Michael Connelly

“What Connelly does so well in this series is to contrast Harry’s desperate need to play the role of the avenger with his growing realization that what he must do to play that role has alienated him from the human intimacy he craves. It isn’t an uncommon theme in hard-boiled novels, but Connelly manages to rub it raw in a way that others can’t quite equal. It’s never pretty watching Harry edge toward connection with those he loves and then back away, drawn by the pain of others, but it just may be the most compelling train wreck in crime fiction.”
— Booklist * starred review

“Award-winning former crime reporter Connelly hits all the right notes with this latest in his Edgar-winning mystery series featuring sax-playing L.A. detective Harry Bosch. …This exciting procedural is as good as any in the series, and Connelly’s concluding coda has a kicker about Harry’s private life that will draw gasps of astonishment from longtime readers.”
— Publishers Weekly * starred review

“Amazingly, Connelly manages to keep every new curve not only clear but breathlessly exciting. Mystery fans will cherish echoes of The Doorbell Rang and The Long Goodbye, but the best news is that prodigious Connelly hasn’t been content simply to echo his own earlier successes.”
— Kirkus Reviews * starred review

“Not only is Michael Connelly’s ninth Harry Bosch novel one of his best, but it takes this important series in interesting new directions.”
— Patrick Anderson, Washington Post

“…Bosch wears his depression like armor, making him the perfect hero for our paranoid age.”
— Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

“Bosch is among the most complex of the recurring characters in contemporary crime fiction. …Lost Light succeeds, and as Bosch is carried along the arc of his life, the reader is given the gift of an intimate look at the world through the eyes of this complex character…”
— Denver Post

“Harry Bosch is back. Like his creator, he never disappoints. In Lost Light, Michael Connelly ventures into new territory by having the taciturn Bosch narrate the story. It takes nerve and skill to tinker with a formula as successful as the Bosch series. Happily, Connelly has plenty of both. …Lost Light has all of the ingenious plotting and skillful writing that are Connelly’s hallmarks.”
—  The Baltimore Sun

“In Lost Light, he sets Harry on a course delving deeper into the character’s psyche. He remains this generation’s Raymond Chandler.”
— Oline Cogdill,  South Florida Sun-Sentinel

“Connelly’s skill as a prose craftsman remains in full force. He writes about the city of Los Angeles and its environs as poignantly and beautifully as anyone since Nathaniel West.”
— David Montgomery, January Magazine

“Harry dusts off his old files and takes another look. What happens afterwards is Connelly at the top of his form. How lucky we are to be along for the ride!”
— Ruth Jordan, MysteryOne.com

“Bosch tells this tale in first person voice, and Connelly’s Chandler-like narrative is as powerful and moving as ever. I have already re-read many parts of the book. In fact this is Michael’s finest work to date. This book is outstanding on many levels.”
— Richard Katz, MysteryOne.com

“It’s a remarkable thriller even for those not already fans of Hieronymus Bosch. If you’ve followed his adventures through the series, as I have, you’ll find the ending immensely satisfying, as the ‘lost light’ of the title seeps into Harry’s wounded soul.”
— BookLoons.com

“Connelly is the true heir of the hard-boiled tradition perfected by Raymond Chandler’s “Philip Marlowe” novels and those heartfelt exposes of Californian corruption exemplified by Ross Macdonald’s “Lew Archer” classic series of mystery books.”
— Hackwriters.com

Chapter One

The voice on the phone was a whisper. It had a forceful, almost desperate quality to it.

Henry Pierce told the caller he had the wrong number. But the voice became insistent.

“Where is she?” the man asked.

“I don’t know,” Pierce said. “I don’t know anything about her.”

“This is her number. It’s on the site.”

“No, you have the wrong number. There is no one named Lilly here. And I don’t know anything about any site. Okay?”

The caller hung up without responding. Then Pierce hung up, annoyed. He had plugged in the new phone only fifteen minutes earlier and already he had gotten two calls on the line for someone named Lilly.

He put the phone down on the floor and looked around the almost empty apartment. All he had was the black leather couch he sat on, the six boxes of clothes in the bedroom and the new phone. And now the phone was going to be a problem.

Nicole had kept everything — the furniture, the books, the CDs, and most of all the house on Amalfi Drive. She didn’t keep it actually; he had given it all to her. The price of his guilt for letting things slip away. The new apartment was nice. It was high luxury and security, a premiere address in Santa Monica. But he was going to miss the house on Amalfi. And the woman who was still living in it.

He looked down at the phone on the beige carpet, wondering if he should call Nicole and let her know he had moved from the hotel to the apartment and had the new number. But then he shook his head. He had already sent her the e-mail with all the new information. To call her would be breaking the rules she had set and he had promised to follow on their last night together.

The phone rang. He leaned down and checked the caller ID screen this time. The call was coming from the Casa Del Mar again. It was the same guy. Pierce thought about letting it ring through to the message service that came with the new phone number but then he picked up the phone and clicked the talk button.

“Look, man, I don’t know what the problem is. You have the wrong number. There is nobody here named —”

The caller hung up without saying a word.

Pierce reached over to his backpack and pulled out the yellow pad on which his assistant had written down the voice mail instructions. Monica Purl had set up the phone service for him as he had been too busy in the lab all week preparing for the following week’s presentation. And because that was what personal assistants were for.

He tried to read the notes in the dying light of the day. The sun had just slipped beneath the Pacific and he had no lamps yet for the new apartment’s living room. Most new places had sunken lights in the ceilings. Not this one. The apartments were newly renovated, with new kitchens and windows, but the building was old. And slab ceilings without internal wiring could not be renovated in a cost effective way. Pierce didn’t think about that when he rented the place. The bottom line was he needed lamps.

He quickly read through instructions on using the phone’s caller ID and caller directory features. He saw that Monica had set up service for him with something called the convenience package—caller ID, caller directory, call waiting, call forwarding, call everything. And she noted on the page that she had already sent the new number out to his A-level e-mail list. There were almost 80 people on this list. People who he would want to be able to reach him at any time, almost all of them business associates or business associates he also considered friends.

Pierce pressed the talk button again and called the number Monica had listed for setting up and accessing his voice mail program. He then followed the instructions provided by an electronic voice for creating a pass code number. He decided on 92102 — the day Nicole had told him that their three-year relationship was over.

He decided not to record a personal greeting. He would rather hide behind the disembodied electronic voice that announced the number and instructed the caller to leave a message. It was impersonal but then again it was an impersonal world out there.

When he was finished setting up the program a new electronic voice told him he had nine messages. Pierce was surprised by the number — his phone had not been put into service until that morning — but immediately hopeful that maybe one was from Nicole. Maybe several. Maybe she’d had a change of heart. He suddenly envisioned himself returning all the furniture Monica had ordered for him online. He saw himself carrying the cardboard boxes of his clothes back inside the house on Amalfi Drive.

But none of the messages were from Nicole. None of them were from Pierce’s associates or associate/friends either. Only one was for him — a welcome to the system message delivered by the now familiar electronic voice.
The next eight messages were all for Lilly, no last name mentioned. The same woman he had already fielded three calls for. All the messages were from men. Most of them gave hotel names and numbers for calling back. A few gave cell numbers or what they said was a private office line. A few mentioned getting her number off the net or the site without being more specific.

Pierce erased each message after listening to it. He then turned the page on his notebook and wrote down the name Lilly. He underlined it while he thought about things. Lilly — whoever she was — had apparently stopped using the number. It had been dropped back into circulation by the phone company and then reassigned to him. Judging by the all male caller list, the number of calls from hotels and the tone of trepidation and anticipation in the voices he had listened to, Pierce guessed that Lilly might be a prostitute. Or an escort, if there was a difference. He felt a little trill of curiosity and intrigue go through him. Like he knew some secret he wasn’t supposed to know. Like when he called up the security cameras on his screen at work and surreptitiously watched what was going on in the hallways and common areas of the office.

