“It’s a study of artists who used darkness as a vital part of the visual medium, according to the introduction.”
She looked up and smiled as she got to the Post-it.
“It has a rather long chapter on Hieronymus Bosch. Complete with illustrations.”
McCaleb lifted his empty bottle and clicked against her glass, which she still hadn’t touched. He then leaned in, along with Bosch, to look at the pages.
“Beautiful,” he said.
Winston turned the pages. The book’s illustrations of Bosch’s work included all of the paintings from which pieces of the crime scene could be traced: The Stone Operation, The Seven Deadly Sins with the eye of God, The Last Judgment and The Garden of Earthly Delights.
“He planned the thing right there from his cell,” McCaleb marveled.
“Looks like it,” Winston said.
They both looked at Bosch, who was nodding his head almost imperceptibly.
“Now your turn, Harry,” McCaleb said.
Bosch looked perplexed.
“My turn at what?”
“At making good luck.”
McCaleb slid the picture of Tafero across the table and nodded toward the bartender. Bosch slid out and took the photo to the bar.
“We’re still just dancing around the edges,” Winston said as they both watched Bosch question the bartender about the photo. “We’ve got little pieces but that’s it.”
“I know,” McCaleb said. He couldn’t hear what was being said at the bar. The music was too loud, Van Morrison singing, “The wild night is coming.”
Bosch nodded to the bartender and came back to the booth.
“She recognizes him — drinks Kahlúa and cream of all things. She can’t put him here with Gunn, though.”
McCaleb shrugged his shoulders in a no-big-deal gesture.
“It was worth the shot.”
“You know where this is going, don’t you?” Bosch said, his eyes shifting from McCaleb’s to Winston’s and then back. “You’re going to have to make a play. It’s going to be the only way. And it’s gotta be a damn good play because my ass is on the line.”
McCaleb nodded.
“We know,” he said.
“When? I’m running out of time.”
McCaleb looked at Winston. It was her call.
“Soon,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow. I haven’t gone into the office with this yet. I have to finesse my captain on it because last he knew, Terry here was banished and I was working with the bureau on you. I also have to get a DA involved because when we make the move we’ll have to move fast. If it all works out I say we take Tafero in tomorrow night and make the play to him.”
Bosch looked down at the table with a rueful smile. He slid an empty bottle back and forth between his hands.
“I met those guys today. The agents.”
“I heard. You didn’t exactly assure them of your innocence. They came back all hot and bothered.”
Bosch looked up.
“So what do you need from me on this?”
“We need you to sit tight,” Winston said. “We’ll let you know about tomorrow night.”
Bosch nodded.
“There is one thing,” McCaleb said. “The exhibits from the trial, do you have access to them?”
“During court, yeah. Otherwise they stay with the clerk. Why?”
“Because Storey obviously had existing knowledge of the painter Hieronymus Bosch. He had to have recognized your name during that interview and known what he could do with it. So I’m thinking that book his assistant brought him in jail had to be his own. He told her to bring it to him.”
Bosch nodded.
“The picture of the bookcase.”
McCaleb nodded.
“You got it.”
“I’ll let you know.” Bosch looked around the place. “Are we done here?”
“We’re done,” Winston said. “We’ll be in touch.”
She slid out of the booth, followed by Bosch and McCaleb. They left two beers and a whiskey rocks untouched on the table. At the door, McCaleb glanced back and saw a couple of the hard-cores moving in on the treasure. From the jukebox John Fogerty was singing, “There’s a bad moon on the rise . . .”
41
The chill off the water worked its way into McCaleb’s bones. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker and turtled his neck as far down into the collar as he could as he carefully made his way down the ramp to the Cabrillo Marina docks.
Though his chin was down his eyes were alert and scanning the docks for unusual movement. Nothing caught his attention. He glanced at Buddy Lockridge’s sailboat as he passed. Despite all the junk — surfboards, bikes, gas grill, an ocean kayak and other assorted equipment and debris — crowding the deck, he could see the cabin lights were on. He walked quietly on the wood planking. He decided that whether Buddy was awake or not it was too late and McCaleb was too tired and cold to deal with his supposed partner. Still, as he approached The Following Sea, he couldn’t help but move his mind over the sharp-edged anomaly in his working theory on the case. Back at the bar Bosch had been correct when he deduced that someone from the Storey camp had to have leaked the story of the Gunn investigation to the New Times. McCaleb knew that the only way the current case theory hung together was if Tafero, or maybe Fowkkes or even Storey from jail, had been Jack McEvoy’s source. The problem was that Buddy Lockridge had told McCaleb that he had leaked the investigation to the weekly tabloid.
Now the only way, at least as it appeared to McCaleb, that this could work would be if both Buddy and someone in Storey’s defense group leaked the same information to the same media source. And this, of course, was a coincidence that even a believer in coincidence would have a difficult time accepting.
