Trunk Music

PART I

AS HE DROVE along Mulholland Drive toward the Cahuenga Pass, Bosch began to hear the music. It came to him in fragments of strings and errant horn sequences, echoing off the brown summer-dried hills and blurred by the white noise of traffic carrying up from the Hollywood Freeway. Nothing he could identify. All he knew was that he was heading toward its source.

He slowed when he saw the cars parked off to the side of a gravel turn-off road. Two detective sedans and a patrol car. Bosch pulled his Caprice in behind them and got out. A single officer in uniform leaned against the fender of the patrol car. Yellow plastic crime-scene tape-the stuff used by the mile in Los Angeles-was strung from the patrol car’s sideview mirror across the gravel road to the sign posted on the other side. The sign said, in black-on-white letters that were almost indistinguishable behind the graffiti that covered the sign:

L.A.F.D. FIRE CONTROL

MOUNTAIN FIRE DISTRICT ROAD

NO PUBLIC ADMITTANCE-NO SMOKING!

The patrol cop, a large man with sun-reddened skin and blond bristly hair, straightened up as Bosch approached. The first thing Bosch noted about him other than his size was the baton. It was holstered in a ring on his belt and the business end of the club was marred, the black acrylic paint scratched away to reveal the aluminum beneath. Street fighters wore their battle-scarred sticks proudly, as a sign, a not so subtle warning. This cop was a headbanger. No doubt about it. The plate above the cop’s breast pocket said his name was Powers. He looked down at Bosch through Ray-Bans, though it was well into dusk and a sky of burnt orange clouds was reflected in his mirrored lenses. It was one of those sundowns that reminded Bosch of the glow the fires of the riots had put in the sky a few years back.

“Harry Bosch,” Powers said with a touch of surprise. “When did you get back on the table?”

Bosch looked at him a moment before answering. He didn’t know Powers but that didn’t mean anything. Bosch’s story was probably known by every cop in Hollywood Division.

“Just did,” Bosch said.

He didn’t make any move to shake hands. You didn’t do that at crime scenes.

“First case back in the saddle, huh?”

Bosch took out a cigarette and lit it. It was a direct violation of department policy but it wasn’t something he was worried about.

“Something like that.” He changed the subject. “Who’s down there?”

“Edgar and the new one from Pacific, his soul sister.”

“Rider.”

“Whatever.”

Bosch said nothing further about that. He knew what was behind the contempt in the uniform cop’s voice. It didn’t matter that he knew Kizmin Rider had the gift and was a top-notch investigator. That would mean nothing to Powers, even if Bosch told him it was so. Powers probably saw only one reason why he was still wearing a blue uniform instead of carrying a detective’s gold badge: that he was a white man in an era of female and minority hiring and promotion. It was the kind of festering sore better left undisturbed.

Powers apparently registered Bosch’s nonresponse as disagreement and went on.

“Anyway, they told me to let Emmy and Sid drive on down when they get here. I guess they’re done with the search. So you can drive down instead of walking, I guess.”

It took a second for Bosch to register that Powers was referring to the medical examiner and the Scientific Investigation Division tech. He’d said the names as if they were a couple invited to a picnic.

Bosch stepped out to the pavement, dropped the half cigarette and made sure he put it out with his shoe. It wouldn’t be good to start a brush fire on his first job back with the homicide table.

“I’ll walk it,” he said. “What about Lieutenant Billets?”

“Not here yet.”

Bosch went back to his car and reached in through the open window for his briefcase. He then walked back to Powers.

“You the one who found it?”

“That was me.”

Powers was proud of himself.

“How’d you open it?”

“Keep a slim jim in the car. Opened the door, then popped the trunk.”

“Why?”

“The smell. It was obvious.”

“Wear gloves?”

“Nope. Didn’t have any.”

“What did you touch?”

Powers had to think about it for a moment.

“Door handle, the trunk pull. That’d be about it.”

“Did Edgar or Rider take a statement? You write something up?”