He wondered how long the phone number would have been out of use before it was reassigned to him. The number of calls to the line in one day indicated that the phone number was still out there — probably on the web site mentioned on a few of the messages — and people still believed it was Lilly’s valid number.

“Wrong number,” he said out loud, though he rarely spoke to himself when he wasn’t looking at a computer screen or engaged in an experiment in the lab.

He flipped the page back and looked at the information Monica had written down for him. She had included the phone company’s customer service number. He could and should call to get the number changed. He also knew it would be an annoying inconvenience to have to resend and receive e-mail notifications correcting the number.

Something else made him hesitate about changing the number. He was intrigued. He admitted it to himself. Who was Lilly? Where was she? Why did she give up the telephone number but leave it on the web site? There was a flaw in the logic flow there and maybe that was what gripped him. How did she maintain her business if the web site delivered the wrong number to the client base? The answer was that she didn’t. She couldn’t. Something was wrong and Pierce wanted to know what and why.

It was Friday evening. He decided to let things stand until Monday. He would make the call about changing the number then.

Pierce got up from the couch and walked through the empty living room to the master bedroom, where the six cardboard boxes of his clothing were lined against one wall and a sleeping bag was unrolled along side another. Before moving into the apartment and needing it, he hadn’t used the sleeping bag in almost three years — since a trip to Yosemite with Nicole. Back when he had time to do things, before the chase began, before his life became only about one thing.

He went out onto the balcony and stared out at the cold blue ocean. He was twelve floors up. The view stretched from Venice on the south side to the ridge of the mountains sliding into the sea off Malibu to the north. The sun was gone but there were violent slashes of orange and purple still in the sky. This high the sea breeze was cold and bracing. He put his hands in the pockets of his pants. The fingers of his left hand closed around a coin and he brought it out. A dime. Another reminder of what his life had become.

The neon lights on the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier were on and flashing a repetitive pattern. It made him remember a time two years earlier when the company had rented the pier’s entire amusement park for a private party celebrating the approval of the company’s first batch of patents on molecular memory architecture. No tickets, no lines, no getting off a ride if you were having fun. He and Nicole had stayed in one of the open yellow gondolas of the Ferris wheel for at least a half hour. It had been cold that night too and they huddled against each other. They’d watched the sun go down. Now he couldn’t look at the pier or even a sunset without thinking about her.

In acknowledging this about himself he realized he had rented an apartment with views of the very things that would remind him of Nicole. There was a subliminal pathology there that he didn’t want to explore at the moment.

He put the dime on his thumbnail and flipped it into the air. He watched it until it disappeared into the darkness. There was a park below, a strip of green between the building and the beach. He had already noticed that homeless people snuck in at night and slept in sleeping bags under the trees. Maybe one of them would find the fallen dime.
The phone rang. He went back into the living room and saw the tiny LED screen glowing in the darkness. He picked up the phone and read the screen. The call was coming from the Century Plaza Hotel. He thought about it for two more rings and then answered without saying hello.

“Are you calling for Lilly?” he asked.

A long moment of silence went by but Pierce knew someone was there. He could hear television sounds in the background.

“Hello? Is this call for Lilly?”

Finally a man’s voice answered.

“Yes, is she there?”

“She’s not here at the moment. Can I ask how you got this number?”

“From the site.

“What site?”

The caller hung up. Pierce held the phone to his ear for a moment and then clicked it off. He walked across the room to return the phone to its cradle when it when it rang again. Pierce hit the talk button without looking at the caller ID display.

“You’ve got the wrong number,” he said.

“Wait, Einstein, is that you?”

Pierce smiled. It wasn’t a wrong number. He recognized the voice. It belonged to Cody Zeller, one of the A list recipients of his new number. Zeller often called him Einstein, one of the college nicknames Pierce still endured. Zeller was a friend first and a business associate second. He was a computer security consultant who had designed numerous systems for Pierce over the years as his company grew and moved from larger space to larger space.

“Sorry, Code,” Pierce said. “I thought you were somebody else. This new number is getting a lot of calls for somebody else.”

“New number, new place, does this mean you’re free, white and single again?”

“I guess so.”

“Man, what happened with Nicki?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

He knew talking about it with friends would add a permanency to the end of their relationship.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Zeller said. “Too much time in the lab and not enough between the sheets. I warned you about that, man.”

Zeller laughed. He’d always had a way and looking at a situation or set of facts and cutting away the bullshit. And his laughter told Pierce he was not overly sympathetic to his plight. Zeller was unmarried and Pierce could never remember him in a long term relationship. As far back as college he promised Pierce and their friends he would never practice monogamy in his lifetime. He also knew the woman in question. In his capacity as a security expert he also handled online back-grounding of employment applicants and investors for Pierce. In that role he worked closely at times with Nicole James, the company’s intelligence officer. Make that former intelligence officer now.

“Yeah, I know,” Pierce said, though he didn’t want to talk about this with Zeller. “I should’ve listened.”

“Well, maybe this means you’ll be able to take your spoon out of retirement and meet me out at Zuma one of these mornings.

Zeller lived in Malibu and surfed every morning. It had been nearly ten years since Pierce had been a regular on the waves with him. In fact, he had not even taken his board with him when he moved out of the house on Amalfi. It was up on the rafters in the garage.

“I don’t know, Code. I’ve still got the project, you know. I don’t think my time is going to change much just because she —”

“That’s right, she was only your fiancé, not the project.”

“I don’t mean it like that. I just don’t think I’m —“

“What about tonight? I’II come down. We hit the town like the old days. Put on your black jeans, baby.”

Zeller laughed in encouragement. Pierce didn’t. There had never been old days like that. Pierce had never been a player. He was blue jeans not black jeans. He’d rather spend the night in the lab looking into a scanning tunneling microscope than pursuing sex in a club with an engine fueled by alcohol.

“I think I’m going to pass, man. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do and I need to go back to the lab tonight.”

“Hank, man, you’ve got to give the molecules a rest. One night out. Come on, it will straighten you out, shake up your own molecules for once. You can tell me all about what happened with you and Nicki and I’II pretend to feel sorry for you. I promise.”

Zeller was the only one on the planet who called him Hank, a name Pierce hated. But Pierce was smart enough to know that telling Zeller to stop was out of the question because that would prompt his friend to use the name at all times.

“Call me next time, all right?”

Zeller reluctantly backed off and Pierce promised to keep the next weekend open for a night out. He made no promises about surfing. They hung up and Pierce put the phone in its cradle. He picked up his backpack and headed for the apartment door.

Chapter Two

Pierce used his scramble card to enter the garage attached to Amedeo Technologies and parked his 540 in his assigned space. The entrance to the building came open as he approached, the approval coming from the night man at the dais behind the double-glass doors.

“Thanks, Rudolpho,” Pierce said as he went by.

He used his electronic key to take the elevator to the third floor where the administrative offices were located. He looked up at the camera in the corner and nodded, though he doubted Rudolpho was watching him. It was all being digitized and recorded for later. If ever needed.

In the third floor hallway he worked the combo-lock on his office door and went in.

“Lights,” he said as he went behind his desk.

The overhead lights came on. He turned his computer on and put in the passwords after it booted up. He plugged in the phone line so he could quickly check his e-mail messages before going to work. It was 8 p.m. He liked working at night, having the lab to himself.

For security reasons he never left the computer on or attached to a phone line when he wasn’t working on it. For the same reason he carried no cell phone, pager or personal digital assistant. Though he had one, he rarely carried a laptop computer either. Pierce was paranoid by nature — just a gene splice away from schizophrenia according to Nicole — but also a cautious and practical researcher. He knew that every time he plugged an outside line into his computer or opened a cellular transmission it was as dangerous as sticking a needle into his arm or having sex with a stranger. You never knew what you might be bringing into the pipeline. For some people that was probably part of the thrill of sex. But it wasn’t part of the thrill of chasing the dime.

