Michael Connelly (97 page)

Once the interior was lighted they moved down the aisle between the rows of stalls, Bosch taking the right and Aguila the
left. The stalls were all empty, the bulls set free to roam the ranch. It was when they reached the back that they saw the
opening to the tunnel.

A forklift was parked in the corner, holding a pallet of hay bales four feet off the ground. There was a four-foot-wide hole
in the concrete floor where the pallet had sat. Zorrillo, or whoever the runner had been, had used the forklift to lift the
pallet but there had been no one to drop it back down to hide his escape.

Bosch crouched down and moved to the edge of the hole and looked down. He saw a ladder leading about twelve feet down to a
lighted passageway. He looked up at Aguila.

“Ready?”

The Mexican nodded.

Bosch went first. He climbed a few steps down the ladder and then dropped the rest of the way, bringing up his gun and ready
to shoot. But there was no one in the tunnel as far as he could see. It wasn’t even like a tunnel. It was more of a hallway.
It was tall enough to stand in and an electrical conduit ran along the ceiling feeding lights in steel cages every twenty
feet. There was a slight curve to the left and so he could not see where it ended. He moved into the passageway and Aguila
dropped down behind him.

“Okay,” Bosch whispered. “Let’s stay to the right. If there is shooting, I’ll go low and you go high.”

Aguila nodded and they began to move quickly through the tunnel. Bosch, trying to figure his bearings, believed they were
heading east and slightly north. They covered the ground to the curve quickly and then pressed themselves hard against the
wall as they moved into the second leg of the passage.

Bosch realized that the bend in the passage was too wide for them to still be on line with EnviroBreed. He stared down the
last segment of the tunnel and saw that it was clear. He could see the exit ladder maybe fifty yards ahead. And he knew they
were going somewhere other than EnviroBreed. He wished he hadn’t left the radio with Ramos’s body.

“Shit,” Harry whispered.

“What?” Aguila whispered back.

“Nothing. C’mon.”

They began to move again, covering the first twenty-five yards quickly and then slowing to a cautious and quieter approach
to the exit ladder. Aguila switched to the right wall and they came upon the opening at the same time, both with guns extended
upward, sweat getting in their eyes.

There was no light from the opening above them. Bosch took the flash-light from Aguila and put its beam through the hole.
He could see exposed wooden rafters of a low ceiling in the room above. No one looked down at them. No one shot at them. No
one did a thing. Harry listened for any sound but heard nothing. He nodded to Aguila to cover and holstered his gun. He started
climbing the ladder, one hand holding the flashlight.

He was scared. In Vietnam, leaving one of Charlie’s tunnels always meant the end of fear. It was like being born again; you
were leaving the darkness for safety and the hands of comrades. Out of the black and into the blue. But not this time; this
time was the opposite.

When he reached the top, before rising through the opening, he flashed the beam around again but saw nothing. Then, like a
turtle, he slowly moved his head out of the opening. The first thing he noticed in the beam was the sawdust everywhere on
the floor. He climbed farther out, taking in the rest of the surroundings. It was some kind of storage room. There were steel
shelves stocked with saw blades, boxes of sanding belts for industrial machinery. There were some hand tools and carpentry
saws. One group of shelves were stacked with wooden dowel pegs, with different sizes on different shelves. Bosch immediately
thought of the pegs attached to the baling wire that had been used to kill Kapps and Porter.

He moved fully into the room now and signaled to Aguila that it was safe to come up. Then Harry approached the storage room’s
door.

It was unlocked and it opened into a huge warehouse with lines of machinery and work benches on one side and the completed
product — unfinished furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers — stacked on the other. Light came from a single bulb that
hung from a cross support beam. It was the night-light. Aguila came up behind him then. They were in Mexitec, Bosch knew.

At the far end of the warehouse were sets of double doors. One of these was open and they moved to it quickly. It led to a
loading-dock area that was off the back alley Bosch had walked through the night before. There was a puddle at the bottom
of the parking bay and he saw wet tire tracks leading into the alley. There was no one in sight. Zorrillo was long gone.

“Two tunnels,” Bosch said, unable to hide the dejection in his voice.

• • •

“Two tunnels,” Corvo said. “Ramos’s informant fucked us.”

Bosch and Aguila were sitting on chairs of unfinished pine watching Corvo pacing and looking like shit, like a man in charge
of an operation that had lost two men, a helicopter and its main target. It had been nearly two hours since they had come
up through the tunnel.

“How d’you mean?” Bosch asked.

“I mean the CI had to have known about the second tunnel. How’s he know about one and not the other? He set us up. He left
Zorrillo the escape route. If I knew who he was I’d charge him with accessory in the death of a federal agent.”

“You don’t know?”

“Ramos didn’t register this one with me. Hadn’t gotten around to it.”

Bosch breathed a little easier.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” Corvo was saying. “I might as well never go back. I’m done, man. Done…. Least you got your
cop killer, Bosch. I got a shit sandwich.”

“Have you put out a Telex?” Bosch said to change the subject.

“Already out. To all stations, all law enforcement agencies. But it doesn’t matter. He’s long gone. He’ll probably go to the
interior, lie low for a year and then start over. Right where he left off. Probably Michoacan, maybe farther down.”

“Maybe he went north,” Bosch said.

“No way he’d try to cross. He knows if we get him up there, he’ll never see daylight again. He went south, where’s he’s safe.”

There were several other agents in the factory with clipboards, cataloging and searching. They had found a machine that hollowed
out table legs so that they could be filled with contraband, recapped and sent across the border. Earlier they had found the
second tunnel opening in the barn and followed it through to EnviroBreed. There had been no explosives on the trapdoor and
they had gone in. The place was empty except for the two dogs outside. They killed them.

