The house was lit from the outside by floodlights angled up from the ground. There was a large turnaround at the front and a tributary drive that wrapped around behind the main structure. Bosch assumed the garage was in the back. There were no vehicles anywhere in sight, and Bosch realized that all of the lights that he had seen through the grove were exterior. The house itself was dark. It looked like nobody was home.

Bosch stood up and climbed the embankment. He started toward the house and soon found himself on a raised concrete pad. The H design painted in the center indicated that it was a helicopter pad. He continued on, moving directly toward the house, when a deviation in his peripheral vision distracted him. He looked to his left toward a slight rise in the landscape.

At first he didn’t see anything. The house was so brightly lit that the stars above were barely visible and the area around the mansion seemed pitch-black. But then he saw the movement again, high up over the hill. He suddenly realized that he was seeing the dark blades of a wind turbine cutting through the air, momentarily blocking the dim light of the stars and rearranging the sky.

The whooshing sound he had been listening to as he moved through the grove was coming from the wind turbine. Cosgrove so believed in the power of the wind that he had built one of his iron giants in his own backyard. Bosch guessed that the lights that bathed the exterior of the château were powered by the winds that tirelessly moved across the Valley.

Bosch refocused his attention on the lighted mansion, and almost immediately he was struck with a feeling of hesitation, a second-guessing of his actions. The man who lived inside the walls in front of him was smart enough and powerful enough to harness the wind. He lived behind a wall of money and a phalanx—no, make that an army—of trees. He did not need to run a fence along the edges of his vast property, because he knew the grove would intimidate any intruder who dared to cross it. He lived in a castle with a surrounding moat, and who was Bosch to think he could take him down? Bosch didn’t even know the exact nature of the crime. Anneke Jespersen was dead and Bosch was chasing a hunch. He had no evidence of anything. He had a twenty-year-old coincidence and nothing else.