Page 100

He turned off the night-vision on the binoculars and almost put them back on the flat top of the railing but thought better of it.

He realized that he had not been the one to leave the glasses on the railing. It was Novak; he’d put them there when he and his men came to the house to take Bosch.

Now he remembered those moments on the deck clearly. Novak was using the binoculars to look across the pass at the homes on the other side of the freeway.

He had mentioned a house that had once been his.

Bosch raised the binoculars and focused across the pass in the direction he had seen Novak looking. He quickly realized it was too dark to see. The images were blurred by distance. Streetlights were points of fuzzy illumination, but most of the houses were dark behind the windows.

He had to wait for daylight. He carried the binoculars inside the house and put them on the dining-room table as he passed into the kitchen. He checked the clock on the oven and determined that dawn was still at least a half hour away. That gave him time to shower and dress. He started brewing the coffee and walked down the hall to the bedroom.

He tried to tiptoe across the room to the bathroom. Hinojos was in bed with her eyes closed. But she spoke.

“Harry, what’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”

“You’re rushing around like something’s wrong.”

“No, it’s just that I think I have a lead and I want to get going with it.”

“A lead to what?”

“Novak.”

He had told her the night before the basic details of the case.

“And you’re going to follow it by yourself?”

“No — if it pans out, I’ll call in the troops. So, Car, you’re awake now?”

“Obviously.”

“I mean, are you going back to sleep or can I ask you a psychology question?”

“I thought you didn’t want me reading anything into your actions.”

“It’s not about me. It’s about Novak. I remember something he said to me.”

Hinojos sat up, put a pillow against the headboard, and leaned back.

“Tell me,” she said.

Bosch moved to the bed and sat on the edge next to her.

“Okay, this was when he and his henchmen took me to MacLaren and he thought he was in control of the situation,” Bosch said. “He said the Poes used to call him the king of the bedwetters, and I was wondering what that might mean.”

“This was a reference to his time as a child at MacLaren?” Hinojos asked.

“Yes. He said the probation officers at MacLaren called him the king of the bedwetters and then he asked if I was a bedwetter. I kind of forgot about it with everything that’s gone down, but now I remember and I wonder what he was saying. It had something to do with people fearing him.”

Hinojos sat up further and Bosch noticed that she was still wearing his old bathrobe over her nightgown. She had brought the nightgown with her on a previous night and left it behind. Bosch had taken that as a sign that there would be more nights and washed it for her.

“Well, as you know, child psychology is not my specialty,” she said, “though some of the police officers I counseled were very childlike in their psychological development and actions.”

“I’m not going to hold you to anything,” Bosch said. “I just want your take on it.”

“I think you’re talking about secondary nocturnal enuresis, which occurs after a child has been toilet-trained.”