“That’s impossible. I just talked to him. On the phone. Right after you left the post.”

That was the trouble with improvising. You never knew when your story would bump into irrefutable facts. Bosch tried to cover by smiling slyly and nodding.

“Of course you did. He was with us when you called him. He said exactly what we told him to say to you. And then he went back to telling us stories about you and Cosgrove and Drummond . . . Drummer, as you guys called him back then.”

Bosch saw belief enter Banks’s eyes. He knew someone had to have told Bosch about Drummer. He couldn’t just make it up.

Bosch made a show of looking at the file in front of him, as if to check whether he had forgotten something.

“I don’t know, Reg. When this all goes down with the grand jury and you guys all get charged with murder, rape, and conspiracy, et cetera, et cetera, who do you think Cosgrove and Drummond will come up with for lawyers? Who will you be able to get? And when they decide to throw you under the bus and say it was you and Dowler and Henderson that formed the conspiracy, who do you think the jury is going to believe? Them or you?”

His arms pinned behind the chair, Banks tried to lean forward but could only move a few inches. So he just hung his head forward in bitter fear and disappointment.

“That statute of limitations is over,” he said. “I can’t be charged with the boat, and that’s all I did.”

Bosch shook his head slowly. The criminal mind always amazed him in its ability to distance itself from crimes and to rationalize them.

“You can’t even say it, can you? You call it ‘the boat.’ It was rape, you guys raped her. And you don’t know the law either. A criminal conspiracy surrounding the cover-up of the crime continues that crime. You can still be charged, Banks, and you’re going to be.”

Bosch was winging it, selling the play, even if he was making it up as he went.