Lost Light by Michael Connelly Page B

license.”
    “Yeah, so? Every cop who retires does that. It’s part of the process of letting go of the badge. You think,
Oh, well, I’ll just get a PI ticket and keep on catching the bad guys.
My ticket is in a drawer in my house, Keisha. I’m not in business and I’m not working for anybody.”
    “Okay, Harry, okay.”
    “Thanks for the clips. I’ve gotta go.”
    “Bye, Harry.”
    I closed the phone and smiled. I liked sparring with her. Ten years covering cops and she seemed no more cynical than the first day I talked to her. That was amazing for a journalist, even more so for a black journalist.
    I looked up at the building. It was a concrete monolith that eclipsed the sun from the angle I had. I was thirty feet from the entrance. But I walked over to a row of benches to the right of the entranceway and sat down. I checked my watch and saw that I was very late for my appointment with Nunez. The trouble was I didn’t know what I was walking into up there and that made me reluctant to go through the doors. The federals always had a way of putting you off balance, of making it clear that it was their world and you were only an invited visitor. I assumed that now without a badge I would be treated more like an uninvited visitor.
    I opened the phone back up and called the general number for Parker Center, one of the few numbers I still remembered. I asked for Kiz Rider in the chief’s office and was transferred. She picked up immediately.
    “Kiz, it’s me, Harry.”
    “Hello, Harry.”
    I tried to read something in her tone but she had flat-lined her response. I couldn’t tell how much of the morning’s anger and animosity remained.
    “How are you doing? You feeling any . . . uh, better?”
    “Did you get my message, Harry?”
    “Message? No, what did it say?”
    “I called your house a little while ago. I apologized. I shouldn’t have let personal feelings get mixed in with the reason I had come out there. I’m sorry.”
    “Hey, it’s okay, Kiz. I apologize, too.”
    “Really? For what?”
    “I don’t know. For the way I left, I guess. You and Edgar didn’t deserve that. Especially you. I should have talked about it with you guys. That’s what partners do. I guess I wasn’t a very good partner at that moment.”
    “Don’t worry about it. That’s what I said on the message. Water under the bridge. Let’s just be friends now.”
    “I’d like to. But . . .”
    I waited for her to pick up the invitation.
    “But what, Harry?”
    “Well, I don’t know how friendly you’ll want to be after this because I’ve got to ask you a question and you’re probably not going to like it.”
    She groaned into the phone so loud that I had to hold it away from my ear.
    “Harry, you’re killing me. What is it?”
    “I’m sitting outside the federal building in Westwood. I’m supposed to go in and see some guy named Nunez. A bureau man. And something’s not feeling right about this. So I was wondering, are these the people you warned me were working the Angella Benton case? A guy named Nunez? Is it connected to Martha Gessler, the agent who disappeared a few years ago?”
    There was a long silence on the phone. Too long.
    “Kiz?”
    “I’m here. Look, Harry, it’s just like I told you at your house. I can’t talk to you about the case. All I can tell you is what I
did
tell you. It is open and active and you should stay away from it.”
    Now it was my turn not to respond. She was like a complete stranger. Less than a year earlier I would have gone into combat with her and trusted her to take my back while I took hers. Now I wasn’t sure I could trust her to tell me if the sun was out, unless she cleared it first with the sixth floor.
    “Harry, you there?”
    “Yeah, I’m here. I’m just kind of speechless, Kiz. I thought if there was somebody in the department who would always level with me, it was going to be you. That’s all.”
    “Look, Harry, have you done anything illegal while