had received at the security desk. He knew, of course, that the Black Widow could have arrived as an employee or with an employee, but nevertheless he studied the names of the seventeen visitors on the list. None of them was Laurie Lee Wells. That would have been too easy. But only four were women, none were visiting Manley, and only one was visiting either Michaelson or Mitchell. That name was Sonja Soquin, who had arrived at 2:55 p.m. for a three o’clock appointment with Michaelson. Calculating from the time Reyes got the call while sitting with Bosch, he estimated that Manley had fallen from the building to his death sometime between 3:50 and 4:00 p.m.
The elevator opened and Bosch stepped out. He looked up and down the hall and saw a uniformed officer standing in front of an open door Bosch assumed was the maintenance entrance to the roof. He walked that way.
“Anybody gone up yet?” he asked.
“Not yet,” the officer said. “It might be a crime scene.”
As Bosch got closer he saw that the officer’s name tag said OHLMAN.
“I’m going up,” Bosch said.
The officer hesitated while eyeing Bosch’s ID tag. But Bosch turned as if to look back down the hallway.
“This is the only way up?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Ohlman said. “The door was open when I got up here.”
“Okay, let me take a look. My partner, Reyes, will be up soon. Tell him I’m up top.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ohlman stepped aside and Bosch entered a large maintenance room that had an iron staircase going up to the roof.
Bosch took the stairs slowly, favoring his surgically repaired knee. It was at least thirty steps. When he got to the top he leaned against a steel railing to catch his breath for a moment and then pushed through a door.
A murder of crows flew into the air as the metal door was taken by the wind and banged sharply against the wall. Bosch stepped out. The view was magnificent. To the west he could see the sun beginning to dip toward the Pacific, the orange ball reflecting on a blue-black surface at least twenty miles away.
He walked toward the far edge, where the building curved and which he judged was the point Manley had dropped from. He walked slowly and scanned the ground, moving first across a helicopter pad and then an expanse of gravel on tar. An LAPD helicopter was circling above. Heavy wind buffeted his body, a reminder not to get too near the edge.
Under his feet he could feel that the tar had softened in the direct sunlight of the day.
The door slammed behind him and he whirled around, his hand going to his hip.
There was no one.
The wind.
A two-foot-high parapet ran along the edge of the building. It had a metal endcap containing the lighting strip that outlined the edges of the building in blue at night. The mirrored tower looked generic by day but was a standout on the downtown skyline after sundown.
Near the edge he saw a disturbance in the gravel—a three-foot-long deviation where gravel had been raked off the tar. He lowered himself, bracing his new knee with his hand as he dropped into a baseball catcher’s stance. He studied the marking and decided it could have been a drag mark or a slide mark that occurred during a struggle. But it appeared to have occurred recently: the tar had not been grayed by exposure to the sun and smog, as it had been in other places.
A helicopter made a loud pass overhead. Bosch did not look up. He studied what he was sure was a mark left by Clayton Manley before he went over the edge and down to the hard ground like a broken crow.
50
There was another police officer standing guard in the reception area on the sixteenth floor. His name tag said FRENCH.
“Any of my guys up here yet?” Bosch asked.
“Not yet,” the officer said.
“You’re keeping people from leaving?”
“That’s right.”
“When did you get here?”
“We were code seven at the food court across the street. We got here pretty quick after the call. Maybe twenty-five minutes ago.”
“We?”
“My partner’s upstairs. The firm has elevators on the second level too.”
“Okay, I need to go back to the victim’s office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bosch walked past the suede couch and started around the staircase but then thought of something and returned to the officer.
“Officer French, did anybody try to leave while you’ve been here?”
“Just a couple people, sir.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t get names. I wasn’t told to do that.”
“Male or