Lost Light

by Michael Connelly

  I followed instructions and was turned away when the other agent tapped in the combination. We then went through and I was led into a dimly lit hallway of doors with small square windows head high. At first I thought they were interview rooms but then I realized there were too many. These were cells. I turned my head to look through some of the windows as we passed and through two of them I saw men looking back out at me. They were dark skinned and of Middle Eastern descent. They wore unkempt beards. Through a third window I saw a short man looking out, his eyes barely at the bottom level of the small window. He had bleached blond hair that had a quarter inch of black at its roots. I recognized him from the photo I had seen on the computer at the library. Mousouwa Aziz.

  We stopped in front of a door marked “29,” and it was popped open electronically by some unseen hand. One of the agents stepped behind me and I heard him working a key into the handcuffs. I was beyond being able to feel it. Soon my wrists were free and I brought my hands around so that I could rub them and get the circulation going again. They were as white as soap, and a deep red welt ran around the circumference of each wrist. I had always believed that cuffing a suspect too tightly was a bullshit thing to do. Same with hitting a custody’s head on the frame of the car door. Easy to do, easy to get away with. But always a bullshit move. A bully’s move. The kind of thing a boy who enjoyed teasing the younger kids in the schoolyard would grow up to do.

  As the tingling feeling started to work its way into my hands a burning sense of anger started building behind my eyes, edging my vision with a velvet blackness. In that darkness was a voice urging me to retaliate. I managed to ignore it. It’s all about power and when to use it. These guys didn’t know that yet.

  A hand pushed me toward the cell and I involuntarily braced myself. I didn’t want to go in there. Then a sharp kick hit me behind my left knee and my leg buckled and I was hurled forward with a stiff-arm shove from behind. I crossed the small square cell to the opposite wall and put my hands up to stop my forward momentum.

  “Make yourself at home, asshole,” the agent said to my back.

  The door was slammed before I could get back to it. I stood there looking at the square of glass, realizing that the other prisoners I had seen in the hallway had been looking at themselves. The glass was mirrored.

  Instinctively I knew the agent that had kicked and shoved me was on the other side looking at me. I nodded to him, sending the message that I would not forget him. He was probably on the other side laughing back at me.

  The light in the room stayed on. I eventually stepped away from the door and looked around. There was a one-inch-thick mattress on a shelflike outcropping from the wall. Built into the opposite wall was a sink-and-toilet combination. There was nothing else except a steel box in one of the upper corners with a two-inch-square window behind which I could see a camera lens. I was being watched. Even if I used the toilet I was being watched.

  I checked my watch but there was no watch. They had somehow taken it, probably when they took off the cuffs and my wrists were so numb I could not feel the theft.

  I spent what I thought was the first hour of my incarceration pacing in the small space and trying to keep my anger sharp but controlled. I walked without pattern other than that I used the entire space, and when I came to the corner where the camera was located I raised the middle finger of my left hand to the lens. Every time.

  In the second hour I sat on the mattress, determined not to exhaust myself with the pacing and trying to keep track of time. On occasion I still gave the camera my finger, usually without even bothering to look up while I delivered it. I started thinking about interview room stories to pass the time. I remembered one about a guy we had brought in as a suspect in a double bagger involving a drug rip-off. Our plan was to sweat him a little before we went into the room and tried to break him down. But soon after being placed in the room he took his pants off, tied the legs around his neck and tried to hang himself from the overhead light fixture. They got to him in time and the man was saved. He protested that he would rather kill himself than spend another hour in the room. He had only been in there twenty minutes.

  I started laughing to myself and then remembered another story, one that wasn’t so funny. A man who was a peripheral witness to a strong-arm robbery was brought into the box and questioned about what he saw. It was late on a Friday. He was an illegal and he was scared shitless, but he wasn’t a suspect and it would mean too many phone calls and too much paperwork to send him back to Mexico. All that the detective wanted was his information. But before he got it the detective was called out of the interview room. He told the man to sit tight, that he’d be back. Only he never came back. Breaking events on the case took him out into the field and soon he forgot about the witness. On Sunday morning another detective who had come in to try to catch up on his paperwork heard a knocking sound and opened the interview room door to find the witness still there. He had taken empty coffee cups out of the trash can and filled them with urine during the weekend. But as instructed he had never left the unlocked interview room.

  Remembering that one made me feel morose. After a while I took off my jacket and lay back on the mattress. I put the jacket over my face to try to block out the light. I tried to give the impression I was sleeping, that I didn’t care what they were doing to me. But I wasn’t sleeping and they probably knew it. I’d seen it all before when I had been on the other side of the glass.

