While Bosch sat in his rental car looking at the Dowler residence, a door opened on the side under the carport and a woman stepped out and looked suspiciously at him. Bosch waved like he was an old friend, disarming her a bit. She stepped down the driveway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was what Bosch’s old partner Jerry Edgar would have called a 50/50—fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight.

“You looking for somebody?” she asked.

“Well, I was hoping to find Frank at home. But I see his truck is gone.”

Bosch waved toward the empty parking pad.

“He coming back anytime soon?”

“He had to take a load of juice up to American Canyon. He might have to wait up there until they have something for him to bring back down. He should be back tomorrow night prob’ly. Who are you?”

“Just a friend passing through. I knew him twenty years ago in the Gulf. Will you tell him John Bagnall said hello?”

“I’ll do that.”

Bosch couldn’t remember if Dowler’s wife’s name was in the material Chu had put together. If he’d had the name, he would have used it as he said good-bye. She turned and headed back to the door she had left open. Bosch noticed a motorcycle with a gas tank painted like a bluebottle fly parked under one of the double-wide’s awnings. He guessed that when Dowler wasn’t running grape juice in a big rig, he liked gliding on a Harley.

Bosch drove out of the park, hoping he had not caused enough suspicion to warrant anything more than curiosity on the woman’s part. And he hoped Dowler wasn’t the sort of husband who called home every night when he was on the road.

Bosch’s second-to-last stop on his tour of the Central Valley took him to Stockton, where he pulled into the lot of the Steers, the steakhouse where Christopher Henderson met his end in the walk-in cooler.

But Bosch had to admit to himself that he was doing more than observing the place as a part of the case. He was famished and had been thinking about eating a good steak all day long. It would be hard to beat the steak he had gotten at Craig’s on Saturday night, but he was hungry enough to try.

Never one to be self-conscious about eating in a restaurant alone, he told the young woman at the greeting station that he’d prefer a table over a seat at the bar. He was led to a two-top next to the glass-paneled wine cooler, and he chose the seat that gave him a full view of the restaurant. It was his habit to do this for safety, but he also always tried to prepare to be lucky. Maybe the man himself, Carl Cosgrove, might enter his own restaurant to eat.