The Last Coyote

the sound of a siren distracted him. He could identify it as a squad car as opposed to a fire engine. He knew he’d get a lot of that with the police station just down the street. He moved about his two rooms and felt restless and out of it, as if life was passing by while he was stuck here. He made coffee with the machine he had brought from home and it only served to make him more jittery.
    He tried the paper again but there was nothing of real interest to him except the story he had already read on the front page. He paged through the thin Metro section anyway and saw a report that the county commission chambers were being outfitted with bulletproof desk blotters that the commissioners could hold up in front of them in the event a maniac came in spraying bullets. He threw the section aside and picked up the front section again.
    Bosch reread the story about his investigation and couldn’t escape a growing feeling that something was wrong, that something was left out or incomplete. Keisha Russell’s reporting had been fine. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was in seeing the story in words, in print. It didn’t seem as convincing to him as it had been when he recounted it for her or for Irving or even for himself.
    He put the newspaper aside, leaned back on the bed and closed his eyes. He went over the sequence of events once more and in doing so finally realized the problem that gnawed at him was not in the paper but in what Mittel had said to him. Bosch tried to recall the words exchanged between them on the manicured lawn behind the rich man’s house. What had really been said there? What had Mittel admitted to?
    Bosch knew that at that moment on the lawn, Mittel was in a position of seeming invulnerability. He had Bosch captured, wounded and doomed before him. His attack dog, Vaughn, stood ready with a gun to Bosch’s back. In that situation, Bosch believed there would be no reason for a man of Mittel’s ego to hold back. And, in fact, he had not held back. He had boasted of his scheme to control Conklin and others. He had freely, though indirectly, admitted that he had caused the deaths of Conklin and Pounds. But despite those admissions, he had not done the same when it came to the killing of Marjorie Lowe.
    Through the fragmented images of that night, Bosch tried to recall the exact words said and couldn’t quite get to them. His visual recollection was good. He had Mittel standing in front of the blanket of lights. But the words weren’t there. Mittel’s mouth moved but Bosch couldn’t get the words. Then, finally, after working at it for a while, it came to him. He had it. Opportunity. Mittel had called her death an opportunity. Was that an acknowledgement of culpability? Was he saying he killed her or had her killed? Or was he simply admitting that her death presented an opportunity for him to take advantage of?
    Bosch didn’t know and not knowing felt like a heavy weight in his chest. He tried to put it out of his mind and eventually started drifting off toward sleep. The sounds of the city outside, even the sirens, were comforting. He was at the threshold of unconsciousness, almost there, when he suddenly opened his eyes.
    “The prints,” he said out loud.
    Thirty minutes later he was shaved, showered and in fresh clothes heading downtown. He had his sunglasses on and he checked himself in the mirror. His battered eyes were hidden. He licked his fingers and pressed his curly hair down to better cover the shaved spot and the stitches in his scalp.
    At County-USC Medical Center, he drove through the back lot to the parking slots nearest the rear garage bays of the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office. He walked in through one of the open garage doors and waved to the security guard, who knew him by sight and nodded back. Investigators weren’t supposed to go in the back way but Bosch had been doing it for years. He wasn’t going to stop until someone made a federal case out of it. The minimum-wage guard was an unlikely candidate to do that.
    He went up to the investigators’ lounge on the second floor, hoping not only that there would be someone there he knew but, more important, someone Bosch hadn’t alienated over the years.
    He swung the door open and immediately was hit with the smell of fresh coffee. But the room was bad news. Only Larry Sakai was in the room, sitting at a table with newspapers spread across it. He was a coroner’s investigator Bosch had never really