She pressed her lips together in an effort to hold back tears.
“Revenge tastes sweet, doesn’t it? Just like pancake syrup.”
I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder but not to comfort her. I gently pushed her to the side of the doorway and stepped in. Rather than head left toward Lawton Cross’s sitting room I went to the right. I went into the kitchen and found the door to the garage. I went to the file cabinets in front of the Malibu and pulled the file on the Antonio Markwell case, the abduction-murder that had made Cross and Dorsey in the department.
I returned to the house and entered the sitting room. I didn’t know where Danny had gone but her husband was waiting for me.
“Harry, you’re all over the tube,” he said.
I looked up at the television screen. It was a helicopter view of my house. I could see all the official cars and media vans on the street in front. I could see the black tarps covering the bodies in the back. I hit the power button with the side of my fist and the screen went blank. I turned back to Cross and dropped the Markwell file on his lap. He couldn’t move. All he could do was lower his eyes to it and try to read the tab.
“How does it feel? Does it give you a hard-on watching what you did? In your case, a make-believe hard-on?”
“Harry, I —”
“Where is she, Law?”
“Where is who? Harry, I don’t know what —”
“Sure you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You sat there like a puppet but the whole time you were pulling the strings. My strings.”
“Harry, please.”
“Don’t ‘Harry, please’ me. You wanted revenge on them and I was your ticket. Well, you got it, partner. I took care of all of them, just like you thought. Like you hoped. You played me just right.”
He didn’t say anything. His eyes were cast down, away from mine.
“Now there’s one thing I want from you. I want to know where you and Jack hid Marty Gessler. I want to bring her home.”
He remained silent, his eyes away from me. I reached down and took the file off his lap. On the bureau I opened it and started leafing through the documents.
“You know, I didn’t see it until somebody I taught the job to saw it first,” I said as I looked through the file. “She’s the one who said it had to be a cop. It was the only way Gessler could’ve been taken so easily. And she was right. Those four punks didn’t have the steel.”
I gestured toward the empty television screen.
“I mean, look what happened when they came for me.”
I found what I was looking for in the file. A map of Griffith Park. I started unfolding it. Its creases cracked and split. It had been folded in the file for maybe five years. It was marked by the location where Antonio Markwell’s body had been found in Bronson Canyon.
“Once I started in that direction, then I began to see it. The gas had always been a problem. Somebody used her card and they bought more gas than her car could hold. That was a mistake, Law. A big one. Not buying the gas. That was part of the misdirection. But getting so much of it. The bureau thought maybe it was a truck, that they were looking for a trucker. But now I’m thinking Crown Vic. The Police Interceptor model they make for all the departments. The cars with extra-capacity gas tanks so you don’t get caught out there on the hunt without any juice.”
I had delicately spread the map open. It depicted the many winding roads and footpaths of the huge mountain park. It showed the public road up through Bronson Canyon and then the fire road which extended further up into the rocky terrain. It showed the area of caves and tunnels left behind when the canyon had been a quarry, its rock payload crushed and used for railroad beds across the west. I laid the map across Cross’s lap and over his dead arms.
“The way I figure it, you guys followed her from Westwood. Then in the Pass you pulled her over in one of the quiet spots. Used the blue light on your Crown Vic and she thought,
No problem, they’re cops.
But then you put her in the trunk of that big car with the big gas tank. One of you drove her car to the airport and the other followed and picked him up. Probably you backed her car into another car or a pillar or something somewhere. Nice touch. Sell the misdirection. Then you drive up to the desert and use the gas card. Again, sell that misdirection. And then you turn around and take her back to the real hiding place. Which one of you did it, Law? Which one actually took from her everything she had or would ever have?”
I didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. I pointed to the map.
“That’s my bet. You guys went to a place you were familiar with, a place nobody would be looking for Marty Gessler because they’d all be looking up in the desert. You wanted her hidden but you wanted access to her, right? You wanted to know exactly where she was. She was your ace in the hole, right? You would use her to get to them. Marty and her computer. The connection was on that box. Find her and find the box, the connection would be made and there’d be a knock on Linus Simonson’s door.”
I paused to give him a chance to protest, to tell me to get the hell out or call me a liar. But he didn’t do any of that. He didn’t say a word.
“It all seemed to work,” I said. “And then that day at Nat’s you guys were supposed to cut the deal, right? Shake hands and share the wealth? Only Linus Simonson had other ideas about that. Turned out he didn’t want to share anything and he’d take his chances with Gessler’s computer. That must have shocked you. There you two were, waiting in there, probably already counting your money. And he comes in and opens up on you . . .
“I think you should’ve seen it coming, Law. ”
I leaned down and tapped the map with a finger.
“Bronson Canyon. All those tunnels, caves. Where you found the boy.”
My eyes came up from the map.
“That’s my guess. They’ve got the roads going up there locked. But you two had a key, didn’t you? From the boy’s case. You kept that key and then it came in handy. Where is she?”
Cross finally brought his eyes up to mine and spoke.
“Look what they did to me,” he said. “They deserved what they got.”
I nodded in agreement.
“And you deserved what you got. Where is she?”
His eyes turned and he looked up at the empty TV. He said nothing. Anger bloomed inside of me. I thought of Milton squeezing the air tubes shut. Of becoming a monster, of becoming the thing I hunted. I took a step toward his chair and looked down on him with eyes dark with rage. Slowly I raised my hands toward his face.
“Tell him.”
I turned and Danny Cross was in the doorway. I didn’t know how long she had been there or what she had heard. I didn’t know if it was a story that was new to her or not. All I knew is that she brought me back from the edge of the abyss. I turned and looked back at Lawton Cross. His eyes were on his wife and his frozen face still somehow took on an expression of sadness and misery.
“Tell him, Lawton,” she said. “Or I won’t be there beside you.”
