“I haven’t heard from you in a few days,” Hannah said. “What have you been up to?”

“Oh, just a case. Walking a gun.”

“What does that mean?”

“Connecting or walking a gun from case to case to case. We don’t have the weapon itself but ballistics matches link cases. You know, across the years, across geography, victims, like that. A case like this is called a gun walk.”

He offered nothing further and she nodded. She knew he never answered questions about his work in detail.

Bosch listened to the piano man finish “Mood Indigo” and then cleared his throat.

“I met your son yesterday, Hannah,” he said.

He hadn’t been sure how to broach the subject. And so he ended up doing it without finesse. Hannah put her soupspoon down on her plate with a sharpness that made the piano man raise his hands off the keys.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I was up at San Quentin on the case,” he said. “You know, walking the gun, and I had to see someone up there. When I was finished, I had a little bit of time, so I asked to see your son. I only spent ten or fifteen minutes with him. I told him who I was and he said he’d heard of me, that you told him about me.”

Hannah stared into space. Bosch realized he had played it wrong. Her son was not a secret. They had talked about him at length. Bosch knew that he was a sexual offender in prison after pleading guilty to rape. His crime had nearly destroyed his mother but she had found a way to carry on by changing the focus of her work. She moved from family therapy to treating offenders like her own son. And it was that work that had brought her to Bosch. Bosch was thankful that she was in his life and understood the dark serendipity of it. If the son had not committed such a horrendous crime, Bosch would never have met the mother.

“I guess I should’ve told you,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I wasn’t even sure I was going to get the time to try to see him. With the budget cutbacks, they don’t allow overnights up there. You gotta go up and back the same day and so I wasn’t sure.”

“How did he look?”

Spoken with a mother’s fear in her voice.

“I guess he looked all right. I asked him if he was okay and he said he was fine. I didn’t see anything that concerned me, Hannah.”

Her son lived in a place where you were either predator or prey. He wasn’t a big man. His crime had involved drugging his victim, not overpowering her. The tables were turned on him in prison and he was often preyed upon. Hannah had told Bosch all of this.

“Look, we don’t have to talk about it,” Bosch said. “I just wanted you to know. It wasn’t really planned. I had the extra time and I just asked to see him and they set it up for me.”