  Finally, I tried to concentrate on the case, running all of the latest occurrences through my head, trying to see how they fit. Why had the bureau stepped in? Because I was getting a copy of Lawton Cross’s file? It seemed unlikely. I decided that I had struck the nerve in the library when I had looked up the reports on Mousouwa Aziz. They had talked to the librarian or checked the computer—new laws allowed them to. That was what brought them out. That was what they wanted to know about.

  After what I estimated to be about four hours in the cube the door snapped open with an electronic release. I pulled the jacket off my face and sat up just as an agent I had not seen before stepped in. He was carrying a file and a cup of coffee. The agent I knew as Parenting Today stood behind him with a steel chair.

  “Don’t get up,” the first agent said.

  I stood up anyway.

  “What the hell is —”

  “I said don’t get up. You sit back down or I’m out of here and we’ll try again tomorrow.”

  I hesitated a moment, holding my pose as an angry man and then sat down on the mattress. Parenting Today put the chair down just inside the door and then stepped out of the cell and closed the door. The remaining agent sat down and lowered his steaming coffee to the floor. The smell of it filled the room.

  “I’m Special Agent John Peoples with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Good for you. What am I doing here?”

  “You are here because you do not listen.”

  He brought his eyes to mine to make sure I was doing what he just said I do not do. He was my age, maybe a little older. He had all of his hair and it was a little too long for the bureau. I guessed that it wasn’t a style choice. He was just too busy to get it properly cut.

  His eyes were the thing. Every face has a magnetic feature, the thing that draws you in. A nose, a scar, a cleft chin. With Peoples everything was drawn to the eyes. They were deeply set and dark. They were worried. They carried a secret burden.

  “You were told to stand down, Mr. Bosch,” he said. “You were told rather explicitly to leave things alone and yet here we are.”

  “Can you answer a question?”

  “I can try. If it’s not classified.”

  “Is my watch classified? Where’s my watch? It was given to me when I retired and I want it back.”

  “Mr. Bosch, forget about your watch for now. I am trying to get something through that thick skull of yours but you don’t want it to get through, do you?”

  He reached down for his coffee and took a sip. He gr
imaced as he burned his mouth. He put the cup back down on the floor.

  “More important things are at work here than your private investigation and your hundred-dollar retirement watch.”

  I put a look of surprise on my face.

  “You really think that’s all they spent on me after all those years?”

  Peoples frowned and shook his head.

  “You are not helping yourself here, Mr. Bosch. You are compromising an investigation that is vitally significant to this country and here all you want to do is show how clever you are.”

  “This is the national security rap, right? It is, isn’t it? Well, Special Agent Peoples, you can hang on to it for next time. I don’t consider a murder investigation to be unimportant. There are no compromises when it comes to murder.”

  Peoples stood up and stepped toward me until he was looking directly down at me. He leaned over the bed, putting his hand against the wall for support.

  “Hieronymus Bosch,” he yelled, actually pronouncing it correctly. “You are trespassing! You are driving the wrong way down a one-way street! Do you understand!”

  He then turned and went back to his chair. I almost laughed at the theatrics and for a moment thought that he did not realize that I had spent twenty-five years working in rooms like these.

  “Am I getting through to you at all?” Peoples said, his voice calm once again. “You are not a cop. You carry no badge. You have no provenance, no case. You have no standing.”

  “It used to be a free country. That used to be enough standing.”

  “It’s not the same country it used to be. Things have changed.”

  He proffered the file held in his hand.

  “The murder of this woman is important. Of course it is. But there are other things at play here. More important matters. You must step back from it, Mr. Bosch. This is the final warning. Stand down. Or we will stand you down. And you won’t like it.”

  “I bet I’ll end up back here? Right? With Mouse and the others? The other enemy combatants. Isn’t that what you call them? Does anyone even know about this place, Agent Peoples? Anyone outside your own little BAM squad?”

  He seemed momentarily taken aback by my knowledge and use of the term.

  “I recognized Mouse when they brought me in. I was window shopping.”

  “And from that you think you know what goes on here?”

  “You’re working the guy. It’s obvious and that’s fine. But what if he’s the one who killed Angella Benton? What if he killed the bank security man? And what if he killed an FBI agent, too? Don’t you care about what happened to Martha Gessler? She was one of your own. Has the world changed that much? Is a special agent no longer special under these new rules of yours? Or does the line change according to convenience? Am I an enemy combatant, Agent Peoples?”

  I could see it hurt. My words opened an old wound if not an old debate. But then a resolve came across his face. He opened the file in his hands and took out the printout I had made at the library. I could see the mugshot of Aziz.

  “How did you know about this? How did you make this connection?”

  “You people.”

