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."Does it mean anything to you?"She finally turned to him.In the bright kitchen light he could see the salty tracks that tears had left on her face.It made him feel inadequate, that he was nothing and could do nothing to help heal her."I don't know.My husband.he was caught on the past.""What do you mean?""He was just -- he was always going back.He liked the past better than the present or the hope of the future.He liked to go back to the time he was growing up.He liked.He couldn't let things go."He watched tears slide into the grooves below her eyes.She turned back to the counter and finished pouring the coffee."What happened to him?" he asked."What happens to anybody?" For a while after that she didn't speak, then said, "I don't know.He wanted to go back.He had a need for something back there"Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought.Sometimes it purls harder on you than the future.She dried her eyes with tissue and then turned and gave him a mug.He sipped it before speaking."Once he told me he lived in a castle;" she said."That's what he called it, at least.""In Calexico?" he asked."Yes, but it was for a short while.I don't know what happened.He never told me a lot about that part of his life.It was his father.At some point, he wasn't wanted anymore by his father.He and his mother had to leave Calexico -- the castle, or whatever it was -- and she took him across the border with her.He liked to say he was from Calexico but he really grew up in Mexicali.I don't know if you've ever been there.""Just to drive through.Never stopped.""That's the general idea.Don't stop.But he grew up there."She stopped and he waited her out.She was looking down at her coffee, an attractive woman who looked weary of this.She had not yet seen that this was a beginning for her as well as an end."It was something he never got over.The abandonment.He often went back there to Calexico.I didn't go but I know he did.Alone.I think he was watching his father.Maybe seeing what could have been.I don't know.He kept pictures from when he was growing up.Sometimes at night when he thought I was asleep, he'd take them out and look at them.""Is he still alive, the father?"She handed him a mug of coffee."I don't know.He rarely spoke of his father and when he did he said his father was dead.But I don't know if that was metaphorically dead or that he actually was dead.He was dead as far as Cal went.That was what mattered.It was a very private thing with Cal.He still felt the rejection, all these years later.I could not get him to talk about it.Or, when he would, he would just lie, say the old man meant nothing and that he didn't care.But he did.I could tell.After a while, after years, I have to say that I stopped trying to talk with him about it.And he would never bring it up.He'd just go down there sometimes for a weekend, sometimes a day.He'd never talk about it when he came back.""Do you have the photos?""No, he took them when he left.He'd never leave them."Bosch sipped some coffee to give himself time to think."It seems," he began, "I don't know, it seems like.could this have had anything to do with.""I don't know.All I can tell you is that it had a lot to do with us.It was an obsession with him.It was more important to him than me.It's what ended it for us.""What was he trying to find?""I don't know.In the last few years he shut me out.And I have to say that after a while I shut him out.That's how it ended." Bosch nodded and looked away from her eyes.What else could he do? Sometimes his job took him too far inside people's lives and all he could do was stand there and nod.He was asking questions he felt guilty asking because he had no right to the answers.He was just the messenger boy here.He wasn't supposed to find out why somebody would hold a double-barrel shotgun up to his face and pull the triggers.Still, the mystery of Cal Moore and the pain on her face wouldn't let him go.She was captivating in a way that went beyond her physical beauty.She was attractive, yes, but the hurt in her face, the tears and yet the strength in her eyes tugged at him.The thought that occurred to him was that she did not deserve this.How could Cal Moore have tucked up so badly?He looked back at her."There was another thing he told me once.Uh, I've had some experience with IAD, uh, that's Internal -- ""I know what it is.""Yes, well, he asked me for some advice
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