walk away? What does doing what I do for the department matter if I can’t do this for her…and for me?”

He stood up and put the notebook into his jacket pocket.

“I’m going. Where’s the rest of my stuff?”

“No.”

Bosch hesitated. Irving looked up at him and Bosch saw the anger was gone now.

“I did nothing wrong,” Irving said quietly.

“Sure you did,” Bosch said just as quietly. He leaned over the table until he was only a few feet away. “We all did, Chief. We let it go. That was our crime. But not anymore. At least, not with me. If you want to help, you know how to reach me.”

He headed toward the door.

“What do you want?”

Bosch looked back at him.

“Tell me about Pounds. I need to know what happened. It’s the only way I’ll know if it’s connected.”

“Then sit down.”

Bosch took the chair by the door and sat down. They both took some time to calm down before Irving finally spoke.

“We started looking for him Saturday night. We found his car Sunday noon in Griffith Park. One of the tunnels closed after the quake. It was like they knew we’d be looking from the air, so they put the car in a tunnel.”

“Why’d you start looking before you knew he was dead?”

“The wife. She started calling Saturday morning. She said he’d gotten a call Friday night at home, she didn’t know who. But whoever it was managed to convince Pounds to leave the house and meet him. Pounds didn’t tell his wife what it was about. He said he’d be back in an hour or two. He left and never came back. In the morning she called us.”

“Pounds is unlisted, I assume.”

“Yes. That gives rise to the probability it was someone in the department.”

Bosch thought about this.

“Not necessarily. It just had to be someone with connections to people in the city. People that could get his number with a phone call. You ought to put out the word. Grant amnesty to anyone who comes forward and says they gave up the number. Say you’ll go light in exchange for the name of the person they gave it to. That’s who you want. Chances are whoever gave out the number didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Irving nodded.

“That’s an idea. Within the department there are hundreds who could get his number. There may be no other way to go.”

“Tell me more about Pounds.”

“We went to work right there in the tunnel. By Sunday the media had wind that we were looking for him, so the tunnel worked to our advantage. No helicopters flying over, bothering us. We just set up lights in the tunnel.”

“He was in the car?”

Bosch was acting like he knew nothing. He knew that if he expected Hinojos to respect his confidences, he must in turn respect hers.

“Yes, he was in the trunk. And, my God, was it bad. He…He’d been stripped of his clothes. He’d been beaten. Then—then there was the evidence of torture…”

Bosch waited but Irving had stopped.

“What? What did they do to him?”

“They burned him. The genitals, nipples, fingers…My God.”

Irving ran his hand over his shaven scalp and closed his eyes while he did it. Bosch could see that he could not get the images out of his mind. Bosch was having trouble with it, too. His guilt was like a palpable object in his chest.

“It was like they wanted something from him,” Irving said. “But he couldn’t give it. He didn’t have it and…and they kept at him.”

Suddenly, Bosch felt the slight tremor of an earthquake and reached for the table to steady himself. He looked at Irving for confirmation and realized there was no tremor. It was himself, shaking again.

“Wait a minute.”

The room tilted slightly then righted itself.

“What is it?”

“Wait a minute.”

Without another word Bosch stood up and went out the door. He quickly went down the hall to the men’s room by the water fountain. There was someone in front of one of the sinks shaving but Bosch didn’t take the time to look at him. He pushed through one of the stall doors and vomited into the toilet, barely making it in time.

He flushed the toilet but the spasm came again and then again until he was empty, until he had nothing left inside but the image of Pounds naked and dead, tortured.

“You okay in there, buddy?” a voice said from outside the stall.

“Just leave me alone.”

“Sorry, just asking.”

Bosch stayed in the stall a few more minutes, leaning against the wall.