The Narrows (23 page)

She didn’t answer me. I walked around the left side of the trailer, stepped over the hitch and headed toward the other side. But then I stopped and walked out to the trash barrel.

The barrel was one-third full with the charred remains of burned refuse. There was a broom handle on the ground that was charred on one end. I picked it up and dug around in the ashes in the barrel, as I was sure Backus had done while the fire was burning. He had wanted to make sure everything got burned.

It appeared to be mostly paperwork and books that had been burned. There was nothing recognizable until I came across a blackened and melted credit card. There was nothing I recognized on it but I guessed that the forensics experts might be able to connect it to one of the victims. I dug around further and saw pieces of melted black plastic. Then I noticed one book that was burned beyond recognition on the outside but still had some partially intact pages on the inside. With my fingers I lifted it out and gingerly opened it. It looked like it was poetry, though it was hard to be sure, since all the pages were partially burned away. Between two of these pages I found a half-burned receipt for the book. At the top it said “Book Car” but the rest was burned away.

“Bosch? Where are you?”

It was Rachel. I was out of her sight. I placed the book back into the barrel and stuck the broom handle in as well. I headed toward the back side of the trailer. I saw another open window.

“Hold on a second.”

RACHEL WAITED. She was growing impatient. She was listening for the distant sound of helicopters crossing the desert. She knew as soon as she heard them that her chance would be over. She would be pushed back, possibly even punished for how she had handled Bosch.

She looked back down at the doorknob. She thought about Backus and whether this could be his last play. Was four years here in the desert enough? Did he kill Terry McCaleb and send her the GPS only to lead her eventually to this? She thought about the note he had left, his telling her he had taught her well. An anger welled up inside her, an anger that wanted her to throw open the door and—

“We’ve got a body!”

It was Bosch, calling from the other side of the trailer.

“What? Where?”

“Come around. I’ve got a view. There’s a bed and I see one body. Two, three days old. I can’t see the face.”

“Okay, anything else?”

She waited. He didn’t say anything. She put her hand on the knob. It turned.

“The door’s not locked.”

“Rachel, don’t open it,” Bosch called. “I think . . . I think there is gas. I smell something besides the body. Something besides the obvious. Something underneath.”

Rachel hesitated but then turned the knob fully and opened the door an inch.

Nothing happened.

She slowly pulled the door all the way open. Nothing happened. Flies saw the opening and buzzed by her and into the light. She waved them away from her eyes.

“Bosch, I’m going in.”

She stepped up into the trailer. More flies. They were everywhere. The smell hit her fully then, invading her and tightening her stomach.

Her eyes adjusted to the dimness after the brightness outside and she saw the photos. They were stacked on tables and taped to the walls and refrigerator. Photos of the victims, alive and dead, tearful, pleading, pitiful. The table in the trailer’s kitchen had been turned into a work station. There was a laptop connected to a printer on one side and three separate stacks of photos. She picked up the largest stack and started to flip through it, again recognizing some of the men in the photos as the missing men whose photos she had carried with them to Clear. But these weren’t the sort of family photos she had carried. These were shots of a killer and his victims. Men whose eyes pleaded to the camera, asking forgiveness and mercy. Rachel noticed that all of the shots were at a downward angle, with the shooter—Backus—in the dominant position, focusing down on his victims as they hoped and pleaded for their lives.

When she could look no more at them she put the photos down and took up the second stack. There were fewer photos here and these were mostly focused on a woman and two children as they moved through a shopping mall. She put them down and was about to move the camera weighing down the third stack of photos when Bosch stepped into the trailer.

“Rachel, what are we doing?”

“Don’t worry. We have five, maybe ten minutes. We’ll back out as soon as we hear the choppers and let the evidence recovery team take over. I just want to see if —”

“I’m not talking about beating other agents to the punch. I don’t like this—the door being left open. Something’s not —”

He stopped when he caught his first glimpse of the photos.

She turned back to the table and lifted the camera that rested on the last stack of photos. She looked down at a photo of herself. It took her a moment to place it but then realized where she had been photographed.

“He was with me all the way,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” Bosch asked.

“This is O’Hare. My layover. Backus was there watching me.”

She quickly shuffled through the photos. There were six of them, all shots of her on the day she traveled. The last shot was of Rachel and Cherie Dei greeting each other in baggage claim, Cherie holding a sign down at her side that said BOB BACKUS on it.

“He’s been watching me.”

“Like he watched Terry.”

