Lost Light

28

Special Agent Peoples was waiting for me in the first-floor lobby of the federal building in Westwood. He was standing when I got there. Maybe he’d been standing there the whole time since he’d made the call.

“Follow me,” he said. “We’re going to make this quick.”

“Whatever works.”

After giving a uniformed guard the nod he led me through a security door using a card key and then he used it again to access the elevator I was already familiar with.

“You guys got your own elevator and everything,” I said. “Pretty cool.”

Peoples wasn’t impressed. He turned so he was looking right at me.

“I’m doing this because I have no choice. I’ve decided to agree to this extortion because I believe in the greater good of what I’m trying to accomplish here.”

“Is that why you sent Milton into my lawyer’s office last night? Was that all part of the greater good you’re talking about?”

He didn’t answer.

“Look, you can hate me and that’s fine. That’s your option. But let’s not bullshit each other. Don’t hide behind that stuff, because we both know what’s going on here. Your guy crossed the line and got caught. Now it’s just time to pay the price. That’s what this is about. It’s that simple.”

“And meantime an investigation is compromised and lives may be at stake.”

“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

The elevator opened on the ninth floor. He led me out without answering. The ever handy card key got us through another door and into a squad room where several agents were working at desks. As we passed through, most of them stopped what they were doing to look at me. I assumed that they had either been briefed on who I was and what I was doing or just the occurrence of a non-agent in the inner sanctum was worth noting.

When I was halfway across the room I spotted Milton sitting at a desk near the back. He was leaning back in his chair giving me his best show of being relaxed. But I could sense the anger pulsing beneath the façade. I winked at him and turned my attention away.

Peoples led me into a small room with a desk and two chairs. On the desk was a cardboard box. I looked into it and recognized my own notebook and the file I had kept on Angella Benton. There was also the file from Lawton Cross’s garage and a black binder full of documents two inches thick. I assumed it was the copy of the LAPD’s murder book. I got excited just looking at it. It was the full deck of cards I had been looking for.

“Where’s the rest?” I asked.

Peoples walked around behind the desk and opened the middle drawer. He removed a file and dropped it on the top of the desk.

“In there you will find subject location reports covering the two dates you requested. I don’t think they will help you but it’s what you wanted. You can look at them here but you cannot take them with you. They will not leave this office. Do you understand that?”

I nodded, deciding not to push it.

“What about Aziz?”

“When you are ready I will put you in a room with him. But he won’t talk to you. You’ll be wasting your time.”

“Well, it’s mine to waste.”

“Then, before you leave here, you will call your attorney and instruct her to turn over to me the original and all copies of the surveillance recordings you have from last night and the night before.”

I shook my head.

“Sorry, that’s not the deal.”

“It certainly is.”

“No, I never said I would turn over the recordings. What I said was that I would not go public with them. There’s a difference. I’m not going to turn over the only leverage I’ve got. I’m not stupid, John.”

“We had a deal,” he said, his cheeks beginning to quiver with anger.

“And I’m keeping the deal. Exactly as offered.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cassette tape. I held it out to him.

“If you don’t believe me you can listen for yourself. I was wearing a wire last night in the booth.”

I watched his eyes register that I now even had him directly tied in.

“Take it, John. Call it a goodwill gesture. It’s the original. No copies were made.”

He slowly reached up and took the tape. I moved around behind the desk.

“Why don’t I take a look at what you’ve got in the file while you go do whatever you have to do to get Aziz ready?”

Peoples pocketed the tape and nodded.

“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he said. “If anyone comes in here and asks what you are doing, close that file and tell them to see me.”

“One last thing. What about the money?”

“What about it?”

“How much money from the movie set heist did Aziz have under his car seat?”

I thought I saw a small smile start to play on Peoples’s face, but then it went away.

“He had a hundred bucks. One bill traced to the heist.”

He stayed long enough to see the disappointment on my face, then turned to the door.

After he left the room I sat down at the desk and opened the file. It contained two pages that had security stamps on them and had words in the middle of paragraphs and then whole paragraphs blocked out with black ink. Peoples clearly wasn’t going to let me see anything I had not bargained for-or extorted from him, as he had put it.

The pages were taken from what I assumed was a larger file. There was a coding in small print at the top left corner. I reached into the cardboard box and opened my file. I took out one of the loose sheets of note paper and wrote the code number from each page down. I then read what Peoples was allowing me to read.

