“It takes two strides to cover ten feet,” Holodnak said. “If you had waited for him to make that move, he would’ve gotten to you as you fired. That would be a tie. Who loses in a tie?”

“I do,” Madeline said.

“That’s right. You handled it correctly.”

Next was a scenario where she entered a school after a report of gunfire. Moving down an empty hallway, she heard children’s screams from up ahead. She then made the turn and saw a man outside a classroom door, pointing a gun at a woman huddled on the floor, trying to shield her head with her hands.

“Please don’t,” the woman begged.

The gunman’s back was to Madeline. She fired immediately, striking the man in the back and head, knocking him down before he could shoot the woman. Even though she had not identified herself as a police officer or told the gunman to drop his weapon, Holodnak told her she had performed well and within policy. He pointed to a whiteboard along the left wall. It had some shooting diagrams drawn on it, but across the top it had one word in large capitals: IDOL

“Immediate defense of life,” Holodnak said. “You are within policy if your action is in immediate defense of life. That can mean your life or somebody else’s. It doesn’t matter.”

“Okay.”

“I have one question for you, though. How did you assess what you saw? What I mean is, what made you think that was a teacher being threatened by a bad guy? How did you know the woman wasn’t the bad guy who had just been disarmed by a teacher?”

Bosch had drawn the same immediate conclusions as his daughter. It had just been instinct. He would have fired just as she had.

“Well,” Maddie said. “Their clothes. He had his shirt out, and I don’t think a teacher would do that. And she had glasses and her hair up like a teacher. I saw she had a rubber band around her wrist, and I had a teacher who did that.”

Holodnak nodded.

“Well, you got it right. I was just curious about how. It’s amazing what can be assimilated by the mind in so short a time.”

They moved on, and Holodnak next put her in an unusual scenario where she was traveling on a commercial airliner, as detectives often do. She was armed and in her seat when a traveler two seats ahead of her jumped up and grabbed a flight attendant around the neck and threatened her with a knife.