He had several messages but only three that he decided to read this night. The first was from Nicole and he opened it immediately, again with a hope in his heart that made him uncomfortable because it verged on being maudlin.

But the message was not what he was looking for. It was short, to the point and so professional it was devoid of any reference to their ill-fated romance. Just a former employee’s last sign off before moving on to bigger and better things—in career and romance.

Hewlett,
I’m out of here. Everything’s in the files. (by the way, the Bronson deal finally hit the media — SJMN got it first. Nothing new but you might want to check it out.) Thanks for everything and good luck.
Nic

Pierce stared at the message for a long time. He noted that it had been sent at 4:55 p.m., just a few hours earlier. There was no sense in replying because her e-mail address would have been wiped from the system at 5 p.m. when she turned in her scramble card. She was gone and there seemed to be nothing so permanent as being wiped from the system.

She had called him Hewlett and he wondered about that for a long moment. In the past she had used the name as an endearment. A secret name only a lover would use. It was based on his initials — HP, as in Hewlett-Packard, the huge computer manufacturer that these days was one of the Goliaths to Pierce’s David. She always said it with a sweet smile in her voice. Only she could get away with nicknaming him with a competitor’s name. But her using it in this final message, what did it mean? Was she smiling sweetly when she wrote this? Smiling sadly? Was she faltering, changing her mind about them? Was there still a chance, a hope of redemption?

Pierce had never been able to judge the motives of Nicole James. He couldn’t now. He put his hands back on the keyboard and saved the message, moving it to a file where he kept all of her e-mails going back the entire three years of their relationship. The history of their time together — good and bad, moving from co-workers to lovers — could be read in the messages. Almost a thousand messages from her. He knew keeping them was obsessive but it was a routine for him. He also had files for e-mail storage in regard to a number of his business relationships. The file for Nicole had started out that way, but then they moved from business associates to what he thought would be partners in life.

He scrolled through the e-mail list in the Nicole James file, reading the captions in the subject lines the way a man might look through photos of an old girlfriend. He outright smiled at a few of them. Nicole was always the master of the witty or sarcastic subject line. Later, by necessity he knew, she mastered the cutting line and then the hurtful line. One line caught his eye during the scroll — Where do you live? — and he opened the message. It had been sent four months before and was as good a clue as any as to what would become of them. In his mind this message represented the start of the descent for them — the point of no return.

I was just wondering where you live because I haven’t seen you at Amalfi in four nights.

Obviously this is not working, Henry. We need to talk but you are never home to talk. Do I have to come to that lab to talk about us? That would certainly be sad.

He remembered going home to talk to her after that one and it resulting in their first break up. He spent four days in a hotel, living out of a suitcase, lobbying her by phone, e-mail and flowers before being invited to return to Amalfi Drive. A genuine effort on his part followed. He came home every night by eight for at least a week it seemed before he started to slip and his lab shifts began lasting into the small hours again.

Pierce closed the message and then the file. Someday he planned to print out the whole scroll of messages and read it like a novel. He knew it would be the very common, very unoriginal story of how a man’s obsession led him to lose the thing that was most important to him. If it were a novel he would call it Chasing the Dime.

He went back to the current e-mail list and the next message he read was from his partner Charlie Condon. It was just an end of the week reminder about the presentation scheduled for the next week, as if Pierce needed to be reminded. The subject line read RE: Proteus and was a return on a message Pierce had sent Charlie a few days before.

It’s all set with God. He’s coming in Wednesday for a ten o’clock Thursday. The harpoon is sharpened and ready. Be there or be square.
CC

Pierce didn’t bother replying. It was a given that he would be there. A lot was riding on it. No, everything was riding on it. The God referred to in the message was Maurice Goddard. He was a New Yorker, an ET investor Charlie was hoping would be their whale. He was coming in to look at the Proteus project before making his final decision. They were giving him a first look at Proteus, hoping it would be the closer on the deal. The following Monday they would file for patent protection on Proteus and begin seeking other investors if Goddard didn’t come on board.

The last message he read was from Clyde Vernon, head of Amedeo security. Pierce figured he could guess what it said before he opened it and he wasn’t wrong.

Trying to reach you. We need to talk about Nicole James. Please call me ASAP.
Clyde Vernon

Pierce knew Vernon wanted to know how much Nicole knew and the circumstances of her abrupt departure. Vernon wanted to know what action he would need to take.

Pierce smirked at the security man’s inclusion of his full name. He then decided not to waste time on the other e-mails and turned off the computer, careful to unplug the phone line as well. He left the office and went down the hallway past the wall of fame to Nicole’s office. Her former office.

Pierce had the override combination for all doors on the third floor. He used it now to open the door and step into the office.

“Lights” he said.

But the overhead lights did not respond. The office’s audio receptor was still registered to Nicole’s voice. That would likely be changed on Monday. Pierce went to the wall switch and turned on the lights.

The top of the desk was clear. She had said she’d be gone by Friday at five and she had made good on the promise, probably sending him that e-mail as her last official act at Amedeo Technologies.

Pierce walked around and sat down in her chair. He could still pick up a scent of her perfume — a whisper of lilac. He opened the top drawer. It was empty except for a paperclip. She was gone. That was for sure. He checked the three other drawers and they were all empty except for a small box he found in the bottom drawer. He took it out and opened it. It was half full of business cards. He took one out and looked at it.

Nicole R. James
Director of Competitive Intelligence
Public Information Officer
Amedeo Technologies
Santa Monica, California

After a while he put the card back in the box and the box back in the drawer. He got up and went to the row of file cabinets against the wall opposite the desk.

She’d insisted on hard copies of all intelligence files. There were four double drawer cabinets. Pierce took out his keys and used one to unlock a drawer labeled Bronson. He opened the drawer and took out the blue file — under Nicole’s filing system the most current file on any competitor was blue. He opened the file and glanced through the printouts and a photocopy of a news clipping from the business section of the San Jose Mercury News. He’d seen everything before except for the clipping.

It was a short story about one of his chief competitors in the private arena getting an infusion of cash. It was dated two days earlier. He had heard about the deal in general already — through Nicole. Word traveled fast in the emerging technologies world. A lot faster than through the news media. But the story was a confirmation of everything he’d already heard — and then some.

BRONSON TECH GETS BOOST FROM JAPAN
By Raoul Puig
Santa Cruz-based Bronson Technologies has agreed to a partnership with Japan’s Tagawa Corporation that will provide funding for the firm’s molecular electronics project, the parties announced Wednesday.

Under terms of the agreement Tagawa will provide $12 million in research funds over the next four years. In return Tagawa will hold a twenty-percent interest in Bronson.

Elliot Bronson, president of the six-year-old company, said the money will help put his company into the lead in the vaunted race to develop the first practical molecular computer. Bronson and a host of private companies, universities and governmental agencies are engaged in a race to develop molecular-based random access memory (RAM) and link it to integrated circuitry. Though practical application of molecular computing is still seen by some as at least a decade away, it is believed by its proponents that it will revolutionize the world of electronics. It is also seen as a potential threat to the multi-billion dollar silicon-based computer industry.

The potential value and application of molecular computing is seen as limitless and therefore the race to develop it is heated. Molecular computer chips will be infinitely more powerful and smaller  than the silicon-based chips that currently support the electronics field.

“From diagnostic computers that can be dropped into the bloodstream to the creation of “smart streets” with microscopic computers contained in the asphalt, molecular computers will change this world,” Bronson said Tuesday. “And this company is going to be there to help change it.”

Among Bronson’s chief competitors in the private arena are Amedeo Technologies of Los Angeles and Midas Molecular in Raleigh, N.C. Also, Hewlett-Packard has partnered with scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. And more than a dozen other universities and private firms are putting significant funding into research into nano-technology and molecular RAM. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is partially or wholly funding many of these programs.

