Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

just not seeing it. I respect your hunch, man, I have seen that come through more than once. But there ain’t enough here. And if I don’t see it, then there’s no judge that’s going to give you a warrant to go back in there.”
    Bosch took his time answering. He was grinding things down, coming up with a plan.
    “Maybe, maybe not,” he finally said.

    T WO DAYS LATER at 9:00 a.m., Bosch pulled up to Diane Gables’s house. The Range Rover was not in the driveway. He got out and went to the front door. After two loud knocks went unanswered he walked around the house to the back door.
    He knocked again. When there was no reply, he removed a set of lock picks that he kept behind his badge in his leather wallet and went to work on the dead bolt. It took him six minutes to open the door. He was greeted by the beeping of the burglar alarm. He located the box on the wall to the left of the back door and punched in the four numbers he had seen Gables enter at the front door two evenings before. The beeping stopped. Bosch was in. He left the door open and started looking around the house.
    It was a post–World War II ranch house. Bosch had been in a thousand of them over the years and all the investigations. After a quick survey of the entire house he started his search in a bedroom that had been converted to a home office. There was a desk and a row of file cabinets along the wall where a bed would have been. There was a line of windows over the cabinets.
    There was also a metal locker with a padlock on it. Bosch opened the venetian blinds over the file cabinets, and light came into the room. He moved to the metal locker and started there, pulling his picks out once again.
    He knelt on the floor so he could see the lock closely. It turned out to be a three-pin breeze, taking less than a minute for him to open. A moment after the hasp snapped free he heard a voice come from behind him.
    “Detective, don’t move.”
    Bosch froze for a moment. He recognized the voice. Diane Gables. She had known he would come back. He slowly started to raise his hands, holding his fingers close together so he could hide the picks between them.
    “Easy,” Gables commanded. “If you attempt to reach for your weapon I will put two bullets into your skull. Do you understand?”
    “Yes. Can I stand up? My knees aren’t what they once were.”
    “Slowly. Your hands always in my sight line.”
    “Absolutely.”
    Bosch started to get up slowly, turning toward her at the same time. She was pointing a handgun with a suppressor attached to the barrel.
    “Easy,” he said. “Just take it easy here.”
    “No, you take it easy. I could shoot you where you stand and be within my rights.”
    Bosch shook his head.
    “No, that’s not true. You know I’m a cop.”
    “Yeah, a rogue cop. What did you think you were going to find here?”
    “Evidence.”
    “Of what?”
    “Randolph and McIntyre. Maybe others. You killed them.”
    “And, what, you thought I’d just keep the evidence around? Hide it in a locker in my home?”
    “Something like that. Can I sit down?”
    “The chair behind the desk. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
    Bosch slowly sat down. She was still standing in the doorway. He now had 60 percent of his body shielded by the desk. He had his back to the file cabinets. The light was coming in from behind and above him. He noticed she had now lowered the muzzle to point at his chest. This was good, though from this range he doubted the Kevlar would completely stop a bullet from a nine-millimeter, even with the suppressor slowing it down. He kept his hands up and close to his face.
    “So now what?” he asked.
    “So now you tell me what you think you’ve got on me.”
    Bosch shook his head as if to say
Not much.
“You lied. The other day. You didn’t mention the McIntyre case. You didn’t want us linking the cases through you. The trouble is we already had.”
    “And that’s it? Are you kidding me?”
    “That’s it. Till now.”
    He nodded at her weapon. It seemed to confirm all hunches.
    “So, without a real case and the search warrant to go with it, of course you decided to break in here to see what you could find.”
    “Not exactly.”
    “We have a problem, Detective Bosch.”
    “No, you have the problem. You’re a killer and I’m onto you. Put the weapon down. You’re under arrest.”
    She laughed and waggled the gun in her hand.
    “You forget one thing. I have the gun.”
    “But you won’t