Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (24)

Bosch and Lourdes waited in the hallway. Only the chief of police and family members were allowed back into the critical care unit. For the most part they sat quietly and drank coffee from paper cups out of a machine. After two hours Chief Valdez emerged with the news.

“They say he only went a couple minutes without oxygen to the brain, so he should be all right,” he said. “It’s a waiting game on that. The bigger concern is the skull fracture from when he hit the ground when the grate gave way.”

Bosch had witnessed and heard the impact when Luzon’s swinging body brought the iron grate down and the back of his head hit the end of the bench. Like a high diver hitting the board after a flip.

“Is he conscious?” Lourdes asked.

“He was but then they went into surgery,” Valdez said. “They say he’s got a subdural hematoma and they had to evacuate it, which means they drilled a fucking hole in his skull to let the blood and pressure out.”

“Shit,” Lourdes said.

“Anyway, I want a full report on what happened in that cell and everything that led up to it,” Valdez said. “How did it go so far sideways, Harry?”

Bosch tried to compose an answer.

“He took me by surprise,” he finally said. “He must have known that that was the way some drunks did it back in the day.”

“Everybody knows that,” Valdez said. “You should have been prepared for it.”

Bosch nodded. He knew Valdez was right.

“It’s on me,” Bosch said. “But are we going to charge him? I have the whole thing on my phone. He tipped Mejia. He put it in terms of a mistake, but he’s responsible.”

“I’m not worried about that right now,” Valdez said. “We’ll look at that later.”

Bosch could see that the chief was having trouble concealing his anger about the whole thing.

“Bella, why don’t you go back to the station and start in on the paper,” Valdez said.

“Roger that,” Lourdes said.

Valdez stood there and was awkwardly silent as he waited for Lourdes to leave.

“See you guys back there,” she said.

Valdez watched her go down the hall toward the elevator alcove. When he judged she was far enough away, he spoke.

“Harry, we need to talk.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to ask the Sheriff’s Department to come in and take a look at this and how it was handled. I think an outside review would be a good thing.”

“I can save you the trouble, Chief. I fucked up. I know it.”

“You know as a reserve you don’t have the same protections the full-timers do.”

“I know. Are you firing me?”

“I think you should go home and let the Sheriff’s Department take a look at this.”

“I’m suspended, then.”

“Whatever. Just go home, Harry, and take a break. When and if the time is right, you’ll be back.”

“When and if…Okay, Chief. I’ll do that. I’ll send Lourdes the audio from the cell.”

“That would be good, yeah.”

Bosch turned and walked away, heading down the hallway in the direction Lourdes had gone.

He knew there was a very low chance that he would be back working for San Fernando after this. He thought about going by the city complex and gathering a few files and personal things from his office in the old jail but then decided against it. He just drove home.

He returned to a quiet house. He checked the porch first but there was no sign of Elizabeth. He then went down the hallway to her room and found the door open. The bed had been made and there were clean, folded towels on the bureau. He checked the closet. There were no clothes on the hangers and no sign of the suitcase she had used.

She was gone.

Bosch pulled his phone and called the number of the cell phone he had given her.

After a few seconds he heard its ring inside the house and found the phone left with a note on the dining room table. The note was brief.

A wave of emotion immediately went through him. He had to admit there was at first relief. Elizabeth had been right that her staying with him was damaging his relationship with his daughter. There was also the relief from the pressures of living with an addict, of not knowing when she might stumble or what would cause it.

But then that feeling was crowded out by concern. What did Elizabeth’s leaving mean? Was she going home to Modesto? Or was she going back to the addiction she had worked for months to leave behind? She had not had a single relapse in that time and Bosch had thought she was getting stronger every day.

Bosch had to consider that she had found clarity of mind and the access it gave her to guilt over her daughter’s death too difficult to continue to live with.

Bosch opened the sliding door and walked out onto the back deck of the house. He looked down on the freeway and the wide expanse of the city beyond it to the mountains that rimmed the Valley. Elizabeth could be out there somewhere.

He pulled his phone and ducked back in and away from the freeway hiss to make a call to Cisco Wojciechowski. They had not spoken in at least two months, since the last time Cisco had checked in on Elizabeth’s progress. He was a private investigator who worked for Mickey Haller, a defense attorney who was also Bosch’s half-brother. That had put him into Bosch’s orbit and he had been instrumental in getting Elizabeth Clayton straight.

