The Last Coyote

you-”
    “No, I’m fine. This is great, thanks.”
    He saluted her with the glass and drank half of it, then put it down on the table.
    “Harry, use the coaster. Getting rings out of the glass is murder.” Bosch looked down at what he had done.
    “Oh, sorry.”
    He corrected the placement of his glass.
    “You’re a detective.”
    “Yes. I work in Hollywood now…Uh, but I’m not really working right now. I’m on sort of a vacation.”
    “Oh, that must be nice.”
    Her spirits seemed to lift, as if she knew there was a chance he was not here on business. Bosch knew it was time to get to the point.
    “Uh, Mer-uh, Katherine, I need to ask you about something.”
    “What is it, Harry?”
    “I look around here and I see you have a very nice home, a different name, a different life. You’re no longer Meredith Roman and I know you don’t need me to tell you that. You’ve got…I think what I’m saying is the past may be a difficult thing to talk about. I know it is for me. And, believe me, I don’t want to hurt you in any way.”
    “You’re here to talk about your mother.”
    He nodded and looked down at the glass on the cork coaster.
    “Your mother and I were best friends. Sometimes I think I had almost as much a hand in raising you as she did. Until they took you away from her. From us.”
    He looked back up at her. Her eyes were looking hard at distant memories.
    “I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think about her. We were just kids. Having a good time, you know. We never thought either of us could get hurt.”
    She suddenly stood up.
    “Harry, come here. I want to show you something.”
    He followed her down a carpeted hallway and into a bedroom. There was a four-poster bed with light blue coverings, an oak bureau and matching bedside tables. Katherine Register pointed to the bureau. There were several photos in ornate stand-up frames on top. Most of them were of Katherine and a man who seemed much older than she was in the photos. Her husband, Bosch guessed. But she pointed to one that was to the right side of the grouping. The photo was old, its color faded. It was a picture of two young women with a tiny boy of three or four.
    “I’ve always had that there, Harry. Even when my husband was alive. He knew my past. I told him. It didn’t matter. We had twenty-three great years together. You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong. I’m strong, Harry. Now, tell me why you came to visit me today.”
    Bosch reached for the framed photo and picked it up.
    “I want…” He looked up from the photo to her. “I’m going to find out who killed her.”
    An undecipherable look froze on her face for a moment and then she wordlessly took the frame out of his hands and put it back on the bureau. Then she pulled him into another deep embrace, her head against his chest. He could see himself holding her in the mirror over the bureau. When she pulled back and looked up at him he saw the tears were already down her cheeks. There was a slight tremor in her lower lip.
    “Let’s go sit down,” he said.
    She pulled two tissues out of a box on the bureau and he led her back to the living room and to her chair.
    “Do you want me to get you some water?”
    “No, I’m fine. I’ll stop crying, I’m sorry.”
    She wiped at her eyes with the tissues. He sat back down on the couch.
    “We used to say we were the two musketeers, both for one and one for both. It was stupid, but it was because we were so young and so close.”
    “I’m starting from scratch with it, Katherine. I pulled the old files on the investigation. It-”
    She made a dismissing sound and shook her head.
    “There was no investigation. It was a joke.”
    “That’s my sense of it, too, but I don’t understand why.”
    “Look, Harry, you know what your mother was.” He nodded and she continued. “She was a party girl. We both were. I’m sure you know that’s the polite way of saying it. And the cops really didn’t care that one of us ended up dead. They just wrote the whole damn thing off. I know you’re a policeman now, but that’s the way it was then. They just didn’t care about her.”
    “I understand. Things probably are not too much different now, believe it or not. But there has to have been more to it than that.”
    “Harry, I don’t know how much you want to know about your mother.”
    He looked at her.
    “The past made me