A look of fear immediately took over his face. Then there was pleading in his eyes.
“You promise to stay with me?”
“I promise.”
His eyes dropped to the map spread across the chair.
“You don’t need this,” he said. “Just go up there. You go in the big cave and then take the tunnel on the right. It comes to an open clearing. Somebody told us they call it The Devil’s Punchbowl. Anyway, that’s where we found him. She’s there now.”
He could no longer hold my eyes and looked away, back down at the map.
“Where do I look, Lawton?”
“Where the kid was. That family marked the spot. You’ll know when you get there.”
I nodded. I understood. Slowly I took the map from him and refolded it. I watched him as I did it. He seemed becalmed, his face now returned to expressionless. I’d seen the look a thousand times before in the eyes and faces of those who have confessed. A lifting of the burden.
There was nothing else to say. I slipped the map back into the file and took it with me as I left the room. Danny Cross remained just outside the door, looking in at her husband. I stopped as I passed her.
“He’s a black hole,” I said. “He’ll suck you in and take you down. Save yourself, Danny.”
“How?”
“You know how.”
I left her there and went out. I got in my car and started driving south toward Hollywood and the secret the hills had hidden for so long.
I
t wasn’t raining yet but the sky was full of the low rumbling of thunder by the time I got to Hollywood. From the freeway I took Franklin over to Bronson and then up into the hills. Bronson Canyon had been in more movies than I had probably seen in my whole life. Its rugged terrain and jagged rock outcroppings formed the backdrop of countless westerns and more than a few low-budget interplanetary explorations. I had been there as a kid and I had been there on cases. I knew that if you weren’t careful you could get lost on the trails or in the caves and quarried-out spaces. The rock facings would begin to crowd you and after a while they all looked the same. You could lose your bearings. In that sameness was the danger.
I took the park road up until it terminated at the fire road. Entrance to this dirt and crushed-gravel extension was blocked by a steel gate with a padlock on it. The key to that lock resided with the fire department and the city’s film bureau, but thanks to Lawton Cross I knew better than that.
I got there before Lindell and I was tempted not to wait. It would be a long walk up to the caves on foot, but my anger had forged into resolve and momentum. Sitting at the locked gate was not the way to stoke those fires and keep them burning. I wanted to get up into the hills and get it over with. I pulled out the cell phone and called him to see where he was.
“Right behind you.”
I checked the mirror. He was coming around the last bend in a federal Crown Vic. It made me think about how he would react when he found out the last clue I had put together had been so close all along.
“It’s about time,” I said.
I hung up and got out of the Mercedes. When Lindell pulled up I leaned into his window.
“Did you bring the bolt cutter?”
Lindell looked out the windshield at the gate.
“For that? I’m not going to cut that. They’ll climb all over me if I break their lock.”
“Roy, I thought you were a big-time federal agent. Give me the cutter, I’ll do it.”
“And you can take all the heat. Just tell them you had a hunch.”
I threw him a look, hoping to communicate that I was operating on more than a hunch now. He popped the trunk lid and I went back and pulled out the bolt cutter he had probably checked out of the federal equipment shed. He stayed in the car while I walked over and cut the lock and pushed the gate open.
I walked by his window on the way back to the trunk.
“By any means, Roy,” I said as I passed. “I think I’m getting the idea why you weren’t picked for the squad.”
I threw the tool in the trunk, slammed it and told him to follow me up the hill.
We drove up the winding road, the gravel crunching under our wheels sounding like the rain that was still coming. The road up took a final 180 and terminated in front of the main tunnel entrance, a fifteen-foot-high opening cut into a granite deposit the size of an office building. I parked next to Lindell and met him at the trunk. He’d brought two shovels and two flashlights. As I was reaching in for mine he put his hand on my arm.
“Okay, Bosch, what are we doing?”
“She’s here. We’re going to go in and find her.”
“Confirmed?”
I looked at him and nodded. In my life I have told a lot of people—too many to count—about loved ones they weren’t going to see alive again. I knew Lindell had long ago given up hope for Marty Gessler, but the final confirmation is still never easy to get. Or to give.
“Yes, confirmed. Lawton Cross told me.”
Lindell nodded and turned away from the trunk. He looked up at the crest of the granite mountain. I busied myself with getting the tools from the trunk and checking to see if my cell phone was catching a signal. Over my shoulder I heard him say, “It’s going to rain.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I handed him a light and a shovel and we approached the mouth of the tunnel.
“He’s going to pay for this,” Lindell said.
I nodded. I didn’t bother to tell him that Lawton Cross had already been paying for it every day of his life.
The tunnel was big. Shaquille O’Neal could walk through with Wilt Chamberlain on his shoulders. It was nothing like the stale, claustrophobic systems I had crawled through thirty-five years before. The air inside was fresh. It smelled clean. Ten feet in we put on the lights, and in another fifty feet the channel curved and we were out of sight of the entrance. I remembered Cross’s directions and kept to the right, moving slowly.
We came to a central cavern and stopped. There were three tributary tunnels. I focused my light on the third opening and knew it was the way. I then turned my light off and told Lindell to do the same.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Just turn it off for a second.”
He did and I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. My vision and focus came back and I could pick up the outline of the rock walls and jutting surfaces. I could see the light that had followed us in.
“What is it?” Lindell asked.
“Lost light. I wanted to see the lost light.”
“What?”
“You can always find it. Even in the dark, even underground.”
I snapped my light back on, careful not to hit Lindell in the face with the beam, and headed toward the third tributary tunnel.
This time we needed to duck and proceed in single file as the tunnel grew smaller and more cramped. The channel curved to the right and soon we could see light ahead. An opening. We moved through and came out into an open bowl, a granite stadium chiseled out decades before. The Devil’s Punchbowl.