McCaleb tried to put it out of his mind for the moment. He got to the boat, looked around again, and stepped down into the cockpit. He unlocked the slider and went in, turning on the lights. He decided that in the morning he would go over and question Buddy more carefully about what he had done and who he had talked to.
He locked the door and put his keys and the videotape he’d been carrying down on the chart table. He immediately went to the galley and poured a large glass of orange juice. He then turned the upper deck lights off and took the juice with him down to the lower deck where he went into the head and quickly began his evening pill ritual. As he swallowed the pills and orange juice he looked at himself in the small mirror over the sink. He thought about what Bosch had looked like. The weariness clearly set deep in his eyes. McCaleb wondered if he would get the same look in a few years, after a few more cases.
When he was finished with his medicine routine he stripped off his clothes and took a quick shower, the water feeling ice cold because the water heater hadn’t been on since he had crossed in the boat the day before.
Shivering, he went into the master cabin and put on a pair of boxer shorts and a sweatshirt. He was dead tired but once he got into the bed he decided he should write a few notes about his thoughts on how Jaye Winston should run the play with Tafero. He reached down to the nightstand’s drawer, where he kept pens and scratch pads. When he opened it he found a folded newspaper crammed into the small drawer space. He pulled it out, unfolded it and found it was the previous week’s issue of New Times. The pages had been folded backward so that the rear advertising section was at the front. McCaleb was looking at a page full of matchbook-sized ads under a heading that said OUTCALL MASSAGE.
McCaleb got up quickly and went to his windbreaker, which he had tossed onto a chair. He pulled the cell phone out of the pocket and went back to the bed with it. Though McCaleb had been carrying the phone with him in recent days, it usually stayed in its charger on the boat. It was paid for out of charter funds and was carried as a business expense. It was used by clients during charter trips and by Buddy Lockridge while confirming reservations and running credit card authorizations.
The phone had a small digital screen with a
menu he scrolled through. He opened the call log program and began scrolling through the last hundred numbers the phone had been used to call. Most of the numbers he quickly identified and eliminated. But every time he did not recognize a number he compared it to the phone numbers at the bottom of the ads on the massage page. The fourth unrecognized number he compared to the ads was a match. The number was for a woman who advertised herself as an “Exotic Japanese-Hawaiian Beauty” named Leilani. Her ad said she specialized in “full-service relaxation” and was not associated with any massage agency.
McCaleb closed the phone and got off the bed again. He started pulling on a pair of sweatpants as he tried to recall exactly what had been said when he had accused Buddy Lockridge of leaking the case information to the New Times.
By the time he was dressed, McCaleb realized he had never specifically accused Buddy of leaking information to the newspaper. He had only mentioned the New Times and Buddy had immediately begun to apologize. McCaleb now understood that Buddy’s apology and embarrassment could have been over his using The Following Sea the week before when it was in the marina as a rendezvous point with the full-service masseuse. It explained why he had asked if McCaleb was going to tell Graciela what he had done.
McCaleb looked at his watch. It was ten after eleven. He grabbed the newspaper and went topside. He didn’t want to wait until the morning to confirm this. He guessed that Buddy had used The Following Sea to meet the woman because his own boat was so small and cramped and looked like a forbidding floating rat trap. There was no master cabin — just one open space that was as crowded with junk as the deck above. If Buddy had The Following Sea available to him, he would have used it.
In the salon he didn’t bother turning on the lights. He leaned over the couch and looked out the window to the boat’s left. Buddy’s boat, the Double Down, was four slips away and he could see the cabin lights were still on. Buddy was still awake, unless he had passed out with the lights on.
McCaleb went to the slider and was about to unlock it when he realized it was already open a half inch. He realized someone was on the boat, probably having entered while he had been in the shower and unable to hear the lock pop or feel the added weight on the boat. He quickly slid the door all the way open in an effort to escape. He was just stepping through when he was grabbed from behind. An arm came over his right shoulder and across the front of his neck. It bent at the elbow and his neck was shoved into the V it formed. His attacker’s other forearm closed the triangle behind his neck. The hold closed like a vise on both sides of his neck, compressing the carotid arteries that carried oxygenated blood to his brain. McCaleb had an almost clinical understanding of what was happening. He was caught in a textbook choke hold. He began to struggle. He brought his arms up and tried to dig his fingers under the forearm and biceps on either side of his neck but it was no use. He was already weakening.
He was dragged back away from the door and into the darkness of the salon. He reached his left hand back to the point where his attacker’s right hand gripped his left forearm — the weak point of the triangle. But he had no leverage and was losing power quickly. He tried to yell. Maybe Buddy would hear. But his voice was gone and nothing came out.
