The Narrows - Michael Connelly [44]
That line revealed an untruth. If Ritz thought McCaleb and his theory were full of shit, he had to have listened to it in order to make such a determination. I believed that it revealed that Ritz had discussed the case with McCaleb, possibly at length.
“Let me ask you one last thing and then I’ll leave you alone. Did Terry mention something about a triangle theory? Something about one point giving three? Does any of that make sense?”
The laugh I heard over the phone wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t even good-natured.
“That was three questions, Bosch. Three questions, three sides of a triangle and three strikes and you’re —”
The phone went dead, its battery drained.
“Out,” I said, completing Ritz’s line.
I knew it meant he was not going to answer my question. I closed the phone and dropped it back into my pocket. I had a charger in my car. I’d have the phone back up and running as soon as we got across the Santa Monica Bay. There was still the reporter at the Sun to talk to but I doubted I’d be having further conversations with Ritz.
I got up and walked out onto the stern to have the cool morning air refresh me. Catalina was far in the distance, just a jagged gray rock sticking up in the mist. We were more than halfway across. I heard a little girl exclaim, “There!” very loudly to her mother and I followed her pointed finger out to the water where a school of porpoises were breaking the surface in the boat’s wake. There must have been twenty of them and soon the stern became crowded with people and their cameras. I think maybe some of the locals even came out to look. The porpoises were beautiful, their gray skin shining like plastic in the morning light. I wondered if they were just having fun or had mistaken the ferry for a fishing boat and were hoping to feed on the debris of the day’s catch.
Soon the show wasn’t enough to hold everyone’s attention and the passengers returned to their former positions. The little girl who first sounded the alert stayed at the gunwale and watched, and so did I, until the porpoises finally dropped off the wake and disappeared in the blue-black sea.
I went inside and took up McCaleb’s file again. I reread everything he and I had written. No new ideas came up. I then looked at all the photos I had printed out the night before. I had shown the photos of the man named Jordan Shandy to Graciela but she didn’t recognize him and hit me with more questions than answers about him, questions I didn’t want to try to answer just yet.
Next in the review were the credit-card and phone records. I had already looked at these in Graciela’s presence but wanted to check them more thoroughly. I paid closest attention to the end of February and the beginning of March, when Graciela was sure her husband had been on the mainland. But there was no purchase with a credit card nor phone call made on his cell that gave any indication of where he was, let alone in Los Angeles or maybe Las Vegas. It was almost as if he wanted to leave no trail.
A half hour later the boat pulled into the Los Angeles Harbor and docked next to the Queen Mary, a permanently moored cruise ship that had been turned into a hotel and convention center. As I was walking through the parking lot to my car I heard a shriek and turned around to see a woman bouncing and swaying upside down from the end of a bungee cord extending down from a jumping platform at the stern of the Queen Mary. She had her arms clamped to the sides of her torso and I realized that the reason she had screamed was not because of the fear and adrenaline rush of the free fall, but because her T-shirt had apparently threatened to fall down over her shoulders and head, exposing her to the crowd that lined the railing of the cruise ship.
I turned away and headed on to my car. I drive a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle, the kind some people think helps keep terrorists in business. I don’t get involved in such debates but I do know that the people who go on talk shows to argue such things usually pull up in stretch limos. As soon as I got into the car and cranked it, I