A handful of companies have chosen to seek private backing instead of relying on the government or universities. Bronson explained the decision makes the company more nimble, able to move quickly with projects and experimentation without having to seek government or university approval.

“The government and these big universities are like battleships,” Bronson said. “Once they get moving in the right direction, then watch out. But it takes them a long while to make the turns and get pointed the right way. This field is too competitive and changes too rapidly for that. It’s better to be a speed boat at the moment.”

Non-reliance on government or university funding also means less sharing of the wealth as patents in the arena become more valuable in years to come.

Several significant advances in the development of molecular computing have occurred in the last five years with Amedeo Tech seemingly leading the way.

Amedeo is the oldest company in the race. Henry Pierce, 34, the chemist who founded the company a year after leaving Stanford, has registered numerous patents in the areas of molecular circuitry and the creation of molecular memory and logic gates — the basic components of computing.

Bronson said he hopes to now level the playing field with the funding from Tagawa.

“I think it will be a long and interesting race but we’re going to be there at the finish line,” he said. “With this deal I guarantee it.”

The move to a significant source of financial support — a “whale” in the parlance of the emerging technologies investment arena — is becoming favored by the smaller companies. Bronson’s move follows Midas Molecular, which secured $10 million in funding from a Canadian investor earlier this year.

“There is no two ways about it, you need the money to be competitive,” Bronson said. “The basic tools of this science are expensive. To outfit a lab costs more than a million before you even get to the research.”

Amedeo’s Pierce did not return calls but sources in the industry indicated his company is also seeking a significant investor.

“Everybody is out hunting whales,” said Daniel F. Daly, a partner in Daly & Mills, a Florida-based investment firm that has monitored the emergence of nano-technology. “Money from the  hundred thousand dollar investor gets eaten up too quickly so everybody’s into one-stop shopping — finding the one investor who will see a project all the way through.”

Pierce closed the file, the newspaper clip inside it. Little in the story was new to him but he was intrigued by the first quote from Bronson mentioning molecular diagnostics. He wondered if Bronson was towing the industry line, talking up the sexier side of the science, or did he know something about Proteus. Was he talking directly to Pierce?
Using the newspaper and his new found Japanese money to throw down the gauntlet?

If he was, then he had a shock coming soon. Pierce put the file back in its place in the drawer.

“You sold out too cheap, Elliot,” he said as he closed it.

As he left the office he turned off the light by hand.

Outside in the hallway, Pierce momentarily scanned what they called the wall of fame. Framed articles on Amedeo and Pierce and the patents and the research covered the wall for twenty feet. During business hours when employees were about in the offices he never stopped to look at these. It was only in private moments that he glimpsed the wall of fame and felt a sense of pride. It was a scoreboard of sorts. Most of the articles came from science journals and the language was impenetrable by the layman. But a few times the company and its work poked through into the general media. Pierce stopped before the piece that privately made him the most proud. It was a Fortune Magazine cover nearly five years old. It showed a photograph of him — in his ponytail days — holding a plastic model of the simple molecular circuit he had just received a patent for. The caption to the right side of his smile asked, “The Most Important Patent of the Next Millennium?”

Then in small type beneath this it added, “He thinks so. 29-year-old wunderkind Henry Pierce holds the molecular switch that could be the key to a new era in computing and electronics.”

The moment was only five years old but it filled Pierce with a sense of nostalgia as he looked at the framed magazine cover. The embarrassing label of wunderkind not withstanding, Pierce’s life changed when that magazine hit the general public. The chase started in earnest after that. The investors came to him, rather than the other way around. The competitors came. Charlie Condon came. Even Jay Leno’s people came calling about the long-haired, surfer chemist and his molecules. The best moment of all that Pierce remembered was when he wrote the check that paid off the scanning electron microscope.

The pressure came then too. The pressure to perform, to make the next stride. And then the next. Given the choice, he wouldn’t go back. Not a chance. But Pierce liked to remember the moment for all that he didn’t know then. There was nothing wrong with that.

Named one of the Best Books Of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times

“Connelly diabolically teases readers with bits of exposition while scaring the hell out of them in the most accomplished slice of Hitchcock since the Master’s heyday. The result is a tour de force of nerve-shredding suspense.”
— Kirkus Reviews * starred review

“Connelly’s plotting is shrink-wrap tight, his characters… are smartly drawn. It’s the rare reader who will be able to finger the villain behind all the mayhem. …this is the perfect book for a long airplane ride…”
— Publishers Weekly

“…it’s a grabber from the beginning, and the subject matter is utterly compelling. …marvelously detailed particulars of both experimental computing and online sex for hire. Connelly brings the two worlds together in a slam-bang finale that will leave fans gasping.”
— Booklist

“”Chasing the Dime” creates a scarily high-tech brand of intrigue. Mr. Connelly is a spare, expeditious storyteller with a natural talent for generating forward momentum.”
— Janet Maslin, New York Times

“With each chapter, Connelly tests his hero and achieves his full potential as an author.”
— USA Today

“As one of today’s top crime novelists, Michael Connelly does many things well. The strongest aspect of his writing, however, may be his ability to create atmosphere, and his compellingly readable new thriller, “Chasing the Dime,” has it in spades.”
— Connor Ennis, Associated Press

“From the compelling beginning to an action-packed finale, Connelly will have readers Chasing the Dime.”
— Oline Cogdill, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

“…a penetrating look at the power of curiosity to change a life, whether it’s applied to inventing molecular computers or tracking a mysterious call girl. …Taking a supergeek who spends all his time in an underground, copper-clad lab and forcing him to apply scientific method to peer into the sleazy corners of the real world is a stroke of pure brilliance.”
— The Times-Picayune

“Chasing the Dime is the do-not-miss mystery of the season!”
— BookPage

“If you are looking for a great thriller this is it! Michael Connelly does an excellent job. This book is loaded with suspense. It is a book that will hold you captive until you read through the very last page. Be prepared to stay up all night until you finish the book! If you don’t read another book this year, you must read this one!”
—  BestSellersWorld.com

“It’s a brilliant departure from the author’s noir Harry Bosch novels, which I also enjoy a great deal. Chasing the Dime is a powerful combination of mystery (what happened to Lilly?) and thriller (what will happen to Henry?), with the added fascination of a window into one of the most exciting areas of research today.”
— Bookloons.com

“In Chasing the Dime, as he did in Blood Work, Connelly takes an entirely innovative idea and runs with it, creating a story that is hard to put down.”
— MostlyFiction.com

Michael Connelly “Interviews” Harry Bosch

The following conversation between Harry Bosch and Michael Connelly was recorded in Los Angeles at a cyber café called the Frontal Lobe on April 1, 2002. Bosch agreed to the recording on the condition that it would be presented here in its entirety. Because it is unedited it is strongly advised that this conversation not be read until AFTER one reads the accounting of Bosch’s last case contained in the book City Of Bones. Bosch’s comments here contain NUMEROUS SPOILERS that will be detrimental to the reading of the book.

SPOILER ALERT!

April 1, 2002

Harry Bosch: Okay, so I’m here. What do you want to know?

Michael Connelly: First of all, can you identify the music they’ve got playing on the sound system here?

HB: What is this, a test? I thought it was supposed to be a conversation.

MC: No, it’s not a test. It’s just that it sounds like your kind of —

HB: It’s Frank Morgan. Mood Indigo is the CD and this song is called “Lullaby.” Do I pass the test?

MC: Yes, thank you. So let’s start then. Let’s talk about the case you were most recently working on. The bones of a boy found on the hill in Laurel Canyon.

HB: What about it?

MC: Well, I got the sense when I read about it that there was sort of a pallor of futility settling over you as you worked it. I would assume that with cops that constantly see the underside of a city and its inhabitants — the abyss, if you will — that there is a real danger of being infected with a sense of what’s the use. You know, where it hits you that for every murder you solve there will just be another and then another and another and so on. What’s to stop somebody from saying what’s the use and giving up?

