The Poet (Jack McEvoy, #1; Harry Bosch Universe, #5)

by Michael Connelly

Whether you are the reader or the writer, it can be extremely hard to start a novel. No one in the book is your friend yet, and all the places are strange; hence, starting to read feels like a forced act of intimacy.

We all know the corny old cliché about reading with all the lights on (as if you could get much reading done with them all turned out),

I gingerly stepped out of the car and walked to the edge of the asphalt where the light from the passing cars reflected in moving rainbows on the petroleum-exhaust glaze on the February snow.

He had an annoying habit of not looking at you when you disagreed with him.

“Out of space,” he said. “Out of time.”

William Gladden’s eyes scanned the happy faces as they moved past him. It was like a giant vending machine. Take your pick. Don’t like him? Here comes another. Will she do?

It was supposed to be about a writer who becomes a quadriplegic in a motorcycle accident. With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can’t move his hands to do it. He is in hell.

‘By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly, / From an ultimate dim Thule—/ From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE—out of TIME.’ That’s it. But there is an editor’s note. It says an Eidolon means a phantom.”

“Look, don’t you see what you’re saying? You’re saying don’t go without the proof. But I need to go to get the proof.”

It was my brother in that car, my twin. It was me.

“Anybody could have written on the windshield. And the glove with the residue could have been worn by the killer. Then he took it off and put it on Sean.

I think Sean had somebody in the car with him. They were talking. Then whoever the bastard was killed him.”

Gladden shook it reluctantly. He didn’t like being touched by anyone, unless it was a child.

My experience with cops as a reporter had always been not to make appointments. If you did, all you were doing was giving them a specific place to avoid and the exact time to avoid it.

Lastly, both had been at children’s centers on their last day. The boy at his school, the woman at the day care center where she worked.

There was something about Brooks’s death that made Washington want to listen to a story from a reporter he didn’t even know.

On the ride back I asked the driver to swing by Wisconsin and Clark and I jumped out and ran across the snow to the tree. I put the photo of Bobby Smathers back where I’d found it.

Larry Legs knew Jumpin’ John hadn’t pulled the trigger on himself because he had known the exact struggle Brooks had experienced coming out of a place like this. Brooks had fought his way out of hell and he wasn’t about to go back by his own hand.

“Why?” I said out loud. “Why what?” “Why is somebody doing this? What exactly are they doing?” Washington didn’t answer. He just drove through the cold night.

“If it is just one guy, who is the real target?” I asked, more to myself than Washington. “Is it the first victim or the cop?”

He clicked on DIAL and then waited while listening to the harsh screech of the computer’s uplink. It was like birth, he thought, every time. The horrible screech of the newly born.

He called up the file marked Eidolon and began reading.

I will begin to tell you all now. Turn on your flashlights. I will live and die here in the dark.

Maybe because it is always easy to trust somebody who has done what you have done.

It’s lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We’d all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.

Only in a reporter’s world would it be a highlight. We both knew that probably the only thing better than witnessing a presidential assassination attempt as a reporter was witnessing a successful assassination. Just as long as you didn’t catch a bullet in the crossfire.

In his own words, the killer was an Eidolon. I was chasing a phantom.

“What federal investigation? You’d still be down there in your office counting suicides if I hadn’t talked to Ford yesterday. But that’s the bureau’s way, right? If it’s a good idea, oh that’s our idea. If it’s a good case, yeah, we made that case. Meantime, it’s hear no evil, see no evil and a lot of shit goes by unnoticed.”

She had just made a mistake that was as telling as if she had said outright that Warren had revealed where I was.

Anyway, what this translates to as far as a description goes is that of a reclusive white male with blond hair, perhaps long or curly blond hair, and eyeglasses. There’s your start on the physical profile.”

But, preliminarily, what we are looking at as far as these secondary cases go is a commonality involving children.

That is that the first homicide was committed by the offender in order to draw a homicide detective into the frame. In other words, the first kill is bait, presented in such a horrific fashion as to attract a homicide detective’s obsession. We are assuming that the Poet then stalked each one of these officers and learned their habits and routines. That enabled him to get close and carry out the eventual murder without detection.”

“So who was the black sheep of the family? You or him?” “Me, definitely. Sean was the saint and I was the sinner.”

But because I had noticed that he had not taken photos of the right hand, I knew he had found something of possible significance on the left.

One, when we found Bill, his hair was parted the wrong way. For twenty years he’d been coming in the office, his part is on the left. We find him dead and the part’s on the right.

A standard method of testing for hypnotic trance would be to prick the skin with a pin after placing the suggestion that there will be no pain.

Trying to figure these people out is like putting a shattered mirror back together. There is no way to explain the behavior of some humans, so we simply say they are not humans. We say they are from the moon. And on the particular moon where the Poet comes from, these instincts that he is following are normal and natural. He is following those instincts, creating scenes that give him satisfaction. It’s our job to chart the Poet’s moon and then we’ll be better able to find him and send him back.”

“Overkill,” Backus said. “Suggesting knowledge or acquaintance of the victim.”

“So he must stand by and watch and see his prey for the first time after the bait kill.”

My pattern had always been the same. When I didn’t care whether a woman rejected me, I always took the chance. When I did care and knew rejection would cut me, I always held back.

Why is it, I wondered, that it is the ones who mean so much that are the hardest to reach out to?

A five-second video bite was all it took and the offender knows we are on his trail.”

I dwell alone in the world of moan, Bob, and my work has just begun.

I knew what they meant now. About the moon. The letter was the voice of a man from someplace else.

The speculation is he has a laptop computer with a fax modem. Most likely a cellular modem.

“I wonder if that choice of car was intentional?” he asked. “A pale yellow Mustang.” “Why’s that?” I asked. I saw Rachel nodding. She knew the answer. “The Bible,” Backus said. “Behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.” “And Hell followed with him,” Rachel finished.

There is nothing worse than living by the letter of an agreement when one of the people you made the deal with doesn’t.

Next I called the third number, not even knowing where the 904 area code was. After three rings the call was answered with a high-pitched squeal—the language only computers knew.

“Well, you’ll have to leave it for now. Unless you want to stay on your own and keep doing the cowboy shit.” “Look, Rachel, if I hadn’t been lied to this might not have happened. I might not even have come.”

Ted Vincent and Steve Raffa in Florida finally got hold of Beltran’s records with the organization this morning. He’d been Best Pal to nine young boys over the years. The second one he sponsored, this is going back something like sixteen years, was Gladden.”