Page 41 of The Hollow | AllFreeNovel

“I’m not going to argue about it with you. My clients, including you, are in line for a pretty good piece of change. And that’s thanks to me.”

Bosch shook his head in frustration, even though he knew Haller couldn’t see him.

“I’m texting you a name. I need to know if he was adopted out and by who. The guy’s probably not even alive.”

“Harry, don’t.”

“I’m texting it now.”

“I’m not — ”

Bosch disconnected and slammed the phone down on his worktable.

“Damn it,” he said out loud.

He picked the phone back up and texted Nicholas Stokely’s name to Haller, then got up from the table and went out on the back deck for some fresh air. He leaned on the railing and looked down into the pass. The freeway was backing up with the morning rush toward downtown, but he wasn’t noticing. He was thinking about the session with Bishop the previous day and how Dr. Sears called the mind a filing cabinet where all files were kept permanently, never expunged or deleted. It was just a matter of understanding the filing system.

He went over to the table and picked up the binoculars. He checked the hawks’ nest in the coastal oak and saw that one of the adult birds was feeding the chicks. It would not be long before they learned to fly.

Through the open slider he heard his phone ding with a text. He went back inside.

The text was from Lorna Taylor. Bosch figured it was coming from her to give Haller some separation from the leaking of court-sealed information. The text contained two names: Mikhail and Judita Novak.

Bosch assumed it was the couple who had adopted Stokely. Excited by the new lead, he opened his laptop and went to work. Assuming that Stokely would have kept his first name while legally changing his last to Novak, he went through all the same searches he had conducted the night before, including reaching out to Gary McIntyre at the NPRC in St. Louis. He got the same results. There was no indication that a Nicholas Novak of the right age, race, and geographic location was alive or dead or had ever served in the military.

Undaunted, he simply typed in the name Nicholas Novak and got a hit on a series of Los Angeles Times stories from 2006 to 2008. The first was a report on the arrest of fifty-five-year-old Nicky Novak in connection with a Prague-based drug ring. Novak was described by a spokesman for the FBI as the leader of a Czech group that manufactured the psychedelic drug ecstasy in Prague and smuggled thousands of pounds of the pills into the United States through the Port of Los Angeles. A total of nine co-conspirators were arrested with Novak in an FBI sting called Operation Bad Czech.

There were no photos of Novak accompanying the stories. Bosch knew that the feds rarely put out mug shots and they made it difficult for the media to get them. It was part of the federal law enforcement culture — they shared nothing unless the court ordered them to. Bosch had run into federal walls many times while with the LAPD.

He quickly read through the rest of the stories from the Times. They chronicled the case as it wound through the system, ultimately leading to a plea agreement in which the conspiracy charge against Novak was dropped in exchange for him pleading guilty to possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. He was sentenced to seven years in federal prison.

The story about Novak’s sentencing identified him formally as Nikolai Novak. With photography not allowed in federal court, Bosch had no means of confirming that Nikolai Novak was Nicholas Stokely. He drummed his fingers on the table while he thought about what he should do. The ages matched up. Nick Stokely must have been born in 1950 or 1951, which would have made him fifty-five years old at the time of Nikolai Novak’s arrest on drug charges. There was also the Czech connection. Anton Czerny, the man in charge of MacLaren when Stokely was there, was Czechoslovakian by birth and stayed active in the community. Was that simply a coincidence?

Bosch had always been suspicious of coincidences. But he had to consider the possibility that Cerny could have played a part in placing Nicholas Stokely with a Czech family.

Bosch needed solid confirmation that he was chasing the right guy. It was time to make a call, and he chose Renée Ballard over Dave Tepps at the sheriff’s department because he knew she would be more receptive to his request. As usual, she answered the call as if their conversation were ongoing.

“I haven’t heard anything yet,” she said.