The Hollow Excerpt
1
BOSCH WALKED BETWEEN the headstones, checking names as he passed. These days he suspected that he knew more people belowground than above. He moved slowly, using the cane for support.
He saw Talbot up ahead, standing at the foot of his first wife’s grave. It had been a while since Bosch had seen him. He had less hair and a thicker waist. As expected, he wasn’t happy to see Bosch approaching with his vase of fresh tulips.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Bosch?” Talbot said.
“I could ask you the same thing, Talbot,” Bosch said.
“She’s my wife.”
“Was your wife.”
“Fuck you. Do you even still have a badge?”
“Lucky for guys like you, I hung it up a long time ago.”
“Then what the fuck? You bringing my wife flowers? You got a thing for dead women, Bosch?”
“Twenty-fifth anniversary. I didn’t expect anyone else to be here. Least of all the guy who put her in the grave.”
“Fuck off, Bosch. You’re a loser. And guess what — I come every year.”
“To gloat.”
“To mourn.”
“I’m sure she appreciates it.”
Sarcasm delivered, Bosch looked down at the grave. The marker was simple and inexpensive.
TALBOT 1962–2001
Her husband hadn’t even put her first name on the stone.
“It’s under your skin, isn’t it?” Talbot said. “All these years . . .the case you couldn’t solve.”
“Nobody bats a thousand in homicide work, Talbot,” Bosch said. “But this one I did solve. I just didn’t make the arrest. There’s a difference.”
The two men held each other’s eyes in a serious stare-down. Talbot looked away first. The guilty man always does.
There was something different about him but Bosch couldn’t place it. It wasn’t the hair or the potbelly.
“You know, this is harassment,” Talbot said. “You and your baseless accusations. I had nothing to do with it, so why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and leave me alone.”
“Yeah. I’ll go. I’ll just leave the flowers. I remember the tulips in the house that day. Never figured out where they came from.”
Bosch bent over and put the vase down in the grass in front of the granite stone. He adjusted the angle so it offered the best display of the yellow and red flowers. When he straightened up, he was hit with a jolt of vertigo. He leaned heavily on the cane till it passed.
“You okay, old man?” Talbot asked. “That would be something, huh? You dying in a graveyard.”
“Yeah, something,” Bosch said. “I’ll leave you to it.”
It was the absence of glasses. Talbot used to wear eyeglasses. He must’ve gotten contacts or had his vision surgically corrected.
“That’s right,” Talbot said. “Take your cane and your slow ass back to the old folks’ home.”
“Catch you later,” Bosch said.
Bosch made his way back to his car, which was parked on one of the cemetery’s narrow access roads. He thought about how, twenty-five years before, he’d come within minutes of getting a confession out of Talbot. His estranged wife, Jennifer, had been found beaten to death in the apartment she had recently moved into. The scene was staged to look like an intruder had broken in and waited for her to come home from work. She had been sexually assaulted with an unknown, never recovered foreign object, but at autopsy it was determined that some of the assault had occurred postmortem. It was part of the staging. So were the tulips — left to help sell the misdirection that whoever delivered the flowers had seen the recipient as vulnerable and come back later to break in and commit the crime. All of that made Bosch focus on the husband, Gregory Talbot. In the interrogation room, Talbot waived his rights and agreed to talk. They went two hours in a cat-and-mouse interview, Bosch slowly closing in, using inconsistencies and a leaky alibi to back him into a corner. But then Talbot ended it by playing the lawyer card. Bosch left the room knowing the killer was Talbot but with nothing to charge him with.
By the time Bosch made it from the grave site to his car, his left leg was burning with pain. It was the longest he had walked and the longest he had stood since getting the knee replacement four weeks before. His recovery had been without incident but he had pushed it going to the cemetery to confront Talbot.
He took the bottle of Tylenol out of the glove box and downed two pills without water, first crunching them in his teeth so that they might hit his bloodstream sooner. The taste was acrid. He started the car and drove through the main gate of the cemetery to Santa Monica Boulevard.
_ _ _
Read more of The Hollow when the book is released in October.
