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“I’ve got a good feeling about that. It reminds me of Tony Gwynn and Seven Grains of Pain.”
“What is that, a song?”
Bosch shook his head. He remembered that Soto didn’t care about sports, especially baseball. Her family had been displaced from their homes in Chavez Ravine so that Dodger Stadium could be built. It was a moral scar on the city that would never fade.
“No. Tony Gwynn was a baseball player,” he said. “But don’t worry, he wasn’t a Dodger. He played for the Padres. Back in ’94 he was close to hitting four hundred, and nobody had hit four hundred since Ted Williams. Most players change bats all the time. But Tony used the same bat all season. It was like a good-luck charm. He loved that bat and wouldn’t swing anything else. He called it Seven Grains of Pain.”
“Almost none of that makes sense to me,” Soto said. “But what happened? Did he get to four hundred, whatever that means?”
“No, the baseball players went on strike and the owners canceled the rest of season. He never got that close again.”
“That’s too bad. I don’t even like baseball and that makes me sad.”
“It was. But you see what I’m saying? It might seem too easy, but maybe Novak just liked that pipe and wanted to keep using it. Keep putting more hash marks on it.”
“Well, it’s still not that easy. Like I said, we still need to connect it to a crime before we can call for the parade down Main Street.”
“Right.”
Bosch heard Shear call his name. There was an urgency to it. He headed in that direction.
Shear was in the opposite rear corner of the warehouse. As Bosch approached he could see a full dental-examination setup — padded recliner, overhead light, pullover instrument table, spit sink, and drill rack.
“Steve?” Bosch asked.
“Look at all this!” Shear said. “It’s crazy.”
The equipment looked old to Bosch. There was a tear in the padding of the recliner, and the porcelain spit sink was yellowed and chipped.
“Harry, I think they torture people here,” Shear said.
He pointed to the chair, and Bosch saw the Velcro straps wrapped around both armrests.
“You might be right,” he said.
“It’s like that movie where the dentist tortures people,” Shear said.
Bosch didn’t know the movie. Shear pointed behind the chair to a row of green pressure tanks lined up along the wall.
“They torture them till they pass out, then they wake ’em up with the oxygen,” Shear said.
Bosch nodded, then stopped when he realized something.
“The gauges are gone,” he said.
All four tanks behind the chair tapered to a point at the top where a valve and pressure gauge would normally be.
“They’re all empty,” Shear said.
He wasn’t seeing what Bosch was seeing.
“You have Cavanaugh’s PowerPoint on your phone?” he asked.
“I do,” Shear said.
“Pull it up.”
“Okay. What are we looking for?”