“Nothing yet.”

Bosch nodded.

“Listen, Powers, I know you’re all proud of yourself, but next time don’t open the car, okay? We all want to be detectives but not all of us are. That’s how crime scenes get fucked up. And I think you know that.”

Bosch watched the cop’s face turn a dark shade of crimson and the skin go tight around his jaw.

“Listen, Bosch,” he said. “What I know is that if I just called this in as a suspicious vehicle that smells like there’s a stiff in the trunk, then you people would’ve said, ‘What the fuck does Powers know?’ and left it there to rot in the sun until there was nothing left of your goddamn crime scene.”

“That might be true but, see, then that would be our fuckup to make. Instead, we’ve got you fucking us up before we start.”

Powers remained angry but mute. Bosch waited a beat, ready to continue the debate, before dismissing it.

“Can you lift the tape now, please?”

Powers stepped back to the tape. He was about thirty-five, Bosch guessed, and had the long-practiced swagger of a street veteran. In L.A. that swagger came to you quickly, as it had in Vietnam. Powers held the yellow tape up and Bosch walked under. As he passed, the cop said, “Don’t get lost.”

“Good one, Powers. You got me there.”

The fire road was one lane and overgrown at its sides with brush that came as high as Bosch’s waist. There was trash and broken glass strewn along the gravel, the trespasser’s answer to the sign at the gate. Bosch knew the road was probably a favorite midnight haunt for teenagers from the city below.

The music grew louder as he went further in. But he still could not identify it. About a quarter mile in, he came to a gravel-bedded clearing that he guessed was a staging point for fire-fighting apparatus in the event that a brush fire broke out in the surrounding hills. Today it would serve as a crime scene. On the far side of the clearing Bosch saw a white Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Standing near it were his two partners, Rider and Edgar. Rider was sketching the crime scene on a clipboard while Edgar worked with a tape measure and called out measurements. Edgar saw Bosch and gave an acknowledging wave with a latex-gloved hand. He let the tape measure snap back into its case.

“Harry, where you been?”

“Painting,” Bosch said as he walked up. “I had to get cleaned up and changed, put stuff away.”

As Bosch stepped closer to the edge of the clearing, the view opened below him. They were on a bluff rising above the rear of the Hollywood Bowl. The rounded music shell was down to the left, no more than a quarter mile. And the shell was the source of the music. The L.A. Philharmonic’s end-of-the-season Labor Day weekend show. Bosch was looking down at eighteen thousand people in concert seats stretching up the opposite side of the canyon. They were enjoying one of the last Sunday evenings of the summer.

“Jesus,” he said out loud, thinking of the problem.

Edgar and Rider walked over.

“What’ve we got?” Bosch asked.

Rider answered.

“One in the trunk. White male. Gunshots. We haven’t checked him out much further than that. We’ve been keeping the lid closed. We’ve got everybody rolling, though.”

Bosch started walking toward the Rolls, going around the charred remnants of an old campfire that had burned in the center of the clearing. The other two followed.

“This okay?” Bosch asked as he got close to the Rolls.

“Yeah, we did the search,” Edgar said. “Nothing much. Got some leakage underneath the car. That’s about it, though. Cleanest scene I’ve been at in a while.”

Jerry Edgar, called in from home like everybody else on the team, was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. On the left breast of the shirt was a drawing of a badge and the words LAPD Homicide. As he walked past Bosch, Harry saw that the back of the shirt said Our Day Begins When Your Day Ends. The tight-fitting shirt contrasted sharply with Edgar’s dark skin and displayed his heavily muscled upper body as he moved with an athletic grace toward the Rolls. Bosch had worked with him on and off for six years but they had never become close outside of the job. This was the first time it had dawned on Bosch that Edgar actually was an athlete, that he must regularly work out.

It was unusual for Edgar not to be in one of his crisp Nordstrom’s suits. But Bosch thought he knew why. His informal dress practically guaranteed he would avoid having to do the dirty work, next-of-kin notification.