Bosch reached to the printer’s tray and used a finger from each hand to lift a photo by its edges and without leaving a print. It apparently was the last image Backus had printed here. It showed the front of a two-story house of no particular design. In the driveway was a station wagon. An old man stood next to the driver’s door and was looking at a keychain as if searching for the key to unlock the car.

Bosch proffered the photo to Rachel.

“Who is this?”

She looked at it for a long moment.

“I don’t know.”

“The house?”

“Never seen it before.”

Bosch carefully put the photo back in the tray so that it would be found in its original position by the evidence team.

Rachel moved behind him and walked down the hallway toward a closed doorway. Before she reached it she stepped through the open door of a bathroom. It was neat except for the dead flies covering all surfaces. In the bathtub she saw two pillows and a blanket arranged as if for sleeping. She remembered the intelligence gathered on Backus and felt a physical repulsion building in her chest.

She stepped out of the bathroom and went to the closed door at the end of the hallway.

“Is this where you saw it?” she asked.

Bosch turned and watched her approach the door.

“Rachel . . .”

RACHEL DIDN’T STOP. She turned the knob and pulled the door open. I heard a distinct metallic
ching
sound that my mind did not associate with any door lock. Rachel stopped her movement and her posture stiffened.

“Harry?”

I started moving toward her.

“What is it?”

“Harry!”

She turned toward me in the close confines of the wood-paneled hallway. I looked past her face and saw the body on the bed. A man on his back, a black cowboy hat canted down on his head to obscure his face. A pistol in his right hand. A bullet wound to the upper left chest.

Flies were buzzing all around us. I heard a louder, hissing sound and pushed further by her and saw the fuse on the floor. I recognized it as a chemical fuse, a braiding of wires treated with chemicals that would burn anywhere under any condition, even underwater.

The fuse was burning fast. We could not stop it. There were maybe four feet of it coiled on the floor and then it disappeared under the bed. Rachel bent down and reached for it to pull it.

“No, don’t! That could set it off. There’s nothing—we have to get out of here.”

“No! We can’t lose this scene! We need —”

“Rachel, no time! Go! Run! Now!”

I pushed her back up the hallway and turned my body to block any attempt by her to return. I started moving backward, my eyes fixed on the figure on the bed. When I thought Rachel had given up I turned and she was waiting. She shoved by me.

“We need DNA!” she yelled.

I watched her move into the room and leap onto the bed. Her hand came up and grabbed the hat off the dead man’s head, revealing a face that was distorted and gray with decomposition. She then backed off the bed and headed toward the doorway.

Even in the moment I admired her thinking and what she had just done. The hat brim would most definitely contain skin cells that would hold the body’s DNA. She carried the hat past me and started running for the door. I looked down to see the burn point on the fuse line disappear under the bed. I started to run behind her.

“Was it him?” she yelled over her shoulder.

I knew what she meant. Was the cadaver on the bed the man who showed up on Terry McCaleb’s boat? Was it Backus?

“I don’t know.
Just go! Go! Go
!”

I hit the door two seconds behind Rachel. She was already on the ground heading directly away, in the direction of Titanic Rock. I followed her lead. I had taken maybe five strides when the explosion ripped through the air behind me. I was hit with the full force of the deafening concussion and knocked forward to the ground. I remembered the tuck-and-roll maneuver from basic training and it served to give me a few more yards’ distance from the explosion.

Time became disjointed and slow. One moment I was running. The next I was on my hands and knees, my eyes open, trying to raise my head. Something momentarily eclipsed the sun and I managed to look up to see the shell of the trailer thirty feet in the air over me. Its walls and roof intact. It seemed to float and almost hang up there. Then it came crashing down ten yards in front of me, its splintered aluminum sides as sharp as razors. It made a sound like a five-car pile-up when it hit the ground.

I checked the sky for more incoming and saw I was clear. I turned to look back at the trailer’s original location and saw intense fire and thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Nothing was recognizable on the trailer pad. Everything had been consumed by the blast and fire. The bed and the man in it were gone. Backus had planned this exit perfectly.

I got to my feet but was unsteady because my eardrums were still reacting and my equilibrium was off. It sounded as though I was walking through a tunnel with trains speeding by me on both sides. I wanted to put my hands over my ears but knew that it would do no good. The noise was reverberating from inside.

Rachel had been only a few feet from me before the blast but now I couldn’t see her. I stumbled around in the smoke and started to think that maybe she was under the trailer’s skin.

But finally I found her on the ground to the left of the trailer debris. She was lying still in the dirt and rocks. The black hat was on the ground next to her, like a sign of death. I moved as quickly as I could to her.

