Lost Light

by Michael Connelly

  Biggar smiled, the skin pulling tight around his eyes. He was intrigued. He knew I wasn’t ever going to be the corporate or industrial security type.

  “I never heard you ask for help on a goddamn thing. What do you need?”

  “I need a setup. Electronic surveillance. One room, nobody can know the camera is there.”

  “How big’s the room?”

  “Like a bedroom. Maybe fifteen by fifteen.”

  “Ah, man, Harry, don’t go down that road. You start that sort of snooping and you’ll lose sight of yourself. Come work for me. I can find some —”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s actually an offshoot of a homicide I’m working. The guy’s in a wheelchair. He sits and watches TV all day. I just want to be able to make sure he’s okay, you know? There’s something going on with the wife. At least I think so.”

  “You mean like abuse?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Something.”

  “Does the guy know you’re going to do this?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve got access to the room?”

  “Pretty much. Think you can help me out?”

  “Well, we got cameras. But you have to understand most of our work is industrial application. Heavy-duty stuff. Sounds to me like all you need is a nanny cam, something that you can just pick up at Radio Shack.”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t want to be too obvious about it. The guy was a cop.”

  Biggar nodded, digested it quickly and stood up.

  “Well, come on back to the tech room and take a look at what we’ve got. Andre’s back there and he can fix you up.”

  He led me back into the hallway and toward the back of the building. We entered the tech room, which was about the size of a double garage and was crowded with workbenches and shelves of all manner of electronics equipment. There were three men gathered around one of the workbenches. They were looking at the screen of a small television. A grainy black-and-white surveillance tape was playing. I recognized one of the men, the largest, as Andre Biggar, Burnett’s son. I had never met him but I knew it was him by his size and resemblance to Burnett. Right down to the shaved scalp.

  Introductions were made and Andre explained that he was reviewing a tape showing a burglary of a client’s warehouse. His father explained what I was looking for and the son led me to another workbench, where he could display and review equipment. He showed me cameras housed in a vase, a lamp, a picture frame and finally a clock. Thinking about how Lawton Cross had complained about not being able to see the time on his television, I stopped Andre right there.

  “This will do. How does it work?”

  It was a round clock about ten inches across.

  “This is a classroom clock. You want to put this on the wall of a bedroom? It will stick out like tits on a —”

  “Andre,” his father said.

  “It’s not being used as a bedroom,” I said. “It’s like a TV room. And the subject told me he can’t see the time on the corner of the screen on CNN. So this will make sense when I bring it in.”

  Andre nodded.

  “Okay. You want sound? Color?”

  “Sound, yes. Color would be good but not necessary.”

  “All right. Are you going to transmit, or you want to go self-contained?”

  I looked at him blankly and he knew I didn’t understand.

  “I build these two ways. One is you have a camera in the clock and you transmit picture and sound to a receiver that records it on video. You would have to find a secure place for the recorder within about a hundred feet to be sure. Are you going to be outside the house in a van or something?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Okay, the second option is to go digital and put everything in the camera and record internally to a digital tape or memory card. The drawback is capacity. With a digital tape you get about two hours real time, then you have to change it out. With a card you get even less.”

  “That won’t work. I was only planning to check on it every few days.”

  I started thinking of how I would be able to hide the receiver inside the house. Maybe the garage. I could pretend I was going to the garage to throw something away and I could hide the receiver somewhere Danny Cross wouldn’t see it.

  “Well, we can slow the recording down if we need to.”

  “How?”

  “A number of different ways. First off we put the camera on a clock. Turn it off, say, midnight to eight. We can also stagger the FPS and lengthen —”

  “FPS?”

  “The recorded frames per second. It makes the image jump, though.”

  “What about sound? Does that jump, too?”

  “No, sound is separate. You’d get full sound.”

  I nodded but wasn’t sure I wanted to lose any of the visual recording.

  “We can also put it on a motion sensor. This guy you say is in a wheelchair, does he move around a lot?”

  “No, he can’t. He’s paralyzed. Most of the time I think he just sits there staring at the TV.”

  “Any pets?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So the only time there is real movement in the room is when the caregiver comes in, and that’s who you want to watch. Am I right?”

  “Right.”

  “No problem then. This will work. We put a motion sensor on it and a two-gig memory card and you’ll probably stretch it out a couple days.”

  “That’ll work.”

