he was close but he had reached a point where he needed help or it would be a guessing game. He was surrounded by thousands of rooms and windows. It was beginning to dawn on him that the final part of his search was impossible. He had traveled more than seven thousand miles to find his daughter and he was about as helpless as the ragtag women begging coins from the pavement.
“Let me see the photo,” Eleanor said.
Bosch handed it to her.
“There’s nothing else,” he said. “All these buildings look the same.”
“Let me just look.”
She took her time and Bosch watched her regress two decades to the time she was an FBI agent. Her eyes narrowed and she analyzed the photo as an agent, not as the mother of a missing girl.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s got to be something here.”
“I thought it would be the air conditioners but they’re on every building around here.”
Eleanor nodded but kept her eyes on the photo. Just then Sun came up, his face flushed from the exertion of trying to track a moving target. Eleanor said nothing to him but slightly moved her arm to share the photo with him. They had reached a point in their relationship where words weren’t necessary.
Bosch turned and looked down the corridor of Nathan Road. Whether it was a conscious move or not, he didn’t want to see what he no longer had. From behind he heard Eleanor say, “Wait a minute. There’s a pattern here.”
Bosch turned back.
“What do you mean?”
“We can do this, Harry. There’s a pattern that will lead us right to that room.”
Bosch felt a ghost run down his spine. He moved in close to Eleanor so he could see the photo.
“Show it to me,” he said, urgency fueling each word.
Eleanor pointed to the photo and ran her fingernail along a line of air conditioners reflected in the window.
“Not every window has an air-conditioning unit in the building we are looking for. Some, like this room, have open windows. So there is a pattern. We only have part of it here because we don’t know where this room is in relation to the building.”
“It’s probably in the center. The audio analysis picked up muffled voices cut off by the elevator. The elevator is probably centrally located.”
“That’s good. That helps. Okay, so let’s say windows are dashes and AC boxes are dots. In this reflection we see a pattern for the floor she is on. You start with the room she is in-a dash-and then you go dot, dot, dash, dot, dash.”
She tapped her nail on each part of the pattern on the photo.
“So that’s our pattern,” she added. “Looking up at the building, we’d be looking for it going left to right.”
“Dash, dot, dot, dash, dot, dash,” Bosch repeated. “Windows are dashes.”
“Right,” Eleanor said. “Should we split up the buildings? We know because of the subway that we’re close.”
She turned and looked up at the wall of buildings that ran the entire length of the street. Bosch’s first thought was to not trust any of the buildings to anybody else. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had scanned each building for the pattern himself. But he held back. Eleanor had found the pattern and made this break. He would ride her wave.
“Let’s start,” he said. “Which one should I take”
Pointing, she said, “You take that one, I’ll take this one and, Sun Yee, you check that one. If you get done, you leapfrog to the next building. We go till we find it. Start at the top. We know from the photo, the room is up high.”
She was right, Bosch realized. It would make the search faster than he’d anticipated. He stepped away and went to work on the building he was assigned. He started on the top floor and worked his way down, his eyes scanning back and forth floor by floor. Eleanor and Sun separated and did the same.
Thirty minutes later Bosch was halfway through scanning his third building when Eleanor called out.
“I’ve got it!”
Bosch headed back to her. She had her hand raised and was counting up the floors of the building directly across the street. Sun soon joined them.
“Fourteenth floor. The pattern starts just a little to the right of center. You were right about that, Harry.”
Bosch counted the floors, his eyes rising with his hopes. He got to the fourteenth level and identified the pattern. There were twelve windows across in all and the pattern fit the last six windows