HB: I would not characterize what happened on that case as me giving up.

MC: Well, I did feel the cloak of futility upon you.

HB: Maybe that was you. Maybe it was coming down on you and you just read it in me.

MC: Maybe it was in relation to the events of September 11th. One of the ripple effects such a catastrophic tragedy has is that it makes everything small in comparison. Even solving the murder of a long forgotten boy.

HB: Or writing a crime novel.

MC: But we’re talking about you here.

HB: Look, I’ve always said that everybody counts or nobody counts. I choose the former over the latter. Everybody counts. That goes just as much for the boy on the hill as it does for every person that was in the World Trade Center or in the Pentagon or on those planes. I’ve never had a problem keeping my eyes on the prize. Not this case or any of the others before it.

MC: Let me try it from another angle. There is a difference between how a cop works on a case and how a case works on a cop. This case seemed to work on you more than most. Maybe it was the nature of the killing. Maybe it was something to do with your age and what you have seen and where you are at in your personal journey. But by the end of the case, it seemed to have gotten the best of you. You were clearly finished, in my opinion.

HB: But that is not the same as giving up. I haven’t given up.

MC: True, you did work the case to its conclusion but it seems that you also worked it to the conclusion of your own career. Is that a fair assessment then?

HB: To the extent it was the conclusion of my career with the LAPD, yes. But I’m not finished yet. I have not given up. Whether or not it worked on me more than I worked on it, I looked at that case as one in which my eyes were opened and I realized I didn’t need all of that anymore. You know, that the things and the institution I thought I needed might actually be what hold me back.

MC: So you are leaving the institution behind but not leaving behind what sort of has been your personal mission in life.

HB: Exactly. I used to think I could not have one without the other. I don’t think that way anymore.

MC: So what are you going to do, get a mask and a cape and sit on roof tops at night or something?

HB: Very funny. I thought this was supposed to be a serious conversation. If you want to have a bunch of laughs why don’t you go down the street to the Improv?

MC: Sorry, I’m not trying to be funny. It’s just that I’m trying to get a picture of your plans.

HB: There are no plans. It will just happen. When I walked out of that police station for the last time, I carried away enough files to keep me busy if I want to be kept busy.

MC: Are those files the cases that haunt you?

HB: You could say that. Anytime somebody gets away you are haunted. It’s the nature of the mission. You speak for the dead, man, because nobody else does. You let down the dead and you’ve got ghosts that haunt you.

MC: All right, so we have not heard the last of Harry Bosch.

HB: Hope not.

MC: Let me ask you this, have you applied to the state of California for a private investigators license?

HB: Yes, but that is just part of the routine. Every cop I know who put in the kind of time I put in applies to get the private ticket. Doesn’t mean anything will come of it. It just sort of helps with the separation — from insider to outsider.

MC: You always hit me as an outsider even when you were an insider.

HB: I probably was. The department, for me, was a means to an end. I always felt I was in it but not of it. There was something I wanted to do and I thought for a lot of years that being in the department was the only way to do it. Now I am looking at other means to the same end.

MC: Any other options besides getting a private ticket?

HB: A few. The DA’s office is starting a cold case squad. They are looking for people with experience, people who know how to close cases. I might send in my name and see what happens. I know some people over there and they have a measure of my skills.

MC: A measure of your temperament, too, I would hope.

HB: Like I said, they know me. But they’re only going to care about one thing; can this guy come in here and close cases for us. They’re not going to care whether I hang around the water cooler or not.

MC: Will they care if you bend the rules, stretch the lines?

HB: I think they will care about results. In this world results count the most.

MC: Tell me, would you ever consider leaving the City of Angels for a job or a woman or anything else?

HB: I don’t think so. This is my place. I don’t want to go anywhere else. I probably wouldn’t know what to do anywhere else.

MC: Tell me about that. What I mean is, can you verbalize your feelings for this city. What makes you stick here? What is the essence of this place for you?

HB: It’s probably the same with everybody else and wherever you go. It’s home, you know. I’ve seen a lot of things go down in this city. Good and bad but I would have to say mostly bad — it’s the nature of what I did for a living. But the thing about this place is that it is always so close to being something good. So I guess the essence I feel is hope. I hope — we all hope — for that better day and we know it is possible. The reality, of course, is that usually something goes wrong. Defeat is snatched from the hands of victory, or whatever that saying is.

MC: That is being cynical, isn’t it?

HB: Sure, but I’m a cop.

MC: Was.

HB: Right. Was.

MC: Julia Brasher.

HB: What about her?

MC: I’m still puzzled by her. What did you learn from her?

HB: Probably something I already knew but had kind of pushed to the back burner. And that’s that you can never know anybody. Everybody’s got a secret room that they go to. It’s a place nobody else can go. There are paintings on the walls but the outsider will never see them. Only the person whose room it is.

MC: Well, you only knew Julia Brasher a couple weeks. What about the people who have been together a long time. Don’t people — I’m talking about couples bonded by love and sex and family and so on — don’t they end up knowing everything about each other? Don’t they get inside each other’s room?

HB: Are you kidding? Those are the ones with the most secrets.

MC: You’re a cynical guy.

HB: Damn right. Keeps me alive. I see a ring on your finger. You’re a married guy. Children, too, I bet.

MC: So?

HB: You’ve got secrets. Lots of them. Secrets your wife and kids don’t know anything about.

MC: That may be true but we’re here to talk about you?

HB: Same difference.

MC: Well, if we’re going to talk about wives, what about Eleanor Wish? Where is she?

HB: At the moment I couldn’t tell you. She’s just out there somewhere.

MC: Will you ever see her again?

HB: I suppose I will. I hope so.

MC: Why? It seemed to end badly with you and her.

HB: Because she’s the one. No matter what happened at the end or along the way, I know she was the one true connection in my life. She’s the one who came closest to seeing the paintings in my secret room. I don’t think that will happen again. I’m a believer in the single bullet theory. You get one shot. I’m sure that I will be with other women — like Julia — but they won’t get inside the wire like Eleanor did.

MC: Inside the wire. That is a war phrase, isn’t it? It refers to the perimeter put up around a camp. If the enemy intrudes it is called getting inside the wire, right?

HB: Something like that. What about it?

MC: I don’t know. It just sort of seems like an unfortunate choice of words when describing relationships. Single bullets and getting inside the wire. Like maybe you look at it as a war and you are this armed encampment or something.

HB: You read too much into things. They’re just words.

MC: I make my living with words. I think they often mean more than what is actually said. Do you think you can ever be happy with a woman in a relationship?

HB: I’m never going to be a Honey-I’m-home type of guy, if that’s what you mean.

MC: Why?

HB: The nature of the beast. I’m not equipped to be that guy. Growing up, I didn’t see that. Then on the job, I saw even worse. I’m not into self-analysis so all I can tell you is that I can’t do that. And the women I am with usually find that out pretty quick. Julia Brasher never got the chance but she would have eventually found it out, too.

MC: The exception being Eleanor Wish?

HB: That’s right and do you know why? Because she wasn’t looking for that in me. She was just looking at me. That made me lift up the wire and she got in.

MC: So then what happened?

HB: Look, I’m done talking about it. We’re way off course here. This was supposed to be about my work on the department, not my screwed up marriage.

MC: Okay, then back to that. How many homicides did you work in this city?

HB: I don’t know. Hundreds.

MC: Is it a better place now for what you’ve done?

HB: I hope so. I think so. It’s an equation, you know. Evil in, evil out. My job was the second part, taking evil out. Getting rid of it. If you look at it on those terms I think I did pretty well by this place. There is less evil out there. At the end of the day, that is what you cling to in a job like that.

MC: So now that you are on the outside of all of that, what do you cling to?

HB: I guess I cling to hope for that better day we were talking about before.

