Before leaving, Bosch changed his shirt, hanging the blue button-down in the closet in case he stayed through Wednesday and needed to wear it again. He opened his bag and selected a black pullover shirt. He got dressed, then locked the place up and went back to his car. “Over the Rainbow” was playing again as he pulled back out on the road.

Bosch’s next stop was Manteca, and long before he got there, he could see the water tower that said “Cosgrove Ag” on it. The Cosgrove business enterprise was located on a frontage road running parallel to the freeway. It consisted of an office structure as well as a vast produce storage and trucking facility where dozens of carriers and tank trucks were lined up and ready for transport. Flanking the complex were what seemed to Bosch to be miles and miles of grapevines covering the landscape until it rolled upward toward the ash-colored mountains to the west. Out on the horizon the natural landscape was broken only by the steel giants that were coming down the slopes like invaders from another world. The towering wind turbines that Carl Cosgrove had brought to the Valley.

After being duly impressed by the expanse of the Cosgrove empire, Bosch went slumming. Following the maps he had printed Saturday, he went to the addresses the DMV held for Francis John Dowler and Reginald Banks. Neither place impressed Bosch beyond the fact that they appeared to be on Cosgrove land.

Banks lived in a small free-standing home that backed up to the almond groves off Brunswick Road. Checking his map and noting the lack of dedicated roads between Brunswick to the north and Hammett to the south, Bosch believed that it might be possible to enter the grove on foot behind Banks’s home and come out on Hammett—many hours later.

Banks’s home needed a paint job and its windows needed cleaning. If he was living there with his family, there were no indications of it. The yard was strewn with beer bottles, all within easy throwing distance of a porch with an old seam-split couch on it. Banks had not cleaned up after his weekend.

The last stop before dinner was Dowler’s double-wide mobile home with the TV dish mounted on the roof’s crest line. It was located in a trailer park off the frontage road, and each home had a parking pad equal in length to the home itself for parking the long hauler. The park was where Cosgrove drivers lived.