The Black Ice (Harry Bosch, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #2)

by Michael Connelly

Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought. Sometimes it pulls harder on you than the future.

Sometimes his job took him too far inside people’s lives and all he could do was stand there and nod. He was asking questions he felt guilty asking because he had no right to the answers.

‘There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.’

Bosch just looked at him over the stack of binders. He had the full measure of this man now. Pounds wasn’t a cop anymore. He was a bureaucrat. He was nothing. He saw crime, the spilling of blood, the suffering of humans, as statistical entries in a log. And at the end of the year the log told him how well he did. Not people. Not the voice from within. It was the kind of impersonal arrogance that poisoned much of the department and isolated it from the city, its people.

He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.

“I could get busted for talking about that,” Sheehan said. “Could end up like you, out there in the cesspool.” “It’s all a cesspool, man. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the bottom or the top. You’re still swimming in shit.”

“I don’t know, man. People do things you’d never expect when they’ve got the gun on them. They always’ve got hope that things might turn out all right. That’s the way I see it.”

They both knew that once you cross, you can never come back.

Bosch was disgusted with himself. He had lost sight of the art. Solving cases was simply getting people to talk to you. Not forcing them to talk. He had forgotten that this time.

facts weren’t the most important part of an investigation, the glue was. He said the glue was made of instinct, imagination, sometimes guesswork and most times just plain luck.

Through studying the past we learn our future. Something like that. You seem to me to be a man still studying, maybe.”

Fear, though always unspoken, nevertheless stripped men of their carefully orchestrated poses.

Looking at the car, Bosch wondered how far back you have to go to trace the reason for a person’s choices in life. He didn’t know the answer about Moore. He didn’t know the answer about himself.

He said it without hesitation and the words froze Bosch. Moore was a cop. He knew never to confess. You didn’t talk until there was a lawyer by your side, a plea bargain in place, and a deal that was signed.

Bosch was sure Moore had told the story the way he believed it. But it was clear to Bosch he had fully embraced the devil. He had found out who he was.