Michael Connelly

“As the conscience of a city…Bosch is a wonderful old-fashioned hero who isn’t afraid to walk through the flames — and suffer the pain for the rest of us.”
— The New York Times

“”Angels Flight” explores the underbelly of the human soul with the usual tight prose and swirling plot twists that Connelly’s legions of fans have come to expect.  Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal

“As usual it is a highly professional, extremely exciting story in which one becomes immersed right from the start. This is Michael Connelly at the very top of his form.”
—  Publishing News, London

“”Angels Flight” is the first must read of 1999.”
— The Chicago Tribune

McCaleb saw her before she saw him. He was coming down the main dock, past the row of millionaires’ boats, when he saw the woman standing in the stern of The Following Sea. It was half past ten on a Saturday morning and the warm whisper of spring had brought a lot of people out to the San Pedro docks. McCaleb was finishing the walk he took every morning — completely around Cabrillo Marina, out along the rock jetty and back. He was huffing by this part of the walk, but he slowed his pace even more as he approached the boat. His first feeling was annoyance — the woman had boarded his boat uninvited. But as he got closer, he put that aside and wondered who she was and what she wanted.

She wasn’t dressed for boating. She had on a loose summer dress that came to mid-thigh. The breeze off the water threatened to lift it and so she kept one hand at her side to keep it down. McCaleb couldn’t see her feet yet but he guessed by the taut lines of the muscles he saw in her brown legs that she wasn’t wearing boat shoes. She had raised heels on.  McCaleb’s immediate read was that she was there to make some kind of impression on someone.

McCaleb was dressed to make no impression at all. He had on an old pair of jeans ripped by wear, not for style, and a T-shirt from the Catalina Gold Cup tournament a few summers before. The clothes were spattered with stains — mostly fish blood, some of his own blood, marine polyurethane and engine oil. They had served him as both fishing and work clothes. His plan was to use the weekend to work on the boat and he was dressed accordingly.

He became more self-conscious about his appearance as he drew closer to the boat and could see the woman better. He pulled the foam pads of his portable off his ears and turned off the CD in the middle of Howlin’ Wolf singing “I Ain’t Superstitious.”

“Can I help you?” he asked before stepping down into his own boat.

His voice seemed to startle her and she turned away from the sliding door that led into the boat’s salon. McCaleb figured she had knocked on the glass and was waiting, expecting him to be inside.

“I’m looking for Terrell McCaleb.”

She was an attractive woman in her early thirties, a good decade or so younger than McCaleb. There was a sense of familiarity about her but he couldn’t quite place it. It was one of those deja vu things. At the same time he felt the stir of recognition, it quickly flitted away and he knew he was mistaken, that he did not know this woman. He remembered faces. And hers was nice enough not to forget.

She had mispronounced the name, saying Mc-Cal-ub instead of Mc-Kay-Leb, and used the formal first name that no one ever used except the reporters. That’s when he began to understand. He knew now what had brought her to the boat. Another lost soul come to the wrong place.

“McCaleb,” he corrected. “Terry McCaleb.”

“Sorry. I, uh, I thought maybe you were inside. I didn’t know if it was okay to walk on the boat and knock.”

“But you did anyway.”

She ignored the reprimand and went on. It was as if what she was doing and what she had to say had been rehearsed.
“I need to talk to you.”

“Well, I’m kind of busy at the moment.”

He pointed to the open bilge hatch she was lucky not to have fallen into and the tools he had left spread out on a drop cloth by the stern transom.

“I’ve been walking around, looking for this boat, for almost an hour,” she said. “It won’t take long. My name is Graciela Rivers and I wanted —”

“Look, Miss Rivers,” he said, holding his hands up and interrupting. “I’m really … You read about me in the newspaper, right?”

She nodded.

“Well, before you start your story, I have to tell you, you’re not the first one to come out here and find me or to get my number and call me. And I’m just going to tell you what I told all of the others. I’m not looking for a job. So if this is about you wanting to hire me or have me help you some way, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. I’m not looking for that kind of work.”