MC: Your mentioning of the equation of evil in and evil out is interesting. What are your thoughts on evil? Where do you stand on the age old debate about whether it simply exists in the world or it is something that is fostered and cultivated. Grown, if you will, inside a person, just the same as maybe love and joy are.

HB: I guess it’s an age old question because there is no sure answer. At times I think I’ve felt both ways about it. Certainly, I have been in contact with people who are flat out evil. And with some of them I could look back across their lives and see where different gateways opened that led to other gateways and eventually a path of evil intent was arrived at. But for every person like that there is also the case where you see the evil behind their eyes and in their deeds and you have no earthly idea where it came from and how it got there. It’s a mystery that can never be solved. It’s just part of their nature to be evil. It’s like evil just existed out there and somehow they walked into it. Like somebody hitting a cobweb walking through an attic. But I have to tell you I don’t spend a lot of time contemplating that sort of question. For me, I know it is out there, no matter what its source. And I don’t worry about where it came from. Because to think about it might be a dangerous distraction. That might get me killed. My bottom line take on the human existence is that each one of us comes with an unlimited capacity to love and hate, to be afraid, to be lonely, so on and so on. Most often you get a good blend of all of that in everybody’s milkshake. But why somebody’s cup gets filled up with only hatred and evil intent might make for a good intellectual question and discussion, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. What matters is going out there and taking that evil out of the world.

MC: So in a way you’re like a dog catcher. If a dog’s loose in the neighborhood it doesn’t really matter why it’s loose. It has to go into the back of the truck before somebody gets bitten.

HB: Especially kids. You don’t want them to get bitten by that dog.

MC: Right. That evil dog.

HB: Yeah, that’s good. I like that. Just call me a dog catcher. I won’t complain about that.

MC: Okay.

HB: Anything else?

MC: No, I think that covers it.

HB: Okay then. I’ll see you around.

With that Bosch stood up and left the Frontal Lobe.

Read a second interview with Harry Bosch done in 2005.

Here is a compilation excerpt — six abbreviated segments from the book that will help set up the story.

EXCERPT I
The old lady changed her mind about dying but by then it had been too late. She dug her fingers into the paint and plaster of the nearby wall until most of her fingernails had broken off. Then she had gone for the neck, scrabbling to push the bloodied fingertips up and under the cord. She broke four toes kicking at the walls. She had tried so hard, shown such a desperate will to live, that it made Harry Bosch wonder what had happened before. Where was that determination and will and why had it deserted her until after she had put the extension cord noose around her neck and kicked over the chair? Why had it hidden from her?

These were not official questions that would be raised in his death report. But they were the things Bosch couldn’t avoid thinking about as he sat in his car outside the Splendid Age Retirement Home on Sunset Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. It was 4:20 p.m. on the first day of the year.  Bosch had drawn holiday call out duty.

The day more than half over and that duty consisted of two suicide runs — one a gunshot, the other the hanging. Both victims were women. In both cases there was evidence of depression and desperation. Isolation. New Year’s Day was always a big day for suicides. While most people greeted the day with a sense of hope and renewal, there were those who saw it as a good day to die, some — like the old lady — not realizing their mistake until it was too late.

Bosch looked up through the windshield and watched as the latest victim’s body, on a wheeled stretcher and covered in a green blanket, was loaded into the coroner’s blue van. He saw there was one other occupied stretcher in the van and knew it was from the first suicide — a 34-year-old actress who had shot herself while parked at a Hollywood overlook on Mulholland Drive. Bosch and the body crew had followed one case to the other.

Bosch’s cell phone chirped and he welcomed the intrusion into his thoughts on small deaths. It was Mankiewicz, the watch sergeant at the Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“You finished with that yet?”

“I’m about to clear.”

“Anything?”

“A changed-my-mind suicide. You got something else?”

“Yeah. And I didn’t think I should go out on the radio with it. Must be a slow day for the media — getting more what’s-happening calls from reporters than I am getting service calls from citizens. They all want to do something on the first one, the actress on Mulholland. You know, a death of a Hollywood dream story. And they’d probably jump all over this latest call, too.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“A citizen up in Laurel Canyon. On Wonderland. He just called up and said his dog came back from a run in the woods with a bone in its mouth. The guy says it’s human — an arm bone from a kid.”

Bosch almost groaned. There were four or five call outs like this a year. Hysteria always followed by simple explanation: animal bones. Through the windshield he saluted the two body movers from the coroner’s office as they headed to the front doors of the van.

“I know what you’re thinking, Harry. Not another bone run. You’ve done it a hundred times and it’s always the same thing. Coyote, deer, whatever. But listen, this guy with the dog, he’s an MD. And he say’s there’s no doubt. It’s a humerus. That’s the upper arm bone. He says it’s a child, Harry. And then get this, he said . . .”

There was silence while Mankiewicz apparently looked for his notes. The blue van pulled off into traffic. When Mankiewicz came back he was obviously reading.

“The bone’s got a fracture clearly visible just above the medial epicondyle, whatever that is.”

Bosch’s jaw tightened. He felt a slight tickle of electric current go down the back of his neck.

“That’s off my notes, I don’t know if I am saying it right. The point is this doctor says it was just a kid, Harry. So could you humor us and go check out this humerus?”

Bosch didn’t respond.

“Sorry, had to get that in.”

“Yeah, that was funny, Mank. What’s the address?”

Mankiewicz gave it to him and told him he had already dispatched a patrol team.

“You were right to keep it off the air. Let’s try to keep it that way.”

Mankiewicz said he would. Bosch closed his phone and started the car. He glanced over at the entrance to the retirement home before pulling away from the curb. There was nothing about it that looked splendid to him. The woman who had hung herself in the closet of her tiny bedroom had no next of kin, according to the operators of the home. In death, she would be treated the way she had been in life, left alone and forgotten.

Bosch pulled away from the curb and headed toward Laurel Canyon.

EXCERPT II
The woods were dark long before the sun disappeared. The overhead canopy created by a tall stand of Monterrey pines knocked down most of the light before it got to the ground. Bosch used the flashlight and made his way up the hillside in the direction in which he had heard the dog moving through the brush. It was slow moving and hard work. The ground contained a foot-thick layer of pine needles that gave way often beneath Bosch’s boots as he tried for purchase on the incline.  Soon his hands were sticky with sap from grabbing branches to keep himself upright.
It took him nearly ten minutes to go thirty yards up the hillside. Then the ground started to level off and the light got better as the tall trees thinned. Bosch looked around for the dog but didn’t see it. He called down to the street, though he could no longer see it or Dr. Guyot.

“Doctor Guyot? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you.”

“Whistle for your dog.”

He then heard a three part whistle. It was distinct but very low, having the same trouble getting through the trees and underbrush as the sunlight had. Bosch tried to repeat it and after a few tries thought he had it right. But the dog didn’t come.

Bosch pressed on, staying on the level ground because he believed that if someone was going to bury or abandon a body then it would be done on even ground as opposed to the steep slope. Following a path of least resistance, he moved into a stand of acacia trees. And here he immediately came upon a spot where the earth had recently been disturbed. It had been overturned, as if a tool or an animal had been randomly rooting in the soil. He used his foot to push some of the dirt and twigs aside and then realized they weren’t twigs.

He dropped to his knees and used his flashlight to study the short brown bones scattered over a square foot of dirt. He believed he was looking at the disjointed fingers of a hand. A small hand. A child’s hand.

Bosch stood up. He realized that he had brought no means with him for collecting the bones. Picking them up and carrying them down the hill would violate every tenet of evidence collection.

The Polaroid camera hung on a shoelace around his neck. He raised it now and took a close up shot of the bones. He then stepped back and took a wider shot of the spot beneath the acacia trees.

In the distance he heard Doctor Guyot’s weak whistle. Bosch went to work with the yellow plastic crime scene tape. He tied a short length of it around the trunk of one of the acacia trees and then strung a boundary around the trees. Thinking about how he would work the case the following morning, he stepped out of the cover of the acacia trees and looked for something to use as an aerial marker. He found a nearby growth of sagebrush. He wrapped the crime scene tape around and over top the bush several times.

