She hung up before he could say good-bye. Bosch stood there next to the couch for a long time, thinking about her and what had happened to them.

The phone rang while still in his hand.

“Yes?”

“Detective Bosch? I got a message to call you.”

“Mr. Vascik?”

“Yes. From Triple A Process. My boss Shelly said you — ”

“Yes, I called.”

Bosch sat down on the couch and pulled a notebook onto his thigh. He took a pen out of his pocket and wrote Vascik’s name on the top of a page. Vascik sounded young and white to him. He had some Midwest in his voice.

“How old are you, Steve?”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“You been with Triple A very long?”

“A few months.”

“Okay, last week, on Thursday, you served paper on an LAPD detective named John Chastain, do you remember that?”

“Sure. He didn’t want to be served. Most cops I’ve done don’t really care. They’re used to it.”

“Right. That’s what I wanted to ask you about. When you say he didn’t want to be served, what do you mean exactly?”

“Well, the first time I tried to serve him he refused to take the subpoena and walked away. Then when — ”

“Wait a minute, go back. When was the first time?”

“It was Thursday morning. I went to the lobby at Parker Center and had the cop at the desk call him and tell him to come down. I didn’t say what it was for. It said on the paper he was IAD so I just said I was a citizen with something for him that he needed. He came down and when I said who I was he just backed off and went back to the elevator.”

“What you’re saying is that it was like he knew you had a subpoena and even what case it was?”

“Right. Exactly.”

Bosch thought about what he had read in Elias’s last notebook. His feuding with a source named “Parker.”

“Okay, then what?”

“Well, then I went and did some other jobs and I came back about three-thirty and watched the employee lot at Parker. I saw him come out to go home, I guess, and I cut between some cars and ducked down and sort of came up just as he was opening his door. I had my spiel all worked out and told him he was served and said the case number and all of that. He still wouldn’t take the paper but that didn’t matter because under California law all you — ”

“Right, I know. You can’t refuse a subpoena once you have been advised that it is a legal, court-ordered subpoena. So what did he do?”

“Well, first he scared the shit out of me. He put his arm under his coat like he was going for his gun or something.”

“Then what?”