She didn’t say anything and he felt a pang of sympathy for her, just as he had for the others who had come to him before her.

“Look, I do know a couple of private investigators I can recommend. Good ones that will work hard and won’t rip you off.”

He stepped over to the stern gunwale, picked up the sunglasses he had forgotten to take on his walk and put them on, signaling the end of the conversation. But the gesture and his words went by her.

“The article said you were good. It said you hated it whenever somebody got away.”

He put his hands in his pockets and hiked his shoulders.

“You have to remember something. It was never me alone. I had partners, I had the lab teams, I had the whole bureau behind me. It’s a lot different than one guy running around out there on his own. A lot different. I probably couldn’t help you even if I wanted to.”

She nodded and he thought that he had gotten through to her and that would be the end of this one. He started thinking about the valve job on one of the boat’s engines that he’d planned to complete over the weekend. But he was wrong about her.

“I think you could help me,” she said. “Maybe help yourself, too.”

“I don’t need the money. I do okay.”

“I’m not talking about money.”

He looked at her for a beat before replying.

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” he said, injecting exasperation into his voice. “But I can’t help you. I’ve got no badge anymore and I’m not a private investigator. It would be illegal for me to act as one or to accept money without a state license. If you read the story in the paper, then you know what happened to me. I’m not even supposed to be driving a car.”

He pointed toward the parking lot beyond the row of docks and the gangway.

“You see the one wrapped up like a Christmas present? That’s mine. It’s sitting there until I get my doctor’s approval to drive again. What kind of investigator would that make me? I’d be taking the bus.”

She ignored his protest and just looked at him with a resolute expression that unnerved him. He didn’t know how he was going to get her off the boat.

“I’ll go get those names for you.”

He walked around her and slid open the salon door. After going in, he pulled the door shut behind him. He needed the separation. He went to the drawers below the chart table and began looking for his phone book. He hadn’t needed it in so long he wasn’t sure where it was. He glanced out through the door and watched her step to the stern and lean her hips against the transom as she waited.

There was reflective film on the glass of the door.  She couldn’t see him watching her. The sense of familiarity came over him again and he tried to place her face. He found her very striking. Dark almond-shaped eyes that seemed both sad and understanding of some secret at the same time. He knew he would easily remember if he had ever met her or even just observed her before. But nothing came. His eyes instinctively went to her hands in search of a ring. There was none. He had been right about her shoes. She wore sandals with two-inch cork heels. Her toenails were painted pink and showed off against her soft brown skin. He wondered if this was how she looked all the time, or if she had dressed to entice him into taking the job.

He found his phone book in the second drawer and quickly looked up the names Jack Lavelle and Tom Kimball. He wrote their names and numbers on an old marine service flier and opened the slider. She was opening her purse as he stepped out. He held up the paper.

”Here are two names. Lavelle is LAPD retired and Kimball was with the bureau. I worked with both and either will do a good job for you. Pick one and call. Make sure you tell him you got his name from me. He’ll take care of you.”

She didn’t take the names from him. Instead she pulled a photo out of her purse and handed it to him. McCaleb took it without thinking. He realized immediately that this was a mistake. In his hand was a photo of a smiling woman watching a small boy blowing out candles on a birthday cake. McCaleb counted seven candles. At first he thought it was a picture of Rivers a few years younger. But then he realized it wasn’t her. The woman in the photo had a rounder face and thinner lips. She wasn’t as beautiful as Graciela Rivers. Though both had deep brown eyes, the eyes of the woman in the photo did not have the same intensity as the eyes of the woman now watching him.

“Your sister?”

“Yes. And her son.”

“Which one?”

“What?”

“Which one is dead?”

The question was his second mistake, compounding the first by drawing him further in. He knew the moment he asked it that he should have just insisted that she take the names of the two private detectives and been done with it.

“My sister Gloria Torres. We called her Glory. That’s her son, Raymond.”

He nodded and handed the photo back but she didn’t take it. He knew she wanted him to ask what had happened but he was finally putting on the brakes.

