“Who is ‘they’?”
“I don’t know. The Cucos? The FBI? It could be anybody at this point. We’ve obviously poked the hornet’s nest.”
I scanned the entire room, surveying the damage.
“I need to figure out what they took,” I said. “And go to the Apple Store.”
With a foot, I shoved the laptop a few feet across the floor. It left a trail of maple syrup.
“This one is done,” I said. “But I’ve got everything on the cloud. I’ll be back in business as soon as I pick up a new one.”
“What makes you think they took something?” Bosch asked.
I spread my hands to take in the whole ransacked room.
“They were covering something up by trashing the place,” I said. “Something they found.”
Bosch didn’t respond.
“You don’t think so?” I asked.
“Not sure,” he said. “Could’ve been a lot of things. First of all, we don’t know this has anything to do with the Sanz case. I’m sure you’ve made your fair share of enemies over the years. It could be unrelated to Sanz.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Bosch. We’ve both had break-ins just days apart. What’s the connection? Sanz. This is them. Believe me. And it’s not going to stop us. Fuck them. This will just make it taste all the better when we take them down and Lucinda does the resurrection walk.”
“Resurrection walk?”
“When she is raised from the dead.”
“Okay.”
He looked a little baffled by the term.
“You gotta make sure you’re there for that, Harry,” I said. “That will be something.”
“You get her out, I’ll be there,” he said.
PART FIVE
OCTOBER — FINAL PREP
21
BOSCH WAS LYINGchest down, his left cheek on the dry scrub grass that had sprouted in the yard after the torrential rains of last winter. It was now October and the grass had dried to a yellow-brown over the summer months. Each blade was crisp and felt like a knife’s edge against his skin. He heard the woman’s voice from behind him.
“Okay, both hands at your sides, palms up,” she said. “There was no effort to break his fall. He was essentially dead before he hit the ground.”
Bosch adjusted his hands accordingly.
“Like that?” he asked.
“Uh, move your right about four inches farther out from your body,” she said. “No, left. Sorry, I meant your left hand four inches farther out.”
Bosch adjusted.
“Perfect,” she said.
She was Shami Arslanian, a forensics expert Mickey Haller had brought out from New York. The hearing on the Lucinda Sanz habeas petition was a week away and Arslanian had come out to prep for her presentation and testimony. Bosch had brought her to the scene of the crime, the front lawn where Roberto Sanz had been fatally shot twice in the back. She had determined that Bosch was within an inch of Sanz’s height and twenty pounds of his weight, so Bosch would be Sanz’s stand-in — actually, his lie-in. She set up a camera with a laser focus on a tripod.