  “What are you talking about? No one here would tell you —”

  “They didn’t have to. I saw your man tailing me in the library. Make a note of that—he’s not that good. Tell him to try Sports Illustrated next time. I knew something was up so I ran a search through the newspaper files and came up with that. I printed it out because I knew it might flush you people out. And it did. Your kind are very predictable.

  “Anyway, then I saw Mouse when they were walking me down the hall and I sort of put things together. Money from my robbery was under the seat of his car when you arrested him. But you don’t care about that or the two and maybe three murders attached to it. You just want to know where that money was going. And you don’t want a little thing like justice for the dead to get in the way of that.”

  Peoples slowly slid the printout back into the file. I could see his face changing, growing darker around the eyes. I had stuck my words directly into a nerve.

  “You have no idea what the world is like out there or what we are doing about it in here,” he said. “You can sit here and be smug and talk about your ideas of justice. But you have no fucking idea what is out there.”

  My response to that was a smile. My words came readily.

  “You can save that speech for the politicians who change the rules for you until there are no rules anymore. Until something like justice for a murdered and violated woman adds up to nothing in the equation. That’s what’s going on out there.”

  Peoples leaned forward. He was about to spill and he wanted to make damn sure I got it.

  “Do you know where Aziz was going with that money? We don’t know but I can tell you where I think he was going with it. To a training camp. A terrorist training camp. And I’m not talking about in Afghanistan. I’m talking about within a hundred miles of our border. A place where they train people to kill us. In our buildings, in our planes. In our sleep. To come across that line and kill us with blind disregard for who we are and what we believe. Are you going to tell me that I’m wrong, that we should not do everything we can to find such a place if it exists? That we should not take whatever measures are necessary with that man to get the information we need from him?”

  I leaned back across the mattress until my back was against the wall. If I’d had a cup of coffee I wouldn’t have ignored it the way he was ignoring his.

  “I’m not telling you anything,” I said. “Everybody’s got to do what they’ve got to do.”

  “Wonderful,” he said sarcastically. “Words of wisdom. I’m going to get a wall plaque for my office and put that right on it.”

  “You know, I was in a trial once and the lawyer on the other side said something I always try to remember. She quoted a philosopher whose name I don’t recall offhand—I’ve got it written down at the house. But this guy said that whoever is out there fighting the monsters of our society should make damn sure that they don’t become monsters themselves. See, because then all is lost. Then we don’t have a society. I always thought that was a good line.”

  “Nietzsche. And you almost got the quote right.”

  “Getting the quote right isn’t what matters. It’s remembering what it means.”

  Peoples reached into the pocket of his coat. He pulled out my watch. He threw it to me and I started putting it on. I looked at the face. The hands of the clock were set against a gold detective’s badge with the city hall on it. I noted the time and saw that I had been in the cube longer than I had thought. It was almost dawn.

  “Get out of here, Bosch,” he said. “If you cross our field of vision on this again you will find yourself back here faster than you’d think was possible. And no one will know you are here.”

  The threat was obvious.

  “I’ll be among the disappeared then, huh?”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  Peoples raised his hand over his head so the camera would see it. He twirled a finger in the air and the electronic lock on the door clacked and the door opened a few inches. I stood up.

  “Go,” Peoples said. “Somebody will see you out. I’m cutting you a break here, Bosch. Remember that.”

  I headed toward the door but hesitated when I was passing him. I looked down at him and the file he still clutched.

  “I assume you cleaned me out, took my files. Lawton Cross’s too.”

  “You won’t be getting it back.”

  “Right, I understand. National security. What I was going to say is look through the photos. Find one of the photos of Angella on the tile. Look at her hands, man.”

  I headed toward the open door.

  “What about her hands?” he called after me.

  “Just look at her hands. The way we found them. You’ll know what I’m talking about then.”

  In the hallway Parenting Today was waiting for me.

  “This w
ay,” he said curtly and I could tell he was disappointed that I was being cut loose.

  On the way up the hallway I looked for Mousouwa Aziz in one of the square windows but didn’t see him. I wondered if by chance I had looked into the face of the killer I was looking for and that it would be my only glimpse, that I would get no closer. I knew that as long as he was in here I would never get to him, literally or legally. He was gone from me. He was among the disappeared. The ultimate dead end.

  We went out through two electronic doors and then I was delivered to an elevator alcove. There was no button for me to push. Parenting Today looked up at a camera in the corner of the ceiling and rolled an extended finger in the air. I heard the elevator start coming.

  When the doors opened he escorted me on. We went down to the basement but not to a car. He walked me up the ramp after yelling to a garage man to open the roll-up door. As the door went up I was hit with sunlight and had to squint.