“Look, this isn’t going to work,” he finally said. “I know what you’re doing. It doesn’t work on me.”

“You mean you have no sympathy?”

He hesitated as the anger boiled up in his throat.

“I have sympathy. You read the newspaper story, you know what happened to me. Sympathy was my problem all along.”

He swallowed it back and tried to clear away any ill feeling. He knew she was consumed by horrible frustrations. McCaleb had known hundreds of people like her. Loved ones taken from them without reason. No arrests, no convictions, no closure. Some of them were left zombies, their lives irrevocably changed. Lost souls. Graciela Rivers was one of them now. She had to be or she wouldn’t have tracked him down. He knew that no matter what she said to him or how angry he got, she didn’t deserve to be hit with his own frustrations as well.

“Look,” he said. “I just can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

He put a hand on her arm to lead her back to the dock step. Her skin was warm. He felt the strong muscle beneath the softness. He offered the photo again but she still refused to take it.

“Look at it again. Please. Just one more time and then I’ll leave you alone. Tell me if you feel anything else?”

He shook his head and made a feeble hand gesture as if to say it made no difference to him.

“I was an FBI agent, not a psychic.”

But he made a show of holding the photo up and looking at it anyway. The woman and the boy seemed happy. It was a celebration. Seven candles. McCaleb remembered that his parents were still together when he turned seven. But not much longer. His eyes were drawn to the boy more than the woman. He wondered how the boy would get along now without his mother.

“I’m sorry, Miss Rivers. I really am. But there is nothing I can do for you. Do you want this back or not?”

“I have a double of it. You know, two for the price of one. I thought you’d want to keep that one.”

For the first time he felt the undertow in the emotional current. There was something else at play but he didn’t know what. He looked closely at Graciela Rivers and had the sense that if he took another step, asked the obvious question, he would be pulled under. He couldn’t help himself.

“Why would I want to keep it if I’m not going to be able to help you?”

She smiled in a sad sort of way.

“Because she’s the woman who saved your life. I thought from time to time you might want to remind yourself of what she looked like, who she was.”

He stared at her for a long moment but he wasn’t really looking at Graciela Rivers. He was looking inward, running what she had just said through memory and knowledge and coming up short of its meaning.

“What are you talking about?”

It was all he could manage to ask. He had the sense that control of the conversation and everything else was tilting away from him and sliding across the deck to her. The undertow had him now. It was carrying him out.

She raised her hand but reached past the photo he was still holding out to her. She placed her palm on his chest and ran it down the front of his shirt, her fingers tracing the thick rope of the scar beneath. He let her do it. He stood there frozen and let her do it.

“Your heart,” she said. “It was my sister’s. She was the one who saved your life.”

“Connelly is so good… How beautifully he strews the faulty suppositions, the flawed conclusions, the false bottoms.”
— New York Daily News

“Fans of Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will feel right at home with this beautifully constructed, powerfully resonating thriller, and newcomers will see right away that all the fuss has been about.”
—  Publishers Weekly

“Thrilling, suspenseful and securely anchored in procedure and purpose.  Not a false note; deeply satisfying stuff.”
— London Literary Review

“Compelling…A spine-tingling manhunt guaranteed to boost the blood pressure.”
— People Magazine

As he drove along Mulholland Drive toward the Cahuenga Pass, Bosch began to hear the music.  It came to him in fragments of string and errant horn sequences, echoing off the brown summer-dried hills and blurred by the white noise of traffic carrying up from the Hollywood Freeway.  Nothing he could identify.  All he knew was that he was heading toward its source.

He slowed when he saw the other cars parked off to the side of a gravel turn-off road.  Two detective sedans and a patrol car.  Bosch pulled his Caprice in behind them and got out.  A single officer in uniform leaned against the fender of the patrol car.  Yellow plastic crime-scene tape — the stuff used by the mile in Los Angeles — was strung from the patrol car’s sideview mirror across the gravel road to the sign posted on the other side.  The sign said, in black-on-white letters that were almost indistinguishable behind the graffiti that covered the sign:

           L.A.F.D. FIRE CONTROL
MOUNTAIN FIRE DISTRICT ROAD
NO PUBLIC ADMITTANCE
NO SMOKING!

