“Haller.”

“Hey, Mick, how’d I do?”

“Who is this?”

“Sticks.”

Sticks was a freelance videographer who fed footage to the local news channels and sometimes even the bigs. I had known him so long I didn’t even remember his real name.

“How’d you do at what, Sticks? I’m busy here.”

“At the press conference. I set you up, man.”

I realized that it had been Sticks behind the lights, throwing the questions to me.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, you did good. Thanks for that.”

“Now you’re going to take care of me on the case, right? Give me the heads-up if there’s something for me, right? Something exclusive.”

“Yeah, no need to worry, Sticks. I got you covered. But I gotta go.”

I ended the call and put the phone back on the table. Maggie was typing something into her laptop. It looked like the momentary discontent had passed and I was hesitant to touch it again.

“That was a guy who works for the news stations. He might be useful to us at some point.”

“We don’t want to do anything underhanded. The prosecution is held to a much higher standard of ethics than the defense.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t win.

“That’s bullshit and I am not talking about doing anything un-”

The door opened and Harry Bosch stepped in, pushing the door with his back because he was carrying two large boxes in his hands.

“Sorry, I’m late,” he said.

He put the boxes down on the table. I could tell the larger one was a carton from evidence archives. I guessed that the smaller one contained the police file on the original investigation.

“It took them three days to find the murder box. It was on the ’eighty-five aisle instead of ’eighty-six.”

He looked at me and then at Maggie and then back at me.

“So what’d I miss? War break out in the war room?”