The first page had two dated paragraphs.

5-11-99-SUBJECT confirmed in Hamburg at •••• in company with •••• and ••••. SUBJECT seen in restaurant by •••• approximately 20:00 until 23:30 hours. No further detail.

7-1-99-SUBJECT passport scan at Heathrow at 14:40 hours. Follow up determination arrival on Lufthansa Flight 698 from Frankfurt. No further detail.

The paragraphs before and after these two were completely blacked out. What I was looking at was the log in which tabs on Aziz had been kept over the years by the feds. He was on the watch list. This is what it amounted to. Sightings by informants or agents and airport passport checks.

The two dates on the page were on either side of the murder of Angella Benton and the movie set heist. It by no means cleared Aziz of active or background involvement in the crimes. Yet, if I believed the document in front of me, he was in Europe both before and after the occurrence of the crimes I was investigating. But it was no alibi. Aziz was known, according to the Times article I had read, to travel with false identification. It was possible he had slipped into this country to commit the crimes and then slipped out.

I went on to the next page. This one had only one paragraph that was not blacked out. But the date was a direct hit.

3-19-00-SUBJECT passport scan at LAX-CA. Arrival on Qantas Flight 88 from Manilla at 18:11 hrs. Security check and search. Questioned by •••• ••••, Los Angeles field office. See transcript #00-44969. Released at 21:15 hrs.

Aziz had what appeared to be a perfect alibi for the night Agent Martha Gessler disappeared. He was being questioned by an FBI agent at Los Angeles International Airport until 9:15 P.M., which put him in federal custody at the same time Gessler disappeared while on her way home from work.

I put the two sheets back in the file and put it back in the drawer. I wrote no further notes-there was nothing to write-on the page from my file. I put it back inside the file and lifted out the murder book. I was just about to start into it when the door to the room opened and there was Milton. I said nothing. I waited for him to make the first move. He stepped in and looked around the room as though it was the size of a warehouse. He finally spoke without looking at me.

“You have some balls on you, Bosch. Doing what you’re doing and thinking you’re going to just walk away from it. Away from me.”

“I guess I could say the same thing about you.”

“If it was me I would have called your bluff.”

“Then you would have called it wrong.”

He leaned down and put both hands on the table and looked right at me.

“You are a has-been, Bosch. The world’s passed you by, but here you are, grabbing at straws, fucking with people who are trying to protect the future.”

I was unimpressed and hoped I showed it. I leaned back and looked up at him.

“Why don’t you relax, man? You’ve got nothing to worry about as far as I can tell. You’ve got a boss who’s more interested in a cover-up than a cleanup. You’ll do okay on this, Milton. I think he’s mad because you got caught, not because of what you did.”

He pointed a finger at me.

“Don’t fucking go there. Don’t. The day I want career advice from you is the day I turn in my badge.”

“Fine. Then what do you want?”

“I want to give you a warning. Watch out for me, Bosch. ’Cause I’m coming.”

“Then I’ll be ready.”

He turned and walked out, leaving the door open. A few seconds later Peoples was back.

“You ready?”

“Been ready.”

“Where’s the file I gave you?”

“It’s back in the drawer.”

He leaned over the desk and slid open the drawer to make sure. He even opened the file to make sure I hadn’t pulled a fast one.

“Okay, let’s go. Bring your box.”

I followed him through a couple security doors and I was once again in the hallway of cells. But before we got close to the doors with the mirrored windows he used his card key to open a door and he ushered me into an interview room. There was a table and two chairs. Mousouwa Aziz was already sitting in one of them. An agent I had not seen before was leaning against the corner to the left of the door. Peoples moved into the other corner.

“Have a seat,” he said. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

I put the box I carried down on the floor, pulled out the remaining chair and sat down across the table from Aziz. He looked weak and thin. A line of dark hair had grown in below the blond dye job. His hooded eyes were bloodshot and I wondered if they ever turned the light out in his cell. Things had certainly changed in his world. Two years ago his arrival and identification at LAX had brought a custody hold for a few hours while an agent attempted to interview him. Now a border stop got him an interminable hold in the FBI’s inner sanctum.

