The Last Coyote

mother was murdered in Hollywood when I was a kid. Nobody…there never was any arrest made.”
    “You’re looking for her killer, aren’t you?”
    He looked up at her and nodded.
    “That’s my mission right now.”
    She showed no shock on her face, which in turn surprised him. It was as if she expected him to say what he had just said.
    “Tell me about it.”

Chapter Thirteen
    BOSCH SAT AT his dining room table with his notebook out and the newspaper clips that Keisha Russell had had a Times intern gather for him sitting in front of him in two separate stacks. One stack for Conklin stories and one for Mittel stories. There was a bottle of Henry’s on the table and through the evening he had been nursing it like cough syrup. The one beer was all he would allow himself. The ashtray, however, was loaded and there was a pall of blue smoke around the table. He had placed no limit on cigarettes. Hinojos had said nothing about smoking.
    She’d had plenty to say about his mission, though. She’d flatly counseled him to stop until he was better emotionally prepared to face what he might find. He told her that he was too far down the road to stop. Then she said something that he kept thinking about as he drove home and it intruded even now.
    “You better think about this and make sure it’s what you want,” she said. “Subconsciously or not, you may have been working toward this all your life. It could be the reason you are who you are. A policeman, a homicide investigator. Resolving your mother’s death could also resolve your need to be a policeman. It could take your drive, your mission, away from you. You have to be prepared for that or you should turn back.”
    Bosch considered what she had said to be true. He knew that all his life it had been there. What had happened to his mother had helped define everything he did after. And it was always there in the dark recesses of his mind. A promise to find out. A promise to avenge. It was never anything that had been spoken aloud or even thought about with much focus. For to have done that was to plan and this was no part of a grand agenda. Still, he was crowded with the feeling that what he was doing was inevitable, something scheduled by an unseen hand a long time ago.
    His mind put Hinojos aside and focused on a memory. He was under the surface of the water, eyes open and looking up toward the light above the pool. Then, the light was eclipsed by a figure standing above, the image murky, a dark angel hovering above. Bosch kicked off the bottom and moved toward the figure.
    Bosch picked up the bottle of beer and finished it in one pull. He tried to concentrate again on the newspaper clips in front of him.
    He had initially been surprised at how many stories there were about Arno Conklin prior to his ascendance to the throne of the district attorney’s office. But as he started to read through them he saw most of the stories were mundane dispatches from trials in which Conklin was the prosecuting attorney. Still, Bosch got somewhat of a feel for the man through the cases he tried and his style as a prosecutor. It was clear that his star rose both in the office and the public’s eyes with a series of highly publicized cases.
    The stories were in chronological order and the first dealt with the successful prosecution in 1953 of a woman who poisoned both her parents and then stored their bodies in trunks in the garage until neighbors complained about the smell to the police a month later. Conklin was quoted at length in several articles on the case. One time he was described as the “dashing deputy district attorney.” The case was one of the early forerunners of the insanity defense. The woman claimed diminished capacity. But judging by the number of articles, there was a public furor over the case and the jury only took a half hour to convict. The defendant received the death penalty and Conklin’s place in the public arena as a champion of public safety, a seeker of justice, was secured. There was a photo of him talking to the reporters after the verdict. The paper’s earlier description of him had him down perfectly. He was a dashing man. He wore a dark three-piece suit, had short blond hair and was clean-shaven. He was lean and tall and had the ruddy, All-American look that actors pay surgeons thousands for. Arno was a star in his own right.
    There were more stories about more murder cases in the clips after that first one. Conklin won every one of them.