When he was finished it was almost dark. He made another cursory look around the area but knew that a flashlight search was useless and the ground would need to be exhaustively covered in the morning. Using a small penknife attached to his key chain, he began cutting four-foot lengths of the crime scene tape off the roll.

Making his way back down the hill, he tied the strips off at intervals on tree branches and bushes.  At one point on the incline the soft ground suddenly gave way and he fell, tumbling hard into the base of a pine tree. The tree impacted his midsection, tearing his shirt and badly scratching his side.

Bosch didn’t move for several seconds. He thought he might have cracked his ribs on the right side. His breathing was difficult and painful. He groaned loudly and slowly pulled himself up on the tree trunk so that he could continue to follow the voices.

He soon came back down into the street where Dr. Guyot was waiting with his dog.

“Oh my, what happened?” Guyot cried out.

“Nothing. I fell.”

“You’re shirt is . . . there’s blood.”

“Comes with the job.”

EXCERPT III
Teresa Corazon lived in a Mediterranean mansion with a stone turn around circle complete with koi pond in front. Eight years earlier, when Bosch had shared a brief relationship with her, she had lived in a one bedroom condominium. The riches of television and celebrity had paid for the house and the lifestyle that came with it. She was not even remotely like the woman who used to show up at his house unannounced at midnight with a cheap bottle of red wine from Trader Joe’s and a video of her favorite movie to watch. The woman who was unabashedly ambitious but not yet skilled at using her position to enrich herself.

Bosch knew he now served as a reminder of what she had been and what she had lost in order to gain all that she had. It was no wonder their interactions were now few and far between but as tense as a visit to the dentist when they were unavoidable.

He parked on the circle and got out with the shoebox and the Polaroids. He looked into the pond as he came around the car and could see the dark shapes of the fish moving below the surface. He smiled, thinking about the movie, Chinatown, and how often they had watched it the year they were together. He remembered how much she enjoyed the portrayal of the coroner.  He wore a black butcher’s apron and ate a sandwich while examining a body. Bosch doubted she had the same sense of humor about things anymore.

The light hanging over the heavy wood door to the house went on and Corazon opened it before he got there. She was wearing black slacks and a cream-colored blouse. She was probably on her way to a New Year’s party. She looked past him at the slickback he had been driving.

“Let’s make this quick before that car drips oil on my stones.”

“Hello to you, too, Teresa.”

“That’s it?”

She pointed at the shoe box.

“This is it.”

He handed her the Polaroids and started taking the lid off the box. It was clear she was not asking him in for a glass of New Year’s champagne.

“You want to do this right here?”

“I don’t have a lot of time. I thought you’d be here sooner. What moron took these?”

“That would be me.”

“I can’t tell anything from these. Do you have a glove?”

Bosch pulled a Latex glove out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. He took the photos back and put them in an inside pocket of his jacket. She expertly snapped the glove on and reached into the open box. She held the bone up and turned it in the light. He was silent. He could smell her perfume. It was strong as usual, a holdover from her days when she spent most of her time in autopsy suites.

After a five second examination she put the bone back down in the box.

“Human.”

“You sure?”

She looked up at him with a glare as she snapped off the glove.

“It’s the humerus. The upper arm. I’d say a child of about ten. You may no longer respect my skills, Harry, but I do still have them.”

She dropped the glove into the box on top of the bone. Bosch could roll with all the verbal sparring from her but it bothered him that she did that with the glove, dropping it on the child’s bone like that.

He reached into the box and took the glove out. He remembered something and held the glove back out to her.

“The man whose dog found this said there was a fracture on the bone. A healed fracture. Do you want to take a look and see if you —“

“No. I’m late for an engagement. What you need to know right now is if it is human. You now have that confirmation. Further examination will come later under proper settings at the medical examiner’s office. Now, I really have to go. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

Bosch held her eyes for a long moment.

“Sure, Teresa, have a good time tonight.”

She broke off the stare and folded her arms across her chest. He carefully put the top back on the shoebox, nodded to her and headed back to his car. He heard the heavy door close behind him.

Thinking of the movie again as he passed the koi pond, he spoke the film’s final line quietly to himself.

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

He got in the car and drove home, his hand holding the shoebox secure on the seat next to him.

EXCERPT IV
Bosch and Edgar spread the twelve cadets out in the areas adjacent to the stand of acacia trees and had them begin conducting side by side searches. Bosch then went down and brought up the two K-9 teams to supplement the search.

Once things were underway he left Edgar with the cadets and went back to the acacias to see what progress had been made. He found Dr. Kohl sitting on an equipment crate and supervising the placement of wooden stakes into the ground so that strings could be used to set the excavation grid.

Bosch had worked one prior case with Kohl and knew she was very thorough and good at what she did. She was in her late thirties with a tennis player’s build and tan. Bosch had once run across her at a city park where she was playing tennis with a twin sister. They had drawn a crowd. It looked like somebody hitting the ball off of a mirrored wall.

Kohl’s straight blonde hair fell forward and hid her eyes as she looked down at the oversized clipboard on her lap. She was making notations on a piece of paper with a grid already printed on it. Bosch looked over her shoulder at the chart. Kohl was labeling the individual blocks with letters of the alphabet as the corresponding stakes were placed in the ground. At the top of the page she had written City of Bones.

Bosch reached down and tapped the chart where she had written the caption.

“Why do you call it that?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Because we’re setting out the streets and the blocks of what will become a city to us,” she said, running her fingers over some of the lines on the chart in illustration. “At least while we’re working here it will feel like it. Our little city.”
Bosch nodded.

“In every murder is the tale of a city,” he said.

She looked up at him.

“Who said that?”

“I don’t know. Somebody did.”

He turned his attention to Corazon who was squatting over the small bones on the surface of the soil, studying them while the lens of the video camera studied her. He was thinking of something to say about it when his rover was keyed and he took it off his belt.

“Bosch here.”

“Edgar. Better come on back over here, Harry. We already have something.”

“Right.”

Edgar was standing in an almost level spot in the brush about forty yards from the acacia trees. A half dozen of the cadets had formed a circle and were looking down at something in the two-foot high brush. The police chopper was circling in a tighter circle above.

Bosch got to the circle and looked down. It was a child’s skull partially submerged in the soil, its hollow eyes staring up at him.

“Nobody touched it,” Edgar said.

Bosch pulled the radio off his belt.

“Dr. Corazon?” he said into it.

It was a long moment before her voice came back.

“Yes, I’m here. What is it?”

“We are going to have to widen the crime scene.”

EXCERPT V
On Saturday morning Bosch and Edgar met in the lobby of the medical examiner’s office and told the receptionist they had an appointment with Dr. William Golliher, the forensic anthropologist on retainer from UCLA.

“He’s waiting for you in suite A,” the receptionist said after making a call to confirm. “You know which way that is?”
Bosch nodded and they were buzzed through the gate. They took an elevator down to the basement level and were immediately greeted by the smell of the autopsy floor when they stepped out. It was a mixture of chemicals and decay that was unique in the world. Edgar immediately took a paper breathing mask out of a wall dispenser and put it on. Bosch didn’t bother.

“You really ought to, Harry,” Edgar said as they walked down the hall. “Do you know that all smells are particulate?”
Bosch looked at him.

“Thanks for that, Jerry.”

Suite A was an autopsy room reserved for Teresa Corazon for the infrequent times she actually left her administrative duties as chief medical examiner and performed an autopsy.  Because the case had initially garnered her hands-on attention she had apparently authorized Golliher to use her suite. Corazon had not returned to the crime scene on Wonderland Avenue after the portable toilet incident.

They pushed through the double doors of the suite and were met by a man in blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt.
“Please call me Bill,” Golliher said. “I guess it’s been a long two days.”

“Say that again,” Edgar said.

