“Sometimes they don’t scream, Jerry. That’s the problem here. It’s Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions. Don’t you see that that’s what they are counting on?”

“Who is ‘they, ’ Harry?”

“Whoever did this.”

He shut up for a minute. He was convincing no one, and that almost included himself. Playing to Edgar’s sense of dedication was wrong. He’d be off the job as soon as he put in twenty. He’d then put a business card-sized ad in the union newsletter-“LAPD retired, will cut commission for brother officers”-and make a quarter million a year selling houses to cops or for cops in the San Fernando Valley or the Santa Clarita Valley or the Antelope Valley or whatever valley the bulldozers aimed at next.

“Why go in the pipe?” Bosch said then. “You said he lived up in the Valley. Sepulveda. Why come down here?”

“Harry, who knows? The guy was a junkie. Maybe his wife kicked him out. Maybe he croaked himself up there and his friends dragged his dead ass down here because they didn’t want to be bothered with explaining it.”

“That’s still a crime.”

“Yeah, that’s a crime, but let me know when you find a DA that’ll file it for you.”

“His kit looked clean. New. The other tracks on his arm look old. I don’t think he was slamming again. Not regularly. Something isn’t right.”

“Well, I don’t know… You know, AIDS and everything, they’re supposed to keep a clean kit.”

Bosch looked at his partner as if he didn’t know him.

“Harry, listen to me, what I’m telling you is that he may have been your foxhole buddy twenty years ago but he was a junkie this year. You’ll never be able to explain every action he took. I don’t know about the kit or the tracks, but I do know that this does not look like one we should bust our humps on. This is a nine-to-fiver, weekends and holidays excluded.”