a while they broke apart but only long enough to get on the chaise lounge together. They sat silently, just holding each other, for the longest time—until the sky started to dim and turn red and purple over the San Gabriels. Bosch knew there were still the secrets he carried, but they would keep for now. And he would avoid that black place of loneliness for just a while longer.

“Do you want to go away this weekend?” he asked. “Get away from the city? We could take that trip up to Lone Pine. Stay in a cabin tomorrow night.”

“That would be wonderful. I could—We could use it.”

A few minutes later she added, “We might not be able to get a cabin, Harry. There's so few of them and they're usually booked by Friday.”

“I already have one on reserve.”

She turned around so she could face him. She smiled slyly and said. “Oh, so you knew all the time. You were just hanging around waiting for me to come back. No sleepless nights, no surprise.”

He didn't smile. He shook his head and for a few moments he looked out at the dying light reflected on the west wall of the San Gabriels.

“I didn't know, Sylvia,” he said. “I hoped.”

About the Author

Michael Connelly is author of the bestselling Harry Bosch series of novels as well as the recent #1 New York Times bestseller The Lincoln Lawyer. He is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Look for the sizzling new thriller

by Michael Connelly

ECHO PARK

Available in mass market in August 07

Please turn this page for a preview.

And don't miss Michael Connelly's

other novels featuring Harry Bosch,

available now wherever books are sold.

The Black Echo

The Black Ice

Angels Flight

A Darkness More than Night

City of Bones

Lost Light

The Narrows

The Closers

THE HIGH TOWER 1993

It was the car they had been looking for. The license plate was gone but Harry Bosch could tell. A 1987 Honda Accord, its maroon paint long faded by the sun. It had been updated in ‘92 with the green Clinton bumper sticker and now even that was faded. The sticker had been made with cheap ink, not meant to last. Back when the election was a long shot. The car was parked in a single-car garage so narrow it made Bosch wonder how the driver had been able to get out. He knew he would have to tell the Forensics people to be extra diligent while checking for prints on the outside of the car and the garage's inner wall. The Forensics people would bristle at being told this but he would become anxious if he didn't.

The garage had a pull-down door with an aluminum handle. Not good for prints but Bosch would point that out to Forensics as well.

“Who found it?” he asked the patrol officers.

They had just strung the yellow tape across the mouth of the cul-de-sac which was made by the two rows of individual garages on either side of the street and the entrance of the High Tower apartment complex.

“The landlord,” the senior officer replied. “The garage goes with an apartment he's got vacant, so it's supposed to be empty. A couple days ago he opens it up because he's got to store some furniture and stuff and he sees the car. Thinks maybe it's somebody visiting one of the other tenants so he lets it go a few days, but then the car stays put and so he starts asking his tenants about it. Nobody knows the car. Nobody knows whose it is. So then he calls us because he starts thinking it might be stolen because of the missing plates. Me and my partner have got the Gesto bulletin on the visor. Once we got here we put it together pretty fast.”

Bosch nodded and stepped closer to the garage. He breathed in deeply through his nose. Marie Gesto had been missing ten days now. If she was in the trunk he would smell it. His partner, Jerry Edgar, joined him.

“Anything?” he asked.

“I don't think so.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“I don't like trunk cases.”

“At least we'd have the victim to work with.”

It was just banter as Bosch's eyes roamed over the car, looking for anything that would help them. Seeing nothing, he took a pair of latex gloves out of his coat pocket, blew them up like balloons to stretch the rubber and then pulled them onto his hands. He held his arms up like a surgeon coming into the operating