The operation had closed down a major smuggling network. Agents had left for Calexico to arrest the head of EnviroBreed, Ely.
There were fourteen arrests made on the ranch. Others would follow. But all of that wasn’t enough for Corvo or anybody. Not
when agents were dead and Zorrillo was in the wind. Corvo had been wrong if he thought Bosch would be satisfied that Arpis
was dead. Bosch wanted Zorrillo, too. He was the man who had called the hits.

Bosch got up so he wouldn’t have to witness the agent’s anguish anymore. He had enough of his own. Aguila must have felt the
same. He, too, stood and began to walk listlessly around the machines and the furniture. Basically, they were waiting for
one of the militia cars to take them back to the airport to Bosch’s car. The DEA would be here until well after sunup. But
Bosch and Aguila were finished.

Harry watched Aguila go back into the storage room and approach the tunnel entrance. He had told him about Grena and the Mexican
had simply nodded. He hadn’t shown a thing. Now Aguila dropped to his haunches and seemed to be studying the floor, as if
the sawdust were a spread of tea leaves in which he could read Zorrillo’s location.

After a few moments, he said, “The pope has new boots.”

Bosch walked over and Aguila pointed to the footprints in the sawdust. There was one that was not from Aguila’s or Bosch’s
shoes. It was very clear in the dust and Harry recognized the elongated heel of a bulldog boot. Inside it was the letter “S”
formed by a curving snake. The edges of the print were sharp in the dust, the head of the snake clearly imprinted.

Aguila had been right. The pope had new boots.

All the way to the border crossing, Bosch contemplated how it had been done, how all the parts now seemed to fit, and how
it might have gone unnoticed if not for Aguila noticing the footprint. He thought about the Snakes box in the closet of the
apartment in Los Feliz. A clue so obvious, yet he had missed it. He had seen only what he wanted to see.

It was still early, just the first hint of dawn’s light was fighting its way up the eastern horizon, and there was not yet
much of a line at the crossing. Nobody was cleaning windshields. Nobody was selling junk. Nobody was there at all. Bosch badged
the bored-looking Border Patrol agent and was waved through.

He needed a phone and some caffeine. He drove two minutes to the Calexico Town Hall, got a Coke from the machine in the police
depart-ment’s cramped lobby and took it out to the pay phone on the front wall. He looked at his watch and knew she would
be at home, probably awake and getting ready for work.

He lit a cigarette and dialed, charging the call to his own PacTel card. While he waited for it to go through he looked across
the street into the fog. He saw the shapes of sleeping figures under blankets scattered about the park. The ground fog gave
the images a ghostly, lonely resonance.

Teresa picked up after two rings. She sounded like she had been awake already.

“Hi.”

“Harry? What is it?”

“Sorry to wake you up.”

“You didn’t. What’s the matter?”

“Are you getting dressed up to go to Moore’s funeral today?”

“Yes. What is this? You called me at ten minutes before six to ask —”

“That isn’t Moore they’ll be putting in the ground.”

There was a long silence during which Bosch looked into the park and saw a man standing there, a blanket wrapped around his
shoulders, staring back at him in the fog. Harry looked away.

“What are you saying? Harry, are you all right?”

“I’m tired but never better. What I’m saying is he’s still alive. Moore. I just missed him this morning.”

“Are you still in Mexico?”

“At the border.”

“That doesn’t make sense. What you said. There were matches made on the latents, we got dental, and his own wife ID’d a photograph
of the tattoo on the body. His identification was confirmed.”

“It’s all bullshit. He set it up.”

“Why, Harry, are you calling me now and telling me this?”

“I want you to help me, Teresa. I can’t go to Irving. Only you. You help me and you’ll help yourself. If I’m right.”

“That’s a big if, Harry.”

Bosch looked back into the park and the man in the blanket was gone. “Just tell me how it could be possible,” she said. “Convince
me.”

Bosch was silent a moment, like a lawyer composing himself before a cross-examination. He knew that every word he spoke now
had to stand the test of her scrutiny or he would lose her.

“Besides the prints and dental, Sheehan told me they also matched his handwriting to the I-found-out-who-I-was note. He said
they compared it to a change-of-address card Moore had put in his personnel file a few months ago after he and his wife separated.”

He took a deep drag on the cigarette and she thought he had finished.

“So? I don’t see — what about it?”

“One of the concessions the protective league won a few years back during contract negotiations was guaranteed access to your
personnel file. So cops could check if there were beefs on their record, commendations, letters of complaint, anything like
that. So Moore had access to his P-file. He went into Personnel a few months back and asked for it because he had just moved
and needed to update it with his new address.”

Bosch held it there a moment, to compose the rest of it in his mind.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

“The P-files also contain print cards. Moore had access to the print card Irving took to you on the day of the autopsy. That
was the card your tech used to identify the prints. You see? While Moore had the file, he could have switched his card for
someone else’s. Then you used the bogus card to identify his body. But, see, it wasn’t his body. It was the other person’s.”

“Who?”

“I think it was a man from down here named Humberto Zorrillo.”

“This seems too farfetched. There were other IDs. I remember that day in the suite. What’s his name, Sheehan, he got a call
from SID saying they matched prints in the motel room to Moore. They used a different set than we did. It’s a double-blind
confirmation, Harry. Then we have the tattoo. And the dental. How do you explain all of that?”

“Look, Teresa, listen to me. It all can be explained. It all works. The dental? You told me you only found one usable fragment,
part of a root canal. That meant no root was left. It was a dead tooth so you could not tell how long it had been out, only
that it matched his dentist’s charts. That’s fine, but one of Moore’s crew told me he once saw Moore get punched during a
Boulevard brawl and he lost a tooth. That could’ve been it, I don’t know.”