“Archway?”

Bosch left them there as Edgar filled her in on the facts of life when it came to murder, the media and the movie business in Hollywood.

Bosch licked his fingers to put the cigarette out and then put it with the used match in the cellophane wrapper. He slowly began walking the quarter mile back to Mulholland, once again searching the gravel road in a back-and-forth manner. But there was so much debris on the gravel and in the nearby brush that it was impossible to know if anything-a cigarette butt, a beer bottle, a used condom-was related to the Rolls or not. The one thing he looked closest for was blood. If there was blood on the road that could be linked to the victim, it could indicate that he was killed elsewhere and left in the clearing. No blood probably meant the killing had taken place right there.

He realized as he made the fruitless search that he was feeling relaxed, maybe even happy. He was back on the beat and following his mission once again. Mindful that the man in the trunk had to have perished for him to feel this way, Bosch quickly wrote that guilt off. The man would have ended up in the trunk whether Bosch had ever made it back to the homicide table or not.

When Bosch got to Mulholland he saw the fire trucks. There were two of them and a battalion of firefighters standing around them, seemingly waiting for something. He lit another cigarette and looked at Powers.

“You’ve got a problem,” the uniform cop said.

“What?”

Before Powers answered, one of the firefighters stepped up. He wore the white helmet of a battalion chief.

“You in charge?” he asked.

“That’s me.”

“Chief Jon Friedman,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“The show down in the Bowl is supposed to end in ninety minutes. After that we’ve got the fireworks. Problem is this fellow says you got yourself a dead body up there and a crime scene. That’s the problem. If we can’t get up there to set up a safety position for the fireworks, there isn’t going to be any fireworks. We can’t allow it. If we’re not in position, we could see the whole down slope of these hills go up with one errant missile. Know what I mean?”