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“No, but can you update her? I should get back to this. There will be questions.”
“Sure. But do you think it was booby-trapped? Like they knew you were coming?”
“Maybe, but I doubt we’ll ever know. On the news, looks like there’s nothing left.”
“But the agents would have said something when they walked in, and weren’t they on the FBI frequency?”
“They were, but as soon as they went in the container, we lost signal.”
Bosch remembered one of the team’s critical incident guys closing the doors of the container. He wondered if that was procedure or if the agent had some sort of prescient feeling when he entered. Had closing the doors helped contain the explosion?
“It’s so sad,” Maddie said. “Was the agent in charge the one who had the PowerPoint at the search briefing?”
“Yeah, Agent Cavanaugh,” Bosch said. “It was him. He’s gone.”
“Wow. He seemed… dedicated.”
Bosch thought his daughter might be crying.
“He was,” he said.
“Okay, well,” she said, “I’ll let you get back to it. Love you, Dad. So glad you’re safe.”
“Love you, Mads. You stay safe too.”
They hung up. Bosch thought about Cavanaugh. He couldn’t remember his first name during the call with Maddie, but now it came to him: Patrick. They hadn’t liked each other, but the idea that he was gone, incinerated inside a steel box, was hard to accept. It left Bosch feeling guilty.
Shear walked over to the desk. “You call your family?” he asked.
“Just did,” Bosch said.
“Good. There’s a few families that aren’t going to get that kind of call today.”
Bosch nodded and looked back at the screens.
“Any ideas?” he said. “You think it was booby-trapped?”
“Who knows?” Shear said. “Could’ve been. Probably.”
“What about radio frequencies? Cell phone interference?”
“Nah, that’s Hollywood stuff. Those weapons have multiple protections for arming, redundancy after redundancy. Electromagnetic interference is not a factor. Truth is, we might never know for sure.”
He gestured at the screen. The fire was out, but there was literally nothing left of the cargo container. Nothing left to analyze and investigate. Just a black scar on the shipyard tarmac.
32
THE WHOLE WAY home Bosch was consumed by thoughts about Cavanaugh and what his last moments were like. The investigation of the shipyard explosion was ongoing, and it was far too early to know what had happened inside the cargo container to set it off. The one thing that was confirmed was that there were no remains to recover from the site. The four men who had entered the container were simply gone, vaporized by the intense heat of the explosion. By the hellfire. Bosch wondered if they realized what had been triggered and if at the last second they knew their lives were over. Was there a moment of relief? Bosch liked to think so. He hoped at the end there would be a moment of understanding and relief that the good fight was over.
After pulling into the carport, he took out his phone and called Carmen Hinojos. But the call went immediately to voicemail. This told him she was probably in a therapy session. Hinojos was retired from the LAPD but worked part-time for an online therapy group. All sessions were on Zoom, and that meant no set office hours, but it also meant sessions could be scheduled at almost any time of day or night, as clients came from all over the world.
“Hey, it’s Harry,” Bosch said. “You’re probably on a Zoom. I just wanted to see if you felt like getting dinner or something tonight. I would love the company. I had a rough… well, I’ll tell you when we talk. Call when you’re free.”
He disconnected. Hinojos didn’t know that Bosch’s investigation into the death of Charles Lamb had led to the federal investigation and the shipyard explosion. He would have to be guarded in what he told her, but he felt the need to talk to somebody after witnessing four men turned to dust in the blink of an eye.
Bosch looked at his phone and saw a text from Renée Ballard: Call me. He wasn’t sure she was the one he wanted to talk to at the moment. He knew she’d ask questions, and they wouldn’t be the kind a therapist would ask. He put his hand on the door handle but then stopped and called her.
He was not wrong about her questions.
