A Darkness More Than Night

by Michael Connelly

  “It’s not what I want. And don’t call me Terry. You don’t even fuckin’ know me.”

  He looked down at the table, shaking his head.

  “Fuck, I’ve been waiting to come back to this place for a long time and now I don’t even feel like eating.”

  “Terry . . . ,” Winston said, not offering anything else.

  “What, you’re going to tell me this is right?”

  “No. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just the way it is. The investigation is official now. You’re not official. You knew this could happen from the start.”

  He reluctantly nodded. He brought his elbows up onto the table and put his face into his hands.

  “Who was the reporter?”

  When Winston didn’t answer he dropped his hands and looked pointedly at her.

  “Who?”

  “A guy named Jack McEvoy. He works for the New Times, an alternative weekly that likes to stir up shit.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “You know McEvoy?” Twilley asked.

  McCaleb’s cell phone began to chirp. It was in the pocket of his jacket draped over his chair. It got caught in the pocket as he tried to get it out. He anxiously struggled with it because he assumed it would be Graciela. Other than Winston and Buddy Lockridge, he’d only given the number to Brass Doran in Quantico and he had finished his business with her.

  He finally answered after the fifth chirp.

  “Hey, Agent McCaleb, it’s Jack McEvoy from the New Times. You got a couple minutes to talk?”

  McCaleb looked across the table at Twilley, wondering if he could hear the voice on the phone.

  “Actually, I don’t. I’m in the middle of something here. How’d you get this number?”

  “Information on Catalina. I called the number and your wife answered. She gave me your cell. That a problem?”

  “No, no problem. But I can’t talk now.”

  “When can we talk? It’s important. Something’s come up that I really want to talk —”

  “Just call me later. In an hour.”

  McCaleb closed the phone and put it down on the table. He looked at it, half expecting McEvoy to call back right away. Reporters were like that.

  “Terry, everything all right?”

  He looked up at Winston.

  “Yeah, fine. My charter tomorrow. He wanted to know about the weather.”

  He looked at Twilley.

  “What was your question again?”

  “Do you know Jack McEvoy? The reporter who called Captain Hitchens.”

  McCaleb paused, looking at Winston and then back at Twilley.

  “Yeah, I know him. You know I know him.”

  “That’s right, the Poet case. You had a piece of that.”

  “A small piece.”

  “When was the last time you talked to McEvoy?”

  “Well, that would’ve been, let’s see . . . that would have been a couple days ago.”

  Winston visibly stiffened. McCaleb looked over at her.

  “Relax, would you, Jaye? I ran into McEvoy at the Storey trial. I went up there to talk to Bosch. McEvoy’s covering it for New Times and he said hello — I hadn’t talked to him in five years. And I did not tell him what I was doing or what I was working on. In fact, at the time I saw him Bosch wasn’t even a suspect.”

  “Well, did he see you with Bosch?”

  “I’m sure he did. Everybody did. There’s as much media up there as there was for O. J. Did he specifically mention me to your captain?”

  “If he did, Hitchens didn’t tell me.”

  “All right, then, if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, where else did the leak come from?”

  “That’s what we are asking you,” Twilley said. “Before we come into this case we want to know the lay of the land and who’s talking to who.”

  McCaleb didn’t reply. He was getting claustrophobic. Between the conversation and Twilley being in his face, and the people standing around in the small restaurant waiting for tables, he was beginning to feel like he couldn’t breathe.

  “What about this bar you went to last night?” Friedman asked.

  McCaleb leaned back and looked over at him.

  “What about it?”

  “Jaye told us what you told her. You specifically asked about Bosch and Gunn there, right?”

  “Yeah, right. And what? You think the bartender then jumped on the phone and called the New Times and asked for Jack McEvoy? All because I showed her a picture of Bosch? Give me a fucking break.”

  “Hey, it’s a media-conscious town. People are plugged in. People sell stories, info, data all the time.”

  McCaleb shook his head, refusing to buy into the possibility that the bartender in the vest had enough intelligence to put together what he was doing and to then make a call to a reporter.

  Suddenly, he realized who did have the intelligence and information to do it. Buddy Lockridge. And if it had been him, it might as well have been McCaleb who leaked the story. He felt sweat start to warm his scalp as he thought about Lockridge hiding down on the lower deck while he had made his case against Bosch to Winston.

  “Did you have anything to drink while you were in the bar? I hear you take a mess of pills every day. Mixing that with alcohol . . . you know, loose lips sink ships.”

