The concrete blonde - By Michael Connelly Page 0,83

talk. I—”

She reached up and straightened his tie and then smoothed it on his chest.

“It's okay,” she said. “What will you do now?”

“Follow the case. Whether officially or not, I have to follow this. I have to find the second man, the second killer.”

She just looked at him for a few moments and he knew she had probably hoped for a different answer.

“I'm sorry. It's not something I can put off. Things are happening.”

“I'm going to go in to school then. So I don't lose the whole day. Will you be up to the house tonight?”

“I'll try.”

“Okay, see you, Harry. Be optimistic.”

He smiled and she leaned into him and kissed him on the cheek. Then she walked off toward the escalator.

Bosch was watching her go when Bremmer came up.

“You want to talk about this? That was some interesting testimony in there.”

“I said all I'm saying on the stand.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nope.”

“What about what she says? That the second killer is really the first and that Church didn't kill anybody.”

“What do you expect her to say? It's bullshit. Just remember, what I said in the courtroom was under oath. What she says out here isn't. It's bullshit, Bremmer. Don't fall for it.”

“Look, Harry, I have to write this. You know? It's my job. You going to understand that? No hard feelings?”

“No hard feelings, Bremmer. Everybody has got their job to do. Now I'm going to go do mine, okay?”

He walked off toward the escalator. Outside at the statue, he lit a cigarette and gave one to Tommy Faraway, who had been sifting through the ash can.

“What's happening, Lieutenant?” the homeless man asked.

“Justice is happening.”

18

Bosch drove over to Central Division and found an open parking space at the front curb. For a while, he sat in his car looking at two trustees from the lockup washing the painted enamel mural that stretched along the front wall of the bunkerlike station. It was a depiction of a nirvana where black and white and brown children played together and smiled at friendly police officers. It was a depiction of a place where the children still had hope. In angry black spray paint along the bottom of the mural someone had written, “This is a damnable lie!”

Bosch wondered whether someone from the neighborhood or a cop had done it. He smoked two cigarettes and tried to clear his mind of what had happened in the courtroom. He felt strangely at peace with the idea that some of his secrets had been revealed. But he held little hope for the outcome of the trial. He had moved into a feeling of resignation, an acceptance that the jury would find against him, that the twisted delivery of evidence in the case would convince them that he had acted, if not like the monster Chandler had described, then at least in an undesirable and reckless manner. They would never know what it was like to have to make such decisions as he had made in so fleeting a moment.

It was the same old story that every cop knew. The citizens want their police to protect them, to keep the plague from their eyes, from their doors. But those same John Q.'s are the first to stare wide-eyed and point the finger of outrage when they see close up exactly what the job they've given the cops entails. Bosch wasn't a hardliner. He didn't condone the actions taken by police in the André Galton and the Rodney King cases. But he understood those actions and knew that his own actions ultimately shared a common root.

Through political opportunism and ineptitude, the city had allowed the department to languish for years as an understaffed and underequipped paramilitary organization. Infected with political bacteria itself, the department was top-heavy with managers while the ranks below were so thin that the dog soldiers on the street rarely had the time or inclination to step out of their protective machines, their cars, to meet the people they served. They only ventured out to deal with the dirtbags and, consequently, Bosch knew, it had created a police culture in which everybody not in blue was seen as a dirtbag and was treated as such. Everybody. You ended up with your André Galtons and your Rodney Kings. You ended up with a riot the dog soldiers couldn't control. You ended up with a mural on a station house wall that was a damnable lie.

He badged his way past the front desk and took the stairs up to the Administrative