Two Kinds of Truth (Harry Bosch, #20; Harry Bosch Universe, #31)

by Michael Connelly

“I can work anywhere,” he said. “I can sleep anywhere.”

Courts across the country had long approved the use of deception and trickery by police in an interview setting with a suspect, holding that an innocent person would see through the deception and not falsely confess to the crime.

He knew there were two kinds of truth in this world. The truth that was the unalterable bedrock of one’s life and mission. And the other, malleable truth of politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers, and their clients, bent and molded to serve whatever purpose was at hand.

Bosch felt a wave of grief. His daughter’s world was expanding. She was going places and it was the natural way of things. He loved seeing it and hated living it.

When he and Edgar were partners in Hollywood twenty-five years before, he had never had the sense that Edgar was all in. But he knew the need for redemption comes in all kinds of ways at all kinds of times.

“When the pills ran out, what did you do?” “I bought a can opener.” “What?” “A can opener and thirty days of rations. I then had a friend put me in a windowless room with a toilet and nail the door shut. He came back in thirty days and I was clean. I’ll never take another pill again. I’ll take a fucking root canal but I still won’t take a pill.”

Livingstone had said sympathy was no substitute for action. That was an essential brick in Bosch’s wall. He had built himself as a man of action and, at the moment when the integrity of his life’s work had been called into question by a man on death row, he had chosen to turn his sympathy for Elizabeth Clayton into action. He understood that but was unsure if anyone else would. They would see other motives. Elizabeth would as well, and that was why he had chosen not to see her.