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“And you never went back in.”

“That’s right, boot. I never went back in.”

There, they had him.

“Then how come your palm print was on the wall over the toilet?”

Eckersly froze. Bosch read his eyes. He remembered the moment he had put his hand on the wall. He knew they had him.

Eckersly glanced out the office’s only window. It was to his left and it offered a view of a fire department equipment yard. He then looked back at Bosch and spoke in a quiet voice.

“You know how often I wondered when somebody like you would show up here… how many years I’ve been waiting?”

Bosch nodded.

“It must have been a burden,” he said without sympathy.

“She wanted more, she wanted something permanent,” Eckersly said. “Christ, she was fifteen years older than me. She was just a patrol pal, that’s what we called them. But then she got the wrong idea about things and when I had to set her straight she said she was going to make a complaint about me. She was going to go to the captain. I was married back then. I couldn’t…”

He said nothing else. His eyes were downcast. He was looking at the memory. Bosch could put the rest of it together. Eckersly hatched a plan that would throw the investigation off, send it in the wrong direction. His only mistake was the moment he put his hand on the wall over the toilet.

“You have to come with us now, Chief,” Rider said.

She stood up. Eckersly looked up at her.

“With you?” he said. “No, I don’t.”

With his right hand he pulled open the desk drawer in front of him and quickly reached in with his left. He withdrew a black, steel pistol and brought it up to his neck.

“No!” Rider yelled.

>

Eckersly pressed the muzzle deep into the left side of his neck. He angled the weapon upward and pulled the trigger. The weapon’s contact against his skin muffled the blast. His head snapped back and blood splattered across the wall of police memorabilia behind him.

Bosch never moved in his seat. He just watched it happen. Pretty soon the woman from the front counter came running in and she screamed and held her hands up to her mouth.

Bosch turned and looked at Rider.

“That was a long time coming,” he said.

Laura was already rented at Eddie’s Saturday Matinee, so Bosch rented Sharky’s Machine instead. He watched it at home that night while drinking beer and eating peanut butter sandwiches, and trying to keep his mind away from what had happened in Eckersly’s office. It wasn’t a bad movie, though he could see almost everything coming. Burt Reynolds and Bernie Casey made pretty good cops and Rachel Ward was the call girl with a heart of gold. Bosch saw what Burt saw in her. He thought he could easily fall in love with her, too. Call girl or not, dead or alive.

Near the end of the movie, there was a shootout and Bernie Casey got wounded. Bleeding and out of bullets, he used a Zen mantra to make himself invisible to the approaching shooter.

It worked. The shooter walked right by him, and Bernie lived to tell about it. Bosch liked that. At the end of the movie he remembered that moment the best. He wished there were a Zen chant he could use now so Ronald Eckersly could just walk on by him, too. But he knew there was no such thing. Eckersly would take his place with the others that came to him at night. The ones he remembered.

Bosch thought about calling Kiz and telling her what he thought of the movie. But he knew it was too late and she would get upset with him. He killed the TV instead and turned off the lights.

And for more Michael Connelly…

The following is an excerpt from the opening pages of The Drop.

On sale 27th October 2011.

Available for pre-order now.

One

Christmas came once a month in the Open-Unsolved Unit. That was when the lieutenant made her way around the squad room like Santa Claus, parceling out the assignments like presents to the squad’s six detective teams. The cold hits were the lifeblood of the unit. The teams didn’t wait for callouts and fresh kills in Open-Unsolved. They waited for cold hits.

The Open-Unsolved