The land opened up after Fresno. The climate was arid from the beating sun and dusty from the dry fields. The highway, too, was rough. Its asphalt was thin and the concrete seams had become disjointed by time and disrepair. The surfaces were crumbling and the Crown Vic’s tires banged hard, sometimes making the music inside jump. It wasn’t how Art Pepper would have wanted it.

The state was sixteen billion in debt, and the news always talked about the deficit’s effect on the infrastructure. Out in the middle of the state the theory was a fact.

Bosch got to Modesto by midday. First on his agenda was a cursory drive by the Public Safety Center, where Sheriff J.J. Drummond held sway. It looked like a fairly new building, with the attendant jail next door. Out front, there was a statue of a police dog fallen in the line of duty, and Bosch wondered why there was apparently no human deserving of the same treatment.

Normally when Bosch followed a case out of Los Angeles, he checked in at the Police or Sheriff’s Department at his destination. It was a courtesy, but it was also like leaving bread crumbs behind should anything go wrong. But not this time. He didn’t know if Sheriff J.J. Drummond had been involved in any way with Anneke Jespersen’s death. But there was too much smoke and there were too many coincidences and connections for Bosch to take the chance of alerting Drummond to the investigation.

As if to underline those coincidences, he found Cosgrove Tractor, the John Deere dealership where Reginald Banks worked, only five blocks away from the sheriff’s complex. Bosch cruised it, made a U-turn, and came back to it, stopping at a curb along the front sidewalk.

There was a line of green tractors arranged small to large in front of the dealership. Behind them was a single-row parking lot and then the dealership with floor-to-ceiling glass windows running along the entire face of the building. Bosch hopped out of his car and grabbed a pair of small but powerful binoculars from one of the equipment boxes in the trunk. Returning to the front seat, he used the binos to look into the dealership. At each front corner was a desk with a salesman behind it. Between them ran another line of tractors and ATVs, all of them grass-green and shining.