is that it is not worth that. It’s not worth the toll you may have to pay.”

“Not worth it? There’s a killer out there. He thinks he made it away free. For years, he has thought that. Decades. And I’m going to change that.”

“You’re not understanding what I’m saying. I don’t want any guilty person to get away, especially with murder. But what I am talking about here is you. You are my only concern here. There is a basic rule of nature. No living thing sacrifices itself or hurts itself needlessly. It’s the will of survival and I fear the circumstances of your life may have blunted your own survival skills. You may be throwing it to the wind, not caring what happens to you emotionally, physically, in every way, in this pursuit. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

She took a breather. He said nothing.

“I have to say,” she continued quietly, “I’m very nervous about this. I’ve never had this situation come up before and I’ve counseled a lot of cops in nine years here.”

“Well, I got bad news for you.” He smiled. “I went and crashed a party last night at Mittel’s. I think I may have spooked him. At least, I spooked myself.”

“Shit!”

“Is that some new psychiatric term? I’m not familiar with it.”

“This isn’t funny. Why’d you do that?”

Bosch thought a moment.

“I don’t know. It was kind of a whim type of thing. I was just driving by his house and there was a party. It kind of…it just made me angry for some reason. Him having a party and my mother…”

“Did you speak to him about the case?”

“No. I didn’t even tell him my name. We just kind’ve sparred around for a few minutes but then I left him something. Remember that newspaper clip I showed you Wednesday? I left that for him. I saw him read it. I think it struck a nerve.”

She exhaled loudly.

“Now, step outside yourself and look as an uninvolved observer at what you did. If you can. Was that a smart thing to do, going there like that?”

“I already have thought about it. No, it wasn’t smart. It was a mistake. He’ll probably warn Conklin. They’ll both know somebody’s out there, coming for them. They’ll close ranks.”

“You see, you are proving my point for me. I want you to promise me you won’t do anything foolish like that again.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, then I have to tell you that a patient-doctor relationship can be broken if the therapist believes the patient is endangering himself or others. I told you I was almost powerless to stop you. Not completely.”

“You’d go to Irving?”

“I will if I believe you are being reckless.”

Bosch felt anger as he realized she had ultimate control over him and what he was doing. He swallowed the anger and held up his hands, surrendering.

“All right. I won’t go crashing any parties again.”

“No. I want more than that. I want you to stay away from these men that you think may have been involved.”

“What I’ll promise you is that I won’t go to them until I have the whole thing in the bag.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

“I hope so.”

They were silent for nearly a minute after that. It was a cooling-off period. She turned slightly in her chair, not looking at him, probably thinking what to say next.

“Let’s move on,” she finally said. “You understand that this whole thing, this pursuit of yours, has eclipsed what we’re supposed to be doing here?”

“I know.”

“So we’re prolonging my evaluation.”

“Well, that doesn’t bother me as much anymore. I need the time off the job for this other thing.”

“Well, as long as you are happy,” she said sarcastically. “Okay, then I want to go back to the incident that brought you to me. The other day you were very general and very short in your description of what happened. I understand why. I think we were both feeling each other out at that point. But we are far past that now. I’d like a fuller story. You said the other day that Lieutenant Pounds set things into motion?”

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“First of all, he’s a commander of detectives who has never been a detective himself. Oh, technically, he probably spent a few months on a table somewhere along the line so he’d have it on his résumé, but basically he’s an administrator. He’s what we call a Robocrat. A bureaucrat with a badge. He doesn’t know the first thing about clearing cases. The only thing he knows about