Detective Bosch, I will make contact with Frej and set up the phone call. I will get back to you with the details as soon as possible. I think at this point we should make our intentions clear. I am promising you confidentiality on this matter as long as you can assure me that I will have the exclusive first story when you make an arrest or wish to seek the public’s help, whichever comes first.

Are we agreed?

Bosch had known that his interaction with the Danish journalist would eventually come to this. He hit the return button and told Bonn that he agreed to provide him with an exclusive once there was something in the case worth reporting.

He fired off the email with a hard strike on the send button, then swiveled his chair and looked back toward the squad lieutenant’s office. He could see O’Toole in there, still at his desk.

“What’s wrong, Harry?” Chu asked. “What did the Tool do now?”

“Nothing,” Bosch said. “Don’t worry about it. But I gotta go.”

“Go where?”

“To see Casey Stengel.”

“Well, you want some backup?”

Bosch stared momentarily at his partner. Chu was Chinese-American, and as far as Bosch could tell, he knew nothing about sports. He had been born long after Casey Stengel was dead. He seemed sincere in not knowing who the Hall of Fame baseball player and manager was.

“No, I don’t think I need backup. I’ll check in with you later.”

“I’ll be here, Harry.”

“I know.”

Chapter 14

14

Bosch spent an hour roaming around Forest Lawn while waiting to pick up sandwiches at Giamela’s. Out of respect for his former partner Frankie Sheehan, he started at Casey Stengel’s last resting spot and then took the celebrity tour, passing stones etched with names like Gable and Lombard, Disney, Flynn, Ladd, and Nat King Cole as he made his way to the Good Shepherd section of the vast cemetery. Once there, he paid respects to the father he never knew. The stone said “J. Michael Haller, Father and Husband,” but Bosch knew that he was never accounted for in that family equation.

After a while he walked down the hill a bit to where it was flatter and the graves were closer together. It took him a while because he was working off a twelve-year-old memory, but eventually he found the stone that marked the grave of Arthur Delacroix, a boy whose case Bosch had once worked. A cheap plastic vase containing the dried stems of long-dead flowers sat next to the stone. They seemed to be a reminder of how the boy had been forgotten in life before being forgotten in death. Bosch picked up the vase and found a trash can for it on his way out of the cemetery.