Even more than Bosch, Wojciechowski was responsible for Elizabeth’s recovery. He had seen her through the immediate withdrawal from the grip of oxycodone. Formerly addicted himself, he had walked and talked her through it, monitored her every minute at first, then by hour and then by day. She had followed that detox with a one-month stint in a more traditional rehab center. After she moved into the room offered by Bosch, Cisco was her weekly monitor. The check-ins didn’t start to drop off until Elizabeth hit the three-month mark without a relapse.

Now Bosch told him that she was gone without much notice or any indication of where she was going.

“She answering her phone?” Cisco asked.

“She left it here,” Bosch said.

“That’s not good. She doesn’t want to be tracked.”

“What I was thinking.”

They were both silent for a while.

“If we take the worst-case scenario, she’s decided to go back to the life,” Bosch said. “The question is, where would she go?”

“Does she have money?” Cisco asked.

Bosch had to think about that. In the last two months, Elizabeth had gotten bored when Bosch went to work at the SFPD. Bosch let her use his credit card to install an Uber account on her phone. She had asked to take over the duties of shopping for food and household products. He had given her cash for that. Between the credit-card number and the possibility that she could have put aside small amounts from the grocery money, he had to assume she had the wherewithal to get back to Modesto or to buy her way back into addiction.

“Let’s say she does,” Bosch said. “Where would she go?”

“Addicts are creatures of habit,” Cisco said. “She’d go back to where she scored before.”

Bosch thought about the place he had rescued Elizabeth from the previous year. A clinic that was little more than a pill mill with examination rooms crowded with the items stolen and offered in trade by addicts. When he found her, Elizabeth had only herself to trade.

“The place I took her from—this so-called clinic in Van Nuys—has got to be closed by now,” he said. “My old partner from Hollywood detectives is now with the state medical board. He was there and saw that place. He was going to shut them down.”

“You sure?” Cisco asked. “Sometimes these doctors get a slap on the wrist and just open up across the street.”

Bosch recalled Jerry Edgar talking about how difficult it was to put charlatan doctors and pill mills out of business permanently.

“Let me call you back,” he said.

Without waiting for a reply, he disconnected and went to his contacts screen. He called his former partner, and Edgar picked up right away.

“Harry Bosch,” he said. “The man who said he would stay in touch but waited a lot of months to actually do it.”

“Sorry, Jerry, I’ve been kind of busy,” Bosch said. “I’ve got a question for you though. Remember that clinic where we found Elizabeth Clayton last year?”

“Yeah, Sherman Way.”

“You said you were going to close that down. Did that happen?”

“Wait a minute, I said I was going to try to close it down. It’s not an easy thing to do, Harry. I told you about how—”

“Yeah, I know, a lot of red tape. So, you’re telling me that seven months later that place is still operating?”

“I opened a file, did the work, and submitted it. The license to practice is under what we call administrative review. I’m waiting on the board to act on it.”

“So in the meantime, that guy we saw in there, that guy masquerading as a doctor, is still in there writing scrips.”

“I haven’t checked but that’s probably the case.”

“Thanks, Jerry, that’s all I needed. I gotta go.”

“Harry—”

Bosch disconnected. Before calling Cisco back he pulled his wallet and dug out the credit card he had given to Elizabeth to set up her Uber account. He called the phone number on the back and asked the service specialist to read him a list of his most recent charges. Other than an Uber charge from that morning, all the purchases had been his own.

Bosch grabbed the phone Elizabeth had left behind on the dining room table. He opened the Uber app and was greeted with a template for rating the driver who had picked Elizabeth up that morning. Bosch gave him five stars, then tapped the My Trips link and was taken to a map that showed the morning’s ride and the address of the destination. Elizabeth had obviously called for the Uber, then left the phone behind when the car arrived. The destination was the Greyhound bus terminal in North Hollywood.

It would seem that Elizabeth had left the city on a Greyhound bus, but Bosch was familiar with the area, having worked cases over the years that took him to the bus terminal and its surroundings, and he knew the neighborhood had a high transient population, many of whom were drug addicts, and had several clinics and mom-and-pop pharmacies that catered to them.

Bosch called Wojciechowski back.

“The place I pulled her out of is still in business,” he said. “But I just traced an Uber she took this morning to the bus station in North Hollywood. She could be back in Modesto by now. Or…”

“Or what?” Cisco prompted.

“You talked about addicts returning to the places they know. The area around the bus terminal is pretty gritty. Lots of clinics, lots of pharmacies, lots of addicts. There’s a park there next to the one seventy where they hang.”

There was a moment of silence before Cisco responded.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.