“Rachel?”

I got down on my hands and knees and first examined her without touching her. She was lying facedown and her hair had fallen forward to further hide her eyes from my view. I was suddenly reminded of my daughter as I used a hand to gently pull the hair back. As I did this I noticed blood on the back of my palm and for the first time realized I was wounded in some minor way. I decided I would worry about that later.

“Rachel?”

I couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. It seemed that my senses were working on the domino theory. With my hearing gone at least temporarily, the coordination of the other senses was gone as well. I patted her cheek lightly.

“Come on, Rachel, wake up.”

I didn’t want to turn her over in case there were unseen injuries that I might aggravate. I patted her cheek again, this time harder. I put my hand on her back, hoping that I would feel the rise and fall of breath as I could with my daughter.

Nothing. I put my ear to her back but this was laughable considering my condition. It was just instinct moving ahead of logic. I was thinking that I had no choice and had to turn her over when I saw the fingers of her right hand twitch and then form a fist.

Rachel suddenly lifted her head off the ground and groaned. It was loud enough that I could hear it.

“Rachel, are you all right?”

“I—I’m . . . there’s evidence in the trailer. We need it.”

“Rachel there is no trailer anymore. It’s gone.”

She struggled to turn over and sit up. Her eyes opened wide at the sight of the burning debris of what had been the trailer. I could see that her pupils were dilated. She had a concussion.

“What did you do?” she asked in an accusatory tone.

“It wasn’t me. The place was rigged to go up. When you opened the bedroom door . . .”

“Oh.”

She turned her head back and forth as if working a kink out of her neck. She saw the black cowboy hat on the ground next to her.

“What is this?”

“His hat. You grabbed it on the way out.”

“DNA?”

“Hopefully, though I’m not sure what good it will be.”

She looked back at the flaming trailer bed. We were too close. I could feel the heat of the fire. But I still wasn’t sure she should be moving.

“Rachel, why don’t you lie back down? I think you have a concussion. You might have other injuries.”

“Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”

She put her head down on the ground and just looked up at the sky. I decided that wasn’t a bad position and did the same. It was like we were at the beach or something. If it had been night we could have counted the stars.

BEFORE I COULD HEAR THEM COMING, I felt the approach of the helicopters. A deep vibration in my chest made me look to the southern sky and I saw the two air force choppers coming over the top of Titanic Rock. I weakly raised an arm and waved them in.

34

“W
HAT THE HELL happened out there?”

Special Agent Randal Alpert’s face was rigid and almost purple. He had been waiting for them in the hangar at Nellis when the helicopter landed. His political instincts had apparently told him not to go to the scene himself. At all costs he had to be able to distance himself from the blowback that would rise from the explosion in the desert and possibly reach all the way to Washington.

Rachel Walling and Cherie Dei stood in the huge hangar and braced for the onslaught. Rachel didn’t answer his question because she thought it was only the opener on a tirade. She was reacting slowly, her head still a bit fuzzy from the blast.

“Agent Walling, I asked you a question!”

“He had rigged the trailer,” Cherie Dei said. “He knew she —”

“I asked her, not you,” Alpert barked. “I want Agent Walling to tell me exactly why she could not follow orders and how this whole thing has gotten completely fucked up beyond recognition.”

Rachel raised her hands palms out as if to signify there was not a damn thing she could have done about what happened out there in the desert.

“We were going to wait for the ERT,” she said. “As Agent Dei instructed. We were on the periphery of the location and that’s when we realized it smelled like there was a body in there and then we thought maybe there could be someone alive in there. Somebody hurt.”

“And how the hell did you get that idea simply because you smelled a dead body?”

“Bosch thought he heard something.”

“Oh, here we go, the old cry for help routine.”

“No, he did. But it was the wind, I guess. Out there it picks up. The windows were left open. It must have created a sound that he heard.”

“And what about you? Did you hear it?”

“No. I didn’t.”

Alpert looked at Dei and then back at Rachel. She could feel his eyes burning through her. But she knew it was a good story and she wasn’t going to blink. She and Bosch had worked it out. Bosch was beyond Alpert’s reach. If she was acting on Bosch’s alarm she could not be faulted either. Alpert could rant and rave but could do nothing more than that.

“You know what the problem with your story is? It’s with your first word. We. You said
we
. There was no we. You were given an assignment of maintaining a cover on Bosch.
Not
joining him in the investigation. Not joining him in his car and driving up there. Not questioning witnesses together and entering that trailer
together
.”

