“Hold on and let me see what we can do.”
The connection went silent and Bosch waited. He thought he had played it just about right. Two minutes later the voice came back on the line.
“Hello?”
“Yes, I’m still here.”
“Okay, we don’t normally do this but I have an address here that you can use to mail a card to Abigail. I can’t give out her phone number without her permission and I just tried and couldn’t reach her.”
“The address will be fine, then. If I put it in the mail today, she should get it in time.”
The woman proceeded to give Bosch an address on Vineland Boulevard in Studio City. He wrote it down, thanked her, and quickly got off the phone.
Bosch looked at the address. It would be a quick drive from his house down into the Valley and Studio City. The address included a unit number, which made him think it could be a retirement home, considering Turnbull’s age. There might be real security involved beyond the usual gates and buttons found at every apartment complex in the city.
Bosch grabbed a rubber band out of a kitchen drawer and stretched it around the stack of birth certificates. He wanted to take them with him, just in case. He grabbed his keys and was heading toward the side door when there was a hard knock at the front of the house. Changing course, he went to the front door.
The unnamed security man who had escorted Bosch through the Vance house the day before was standing on the front step.
“Mr. Bosch, I’m glad I caught you,” he said.
His eyes fell on the banded stack of birth certificates and Bosch reflexively dropped the hand that held them down and behind his left thigh. Annoyed that he had made such an obvious move to hide them, he spoke abruptly.
“What can I do for you?” he said. “I’m on my way out.”
“Mr. Vance sent me,” the man said. “He wanted to know if you have made any progress.”
Bosch looked at him for a long moment.
“What’s your name?” he finally asked. “You never said it yesterday.”
“Sloan. I’m in charge of security at the Pasadena estate.”
“How did you find out where I live?”
“I looked it up.”
“Looked it up where? I’m not listed anywhere and the deed to this house isn’t in my name.”
“We have ways of finding people, Mr. Bosch.”
Bosch looked at him for a long moment before responding.
“Well, Sloan, Mr. Vance told me to talk only to him about what I was doing. So if you’ll excuse me.”
Bosch started to close the door and Sloan immediately put his hand out and stopped it.
“You really don’t want to do that,” Bosch said.
Sloan backed off and held his hands up.
“I apologize,” he said. “But I must tell you, Mr. Vance took ill yesterday after speaking with you. He sent me this morning to ask you if you’ve made any headway.”
“Headway with what?” Bosch asked.
“With the job you were hired to do.”
Bosch held up a finger.
“Can you wait here one minute?” he asked.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He closed the door and put the stack of birth certificates under his arm. He went to the dining room table, where he had left the business card with the direct number to Vance printed on it. He punched in the number on his phone and then went back to the front door, opening it while listening to his call ringing.
“Who are you calling?” Sloan asked.
“Your boss,” Bosch said. “Just want to make sure he’s okay with our discussing the case.”
“He won’t answer.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll just—”
The call clicked over to a long beep without an outgoing message from Vance.
“Mr. Vance, this is Harry Bosch. Please call me back.”
Bosch recited his number, disconnected, and then spoke to Sloan.
“You know what I don’t get? I don’t get Vance sending you here to ask that question without first telling you what the job is he hired me to do.”
“I told you, he has taken ill.”
“Yeah, well, then I’ll wait until he’s better. Tell him to call me then.”
Bosch read the look of hesitation on Sloan’s face. There was something else. He waited and Sloan finally delivered.
“Mr. Vance also has reason to believe the phone number he gave you has been compromised. He wants you to report through me. I’ve been in charge of his personal security for twenty-five years.”
“Yeah, well, he’ll have to tell me that himself. When he gets better, you let me know and I’ll come back out there to the palace.”
Bosch swung the door closed and it caught Sloan by surprise. It banged loudly in its frame. Sloan knocked on it again but by then Bosch was quietly opening the side door to the carport. He exited the house, then stealthily opened the door of his Cherokee and got in. The moment the engine turned over he dropped the vehicle into reverse and backed out quickly into the road. He saw a copper-colored sedan parked pointing downhill across the street. Sloan was walking toward it. Bosch turned the wheel and backed out to his right, then gunned the Cherokee uphill, speeding by Sloan at the door to his car. He knew Sloan would have to use the carport to turn around in the narrow street, a maneuver that would give Bosch enough time to lose him.
After twenty-five years of living there, taking the curves of Woodrow Wilson Drive came as second nature to Bosch. He quickly arrived at the stop sign at Mulholland Drive and banged a hard right without pausing. He then followed the asphalt snake along the mountain ridgeline until he reached Wrightwood Drive. He checked his mirrors and saw no sign of Sloan or any other follow car. He took the sharp right onto Wrightwood and quickly descended the northern slope into Studio City, hitting the Valley floor at Ventura Boulevard.
A few minutes later he was on Vineland, parked against the curb in front of an apartment complex called the Sierra Winds. It was built next to the 101 freeway overpass and looked old and worn. There was a twenty-foot concrete sound-barrier wall running along the curve of the freeway but Bosch imagined that the sound of traffic still swept across the sprawling two-story complex like a sierra wind.
The important thing was that Abigail Turnbull was not living in a retirement center after all. Bosch would have no trouble getting to her door and that was a good break.
10
Bosch loitered near the gated entrance to the apartment complex and acted like he was on a phone call, when all he was really doing was replaying a year-old message his daughter had left him after she had accepted admission to Chapman University.
“Dad, it’s a really exciting day for me and I want to thank you for all your help in getting me to this point. And I am so glad I won’t be too far away from you and that whenever we need each other we will only be an hour away. Okay, well, maybe two because of traffic.”
He smiled. He didn’t know how long messages would be retained on his phone but he hoped he would always be able to listen to the pure joy he heard in his daughter’s voice.
He saw a man approaching the gate from the other side and timed his approach to reach it at the same time. He acted like he was trying to carry on a phone conversation while digging his key to the gate out of his pocket.
“That’s great,” he said into the phone. “I feel the same way about it too.”
The man on the other side pushed open the gate to exit. Bosch mumbled a thank you and entered. He preserved the message from his daughter one more time and put his phone away.
Signs along the stone pathway directed him to the building he was looking for and he found Abigail Turnbull’s apartment on the first floor. As he approached he saw that the front door was open behind a screen door. He heard a voice from within the apartment.