I wasn’t expecting much from the interview but felt I needed the face-to-face before proceeding or disposing of Aziz as a suspect. After viewing the intelligence reports a few minutes earlier, I was leaning toward the latter. All I had that connected the diminutive would-be terrorist to Angella Benton was the money. At the time of his arrest at the border he’d had in his possession one of the hundred-dollar bills that had come from the movie set heist. Only one. There were probably a lot of explanations for this and I was beginning to think that his involvement in the murder and heist was not one of them.

Reaching down to the cardboard box I pulled up my file on Angella Benton and opened it on my lap, where Aziz could not see it. I took out the photo of Angella that had been provided by her family. It showed her in a studio portrait taken at the time of her graduation from Ohio State, less than two years before her death. I looked up at Aziz.

“My name is Harry Bosch. I am investigating the death of Angella Benton four years ago. Does she look familiar to you?”

I slid the photo across the table and studied his face and eyes for any tell, any giveaway. His eyes moved over the photograph but I saw nothing in the way of a reaction. He said nothing.

“Did you know her?”

He didn’t answer.

“She worked for a movie company that was robbed. You ended up with some of the money. How?”

Nothing.

“Where did the money come from?”

He raised his eyes from the photo to mine. He said nothing.

“Did these agents tell you not to talk to me?”

Nothing.

“Did they? Look, if you didn’t know her, then tell me.”

Aziz dropped his sad eyes to the table again. He appeared to be looking at the photo again but I could tell he wasn’t. He was looking at something far away. I knew it was useless, just as I had probably known before sitting down.

I got up and turned to Peoples.

“You can keep the rest of the fifteen minutes.”

He pushed off the wall and looked up at an overhead camera. He made the little swirling motion with a finger and the door’s electronic lock snapped open. Without thinking I moved toward the door and pushed it open. Almost immediately I heard a banshee cry from behind me and Aziz was up and over the table. He hit me in the upper back with all his weight-maybe 130 pounds tops-and I went through the door and into the hallway.

Aziz was still on me and as I started to go down I felt his arms and legs flailing for purchase. He then jumped off and started running down the hall. Peoples and the other agent were quickly down the hall after him. As I got up I saw them corner Aziz at a dead end. Peoples held back while the other agent moved in and roughly wrestled the smaller man to the ground.

Once Aziz was controlled Peoples turned and came back to me.

“Bosch, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

I stood up and made a show of straightening my clothes. I was embarrassed. I had been taken by surprise by Aziz and I knew it would probably be the talk of the squad room at the other end of the hall.

“I wasn’t ready for that. I guess being out of the life so long, I got rusty.”

“Yes. You never can turn your back on them.”

“My box. I forgot it.”

I went back into the interview room and got the photo off the table and the box. Just as I came back out Aziz was being walked by, his wrists cuffed behind his back.

I watched him go by and then Peoples and I followed at a safe distance.

“And so,” Peoples said, “all of this was for naught.”

“Probably.”

“And it all could have been avoided if…”

He didn’t finish so I did.

“Your agent hadn’t committed those crimes on camera. Yeah.”

Peoples stopped in the hallway and I did, too. He waited for the other agent and Aziz to go through the door.

“I’m not comfortable with this arrangement,” he said. “I have no guarantees. You could walk out of here and get hit by a truck. Does that mean those recordings will end up on the news?”

I thought for a moment, then nodded.

“Yeah, it does. You better hope that truck misses me.”

“I don’t want to live and work under the weight of that.”

“I don’t blame you. What are you going to do about Milton?”

“What I told you. He’s out. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

“Well, let me know when that happens. Then we can talk about the weight again.”

He looked like he was about to say something more but then thought better of it and started walking again. He led me through the security doors to the elevator. He used his card key to summon it and then to push the button for the lobby. He held his hand on the door’s bumper.

“I’m not going down with you,” he said. “I think we’ve said enough.”

I nodded and he stepped back through the door. He stood there and watched, maybe to make sure I didn’t sneak off the elevator and try to spring the incarcerated terrorists.

Just as the door started closing I hit the bumper with the side of my hand and it slowly reopened.

“Remember, Agent Peoples, my lawyer has taken steps to secure herself and the recordings. If something happens to her it’s the same as it happening to me.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Bosch. I will make no move against her or you.”

“It’s not you I’m worried about.”

The door closed as we were holding each other’s eyes in a pointed stare.

“I understand,” I heard him say through the doors.