The Overlook

call you asked about came in at ten-oh-five from a phone registered to Easy Print at nine-thirty Cahuenga Boulevard. Man down in the parking lot. Fire department paramedics responded from station fifty-four. Response time six minutes, nineteen seconds. Anything else?”
    “What’s the nearest cross at that location?”
    After a moment the dispatcher told him the cross street was Lankershim Boulevard. Bosch thanked her and disconnected.
    The address where Gonzalves collapsed was not far from the Mulholland overlook. Bosch realized that almost every location associated with the case so far-from the murder site to the victim’s house to Ramin Samir’s house and now to the spot where Gonzalves collapsed-could fit on one page of a Thomas Brothers map book. Murder cases in L.A. usually dragged him all over the map book. But this one wasn’t roaming. It was staying close.
    Bosch looked around the ER. He noticed that all the people who had been crowding the waiting room before were now gone. There had been an evacuation and agents in protective gear were moving about the area with radiation monitors. He spotted Rachel Walling by the nursing station and walked over to her. He held out the canister.
    “Here’s the guy’s stuff.”
    She took the canister and put it down on the floor, then called over to one of the men in protection gear. She told him to take charge of the canister. She then looked back at Bosch.
    “There’s a cell phone in there,” he told her. “They might be able to get something out of that.”
    “I’ll tell them.”
    “How’s the victim doing?”
    “Victim?”
    “Whether he’s involved in this or not he is still a victim.”
    “If you say so. He’s still out of it. I don’t know if we’ll ever get the chance to talk to him.”
    “Then I’m leaving.”
    “What? Where? I’m going with you.”
    “I thought you had to run the CP.”
    “I passed it off. If there’s no cesium here I’m not staying. I’ll stick with you. Let me just tell some people I’m leaving to follow a lead.”
    Bosch hesitated. But deep down he knew he wanted her with him.
    “I’ll be out front in the car.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “I don’t know if Digoberto Gonzalves is a terrorist or just a victim, but I do know one thing. He drives a Toyota. And I think I know where we’ll find it.”

SEVENTEEN
    HARRY BOSCH KNEW that the physics of traffic would not work for him in the Cahuenga Pass. The Hollywood Freeway always moved slowly in both directions through the bottleneck created by the cut in the mountain chain. He decided to stay on surface streets and take Highland Avenue past the Hollywood Bowl and up into the pass. He filled Rachel Walling in along the way.
    “The call for paramedics came from a print shop on Cahuenga near Lankershim. Gonzalves must have been in the area when he collapsed. The initial call said a man was down in the parking lot. I’m hoping that the Toyota he was driving is right there. I’m betting that if we find it, we find the cesium. The mystery is why he had it.”
    “And why he was foolish enough to put it in his pocket unprotected,” Walling added.
    “You’re basing that on him knowing what he had. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe this isn’t what we think it is.”
    “There’s got to be a connection, Bosch, between Gonzalves and Nassar and El-Fayed. He probably brought them across the border.”
    He almost smiled. He knew she had used his last name as a term of endearment. He remembered how she used to do that.
    “And don’t forget about Ramin Samir?” he said.
    Walling shook her head.
    “I’m still thinking he was a red herring,” she said. “A misdirection.”
    “A good one,” Bosch responded. “It took the mighty Captain Done Badly out of the picture.”
    She laughed.
    “Is that what they call him?”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Not to his face, of course.”
    “And what do they call you? Something tough and hard-headed, I’m sure.”
    He glanced over at her and shrugged. He thought about telling her that his Vietnam nickname was Hari Kari but that would require further explanation and there wasn’t the time right now and this wasn’t the place.
    He took the ramp up to Cahuenga from Highland. It ran parallel to the freeway and as soon as he checked he saw that he had been right. The traffic over on the freeway was frozen in both directions.
    “You know, I still had your number in my cell’s directory,” he said. “I guess I never wanted to delete