Bosch stopped what he was doing and looked over the top of the briefcase at her for a moment.

“Not really,” he said. “I was just getting a feel for the place. I assume it was thoroughly searched before and there isn’t anything in there that I could find. Did Stacey like the pool?”

He went back to his work inside the briefcase while she told him what a fine swimmer her daughter had been. Bosch really wasn’t doing anything. He was just following an act he had rehearsed in his head all morning.

“She could go up and back without having to come up for air,” Kate Kincaid said.

Bosch closed the case and looked at her. She was smiling at the memory of her daughter. Bosch smiled but without any warmth.

“Mrs. Kincaid, how do you spell innocence?”

“Excuse me?”

“The word. Innocence. How do you spell it?”

“Is this about Stacey? I don’t understand. Why are you — ”

“Indulge me for a moment. Please. Spell the word.”

“I’m not a good speller. With Stacey I always kept a dictionary in my purse in case she asked about a word. You know, one of those little ones that — ”

“Go ahead. Try it.”

She paused to think. The confusion was evident on her face.

“I-double n, I know there’s two. I-double n-o-c-e-n-s-e.”

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Bosch shook his head and reopened the briefcase.

“Almost,” he said. “But there’s two c’s, no s.”

“Darn. I told you.”

She smiled at him. He took something out of the briefcase, closed it and put it down on the floor. He got up and walked across to the couch. He handed her a plastic document envelope. Inside it was one of the anonymous letters that had been sent to Howard Elias.

“Take a look,” he said. “You spelled it wrong there, too.”

She stared at the letter for a long time and then took a deep breath. She spoke without looking up at Bosch.

“I guess I should have used my little dictionary. But I was in a hurry when I wrote this.”

Bosch felt a lifting inside. He knew then that there would be no fight, no difficulty. The woman had been waiting for this moment. Maybe she knew it was coming. Maybe that was why she had said she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

“I understand,” Bosch said. “Would you like to talk to me about this, Mrs. Kincaid? About everything?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would.”

• • •

Bosch put a fresh battery into the tape recorder, then turned it on and put it down on the coffee table, the microphone pointed up so that it would capture his voice as well as Kate Kincaid’s.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.