Cielo Azul

by Michael Connelly

  “Last one on the right,” he said. “When you want out wave at one of the cameras. We’ll be watching.”

  He left me there, closing the steel door with a thunderous bang that seemed to reverberate through my marrow.

  ***

  Frankie Sheehan wasn’t happy about it but I was the lead and I made the call. I allowed McCaleb to come with us on the interviews. We started with Victor Seguin. He was first on McCaleb’s list, second on mine. But there was something about the intensity in McCaleb’s eyes and words that made me defer and go with Seguin first.

  Seguin was a stage builder who lived on Screenland Drive in Burbank. It was a small house with a lot of woodwork you might expect to find in a carpenter’s house. It looked as though when Seguin wasn’t finding movie work he was home building handsome window boxes and planters for the house.

  The Ford Taurus with the license plate containing 1JK on it was parked in the driveway. I put my hand on the hood as we walked up the driveway to the door. It was cold.

  At 8:00 p.m., just as the light was leaving the sky, I knocked on the front door. Seguin answered in blue jeans and a T-shirt. No shoes. I saw his eyes go wide when he looked at me. He knew who I was before I held up the badge and said my name. I felt the cold finger of adrenaline slide down my back. I remembered what McCaleb had said about the killer tracking the police while they tracked him. I had been on TV talking about the case. I had been in the papers.

  Giving nothing away, I calmly said, “Mr. Seguin, I am Detective Harry Bosch with the LAPD. Is that your car in the driveway?”

  “Yeah, it’s mine. What about it? What’s going on?”

  “We need to ask you about it, if you don’t mind. Can we come in for a few minutes?”

  “Well, no, I’d first like to know what-”

  “Thank you.”

  I moved through the threshold, forcing him to step back. The others followed me in.

  “Hey, wait a minute, what is this?”

  We had worked it out before we’d arrived. The interview was mine to conduct. Sheehan was second seat. McCaleb said he just wanted to observe.

  The living room was carpenter overkill. Built-in bookshelves on three walls. A wooden mantel that was too big for the room had been built around the small, brick fireplace. A floor to ceiling television cabinet was built in place as a divider between the sitting area and what looked like a little office space.

  I nodded approvingly.

  “Nice work. You get a lot of downtime with your work?”

  Seguin reluctantly nodded.

  “Did most of this when we had a strike a couple years ago.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Stage builder. Look, what is this about my car? You can’t just push your way in here like this. I have rights.”

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Seguin, and I’ll explain. We believe your car was possibly used in the commission of a serious crime.”

  Seguin dropped into a soft chair positioned for best viewing of the television. I noticed that McCaleb was moving about the outer edges of the room, studying the books on the shelves and the various knickknacks displayed on the mantel and other surfaces. Sheehan sat down on the couch to Seguin ’s left. He stared at him coldly, wordlessly.

  “What crime?”

  “A murder.”

  I let that sink in. But it appeared to me that Seguin had recovered from his initial shock and was hardening. I had seen this before. He was going to try to ride it out.

  “Does anyone drive your car besides you, Mr. Seguin?”

  “Sometimes. If I loan it to somebody.”

  “What about three weeks ago, August fifteenth, did you lend it to anybody?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to check. I don’t think I want to answer any more questions and I think I want you people to leave now.”

  McCaleb slid into the seat to Seguin ’s right. I remained standing. I looked at McCaleb and he nodded slightly and only once. But I knew what he was telling me; he’s the guy.

  I looked at my partner. Sheehan had missed the sign from McCaleb because he had not taken his eyes off Seguin. I had to make a call. Go with McCaleb’s signal or back out. I looked back at McCaleb. He looked up at me, his eyes as intense as any I had ever seen.

  I signaled Seguin to stand up.

  “Mr. Seguin, I need you to stand up for me. I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of murder.”

  Seguin slowly came to his feet and then made a sudden move toward the door. But Sheehan was ready for it and was all over him and had his face down in the carpet before he had gotten three feet. Frankie pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed them. I then helped him pull Seguin to his feet and we walked him out to the car, leaving McCaleb behind.

  Frankie stayed with the suspect. As soon as I could I came back inside. I found McCaleb still sitting in the chair.

  “What was it?”

  McCaleb reached out his arm to the nearest bookshelf.

  “This is his reading chair,” he said.

  He pulled a book off the shelf.

  “And this is his favorite book.”

  The book was badly worn, its spine cracked and its pages weathered by repeated readings. As McCaleb thumbed the pages I could see paragraphs and sentences had been underlined by hand. I reached over and closed the book so I could read the cover. It was called The Collector.