“I understand that, but given the circumstances I decided it was in the best interest of the investigation to pool our knowledge and resources. Quite frankly, Agent Alpert, Bosch was the one who found that place. We wouldn’t have what we have right now if not for him.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Agent Walling. We would have gotten there.”

“I know that. But velocity was a factor. You said so yourself after the morning briefing. The director was going before the cameras. I wanted to push the case so that he would have as much information as possible.”

“Well, forget about that now. Now we don’t know what we have. He postponed the news conference and has given us until noon tomorrow to figure out what we have out there.”

Cherie Dei cleared her voice and risked intruding again.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “That’s a well-done crispy critter out there. They’re using multiple bags to get it out of there. ID and cause of death are going to take weeks, if an ID and cause of death are even possible. Luckily, it appears that Agent Walling was able to obtain a DNA sampling from the body and that would speed things but we have no comparative evidence. We —”

“Maybe you weren’t listening ten seconds ago,” Alpert said, “but we don’t have weeks. We’ve got less than twenty-four hours.”

He turned away from them and put his hands on his hips, striking a pose that showed the burden that weighed upon him as the only intelligent and savvy agent left on the planet.

“Then let us go back up there,” Rachel said. “Maybe in the debris we’ll find something that —”

“No!” Alpert yelled.

He spun back around to them.

“That won’t be necessary, Agent Walling. You have done enough.”

“I know Backus and I know the case. I should be out there.”

“I decide who should be and shouldn’t be out there. I want you to get back to the field office and start the paperwork on this fiasco. I want it on my desk by eight a.m. tomorrow. I want a detailed listing of everything you saw inside that trailer.”

He waited to see if she would argue the order. Rachel remained silent and this seemed to please him.

“Now, I’ve got the media all over this. What do we put out that doesn’t give away the store and won’t upstage the director tomorrow?”

Dei shrugged.

“Nothing. Tell them the director will address it tomorrow, end of story.”

“That won’t work. We have to give them something.”

“Don’t give them Backus,” Rachel said. “Tell them agents wanted to speak to a man named Thomas Walling about a missing persons case. But Walling had rigged his trailer and it exploded while agents were on the premises.”

Alpert nodded. It sounded good to him.

“What about Bosch?”

“I’d leave him out of it. We don’t have any control over him. If a reporter got to him he might lay the whole thing out.”

“And the body. Do we say it was Walling?”

“We say we don’t know because we don’t. ID is forthcoming, so on and so forth. That should be enough.”

“If the reporters go to the brothels they’ll get the whole story.”

“No, they won’t. We never told anyone the whole story.”

“By the way, what happened to Bosch?”

Dei answered that one.

“I took his statement and released him. Last I saw he was driving back to Vegas.”

“He’ll keep quiet about this?”

Dei looked at Rachel and then back at Alpert.

“Put it this way, he isn’t going to be looking to talk to anybody about it. And as long as we keep his name out of it, there will be no reason for anyone to go looking for him.”

Alpert nodded. He dug a hand into one of his pockets and came out with a cell phone.

“When we are finished here I have to call Washington. Gut reaction time: Was that Backus in that trailer?”

Rachel hesitated, not wanting to respond first.

“At this point there is no way to tell,” Dei said. “If you are asking if you should tell the director that we got him, my answer right now is no, don’t tell the director that. That could’ve been anybody in that trailer. For all we know it was an eleventh victim and we may never know who it was. Just somebody who went to one of the brothels and was intercepted by Backus.”

Alpert looked at Rachel, expecting her take.

“The fuse,” she said.

“What about it?”

“It was long. It was like he wanted me to see the body but not get too close. But he also wanted me to get out of there.”

“And?”

“On the body there was a black cowboy hat. I remember there was a man on my plane from Rapid City in a black cowboy hat.”

“For chrissake, you were flying from South Dakota. Doesn’t everybody wear cowboy hats there?”

“But he was there, with me. I think this whole thing was a setup. The note in the bar, the long fuse, the photos in the trailer and the black hat. He wanted me to get out of there in time to tell the world he was dead.”

Alpert didn’t respond. He looked down at the phone in his hands.

“There’s too much we don’t know yet, Randal,” Dei offered.

He shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“Very well. Agent Dei, is your car here?”

“Yes.”

“Take Agent Walling to the field office now.”

They were dismissed, but not before Alpert looked at Rachel and threw one more grimace at her.

“Remember, Agent Walling, my desk by eight.”

“You got it,” Rachel said.