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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.

2

BOSCH TURNED RIGHT onto Gower and pulled to the red curb behind a white van with READY ROOTER painted on its side. He got out of his car and walked up to the van. He rapped his knuckles on the side door, and it was opened by Renée Ballard.

“Anything?” Bosch asked.

“We’re getting some stuff,” Ballard said. “He’s talking to her and he doesn’t care much for you, Harry.”

“I noticed that.”

“Climb in.”

Bosch glanced down at what looked like an eighteen-inch step up from the curb. Ballard noticed his dilemma.

“Tom, help him in,” she said.

Tom Laffont took his headset off and rolled his chair to the van’s door. He reached a hand out to Bosch and managed to pull him in, with Harry putting minimal stress on his new knee.

“Take my seat,” Ballard said. “Ozzie, put it on speaker.”

Ozzie was John Osmond of the tech unit. Bosch remained standing. New knee or not, he didn’t like the idea of taking a seat from the woman in charge. The van had an extended top and he didn’t have to crouch.

Osmond flipped a switch on the monitoring equipment and a one-sided conversation came through the van’s speakers. Laffont slid the van’s door closed.

“No, you had to laugh. You had to make me feel small.”

It was Talbot talking to his dead wife. His murdered wife.

“Twenty-five years,” he said. “We could still be together. We could be happy. But you had to laugh when a man opened his heart to you.”

“There’s your motive,” Laffont said.

“Maybe,” Ballard said.

There was a prolonged silence and then Talbot’s visit to his wife’s grave was apparently over. The bug in the tulip vase picked up Talbot’s footsteps walking away in the grass.

“Oh, baby,” Laffont said. “We’re this close.” He held a thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

“What did I miss?” Bosch asked.

“He started with the usual blame-the-victim rant,” Ballard said. “The It was all your fault schtick.”

“But nothing specific?” Bosch pressed.

“Not really,” Ballard said.

Bosch shook his head. He knew it had been a long shot but he’d hoped that with his prodding and the tulips, Talbot would be goaded into lashing out verbally and solidly incriminating himself. Bosch had waited a year for this. The tip had come after the previous anniversary. A gravedigger had overheard Talbot yelling at his dead wife and gloating at getting away with murder. But that hadn’t been taped and the gravedigger was not a good witness, having a felony assault conviction on his record.