 The patrol cop, a large man with sun-reddened skin and blond bristly hair, straightened up as Bosch approached.  The first thing Bosch noted about him other than his size was the baton.  It was holstered in a ring on his belt and the business end of the club was marred, the black acrylic paint scratched away to reveal the aluminum beneath.  Street fighters wore their battle-scarred sticks proudly, as a sign, a not so subtle warning.  This cop was a headbanger.  No doubt about it.  The plate above the cop’s breast pocket said his name was Powers.  He looked down at Bosch through Ray-Bans, though it was well into dusk and a sky of burnt orange clouds was reflected in his mirrored lenses.  It was one of those sundowns that reminded Bosch of the glow the fires of the riots had put in the sky a few years back.

“Harry Bosch,” Powers said with a touch of surprise.  “When did you get back on the table?”

Bosch looked at him a moment before answering.  He didn’t know Powers but that didn’t mean anything.  Bosch’s story was probably known by every cop in Hollywood Division.

“Just did,” Bosch said.

He didn’t make any move to shake hands.  You didn’t do that at crime scenes.

“First case back in the saddle, huh?”

Bosch took out a cigarette and lit it.  It was direct violation of department policy but it wasn’t something he worried about.

“Something like that.”  He changed the subject.  “Who’s down there?”

“Edgar and the new one from Pacific, his soul sister.”

“Rider.”

“Whatever.”

Bosch said nothing further about that.  He knew what was behind the contempt in the uniform cop’s voice.  It didn’t matter that he knew Kizmin Rider had the gift and was a top-notch investigator.  That would mean nothing to Powers, even if Bosch told him it was so. Powers probably saw only one reason why he was still wearing a blue uniform instead of carrying a Detective’s gold badge: that he was a white man in an era of female and minority hiring and promotion.  It was the kind of festering sore better left undisturbed.

Powers apparently registered Bosch’ s non-response as disagreement and went on.

“Anyway, they told me to let Emmy and Sid drive on down when they get here.  I guess they’re done with the search.  So you can drive down instead of walking, I guess.”

It took a second for Bosch to register that Powers was referring to the medical examiner and the Scientific Investigation Division tech.  He’s said the names as if they were a couple invited to a picnic.

Bosch stepped out to the pavement, dropped the half cigarette and made sure he put it out with his shoe.  It wouldn’t be good to start a brush fire on his first job back on the homicide table.

“I’ll walk it,” he said.  “What about Lieutenant Billets?”

“Not here yet.”

Bosch went back to his car and reached in through the open window for his briefcase.  He then walked back to Powers.

“You the one who found it?”

“That was me.”

Powers was proud of himself.

“How’d you open it?”

“Keep a slim jim in the car.  Opened the door, then popped the trunk.”

“Why?”

“The smell.  It was obvious.”

“Wear gloves?”

“Nope.  Didn’t have any.”

“What did you touch?”

Powers had to think about it for a moment.

“Door handle, the trunk pull.  That’d be about it.”

“Did Edgar or Rider take a statement?  You write something up?’

“Nothing yet.”

Bosch nodded.

“Listen, Powers, I know you’re all proud of yourself, but next time don’t open the car, okay?  We all want to be detectives but not all of us are.  That’s how crime scenes get fucked up.  And I think you know that.”

Bosch watched the cop’s face turn a dark shade of crimson and the skin go tight around his jaw.

“Listen, Bosch,” he said.  “What I know is that if I just called this in as a suspicious vehicle that smells like there’s a stiff in the trunk, then you people would’ve said, ‘What the fuck does Powers know?’ and left it there to rot in the sun until there was nothing left of your goddamn crime scene.”

“That might be true but, see, then that would be our fuckup to make.  Instead, we’ve got you fucking us up before we start.”

