The Narrows

bring them."
    "Are we just going to sit here all day?" Mecca asked from the backseat.
    Rachel turned around to look back at the two women.
    "We're going over to the western ridge to check out a trailer. You can go with us and stay in the car or you can go into the bar and wait. More agents are on the way. You'll probably be able to get your interviews over with here and not have to go into Vegas." "Thank God," Mecca said. "I'll wait here."
    "Me, too," said Tammy.
    Bosch let them out of the car.
    "Just wait here," Rachel called to them. "If you go back to your trailer or go anywhere else you won't get far and it will just make them mad."
    They didn't acknowledge this cautioning. Rachel watched them walk up the ramp and into the bar. Bosch got back in and put the car into reverse.
    "You sure about this?" he asked. "My guess is that Agent Dei told you to sit still until the reinforcements got here."
    "She also said one of the first things she was going to do was send you on your way. You want to wait for that or do you want to go see this trailer?"
    "Don't worry, I'll go. I'm not the one with the career to worry about."
    "Such as it is."
    We followed the dirt road Billings Rett had directed us to, and it ranged west from the settlement of Clear and up a sloping landscape for a mile. The road then leveled off and curved behind a reddish-orange outcropping of rock that was exactly as Rett had described it. It looked like the tail-end of the great passenger ship as it drew upward out of the water at a sixty-degree angle and then plunged downward into the sea. According to the movie, anyway. The rock climber Rett mentioned had climbed to the appropriate spot at the top and had used white paint to scrawl "Titanic" across the rock surface. We didn't stop to appraise the rock or the paintwork. I drove the Mercedes around it and we soon came to a clearing where there was a small trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was a junked car on four flats next to it and an oil drum used to burn trash nearby. On the other side was a large fuel tank and a power generator.
    To preserve possible crime scene evidence I stopped just outside the clearing and killed the engine. I noticed that the generator was silent. There was a stillness about the whole scene that seemed ominous in some way. I had a real sense that I had come to the end of the world, a place of darkness. I wondered if this was where Backus had taken his victims, if this was the end of the world for them. Probably, I concluded. It was a place of waiting evil.
    Rachel broke the silence.
    "Well, are we just going to look at it or are we going to check it out?"
    "Just waiting on you to make the move."
    She opened her door and then I opened mine. We met at the front of the car. That was when I noticed that the trailer's windows were all open, not what I would expect someone would do if they were leaving their home for a long period of time. After that recognition came the odor.
    "You smell that?"
    She nodded. Death was in the air. It was much worse, much stronger than at Zzyzx. I instinctively knew that what we would find here would not be the buried secrets of the killer. Not this time. There was a body in that trailer-at least one-that was open to the air and decomposing. "With my last act," Rachel said.
    "What?"
    "The card. What he wrote on the card."
    I nodded. She was thinking suicide.
    "You think?"
    "I don't know. Let's check."
    We walked slowly forward, neither saying a word after that. The smell grew stronger and we both knew that whatever and whoever was dead inside the trailer had been baking in there for a long time.
    I broke from her side and walked to a set of windows to the left of the trailer's door. Cupping my hands to the screen I tried to look into the darkness within. My hands hitting the screen set off an alarm of buzzing flies within the trailer. They were bouncing against the screen, looking to get out as if maybe the scene and the smell inside were too much even for them.
    There was no curtain across the window but I couldn't see much from the angle I had-at least not a body or an indication of one. It looked like a small sitting area with a couch and a chair. There was a table with two stacks of hardback books on it. Behind the chair was a bookcase with its shelves full of books.
    "Nothing," I said.
    I stepped back from the window and looked up the length of the trailer. I saw Rachel's eyes focused on the door and then the doorknob. Something came to me