  “Ever read it?” McCaleb asked.

  “No. What is it?”

  “It’s about a guy who abducts women. He collects them. Keeps them in his house, in the basement.”

  I nodded.

  “Terry, we need to back out of here and get a search warrant. I want to do this right.”

  “So do I.”

  ***

  Seguin was sitting on the bed in his cell looking at a chessboard set up on the toilet. He didn’t look up when I came to the bars, though I could tell my shadow had fallen across the game board.

  “Who are you playing?” I asked.

  “Somebody who died sixty-five years ago. They put his best moment-this game-in a book. And he lives on. He’s eternal.”

  He looked up at me then, his eyes still the same-cold, green killer’s eyes-in a body turned pasty and weak from twelve years in small, windowless rooms.

  “Detective Bosch. I wasn’t expecting you until next week.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not coming next week.”

  “You don’t want to see the show? To see the glory of the righteous?”

  “Doesn’t do it for me. Back when they used the gas, maybe that’d be worth seeing. But watching some asshole on a massage table get the needle and then drift off to Never-Never Land? Nah, I’m going to go see the Dodgers play the Giants that day. Already got my ticket.”

  Seguin stood up and approached the bars. I remembered the hours we had spent in the interrogation room, close like this. The body was worn but not the eyes. They were unchanged. Those eyes were the signature of all the evil I had ever known.

  “Then what is it that brings you to me here today, Detective?”

  He smiled at me, his teeth yellowed, his gums as gray as the walls. I knew then that the trip had been a mistake. I knew then that he would not give me what I wanted and release me.

  ***

  Two hours after we put Seguin in the car two other detectives from RHD arrived with a signed search warrant for the house and car. Because we were in the city of Burbank, I had routinely notified the local authorities of our presence and a Burbank detective team and two patrol officers arrived on scene. While the patrol officers kept a vigil on Seguin, the rest of us began the search.

  We spread out. The house had no basement. McCaleb and I took the master bedroom and Terry immediately noticed wheels had been attached to the legs of the bed. He dropped to his knees, pushed the bed aside and there was a trapdoor in the wood floor. There was a padlock on it.

  While McCaleb went off into the house to find the key I took my picks out of my wallet and worked the lock.
I was alone in the room. As I fumbled with the lock I banged it against the metal hasp and I thought I heard a noise from beyond the door in response. It was far away and muffled but to me it was the sound of terror in someone’s voice. My insides seized with my own terror and hope.

  I worked the lock with all my skill and in another thirty seconds it came open.

  “Got it! McCaleb, I got it!”

  McCaleb came rushing back into the room and we pulled open the door revealing a sheet of plywood below with finger latches at the four corners. We raised this next and there beneath the floor was a young girl. She was blindfolded, gagged and her hands were shackled behind her back. She was naked beneath a dirty pink blanket.

  But she was alive. She turned and pushed herself into the soundproofing padding that lined the coffinlike box. It was as if she were trying to get away. I realized then that she thought the opening of the door had been him coming back to her. Seguin.

  “It’s okay,” McCaleb said. “We’re here to help.”

  McCaleb reached down into the box and gently touched her shoulder. She startled like an animal but then calmed.

  McCaleb then lay down flat on the floor and reached into the box to start removing the blindfold and gag.

  “Harry, get an ambulance.”

  I stood up and stepped back from the scene. I felt my chest growing tight, a clarity of thought coming over me. In all my years I had spoken for the dead many times. I had avenged the dead. I was at home with the dead. But I had never so clearly had a part of pulling someone away from the outstretched hands of death. And in that moment I knew we had just done that. And I knew that whatever happened afterward and wherever my life took me, I would always have this moment, that it would be a light that could lead me out of the darkest of tunnels.

  “Harry, what are you doing? Get an ambulance.”

  I looked at him.

  “Yeah, right away.”

  ***

  The woodworker’s cell was all concrete and steel. It had been a decade since he had run his fingers over the grain of wood. I stepped closer to the bars and looked in at him.

  “You’re running out of time. You’ve exhausted your appeals, you’ve got a governor who needs to show he’s tough on crime. This is it, Victor. A week from today you take the needle.”

  I waited for a reaction but there was nothing. He just looked at me and waited for what he knew I would ask.

  “Time to come clean. Tell me who she was. Tell me where you took her from.”

  He moved closer to the bars, close enough for me to smell the decay in his breath. I didn’t back away.

  “All these years, Bosch. All these years and you still need to know. Why is that?”

  “I just need to.”

  “You and McCaleb.”

  “What about him?”

  “Oh, he came to see me, too.”