He remembered another defensive measure. He raised his right foot up and drove it down, heel first, toward his attacker’s foot, with the last strength he could muster. But he missed. His heel hit the floor ineffectively and his attacker took another step backward, violently pulling McCaleb off balance and unable to attempt the kick release again.
McCaleb was quickly losing consciousness. His vision of the marina lights through the salon door was being crowded by a closing blackness with a reddish outline. His last thoughts were that he was in the grip of a classic choke hold, the kind taught at police departments across the country until too many deaths resulted from its use.
Soon even that thought drifted away and he saw no lights. The darkness moved in and took him.
42
McCaleb came awake to tremendous muscular pain in his shoulders and upper legs. When he opened his eyes he realized he was lying chest down across the master cabin’s bed. His head was lying flat on the mattress, his left cheek down, and he was staring at the headboard. It took him a moment before he remembered that he had been on his way to visit Buddy Lockridge when he was attacked from behind.
He became completely conscious and tried to relax his aching muscles but realized he could not move. His wrists were bound behind his back and his legs were bent backward at the knees and were being held in that position by someone’s hand.
He lifted his head off the mattress and tried to turn. He couldn’t get the angle. He dropped back to the mattress and turned his head to the left. He lifted up once again and turned to see Rudy Tafero, standing next to the bed, smiling at him. With one gloved hand he was holding McCaleb’s feet, which were bound at the ankles and folded back toward his thighs.
Comprehension rushed over him. McCaleb realized he was naked and that he was bound and held in the same posture as he had seen the body of Edward Gunn. The reverse fetal pose from the painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The cold chill of terror exploded in his chest. He instinctively flexed his leg muscles. Tafero was ready for it. His feet barely moved. But he heard three clicks behind his head and became aware of the ligature around his neck.
“Easy,” Tafero said. “Easy now. Not yet.”
McCaleb stopped his movement. Tafero continued to press his ankles down toward the back of his thighs.
“You’ve seen the setup before,” Tafero said matter of factly. “This one’s a little different. I strung together a bunch of snap-cuffs, like every L.A. cop carries around in the trunk of his car.”
McCaleb understood the message. The plastic strips first invented to bundle cables together but found to be useful by police agencies faced with occasional social unrest and the need to make mass arrests. A cop can carry one set of handcuffs but hundreds of snap cuffs. String them around the wrists, slide the end through the lock. Tiny grooves in the plastic strip click and lock as the tie gets tighter. The only way to remove it is to cut it off. McCaleb realized that the clicking sound he had just heard had been a snap cuff tightening around his neck.
“So you be careful now,” Tafero said. “Hold real steady.” McCaleb put his face down into the mattress. His mind was racing, looking for the way out. He thought if he could engage Tafero he might buy some time. But time for what?
“How’d you find me?” he spoke into the mattress.
“Easy enough. My little brother followed you from my shop and got your plate. You should look around more often, make sure you aren’t being followed.”
“I’ll remember that.”
He understood the plan. It would look as if Gunn’s killer had gotten McCaleb when he had gotten too close. He turned his head again so he could see Tafero.
“It’s not going to work, Tafero,” he said. “People know. They’re not going to buy that it was Bosch.”
Tafero smiled down at him.
“You mean Jaye Winston? Don’t worry about her. I’m going to go pay her a visit when I’m done here with you. Eighty-eight-oh-one Willoughby, apartment six, West Hollywood. She was easy to find, too.”
He raised his free hand and waved the fingers as though he were playing the piano or typing.
“Let your fingers do the walking through the voters registration — I’ve got it on CD-ROM. She’s a registered Democrat, if you can believe it. A homicide cop who votes Democrat. Wonders never cease.”
“There are others. The FBI’s on this. You —”
“They’re on Bosch. Not me. I saw them today at the courthouse.”
He reached down and ticked one of the snap cuffs strung from McCaleb’s legs to his neck.
“And these, I’m sure, will help bring them directly to Detective Bosch.”
He smiled at the genius of his own plan. And McCaleb knew his thinking was sound. Twilley and Friedman would go after Bosch like a pair
of dogs chasing either side of a car.
“Hold steady now.”
Tafero let go of his feet and moved out of his sight. McCaleb strained to keep his legs from unfolding. Almost immediately he felt the muscles in his legs start to burn. He knew he didn’t have the strength to hold them for long.
“Please . . .”
Tafero returned to view. He was holding a plastic owl in both hands, a delighted smile on his face.
“Took this off one of the boats down the dock. A little weathered but it’ll work out nice. Gonna get another one for Winston.”
He looked around the room as if looking for a place for the owl. He settled on a shelf above the built-in bureau. He placed the owl there, looked back at McCaleb once and then adjusted it so the plastic bird’s gaze was upon him.
A Darkness More Than Night Page 36