They slowed their steps when they got close to the Rolls, as if perhaps whatever was wrong here might be contagious. The car was parked with its rear end facing south and visible to the spectators in the upper levels of the Bowl across the way. Bosch considered their situation again.

“So you want to pull this guy out of there with all those people with their wine and box lunches from the Grill watching?” he asked. “How do you think that’s going to play on the TV tonight?”

“Well,” Edgar replied, “we thought we’d kind of leave that decision to you, Harry. You being the three.”

Edgar smiled and winked.

“Yeah, right,” Bosch said sarcastically. “I’m the three.”

Bosch was still getting used to the idea of being a so-called team leader. It had been almost eighteen months since he had officially investigated a homicide, let alone headed up a team of three investigators. He had been assigned to the Hollywood Division burglary table when he returned to work from his involuntary stress leave in January. The detective bureau commander, Lieutenant Grace Billets, had explained that his assignment was a way of gradually easing him back into detective work. He knew that explanation was a lie and that she had been told where to put him, but he took the demotion without complaint. He knew they would come for him eventually.

After eight months of pushing papers and making the occasional burglary arrest, Bosch was called into the CO’s office and Billets told him she was making changes. The division’s homicide clearance rate had dipped to its lowest point ever. Fewer than half of the killings were cleared. She had taken over command of the bureau nearly a year earlier, and the sharpest decline, she struggled to admit, had come under her own watch. Bosch could have told her that the decline was due in part to her not following the same statistical deceptions practiced by her predecessor, Harvey Pounds, who had always found ways of pumping up the clearance rate, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he sat quietly while Billets laid out her plan.

The first part of the plan was to move Bosch back to the homicide table as of the start of September. A detective named Selby, who barely pulled his weight, would go from homicide to Bosch’s slot on the burglary table. Billets was also adding a young and smart detective transfer she had previously worked with in the Pacific Division detective bureau, Kizmin Rider. Next, and this was the radical part, Billets was changing the traditional pairing of detectives. Instead, the nine homicide detectives assigned to Hollywood would be grouped into three teams of three. Each of the three teams would have a detective third grade in charge. Bosch was a three. He was named team leader of squad one.

The reasoning behind the change was sound-at least on paper. Most homicides are solved in the first forty-eight hours after discovery or they aren’t solved at all. Billets wanted more solved so she was going to put more detectives on each one. The part that didn’t look so good on paper, especially to the nine detectives, was that previously there had been four pairs of partners working homicide cases. The new changes meant each detective would be working every third case that came up instead of every fourth. It meant more cases, more work, more court time, more overtime, and more stress. Only the overtime was considered a positive. But Billets was tough and didn’t care much for the complaints of the detectives. And her new plan quickly won her the obvious nickname.

“Anybody talk to Bullets yet?” Bosch asked.

“I called,” Rider said. “She was up in Santa Barbara for the weekend. Left a number with the desk. She’s coming down early but she’s still at least an hour and a half from us. She said she was going to have to drop the hubby off first and would probably just roll to the bureau.”

Bosch nodded and stepped to the rear of the Rolls. He picked up the smell right away. It was faint but it was there, unmistakable. Like no other. He nodded to no one in particular again. He placed his briefcase on the ground, opened it and took a pair of latex gloves from the cardboard box inside. He then closed the case and placed it a few feet behind him and out of the way.

“Okay, let’s take a look,” he said while stretching the gloves over his hands. He hated how they felt. “Let’s stand close, we don’t want to give the people in the Bowl more of a show than they paid for.”

“It ain’t pretty,” Edgar said as he stepped forward.

The three of them stood together at the back end of the Rolls to shield the view from the concertgoers. But Bosch knew that anybody with a decent pair of field glasses would know what was going on. This was L.A.

Before opening the trunk, he noticed the car’s personalized license plate. It said TNA. Before he could speak, Edgar answered his unasked question.

“Comes back to TNA Productions. On Melrose.”