Powers remained angry but mute.  Bosch waited a beat, ready to continue the debate, before dismissing it.

“Can you lift the tape now, please?”

Powers stepped back to the tape.  He was about thirty-five, Bosch guessed, and had the long-practiced swagger of a street veteran.  In L.A. that swagger came to you quickly, as it had in Vietnam.  Powers held the yellow tape up and Bosch walked under.  As he passed, the cop said, “Don’t get lost.”

“Good one, Powers.  You got me there.”

“A jazzy, funky, roller coaster of a book….Connelly has it all working together here: skillful dialogue, solid plotting, nuances of race and a pace that will keep readers gasping to keep up…. His best yet.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Truly one of the year’s best entertainments.”
— Booklist

“Compelling…Connelly displays a wonderful atmospheric feel for the posh and the poor…The last pages bring things to a shocking end that should satisfy Connelly’s growing audience.”
—  Washington Post

“For those seeking the kind of action that takes more turns than a roulette wheel, “Trunk Music” is a sure bet.”
— People Magazine

By Michael Connelly, from the Limited Edition Release of The Poet.  WARNING: SPOILERS for The Poet.

After Robert Backus headed off into the darkness in the last pages of The Poet my full intention was for him to remain in the darkness, to never return, to always be out there like a killer ghost haunting my fictional world. I started writing the book in 1995. I had recently left my job as a journalist and was still struggling with the idea that as a crime novelist it would be expected that I write stories where good always vanquished evil, where the good guy caught the bad guy, where there were no loose ends — especially a jagged end like a killer left in the wind. I had spent a dozen years as a police beat reporter and I knew that reality was quite the opposite of that. People get away with murder everyday. I had written dozens and dozens of newspaper stories about murders that had gone unsolved. During the year I was writing The Poet I saw the murder case against O.J. Simpson start to self-destruct and the Los Angeles Police Department vilified for it. And so it was hard for me to turn from the reality of the world I knew and write one more murder mystery in which the sun rose at the end and all was right in the world. So I wrote The Poet with the idea that it would be a thrill ride with enough reader fulfillment at the end to overcome the dissatisfaction of having the killer ultimately get away. Before I wrote the first line — Death is my beat — I knew that the book would end with the killer slipping away into the darkness.

Now here I am eight years later, sitting in the same room at the Chateau Marmont where Jack McEvoy encountered Robert Backus, and I am trying to explain to you and myself why I have just written a sequel to The Poet. It is hard to explain, other than to simply say things have changed. That was then and this is now. Just out the window and across the balcony I no longer see the Marlboro Man’s steely eyes watching from the billboard. He has been replaced by a vanilla vodka bottle. I am different, too. And so is the world.

In the years since writing The Poet the world has grown more welcoming to me at the same time it’s become more uncertain to me. A couple years after writing The Poet I became a father and my life became wonderful and vulnerable in the same moment. As I watched my daughter grow it began to bother me that I had created a fictional world where a killer like Robert Backus could walk free. I started to long for order to be restored in that world. After all, the real world had become a place of increased fears and uncertain safety. I came to realize that the one place where I could control things was in the fictional universe that I had created. So six years after Robert Backus disappeared into the dark I made the decision to go back into that darkness to find him. And I decided to use Harry Bosch for the job. Harry is my best man. He is also a man who has become a father and knows my sense of wonder and joy and fear all at the same time. The story is called The Narrows and my hope is that it shows a bit of what I have learned since the time I decided to let a killer go free.

Yes, in reality people still get away with murder. I don’t know if that will ever change. But I have come to realize that the line between reality and the created world of a novel is thinnest when it comes to human feelings and desires. It is easy to take those across the line, traveling from fiction to reality. And so I have learned that it is important to take care in the fictional universe of your own creation. It is important to remember that the darkness into which you may banish a killer can travel. It can cross that line. I don’t want that to happen. In that respect I look at The Narrows as a story that is long overdue.

Michael Connelly
Chateau Marmont Hotel, Los Angeles
December 13, 2003