“I’m looking for somebody and there is a good chance she is at one of your tables right now. I was wondering if you could look at the tubes for me.”

“What’s she look like?”

Bosch described his wife but could not give any description on clothes because he had not checked the closets at the house. He then waited two minutes while Jardine apparently studied the video screens connected to the surveillance cameras in the poker room.

“Uh, if she’s here, I’m not seeing her,” Jardine finally said. “We don’t have very many women in here this time of night. And she doesn’t match the ones we’ve got. I mean, she could have been in here earlier, maybe one or two o’clock. But not now.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Hey, you got a number. I’ll take a walk around the place, call you back if I see anything.”

“I’ll give you my pager. But if you see her, don’t approach her. Just give me a page.”

“Will do.”

After giving the man his pager number and hanging up, Bosch thought about the card clubs in Gardena and Commerce but decided not to call. If Eleanor was going to stay local she would have gone to Hollywood Park. If she didn’t go there she’d go to Vegas or maybe the Indian place in the desert near Palm Springs. He tried not to think about that and focused his mind back on the case.

Bosch next called the district attorney’s night switchboard after getting the number out of his phone book. He asked to be connected to the on-call prosecutor and was eventually connected to a sleepy attorney named Janis Langwiser. She happened to be the same prosecutor who had filed charges in the so-called hard-boiled eggs case. She had recently moved over from the city attorney’s office and it had been the first time Bosch had worked with her. He had enjoyed her sense of humor and enthusiasm for her job.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, “you’ve got a scrambled eggs case this time? Or better yet, the western omelet case.”

“Not quite. I hate to pull you out of bed but we’re going to need somebody to come out and give us a little guidance on a search we’ll be doing pretty soon.”

“Who’s dead and where’s the search?”

“Dead is Howard Elias, Esquire, and the search is going to be in his office.”

She whistled into the phone and Bosch had to hold it away from his ear.

“Wow,” she said, now fully alert. “This is going to be . . . well, something. Tell me the general details.”

He did and when he was finished Langwiser, who lived thirty miles north in Valencia, agreed to meet the search team at the Bradbury in one hour.