Trunk Music

photos from beneath the clip and began to look through them. The girl had been badly mistreated and the bruises documented on her body by Cantu’s camera were a depressing testament to all that was wrong with the city. Bosch always found it easier to deal with victims who were no longer living. The live ones haunted him because they could never be consoled. Not fully. They were forever left with the question why.
    Sometimes Bosch thought of his city as some kind of vast drain that pulled all bad things toward a spot where they swirled around in a deep concentration. It was a place where it seemed the good people were often outnumbered by the bad. The creeps and schemers, the rapists and killers. It was a place that could easily produce someone like Powers. Too easily.
    Bosch put the photos back under the clip, embarrassed by his thoughtless voyeurism of the girl’s pain. He went back to the homicide table, picked up the phone and dialed his home number. It was nearly twenty-four hours since he had been to his house, and his hope was that Eleanor Wish would answer-he had left the key under the mat-or there might be a message from her. After three rings the line was picked up and he heard his own voice on tape tell himself to leave a message. He punched in his code to check for messages and the machine told him he had none.
    He stood there a long moment thinking about Eleanor, the phone still at his ear, when suddenly he heard her voice.
    “Harry, is that you?”
    “Eleanor?”
    “I’m here, Harry.”
    “Why didn’t you answer?”
    “I didn’t think it would be for me.”
    “When did you get there?”
    “Last night. I’ve been waiting for you. Thanks for leaving the key.”
    “You’re welcome… Eleanor, where’d you go?”
    There was a beat of silence before she answered.
    “I went back to Vegas. I needed to get my car…clear out my bank account, things like that. Where have you been all night?”
    “Working. We have a new suspect. We’re holding him here. Did you go by your apartment?”
    “No. There was no reason to. I just did what I had to do and drove back.”
    “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
    “That’s okay. I was worried about where you were, but I didn’t want to call you there in case you were in the middle of something.”
    Bosch wanted to ask her what came next for them, but he felt such a sense of happiness that she was there in his home that he didn’t dare to ruin the moment.
    “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be tied up,” he said.
    Bosch heard the heavy doors in the station’s rear hallway open and bang shut. Footsteps were coming toward the squad room.
    “Do you have to go?” Eleanor asked.
    “Um…”
    Edgar and Rider walked into the squad room. Rider carried a brown evidence bag with something heavy in it. Edgar carried a closed cardboard box across which someone had stenciled Xmas with a Magic Marker. He also had a broad smile on his face.
    “Yeah,” Bosch said, “I think I better go.”
    “Okay, Harry, I’ll see you.”
    “You’ll be there?”
    “I’ll be here.”
    “Okay, Eleanor, I’ll see you as soon as I can.”
    He hung up and looked up at his two partners. Edgar was still smiling.
    “We got your Christmas present here, Harry,” Edgar said. “We got Powers right here in this box.”
    “You got the boots?”
    “No. No boots. We got better than boots.”
    “Show me.”
    Edgar lifted the lid off the box. Off the top he took out a manila envelope. He then tilted the box so that Bosch could look in. Bosch whistled.
    “Merry Christmas,” Edgar said.
    “You count it?” Bosch asked, his eyes still on the stacks of currency with rubber bands around them.
    “Each bundle has a number on it,” Rider said. “You add them all up, it equals four hundred eighty thousand. It looks like it’s everything.”
    “Not a bad present, eh Harry?” Edgar said excitedly.
    “No. Where was it?”
    “Attic crawl space,” Edgar said. “One of the last places we looked. Box was just sitting there in front of me as soon as I stuck my head up.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Okay, what else?”
    “Found these under his mattress.”
    From the envelope Edgar withdrew a stack of photos. They were six by four in size and each had the date of the photograph digitally printed on the bottom left corner. Bosch put them on the table in front of them and looked through them, carefully picking them up by the corners. He hoped Edgar had handled them the same way.
    The first