The Night Fire (Harry Bosch #22) - Michael Connelly Page 0,1

the end.”

“It’s okay, Harry,” she said. “You had your knee. How is it doing?”

“Better every day. I won’t need this cane much longer.”

“When John Jack had his knees done he said it was a new lease on life. That was fifteen years ago.”

Bosch just nodded. He thought a new lease on life was a little optimistic.

“Are you coming back to the house?” Margaret asked. “There is something there for you. From him.”

Bosch looked at her.

“From him?”

“You’ll see. Something I would give only to you.”

Bosch saw members of the family gathered by a couple of stretch limos in the parking lane. It looked like two generations of children.

“Can I walk you over to the limo?” Bosch asked.

“That would be nice, Harry,” Margaret said.

2

Bosch had picked up a cherry pie that morning at Gelson’s and that was what had made him late to the funeral. He carried it into the bungalow on Orange Grove, where John Jack and Margaret Thompson had lived for more than fifty years. He put it on the dining room table with the other plates and trays of food.

The house was crowded. Bosch said hellos and shook a few hands as he pushed his way through the knots of people, looking for Margaret. He found her in the kitchen, oven mitts on and getting a hot pan out of the oven. Keeping busy.

“Harry,” she said. “Did you bring the pie?”

“Yes,” he said. “I put it on the table.”

She opened a drawer and gave Bosch a spatula and a knife.

“What were you going to give me?” Bosch asked.

“Just hold your horses,” Margaret said. “First cut the pie, then go back to John Jack’s office. Down the hall, on the left. It’s on his desk and you can’t miss it.”

Bosch went into the dining room and used the knife she had given him to cut the pie into eight slices. He then made his way again through the people crowded in the living room to the hallway that led back to John Jack’s home office. He had been there before. Years earlier, when they worked cases together, after a long shift Bosch would often end up at the Thompson house for a late meal prepared by Margaret and a strategy session with John Jack. Sometimes Bosch would take the couch in the home office and sleep a few hours before getting back to work on the case. He even kept spare clothes in the office closet. Margaret always left a fresh towel for him in the guest bathroom.

The door was closed and for some reason he knocked, even though he knew no one should be in there.

He opened the door and entered a small cluttered office with shelves on two walls and a desk pushed up against a third under a window. The couch was still there, across from the window. Sitting on a green blotter on the desk was a thick blue plastic binder with three inches of documents inside.

It was a murder book.

BALLARD

3

Ballard studied what she could see of the remains with an unflinching eye. The smell of kerosene mixed with that of burned flesh was overpowering this close, but she stood her ground. She was in charge of the scene until the fire experts arrived. The nylon tent had melted and collapsed on the victim. It tightly shrouded the body in places where the fire had not completely burned through. The body seemed to be in repose and she wondered how he could have slept through it. She also knew that toxicity tests would determine his alcohol and drug levels. Maybe he never felt a thing.

Ballard knew it would not be her case but she pulled out her phone and took photos of the body and the scene, including close-ups of the overturned camping heater, the presumed source of the blaze. She then opened the temperature app on the phone and noted that the current temperature listed for Hollywood was 52 degrees. That would go in her report and be forwarded to the Fire Department’s arson unit.

She stepped back and looked around. It was 3:15 a.m. and Cole Avenue was largely deserted, except for the homeless people who had come out of the tents and cardboard shanties that lined the sidewalk running alongside the Hollywood Recreation Center. They stared both wide-eyed and addled as the investigation into the death of one of their own proceeded.

“How’d we get this?” Ballard asked.

Stan Dvorek, the patrol sergeant who had called her out, stepped over. He had worked the late-show shift