. Something about it reminded Bosch of a smaller version of the Château Marmont back in L.A.
    The house was lit from the outside by floodlights angled up from the ground. There was a large turnaround at the front and a tributary drive that wrapped around behind the main structure. Bosch assumed the garage was in the back. There were no vehicles anywhere in sight, and Bosch realized that all of the lights that he had seen through the grove were exterior. The house itself was dark. It looked like nobody was home.
    Bosch stood up and climbed the embankment. He started toward the house and soon found himself on a raised concrete pad. The H design painted in the center indicated that it was a helicopter pad. He continued on, moving directly toward the house, when a deviation in his peripheral vision distracted him. He looked to his left toward a slight rise in the landscape.
    At first he didn’t see anything. The house was so brightly lit that the stars above were barely visible and the area around the mansion seemed pitch-black. But then he saw the movement again, high up over the hill. He suddenly realized thathe was seeing the dark blades of a wind turbine cutting through the air, momentarily blocking the dim light of the stars and rearranging the sky.
    The whooshing sound he had been listening to as he moved through the grove was coming from the wind turbine. Cosgrove so believed in the power of the wind that he had built one of his iron giants in his own backyard. Bosch guessed that the lights that bathed the exterior of the château were powered by the winds that tirelessly moved across the Valley.
    Bosch refocused his attention on the lighted mansion, and almost immediately he was struck with a feeling of hesitation, a second-guessing of his actions. The man who lived inside the walls in front of him was smart enough and powerful enough to harness the wind. He lived behind a wall of money and a phalanx—no, make that an army—of trees. He did not need to run a fence along the edges of his vast property, because he knew the grove would intimidate any intruder who dared to cross it. He lived in a castle with a surrounding moat, and who was Bosch to think he could take him down? Bosch didn’t even know the exact nature of the crime.