  Twilley had asked the question but McCaleb looked sharply at Winston. He was stung with a sense of betrayal by the whole scene and at how quickly things had shifted. But before he could say anything he saw the apology in her eyes and he knew she wished things had been handled differently. He finally looked back at Twilley.

  “You think maybe I mixed a few too many drinks and pills, Twilley? That it? You think I started shooting my mouth off in the bar?”

  “I don’t think that. I’m just asking, okay? No reason to get defensive here. I’m just trying to figure out how this reporter knows what he thinks he knows.”

  “Well, figure it out without me.”

  McCaleb pushed back his chair to get up.

  “Try the lechon asada,” he said. “It’s the best in the city.”

  As he began to get up, Twilley reached across the table and grabbed his forearm.

  “Come on, Terry, let’s talk about this,” Twilley said.

  “Terry, please,” Winston said.

  McCaleb pulled his arm loose from Twilley’s grip and stood up. He looked over at Winston.

  “Good luck with these guys, Jaye. You’ll probably need it.”

  Then he looked down at Friedman and then Twilley.

  “And fuck you guys very much.”

  He made his way through the crowd of people waiting and out the front door. Nobody followed him.

  • • •

  He sat in the Cherokee parked on Sunset and watched the restaurant while letting the anger slowly leach out of his body. On one level McCaleb knew the moves Winston and her captain were making were the right moves. But on another he didn’t like being moved out of his own case. A case was like a car. You could be driving it or riding in the front or back. Or you could be left on the side of the road as the car went by. McCaleb had just gone from having his hands on the wheel to thumbing it from the side of the road. And it hurt.

  He began to think about Buddy Lockridge and how he would handle him. If he determined that it had been Buddy who had talked to McEvoy after eavesdropping on McCaleb’s briefing of Winston on the boat, then he would cleanly sever all ties to him. Partner or not, he wouldn’t be able to work with Buddy again.

  He realized that Buddy had the number to his cell phone and could have been the one who gave it to McEvoy. He got the phone out and called his home. Graciela answered, Fridays being one of her half days at the school.

  “Graciela, did you give my cell number to anybody lately?”

  “Yes, a reporter who said he knew you and needed to speak with you right away. A Jack something. Why, is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing’s wrong. I was just checking.”

  �
��Are you sure?”

  McCaleb got a call-waiting beep. He looked at his watch. It was ten to one. McEvoy wasn’t supposed to call back until after one.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he told Graciela. “Look, I’ve got another call. I’ll be home by dark tonight. I’ll see you then.”

  He switched to the other call. It was McEvoy, who explained that he was at the courthouse and had to get back into the trial at one or he’d lose his precious seat. He couldn’t wait the full hour to call back.

  “Can you talk now?” he asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “You keep saying that. About what?”

  “Harry Bosch. I’m working on a story about —”

  “I don’t know anything about the Storey case. Only what’s on TV.”

  “It’s not that. It’s about the Edward Gunn case.”

  McCaleb didn’t answer. He knew this was not good. Dancing with a reporter over something like this could only lead to trouble. McEvoy spoke into the silence.

  “Is that what you wanted to see Harry Bosch about the other day when I saw you here? Are you working on the Gunn case?”

  “Listen to me. I can honestly tell you that I am not working on the Edward Gunn case. Okay?”

  Good, McCaleb thought. So far he hadn’t lied.

  “Were you working on the case? For the sheriff’s department?”

  “Can I ask you something? Who told you this? Who said I was working this case?”

  “I can’t answer that. I have to protect my sources. If you want to give me information I will protect your identity as well. But if I give up a source, I’m fucked in this business.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, Jack. I’m not talking to you unless you are talking to me, know what I mean? It’s a two-way street. You want to tell me who is saying this shit about me and I’ll talk to you. Otherwise, we’ve got nothing to say to each other.”

  He waited. McEvoy said nothing.

  “I thought so. Take it easy, Jack.”

  He closed the phone. Whether McEvoy had mentioned his name or not to Captain Hitchens, it was clear that McEvoy was tapped in to a credible pipeline of information. And again McCaleb narrowed it down to one person besides himself and Jaye Winston.

  “Goddamnit!” he said out loud in the car.

  A few minutes after one he watched Jaye Winston come out of El Cochinito. McCaleb was hoping for the chance to corner her and talk to her alone, maybe tell her about Lockridge. But Twilley and Friedman followed her out and all three got into the same car. A bureau car.

  McCaleb watched them pull out into traffic and drive off in the direction of downtown. He got out of the Cherokee and went back into the restaurant. He was starved. There were no tables available so he made an order to go. He’d eat in the Cherokee.

