Trunk Music - Michael Connelly [144]
“Not yet, Powers,” Bosch said. “Not just yet.”
Bosch sat at his spot at the homicide table with his head down on his folded arms. An empty coffee cop was near his elbow. A cigarette he had perched on the edge of the table had burned down to the butt, leaving one more scar on the old wood.
Bosch was alone. It was almost six and there was just the hint of dawn’s light coming through the windows that ran high along the east wall of the room. He’d gone at it for more than four hours with Powers and had gained no ground. He hadn’t even made a dent in Powers’s cool demeanor. The first rounds had assuredly gone to the big patrol cop.
Bosch wasn’t asleep, though. He was simply resting and waiting and his thoughts remained focused on Powers. Bosch had no doubts. He was sure that he had the right man sitting handcuffed in the interview room. What minimal evidence they had certainly pointed to Powers. But it was more than the evidence that convinced him. It was experience and gut instinct. Bosch believed an innocent man would have been scared, not smug as Powers had been. An innocent man would not have taunted Bosch. And so what still remained now was to take away that smugness and break him. Bosch was tired but still felt up to the task. The only thing that worried him was time. Time was against him.
Bosch raised his head and looked at his watch. Billets would be back in three hours. He picked up the empty cup, used his palm to push the dead cigarette and its ashes into it and dropped it into the trash can under the table. He stood up, lit another cigarette and took a walk down the aisle between the crime tables. He tried to clear his mind, to get ready for the next round.
He thought about paging Edgar to see if he and Rider had found anything yet, anything at all that could help, but decided against it. They knew that time was important. They would have either called or come back if they had something.
As he stood at the far end of the squad room and these thoughts traveled through his mind, his eyes fell on the sex crimes table, and he realized after a moment that he was looking at a Polaroid photo of the girl who had come into the station with her mother on Friday to report that she had been raped. The photo was on the top of a stack of Polaroids that were paper-clipped to the outside of the case envelope. Detective Mary Cantu had left it on the top of her pile for Monday. Without thinking about it, Bosch pulled the stack of photos from beneath the clip and began to look through them. The girl had been badly mistreated and the bruises documented on her body by Cantu’s camera were a depressing testament to all that was wrong with the city. Bosch always found it easier to deal with victims who were no longer living. The live ones haunted him because they could never be consoled. Not fully. They were forever left with the question why.
Sometimes Bosch thought of his city as some kind of vast drain that pulled all bad things toward a spot where they swirled around in a deep concentration. It was a place where it seemed the good people were often outnumbered by the bad. The creeps and schemers, the rapists and killers. It was a place that could easily produce someone like Powers. Too easily.
Bosch put the photos back under the clip, embarrassed by his thoughtless voyeurism of the girl’s pain. He went back to the homicide table, picked up the phone and dialed his home number. It was nearly twenty-four hours since he had been to his house, and his hope was that Eleanor Wish would answer — he had left the key under the mat — or there might be a message from her. After three rings the line was picked up and he heard his own voice on tape tell himself to leave a message. He punched in his code to check for messages and the machine told him he had none.
He stood there a long moment thinking about Eleanor, the phone still at his ear, when suddenly he heard her voice.
“Harry, is that you?”
“Eleanor?”
“I’m here, Harry.”
“Why didn