  I knew McCaleb was out of the life. The job had taken his heart. He got a transplant and moved to Catalina. He was running a fishing charter.

  “When did he come?”

  “Oh, let me see. Time is so hard to track here. A few months ago. Dropped by for a chat with his new heart, Terry did. Said he was in the neighborhood. He didn’t like my review of the film. What did you think of it?”

  He was talking about the film in which Clint Eastwood portrayed McCaleb.

  “I didn’t see it. What did he want when he came here?”

  “He wanted to know the same thing. Who was the girl, where did she come from? He told me you gave her a name back then, during the trial. Cielo Azul. That’s really very pretty, Detective Bosch. Blue Sky. Why did you choose that?”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes, standing right where you are standing. That’s unprofessional, isn’t it, Detective Bosch? To get close like that. That could be dangerous to let a woman in like that. Dead or alive.”

  I wanted to go, to get away from him.

  “Look, Seguin, are you going to tell me or not? Or are you just going to take it with you?”

  He smiled and stepped back from the bars. He walked over to the chessboard and seemed to look down at it to consider a move.

  “You know, they used to let me keep a cat in here. I miss that cat.”

  He picked up one of the plastic game pieces but then hesitated and returned it to the same spot. He turned and looked at me.

  “You know what I think? I think that you two can’t stand the thought of that girl not having a name, not coming from a home with a mommy and a daddy and a little baby brother. The idea of no one caring and no one missing her, it leaves you hollow, doesn’t it?”

  “I just want to close the case.”

  “Oh, but it is closed. You’re not here because of any case. You are here on your own. Admit it, Detective. Just as McCaleb came on his own. The idea of that pretty little thing-and by the way, if you thought she was beautiful in death then you should have seen her before-the idea of her lying unclaimed in an unmarked grave all this time undercuts everything you do, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a loose end. I don’t like loose ends.”

  “It’s more than that, Detective. I know.”

  I said nothing, hoping that if he kept on talking he would make a mistake.

  “Her face was like an angel’s,” he said. “And that long brown hair… I was always a sucker for that kind of hair. I can still remember its smell. She told me she used a strawberry and cream shampoo. I didn’t even know they put that stuff in shampoo, man.”

  He was taunting me. The whole idea I had of getting him to tell me her name seemed absurd now.

  “She was one of those women, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Well, she had that thing, that power. That was why I chose her.”

  “What power?”

  “You know, she could wound you with just a look. Face like an angel but a body like… Have you ever noticed how red cars look like they’re going fast even if they’re just sitting still? She was like that. She was dangerous. She had to go. If I didn’t do it, she would’ve done it to us. A lot of us.”

  He smiled at me and I knew he was still pulling the strings. He was giving me nothing, just trying to get a rise out of me.

  “Hey, Bosch?”

  “What?”

  “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”

  His smile opened even broader.

  “If a woman is murdered in the city and nobody cares, does it matter?”

  “I care.”

  “Exactly.”

  He came back to the bars.

  “And you need me to relieve you of that burden by giving you a name, a mommy and daddy who care.”

  He was a foot away from me. I could reach through the bars and grab his throat if I wanted to. But that would be what he’d want me to do.

  “Well, I won’t release you, Detective. You put me in this cage. I put you in that one.”

  He stepped back and pointed at me. I looked down and realized both my hands were tightly gripped on the steel bars of the cage. My cage.

  I looked back up at him and his smile was back, as guiltless as a baby’s.

  “Funny isn’t it? I remember that day-twelve years ago today. Sitting in the back of the car while you cops played hero. So full of yourselves for saving her. Bet you never thought it would come to this, did you? You saved one but you lost the other.”

  I lowered my head to the bars.

  “ Seguin, you’re going to burn. You are going to hell.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But I hear it’s a dry heat.”

  He laughed loudly and I looked at him.

  “Don’t you know, Detective? You have to believe in heaven to believe in hell.”

  I abruptly turned from the bars and headed back toward the steel door. Above it I saw the mounted camera. I made an open up gesture with my hand and picked up my speed as I got closer. I needed to get out of there.

  I heard Segu
in ’s voice echoing off the walls behind me.

  “I’ll keep her close, Bosch! I’ll keep her right here with me! Eternally together! Eternally mine!”

  When I got to the steel door I hit it with both fists until I heard the electronic lock snap and the guard began to slide it open.

  “All right, man, all right. What’s the hurry?”

  “Just get me out of here,” I said as I pushed past him.

  I could still hear Seguin ’s voice echoing from the death house as I crossed back across the open field.

  Michael Connelly

  ***

  Edward Hopper. Nighthawks

  ***

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