The Last Coyote

for a few minutes but then I left him something. Remember that newspaper clip I showed you Wednesday? I left that for him. I saw him read it. I think it struck a nerve.”
    She exhaled loudly.
    “Now, step outside yourself and look as an uninvolved observer at what you did. If you can. Was that a smart thing to do, going there like that?”
    “I already have thought about it. No, it wasn’t smart. It was a mistake. He’ll probably warn Conklin. They’ll both know somebody’s out there, coming for them. They’ll close ranks.”
    “You see, you are proving my point for me. I want you to promise me you won’t do anything foolish like that again.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Well, then I have to tell you that a patient-doctor relationship can be broken if the therapist believes the patient is endangering himself or others. I told you I was almost powerless to stop you. Not completely.”
    “You’d go to Irving?”
    “I will if I believe you are being reckless.”
    Bosch felt anger as he realized she had ultimate control over him and what he was doing. He swallowed the anger and held up his hands, surrendering.
    “All right. I won’t go crashing any parties again.”
    “No. I want more than that. I want you to stay away from these men that you think may have been involved.”
    “What I’ll promise you is that I won’t go to them until I have the whole thing in the bag.”
    “I mean it.”
    “So do I.”
    “I hope so.”
    They were silent for nearly a minute after that. It was a cooling-off period. She turned slightly in her chair, not looking at him, probably thinking what to say next.
    “Let’s move on,” she finally said. “You understand that this whole thing, this pursuit of yours, has eclipsed what we’re supposed to be doing here?”
    “I know.”
    “So we’re prolonging my evaluation.”
    “Well, that doesn’t bother me as much anymore. I need the time off the job for this other thing.”
    “Well, as long as you are happy,” she said sarcastically. “Okay, then I want to go back to the incident that brought you to me. The other day you were very general and very short in your description of what happened. I understand why. I think we were both feeling each other out at that point. But we are far past that now. I’d like a fuller story. You said the other day that Lieutenant Pounds set things into motion?”
    “That’s right.”
    “How?”
    “First of all, he’s a commander of detectives who has never been a detective himself. Oh, technically, he probably spent a few months on a table somewhere along the line so he’d have it on his résumé, but basically he’s an administrator. He’s what we call a Robocrat. A bureaucrat with a badge. He doesn’t know the first thing about clearing cases. The only thing he knows about it is how to draw a line through the case on this little chart he keeps in his office. He doesn’t know the first thing about the differences between an interview and an interrogation. And that’s fine, the department is full of people like him. I say let them do their job and let me do mine. The problem is Pounds doesn’t realize where he’s good and where he’s bad. It’s led to problems before. Confrontations. It finally led to the incident, as you keep calling it.”
    “What did he do?”
    “He touched my suspect.”
    “Explain what that means.”
    “When you’ve got a case and you bring someone in, he’s all yours. Nobody goes near him, understand? The wrong word, the wrong question and it could spoil a case. That’s a cardinal rule; don’t touch somebody else’s suspect. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lieutenant or the damn chief, you stay clear until you check first with the guys with the collar.”
    “So what happened?”
    “Like I told you the other day, my partner Edgar and I brought in this suspect. A woman had been killed. One of these ones who puts ads in the sex tabs you can buy on the Boulevard. She gets called to one of those shithole motel rooms on Sunset, has sex with the guy and ends up stabbed to death. That’s the short story. The stab wound’s to the upper right chest. The john, he plays it cool, though. He calls the cops and says it was her knife and she tried to rob him with it. He says he turned her arm and put it into her. Self-defense. Okay, so that’s when me and Edgar show up and right away we see some things don’t fit with that story.”
    “Like what?”
    “First of all, she’s a lot smaller than he is.