  I nodded and looked at Burnett. I was impressed with his son. Andre looked like he should be out breaking quarterbacks in half. But he had found a specialty in life dealing with circuits and microprocessors. I could see the pride in Burnett’s eyes.

  “Give me fifteen minutes to put it together and then I’ll come show you how to install it and how to switch out the memory card.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I sat with Burnett in his office and we talked about the department and a couple of the cases that we had worked together. One case had involved a hired killer who had murdered both the intended target in South L.A. and then his employer in Hollywood when the employer failed to pay the second half of the agreed-upon fee. We had worked it together for a month, my team and Biggar and his partner, who was named Miles Manley. We broke it when Big and Manley, as the pair were called, came up with a witness in the target victim’s neighborhood who remembered seeing a white man on the day of the shooting and could describe his car, a black Corvette with red leather interior. The car matched the vehicle used by the second victim’s next-door neighbor. He confessed after a lengthy interrogation conducted alternately by Biggar and me.

  “It’s always something small like that,” Biggar said while leaning back behind his desk. “That’s what I loved best about it. Not knowing where that little break was going to come from.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “So you miss it?”

  “Yeah. But I’ll get it back. I’m starting to now.”

  “You mean the feeling, not the job.”

  “Right. How about you, you still missing it?”

  “I’m making more money than I need here but, yeah, I miss the juice. The job gave me the juice and I don’t get it shuffling rent-a-cops around and setting up cameras. Be careful what you do, Harry. You might end up successful like me and then you sit around remembering the old days, thinking they were a lot better than they were.”

  “I’ll be careful, Big.”

  Biggar nodded, pleased that he had dispensed his dose of advice for the day.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Harry, but I’m guessing this guy in the chair is Lawton Cross, huh?”

  I hesitated but decided it didn’t matter.

  “Yeah, it’s him. I’m working something else and it crossed his path. I went to see him and he said some stuff. I just want to make sure. You know.”

  “Good luck with it. I remember his wife, saw her a couple
times at things. She was a nice lady.”

  I nodded. I knew what he was saying, that he hoped Cross wasn’t being victimized by his wife.

  “People can change,” I said. “I’m going to find out.”

  Andre Biggar came in a few minutes later carrying a toolbox, a laptop computer and the camera clock in a box. He took me to school on electronic surveillance. The clock was rigged and ready. All I needed to do was mount it on a wall and plug it in. When I adjusted the time, I would activate the surveillance by pushing the dial all the way in. To switch out the memory card I just had to remove the backing of the clock and pop the card out of the camera. Easy.

  “Okay, so once I take the card out, how do I look at what I’ve got?”

  Andre nodded and showed me how to plug the memory card into the side of the laptop computer. He then went through the keyboard commands that would bring up the surveillance recording on the computer’s screen.

  “It’s simple. Just take care of the equipment and bring it all back. We’ve got a lot of bread invested in it.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that it wasn’t simple enough for me. I seized on the financial side of the equation as a way of avoiding revealing my technical shortcomings.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I think I’ll leave your laptop here and just come back with the memory card when I want to look at it. I don’t want to risk all your equipment. I like to travel light, anyway.”

  “Whatever suits you. But the beauty of this setup is the immediacy. You can pull the card and watch it in your car right outside the guy’s house if you want. Why come all the way back here?”

  “I don’t think there’s that kind of urgency. I’ll leave the laptop and bring you back the card, okay?”

  “Whatever.”

  Andre put the clock back in its cushioned box, then shook my hand and left the office, taking the laptop with him but leaving me the toolbox along with the clock. I looked at Burnett. It was time to go.

  “He looks like he’s more than helping you.”

  “Andre’s the heart of this place.”

  He gestured toward the wall of framed memorabilia.

  “I bring the clients in, impress them, sign them up. Andre’s the one who gets it done. He figures out the needs and gets it done.”

  I nodded and stood up.

  “You want to charge me something for this?” I said, holding up the box with the clock in it.

  Biggar smiled.

  “Not if you bring it back.”

  Then his face turned serious.

  “It’s the least I can do for Lawton Cross.”

  “Yeah,” I said, knowing the feeling.

  We shook hands and I went out, carrying the clock and the toolbox, hoping the hidden camera would be the piece of equipment that would show me the world wasn’t as bad as I thought it could be.