  The old woman who took his order looked up at him with sad brown eyes. She said it had been a busy week and the kitchen had just run out of lechon asada.

  27

  John Reason surprised the spectators, the jurors and probably most of the media when he reserved his cross-examination of Bosch until the defense’s case began, but it had been anticipated by the prosecution team. If the defense strategy was to shoot the messenger, that messenger was Bosch and the best place from which to take the shot was during the presentation of the defense’s side. That way, Fowkkes’s attack on Bosch could be part of an orchestrated attack on the entire case against David Storey.

  Following a lunch break during which Bosch and the prosecutors were relentlessly pursued by the media with questions about Bosch’s testimony, the prosecution began to move quickly with the momentum gained in the morning’s session. Kretzler and Langwiser took turns examining a series of witnesses with short stays on the stand.

  The first of these was Teresa Corazón, chief of the medical examiner’s office. Under Kretzler’s questioning, she testified to her findings during the autopsy and put Jody Krementz’s time of death at some point between midnight and 2 A.M. on Friday, October 13 . She also gave corroborating testimony on the rarity of autoerotic deaths involving female victims.

  Once more Fowkkes reserved the right to question the witness during the defense phase of the trial. Corazón was dismissed after less than a half hour on the stand.

  Now that his own testimony was completed — as far as the prosecution’s case went — it was not vital for Bosch to be in the courtroom for every moment of the trial. While Langwiser called the next witness — a lab tech who would identify the hair samples gathered from the victim’s body as belonging to Storey — Bosch walked Corazón to her car. They had been lovers many years before in what current culture would term a casual relationship. But while there may not have been any love involved, there had been nothing casual about it to Bosch. In his view it had been two people who looked at death every day pushing it away with the ultimate life-affirming act.

  Corazón had broken it off after she was named to the top slot in the coroner’s office. Their relationship since that point had been strictly professional, though Corazón’s new position reduced her time in the autopsy suites and Bosch did not see her often. The Jody Krementz case was different. Corazón had instinctively known it might become a case that drew the bead of the media horde and had taken the autopsy herself. It had paid off. Her testimony would be seen across the nation and probably around the globe. She was attractive, smart, skilled and thorough. That half hour on the stand would be like a half-hour commercial for lucrative jobs as an independent examiner or commentator. Bosch knew one thing about her from his time with her: Teresa Corazón always had her eye on the next step.

  She was parked in the garage next to the state parole office on the back side of the justice complex. They spoke of banalities — the weather, Harry’s attempts to stop smoking — until Corazón brought the case up.

  “It seems to be going well.”

  “So far.”

  “It’d be nice if we won one of these big ones for a change.”

  “It would.”

  “I watched you testify this morning. In my office I had the TV on. You did very well, Harry.”

  He knew her tone. She was leading to something.

  “But?”

  “But you look tired. And you know they’re going to come after you. This kind of case, if they destroy the cop they destroy the case.”

  “O. J. one-oh-one.”

  “Right. So are you ready for them?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Just rest up.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  As they approached the garage Bosch looked over at the parole office and saw a gathering of the staff out front for some kind of presentation. The group was standing below a banner hanging from the roofline that said WELCOME BACK THELMA. A man in a suit was presenting a plaque to a heavyset black woman who was leaning on a cane.

  “Oh . . . , that’s that parole agent,” Corazón said. “The one who got shot last year. By that hit man from Vegas?”

  “Right, right,” Bosch said, remembering the story. “She came back.”

  He noticed that there were no television cameras recording the presentation. A woman got shot in the line of duty and then fought her way back to the job. It apparently wasn’t worth wasting videotape over.

  “Welcome back,” he said.

  Corazón’s car was on the second floor. It was a two-seat, shining black Mercedes.

  “I see the outside work must be going pretty well,” Bosch said.

  Corazón nodded.

  “In my last contract I got four weeks’ professional leave. I’m making the most of it. Trials, TV, that sort of thing. I did a case on that autopsy show on HBO, too. It airs next month.”

  “Teresa, you’re going to be world famous before we know it.”

  She smiled and stepped close to him and straightened his tie.

  “I know what you think about it, Harry. That’s okay.”

  “Doesn’t matter what
I think about it. Are you happy?”

  She nodded.

  “Very.”

  “Then I’m happy for you. I better get back in there. I’ll see you, Teresa.”

  She suddenly rose on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. It had been a long time since he had gotten one of those.