“T and A?”

“No, the letters, T-N-A, just like on the plate.”

“Where on Melrose?”

Edgar took a notebook out of his pocket and looked through the pages. The address he gave was familiar to Bosch but he couldn’t place it. He knew it was down near Paramount, the sprawling studio that took up the entire north side of the fifty-five-hundred block. The big studio was surrounded by smaller production houses and ministudios. They were like sucker fish that swam around the mouth of the big shark, hoping for the scraps that didn’t get sucked in.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

He turned his attention back to the trunk. He could see that the lid had been lightly placed down so it would not lock closed. Using one rubber-coated finger, he gently lifted it.

As the trunk was opened, it expelled a sickeningly fetid breath of death. Bosch immediately wished he had a cigarette but those days were through. He knew what a defense lawyer could do with one ash from a cop’s smoke at a crime scene. Reasonable doubts were built on less.

He leaned in under the lid to get a close look, careful not to touch the bumper with his pants. The body of a man was in the trunk. His skin was a grayish white and he was expensively dressed in linen pants sharply pressed and cuffed at the bottom, a pale blue shirt with a flowery pattern and a leather sport coat. His feet were bare.

The dead man was on his right side in the fetal position except his wrists were behind him instead of folded against his chest. It appeared to Bosch that his hands had been tied behind him and the bindings then removed, most likely after he was dead. Bosch looked closely and could see a small abrasion on the left wrist, probably caused by the struggle against the bindings. The man’s eyes were closed tightly and there was a whitish, almost translucent material dried in the corners of the sockets.

“Kiz, I want you taking notes on appearance.”

“Right.”

Bosch bent further into the trunk. He saw a froth of purged blood had dried in the dead man’s mouth and nose. His hair was caked with blood which had spread over the shoulders and to the trunk mat, coating it with a coagulated pool. He could see the hole in the floor of the trunk through which blood had drained to the gravel below. It was a foot from the victim’s head and appeared to be evenly cut in the metal underlining in a spot where the floor mat was folded over. It was not a bullet hole. It was probably a drain or a hole left by a bolt that had vibrated loose and fallen out.

In the mess that was the back of the man’s head, Bosch could see two distinct jagged-edged penetrations to the lower rear skull-the occipital protuberance-the scientific name popping easily into his mind. Too many autopsies, he thought. The hair close to the wounds was charred by the gasses that explode out of the barrel of a gun. The scalp showed stippling from gunpowder. Point-blank shots. No exit wounds that he could see. Probably twenty-twos, he guessed. They bounce around inside like marbles dropped into an empty jelly jar.

Bosch looked up and saw a small spray of blood splattered on the inside of the trunk lid. He studied the spots for a long moment and then stepped back and straightened up. He appraised the entire view of the trunk now, his mind checking off an imaginary list. Because no blood drips had been found on the access road into the clearing, he had no doubts that the man had been killed here in the trunk. Still, there were other unknowns. Why here? Why no shoes and socks? Why were the bindings taken off the wrists? He put these questions aside for the time being.

“You check for the wallet?” he asked without looking at the two others.

“Not yet,” Edgar replied. “Recognize him?”

For the first time Bosch looked at the face as a face. There was still fear etched on it. The man had closed his eyes. He had known what was coming. Bosch wondered if the whitish material in the eyes was dried tears.

“No, do you?”

“Nope. It’s too messy, anyway.”

Bosch gingerly lifted the back of the leather coat and saw no wallet in the back pockets of the dead man’s pants. He then opened the jacket and saw the wallet was there in an inside pocket that carried a Fred Haber men’s shop label on it. Bosch could also see a paper folder for an airline ticket in the pocket. With his other hand he reached into the jacket and removed the two items.

“Get the lid,” he said as he backed away.

Edgar closed it over as gently as an undertaker closing a coffin. Bosch then walked over to his briefcase, squatted down and put the two items down on it.

