“Detective?”
Bosch turned and put the beam of his light into the face of a patrolman. It was the officer who had taken his name and badge number at the perimeter. He lowered the light.
“What is it?”
“There’s an FBI agent here. She’s asking permission to enter the crime scene.”
“Where is she?”
The officer led the way back to the yellow tape. As Bosch got close he saw a woman standing next to the open door of a car. She was alone and she wasn’t smiling. Bosch felt the thud of uneasy recognition hit his chest.
“Hello, Harry,” she said when she saw him.
“Hello, Rachel,” he said.
TWO
IT HAD BEEN ALMOST SIX MONTHS since he had seen Special Agent Rachel Walling of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As he approached her at the tape, Bosch was sure that not a day had gone by in that time when he hadn’t thought about her. He had never imagined, however, that they would be reunited-if they ever were reunited-in the middle of the night at a murder scene. She was dressed in jeans, an oxford shirt and a dark blue blazer. Her dark hair was unkempt but she still looked beautiful. She obviously had been called in from home, just as Bosch had. She wasn’t smiling and Bosch was reminded of how badly things had ended the last time.
“Look,” he said, “I know I’ve been ignoring you but you didn’t have to go to all the trouble of tracking me down at a crime scene just to-”
“It’s not really a time for humor,” she said, cutting him off. “If this is what I think it might be.”
They’d last had contact on the Echo Park case. He had found her at the time working for a shadowy FBI unit called Tactical Intelligence. She had never explained what exactly the unit did and Bosch had never pushed it, since it wasn’t important to the Echo Park investigation. He had reached out to her because of her past tenure as a profiler-and their past personal history. The Echo Park case had gone sideways and so had any chance for another romance. As Bosch looked at her now, he knew she was all business and he had a feeling he was about to find out what the Tactical Intelligence Unit was all about.