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“By that thinking, why’d I get a new knee? I’m not going to need it for very long.”

Hinojos started laughing.

“You know, your logic defies logic sometimes,” she said.

“Not really,” Bosch said. “I’m trying to ease the pain of my final years, okay? Physically and mentally. These past couple years, the lawsuit and all that, it woke something up in me. I’m not sure what it is but it’s something I have to make right. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Even if making it right for others might make it wrong for you?”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take, I guess.”

“Is it guilt that’s driving this? You feel guilty about this boy’s death? There but for the grace of God go I — that sort of thing?”

“No, it’s something else. Me and Chops… we were pretty tight from the start. From his first day there. And then I got placed and he didn’t — it seemed like the Black kids never really got placed with fosters. For me, it didn’t last, and when they put me back in the Mac, they told me he was gone. He died there.”

“So you think you could have saved him if you were there? Harry, you were, what, fourteen years old?”

“Fifteen, actually, and, yeah, I might have done something about it. I don’t know. I never really knew what happened. I’m trying to find out. I made one call about it a long time ago. I was newly minted in homicide and I called over to the sheriff’s — MacLaren was their jurisdiction. This was at least twenty years later, and some guy pulled the file and told me it was a homicide. No arrests, no suspects; cause of death: BFT.”

“BFT?”

“Blunt-force trauma — he was beaten to death. His head was smashed against something hard.”

“How awful.”

“It happened all the time there, assaults like that. If it wasn’t the probation officers, it was the inmates.”

“You were called inmates?”

“We were wards of the state, but the place was overseen by the probation department, so it was basically run like a prison. It was surrounded by twelve-foot-high walls and they put barbed wire on top. They said that was to keep people out, but they weren’t fooling anybody. It was overcrowded, and in some of the dorms we slept on the floor on mattresses made in the prison shop up at San Quentin.”

“It’s amazing anyone survived it.”

“Over twenty thousand kids went through that place during the six years I was there. It was a polio hospital in the fifties. Then, when the vaccine wiped that disease out, the county bought it and started stuffing kids in there. It was supposed to be separate from juvenile detention, but that was on paper. In practice, they brought in kids who were thugs and gangsters. They ran the place. Some of those kids the probation officers were even afraid of.”

Stevie brought Bosch his bean and barley soup. It came with bagel chips on the side. He dunked them in the soup so they would soften. He stopped talking as he began to eat.

“I’m sorry you had to experience that at such a formative age,” Hinojos said. “And I think it had a lot to do with who you became later.”

“And I thought you were retired,” Bosch quipped.

“I’m retired from treating you. But sometimes I can’t help myself.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Okay. How’s your daughter?”

“She’s doing good. She made detective based on her work with the cold-case team. They put her on a fraud table.”

“Is that good?”

“Better than auto-theft detail — that was where I started. That’s just pushing paper and dealing with insurance companies. But I’m glad she’s off the street. Not so sure she is, though.”

“She liked it out there.”

“Most of the time.”

“How often do you get to see her?”