Bosch thought about the chance he’d had on the hillside, when Mendenhall had left him alone with Drummond.

“I understand,” he said again.

There was only silence in response.

“Henrik? You there?”

“I am sorry. Please hold.”

The line went dead without Bosch being able to respond. Again, he wished he could be in person with this man who had lost so much. O’Toole had reminded Bosch that Anneke Jespersen had been dead twenty years. He said people had moved on and there was no reason to support his traveling all the way to Copenhagen just to give the personal touch to the notification of arrest to her next of kin.

As he waited for Henrik to come back, Bosch raised his eyes over the edge of the cubicle wall like a soldier peeking out of a foxhole. O’Toole happened to be standing in the doorway of his office, surveying the squad room like a land baron watching over his fiefdom. He thought it was about numbers and statistics. He had no clue as to what they were really doing here. He had no idea about the mission.

O’Toole’s eyes eventually came to Bosch’s and they held each other’s stare for a moment. But then the weaker man looked away. O’Toole stepped back into his office and closed the door.

When they had been on the hill, waiting for the first responders, Mendenhall had quietly opened up to Bosch about her investigation. She’d told him things that surprised and hurt him. O’Toole had merely seized on an opportunity to put heat on Bosch but the complaint hadn’t originated with him. It had been Shawn Stone who filed it from San Quentin, claiming that Bosch had endangered him by having him brought to a law enforcement interview room, putting him at risk of being tagged as a snitch. Mendenhall said her conclusion after interviewing all parties was that Stone was more concerned about losing his mother’s attention to Bosch than with getting hit with a snitch jacket. He was hoping that his complaint would damage the relationship between Hannah and Harry.

Bosch had yet to bring the matter up with Hannah and wasn’t sure when he would. He feared that in the long run her son might have been successful with his plan.

The one thing Mendenhall refused to give up was her own motivation. She would not tell Bosch why she had followed him off the reservation. He had to be content with being grateful that she did.

“Detective Bosch?”

“I’m here, Henrik.”

There was a long moment of silence as Henrik gathered his thoughts after coming back on the line.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I thought this would be different, you know?”

His voice was tight with emotion.

“How so?”

There was another pause.