Golliher nodded in a friendly manner. He was about fifty with dark hair and eyes and an easy manner. He gestured toward the autopsy table that was in the center of the room. The bones that had been collected from beneath the acacia trees were now spread across the stainless steel surface.

“Well, let me tell you what’s been going on in here,” Golliher said. “As the team in the field has been collecting the evidence, I’ve been here examining the pieces, doing the radiograph work and generally trying to put the puzzle of all of this together.”

Bosch stepped over to the stainless steel table. The bones were laid out in place so as to form a partial skeleton. The most obvious pieces missing were the bones of the left arm and leg and the lower jaw. It was presumed that long ago these were the pieces that had been taken and scattered distantly by animals that had rooted in the shallow grave.
Each of the bones was marked, the larger pieces with stickers and the smaller ones with string tags. Bosch knew that notations on these markers were codes by which the location of each bone had been charted on the grid Kohl had drawn on the first day of the excavation.

“Bones can tell us much about how a person lived and died,” Golliher said somberly. “In cases of child abuse, the bones do not lie. The bones become our final evidence.”

Bosch looked back at him and realized his eyes were not dark. They actually were blue but they were deeply set and seemed haunted in some way. He was staring past Bosch at the bones on the table. After a moment he broke from this reverie and looked at Bosch.

“Let me start by saying that we are learning quite a bit from the recovered artifacts,” the anthropologist said. “But I have to tell you guys, I’ve consulted on a lot of cases but this one blows me away. I was looking at these bones and taking notes and I looked down and my notebook was smeared. I was crying, man. I was crying and I didn’t even know it at first.”

He looked back at the outstretched bones with a look of tenderness and pity. Bosch knew that the anthropologist saw the person that was once there.

“This one is bad, guys. Real bad.”

“Then give us what you’ve got so we can go out there and do our job,” Bosch said in a voice that sounded like a reverent whisper.

Golliher nodded and reached back to a nearby counter for a spiral notebook.

“Okay,” Golliher said. “Let’s start with the basics. Some of this you may already know but I’m just going to go over all of my findings, if you don’t mind.”

“We don’t mind,” Bosch said.

“Good. Then here it is. What you have here are the remains of a young male Caucasoid. Comparisons to the indices of Maresh growth standards put the age at approximately ten years old. However, as we will soon discuss, this child was the victim of severe and prolonged physical abuse. Histiologically, victims of chronic abuse often suffer from what is called growth disruption. This abuse-related stunting serves to skew age estimation. What you often get is a skeleton that looks younger than it is. So what I am saying is that this boy looks ten but is probably twelve or thirteen.”

Bosch looked over at Edgar. He was standing with his arms folded tightly across his chest, as if bracing for what he knew was ahead. Bosch took a notebook out of his jacket pocket and started writing notes in short hand.

“Time of death,” Golliher said. “This is tough. Radiological testing is far from exact in this regard. We have the coin that was buried with the body and that gives us the early marker of 1975. That helps us. What I am estimating is that this kid has been in the ground anywhere from twenty to twenty-five years. I’m comfortable with that and there is some surgical evidence we can talk about in a few minutes that adds support to that estimation.”

“So we’ve got a ten to thirteen year old kid killed twenty to twenty-five years ago,” Edgar summarized, a note of frustration in his voice.

“I know I am giving you a wide set of parameters, Detective,” Golliher said. “But at the moment it’s the best the science can do for you.”

“Not your fault, Doc.”

Bosch wrote it all down. Despite the wide spread of the estimation, it was still vitally important to set a time frame for the investigation. Golliher’s estimation put the time of death into the late ‘70s to early ‘80s. Bosch momentarily thought of Laurel Canyon in that time frame. It had been a rustic, funky enclave, part bohemian and part upscale with cocaine dealers and users, porno purveyors and burned out rock and roll hedonists on almost every street. Could the murder of a child have been part of that mix?

“Cause of death,” Golliher said. “Tell you what, let’s get to cause of death last. I want to start with the extremities and the torso, give you guys an idea of what this boy endured in his short lifetime.”

His eyes locked on Bosch’s for a moment before returning to the bones. Bosch breathed in deeply, producing a sharp pain from his damaged ribs. He knew his fear from the moment he had looked down at the small bones on the hillside was now going to be realized. He instinctively knew all along that it would come to this. That a story of horror would emerge from the overturned soil and that he would have to one more time find a place in the recesses of his mind to hide it.

He started scribbling on the pad, running the ballpoint deep into the paper, as Golliher continued

EXCERPT VI
Bosch thought of the pain he was in, of how he had been unable to sleep well because of the injury to his ribs. He thought of a young boy living with the kind of pain and abuse Golliher had described.

“I gotta go wash my face,” he suddenly said. “You can continue.”

He walked to the door, shoving his notebook and pen into Edgar’s hands. In the hallway he turned right. He knew the layout of the autopsy floor and knew there were restrooms around the next turn of the corridor.

He entered the restroom and went right to an open stall. He felt nauseous and waited but nothing happened. After a long moment it passed.

Bosch walked to the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was red. He bent down and used his hands to cup cold water against his face and eyes. He thought about baptisms and second chances. Of renewal. He raised his face until he was looking at himself again.

I’m going to get this guy.

He almost said it out loud.

Nominated for the 2003 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Named a Notable Book Of The Year by the New York Times

“Harry Bosch is at the top of his form… His latest adventure is as dark and angst-ridden as any of Bosch’s past outings, but it also crackles with energy — especially in the details of police procedure and internal politics that animate virtually every page.”
— Publishers Weekly *starred review

“…Bosch never stops feeling the bruises he has acquired through multiple encounters with evil. His view of the world darkens with each case, and he feels more and more powerless: “True evil could never be taken out of the world. At best he was wading into the dark waters of the abyss with two leaking buckets in his hands.” Hard-boiled cop fiction at its most gripping.”
— Booklist *starred review

“This riveting thriller finds Harry even more introspective than usual, and while the tight prose of the plot swirls around the mystery of the bones, Harry’s turbulent life and career are changed forever in a stunning conclusion. Another thrilling winner for Connelly’s many fans; highly recommended.”
— Library Journal

“I had a few plans for the day on which I read Michael Connelly’s latest mystery. Nothing much, but enough to have made me put the book down once in a while. Well, no way. Not a chance. Everything else took a back seat to following Harry Bosch, Mr. Connelly’s tough, moody Hollywood detective, through the author’s latest carefully wrought maze. …”City of Bones” is a clean, tight, propulsive thriller set in the moral murk of detective-story Los Angeles. And it is an incendiary page turner…”
— New York Times

“Enough to say this is strong Connelly: well-plotted, lean and spare and more than a little sad… The search for truth leading to unintended consequences is a cautionary theme that has worked since Sophocles, and it works here.”
— Los Angeles Times

“…City Of Bones is up to the high standards of its predecessors. …Connelly’s prose has become leaner over the years, and his understanding of how cops work and think remains unsurpassed. …the best American crime series now in progress.”
— Washington Post

“Harry remains Harry as he retains the same edge that readers enjoyed in his previous book, A Darkness More Than Night… City Of Bones is a taut Harry Bosch police procedural.”
— BookReview.com

“Since his Edgar-winning debut Black Echo in 1992, Connelly…has surpassed himself with each novel. Connelly long ago joined the cadre of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald.”
— Sun-Sentinel

“Harry’s still the same tightlipped outsider, taking each crime as a personal affront as he tries to cleanse his beloved city of the darkness he sees engulfing it.”
— Amazon.com Editorial Review

“Book Of The Week. …his melancholy hero deftly weaves a thin thread of hope through a spartan saga of good and evil, light and darkness.”
— People Magazine

“City of Bones is another stunner from the writer doing the best work in the genre today. The plot is interesting, fast-moving, and just complex enough to keep you guessing. …His work is for the ages.”
— MysteryInkOnline.com