Resurrection Walk

Maddie’s car was not there, and there were no other vehicles that drew Bosch’s suspicion. He turned back to the kitchen door and quietly entered the house again, holding the gun up at the ready. His most valuable tool now was his hearing but his left ear was afflicted with low-level tinnitus. He strained to hear any sound. He made the turn out of the kitchen and into the entry area by the front door. This gave him a view of the living room and dining area. He moved forward but noticed nothing unusual until he got into the living room and saw a record spinning on the turntable.

The tonearm was up; no music was playing. Bosch switched the player off and stared at the record until it stopped turning. It was the Miles Davis Live at the Fillmore East album he had last played days before. He knew he had left it on the platter, but he was sure he had turned off the player.

“Harry, what’s happening?”

Bosch heard Haller’s tinny voice coming from his pocket. He pulled out his phone and responded.

“So far nothing seems wrong. But somebody was here. And they wanted me to know it.”

“You sure?”

Bosch realized that someone had been smoking in the house. He hadn’t smoked in twenty years but he knew the smell that hung in the air in a closed space when someone recently had.

“I’m sure,” he said.

“Who?” Haller asked.

“I don’t know. Yet.”

“You need to call the cops. Get it on the record.”

“I’m not finished checking the house. Let me call you back.”

“Fine, but you need to call the—”

Bosch disconnected, dropped the phone in his pocket, and continued the sweep of the house. He checked the bedrooms and bathrooms but saw no further evidence of intrusion. He sat down on his bed. He thought about things and wondered again if it was possible that he had left the door open and the turntable spinning. Maybe the smell of a cigarette was a ghost memory of his own former addiction or a side effect of his medical treatment. He knew that short-term memory loss and a heightened or diminished sense of smell or taste were possible side effects of the therapy he was receiving.

Dr. Ferras had given Bosch his personal cell number, and Bosch thought about calling now. But he quickly dismissed the idea. What was Ferras going to say beyond what was already in the small print of the materials Bosch had signed? Forgetfulness was a possible side effect.

Bosch felt tired and old. And defeated. He put the gun on the side table. The pillow looked so inviting. He thought about calling his daughter to see if she had come by and left the door open. She didn’t smoke, as far as Bosch knew, but the man she was dating did. He decided he would do it later. He would also decide whether to call the police later. Right now he needed to rest.

He lay down and soon his dark thoughts about mortality slipped away and he was dreaming of himself as a younger man, moving through a tunnel with a dying flashlight.

17

It was a five-hour drive and Bosch left home in predawn darkness to get ahead of traffic and make it to the prison by 10 a.m., the start of visiting hours. He knew he was risking a ten-hour round trip and the waste of a whole day if Angel Acosta refused to see him. But he was riding on a hunch based on decades of experience in law enforcement and banking that a twenty-nine-year-old lifer would welcome any interruption or change of pace in a schedule that offered little of it for the next forty or fifty years. The trick would be getting him to open up and talk once they were face-to-face.

Along the way he burned through his whole playlist of favorite jazz recordings, from Cannonball Adderley to Joe Zawinul, finishing with Weather Report’s “Birdland,” Zawinul’s signature fusion composition, as he pulled into the visitors’ parking lot at Corcoran State Prison. The music had cleared his mind of the concerns he’d been carrying since arriving home to see his kitchen door open three days earlier. He had found himself in the strange position of hoping it had been an intruder and not the other option: the first indication of a slide into dementia. He had filed a police report but knew that it was the kind of crime that would receive little attention from the LAPD’s North Hollywood Division burglary unit. The officer who took the report was not convinced there had been a break-in, since Bosch could not say whether anything was taken. The officer did not bother to call a fingerprint technician to the house either. Bosch could not fault him for this, given his own uncertainty.