  15

  From Biggar & Biggar I drove back to the Valley, taking the Sepulveda Pass and catching the first brutal wave of rush hour. It took me almost an hour just to get to Mulholland Drive. At that point I jumped off the freeway and drove west along the crest of the mountains. I watched the sun drop behind Malibu and leave a burning sky in its trail. At the low angles the sun often reflected off the smog caught in the bowl of the Valley and turned it brilliant shades of orange and pink and purple. It was like some sort of reward for putting up with having to breathe the poisoned air every day. This evening it was mostly a smooth orange color with wisps of white mixed in. It was what my ex-wife used to call a Creamsicle sky when she watched sunsets off the back deck of the house. She had a descriptive label for each one and that always made me smile.

  The memory of her on the deck seemed like such a long time ago and such a different part of my life. I thought about what Roy Lindell had said about seeing her in Las Vegas. He knew I had been asking about her even though I told him I hadn’t. If not a day then at least not a week went by that I didn’t think about going out there, finding her and asking for another chance. A chance of making a go of it on her terms. I had no job holding me to L.A. anymore. I could go where I wanted. This time I could go to her and we could live there together in the city of sin. She could still be free to find what she needed on the blue felt poker tables of the city’s casinos. And at the end of each day she could come home to me. I could do whatever came up. There would always be something in Vegas for a person with my skills.

  One time I had packed a box, put it in the back of the Benz and had gotten as far as Riverside before the familiar fears started rising in my chest and I pulled off the freeway. I ate a hamburger at an In-N-Out and then headed back home. I didn’t bother unpacking the box when I got there. I put it on the floor in the bedroom and took out the clothes I had packed as I needed them over the next two weeks. The empty box was still there on the floor, ready for the next time I wanted to pack it and make that drive.

  The fear. It was always there. Fear of rejection, fear of unrequited hope and love, fear of feelings still below the surface in me. It was all mixed in the blender and poured smooth as a milkshake into my cup until it was filled to the very edge. So full that if I were to move even a step it would spill over the sides. Therefore I couldn’t move. I stood paralyzed. I stayed home and lived out of a box.

  I’m a believer in the single-bullet theory. You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.

  Roy Lindell might have had Martha Gessler’s name on a bullet. I don’t know. What I do know is that Eleanor Wish had been my bullet. She had pierced me through and through. There were other women before and other women since but the wound she left was always there. It would not heal right. I was still bleeding and I knew I would always bleed for her. That was just the way it had to be. There is no end of things in the heart.

  16

  On the way into Woodland Hills I made a quick stop at a Vendome Liquors and then headed to the house on Melba Avenue. I didn’t call ahead. With Lawton Cross I knew the chances were always good he’d be at home.

  Danielle Cross answered the door after three knocks, and her already strained face took on a deeper scowl when she saw it was me.

  “He’s sleeping,” she said, holding her body tightly in the door’s opening. “He’s still recovering from yesterday.”

  “Then wake him up, Danny, because I need to talk to him.”

  “Look, you can’t just barge in here. You’re not a cop anymore. You have no right.”

  “Do you have the right to decide who he does and doesn’t see?”

  That seemed to stall her anger a little bit. She looked down at the toolbox in one hand and the box I had under my arm.

  “What is all of that?”

  “I got him a gift. Look, Danny, I need to talk to him. People are going to be coming to see him. I have to talk to him about it so he’ll be ready.”

  She relented. Without further word she stepped back and opened the door wide. She signaled me in with an outstretched arm and I stepped over the threshold. I found my way to the bedroom.

  Lawton Cross was asleep in his chair, his mouth open and a spill of medicinal-looking drool curved down his cheek. I didn’t want to look at him. He was too much of a reminder of what could happen. I put the toolbox and the clock box down on the bed. I went back to the door and closed it, making sure it banged in the jamb loud enough to hopefully startle Cross awake. I didn’t want to have to touch him to wake him up.

  When I turned back to the chair I noticed his eyes flutter and then go still at half mast.

  “Hey, Law? It’s me, Harry Bosch.”

  I noticed the green light on the monitor on the bureau and moved behind the chair to turn it off.

  “Harry?” he said. “Where?”

  I came back around the chair and looked down on him with a frozen smile on my face.

  “Right here, man. You awake now?”

  “Yeah . . . mmm ’wak
e.”

  “Good. There’s some stuff I need to tell you. And I got you something.”

  I went to the bed and started pulling the clock out of the box Andre Biggar had packed for me.

  “Black Bush?”

  His voice was alert now. Once again I regretted my choice of words to him. I came back into his field of vision holding the clock up.