“I’m going to go, Doctor. We’ll be back tomorrow. In force, I’d expect. We might want to use your dog again. Will you be here?”

“I’ll be here and be glad to help. How are the ribs?”

“They hurt.”

“Only when you breathe, right? That’ll last about a week.”

“Thanks for taking care of me. You don’t need that shoe box back, do you?”

“No, I wouldn’t want that back now.”

Bosch turned to head toward the front door but then turned back to Guyot.

“Doctor, do you live alone here?”

“I do now. My wife died two years ago. A month before our fiftieth anniversary.”

“I’m sorry.”

Guyot nodded and said, “My daughter has her own family up in Seattle. I see them on special occasions.”

Bosch felt like asking why only on special occasions but didn’t. He thanked the man again and left.

Driving out of the canyon and toward Teresa Corazon’s place in Hancock Park, he kept his hand on the shoe box so that it would not be jostled or slide off the seat. He felt a deep sense of dread rising from within. He knew it was because fate had certainly not smiled on him this day. He had caught the worst kind of case there was to catch. A child case.

Child cases haunted you. They hollowed you out and scarred you. There was no bulletproof vest thick enough to stop you from being pierced. Child cases left you knowing the world was full of lost light.

Chapter 4

TERESA Corazon lived in a Mediterranean-style mansion with a stone turnaround 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.