He opened the wallet first. There was a full complement of credit cards in slots on the left side and a driver’s license behind a plastic window on the right. The name on the license said Anthony N. Aliso.

“Anthony N. Aliso,” Edgar said. “Tony for short. TNA. TNA Productions.”

The address was in Hidden Highlands, a tiny enclave off Mulholland in the Hollywood Hills. It was the kind of place that was surrounded by walls and had a guard shack manned twenty-four hours a day, mostly by off-duty or retired LAPD cops. The address went well with the Rolls-Royce.

Bosch opened the billfold section and found a sheaf of currency. Without taking the money out, he counted two one-hundred-dollar bills and nine twenties. He called the amount out so that Rider could make a note of it. Next he opened the airline folder. Inside was the receipt for a one-way ticket on an American Airlines flight departing Las Vegas for LAX at 10:05 Friday night. The name on the ticket matched the driver’s license. Bosch checked the back flap of the ticket folder, but there was no sticker or staple indicating that a bag had been checked by the ticket holder. Curious, Bosch left the wallet and the ticket on the case and went to look into the car through the windows.

“No luggage?”

“None,” Rider said.

Bosch went back to the trunk and raised the lid again. Looking in at the body, he hooked a finger up the left sleeve of the jacket and pulled it up. There was a gold Rolex watch on the wrist. The face was encircled with a ring of tiny diamonds.

“Shit.”

Bosch turned around. It was Edgar.

“What?”

“You want me to call OCID?”

“Why?”

“Wop name, no robbery, two in the back of the head. It’s a whack job, Harry. We oughta call OCID.”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll tell you right now that’s what Bullets is gonna wanna do.”

“We’ll see.”

Bosch appraised the body again, looking closely at the contorted, bloodied face. Then he closed the lid.

Bosch stepped away from the car and to the edge of the clearing. The spot offered a brilliant view of the city. Looking east across the sprawl of Hollywood, he could easily pick up the spires of downtown in the light haze. He saw the lights of Dodger Stadium were on for the twilight game. The Dodgers were dead even with Colorado with a month to go and Nomo due to pitch the game. Bosch had a ticket in his inside coat pocket. But he knew that bringing it along had been wishful thinking. He wouldn’t get anywhere near the stadium tonight. He also knew Edgar was right. The killing had all the aspects of a mob hit. The Organized Crime Intelligence Division should be notified-if not to take over the investigation entirely, then at least to offer advice. But Bosch was delaying that notification. It had been a long time since he’d had a case. He didn’t want to give it up yet.

He looked back down at the Bowl. It looked like a sellout to him, the crowd seated in an elliptical formation going up the opposite hill. The seating sections furthest away from the music shell were the highest up the hill and at an almost even level with the clearing where the Rolls was parked. Bosch wondered how many of the people were watching him at that moment. Again he thought of the dilemma he faced. He had to get the investigation going. But he knew that if he pulled the body out of the trunk with such an audience watching, there likely would be hell to pay for the bad public relations such a move would cause the city and the department.

Once again Edgar seemed to know his thoughts.

“Hell, Harry, they won’t care. At the jazz festival a few years back, there was a couple up on this spot doing the nasty for half an hour. When they were done, they got a standing ovation. Guy stands up buck naked and takes a little bow.”

Bosch looked back at him to see if he was serious.

“I read it in the Times. The ‘Only in L.A.’ column.”

“Well, Jerry, this is the Philharmonic. It’s a different crowd, know what I mean? And I don’t want this to end up in ‘Only in L.A.,’ okay?”

“Okay, Harry.”

Bosch looked at Rider. She hadn’t said much of anything yet.

“What do you think, Kiz?”

“I don’t know. You’re the three.”

Rider was small, five feet and no more than a hundred pounds with her gun on. She would never have made it before the department relaxed the physical requirements to attract more women. She had light brown skin. Her hair was straightened and kept short. She wore jeans and a pink oxford shirt beneath a black blazer. On her small body, the jacket did not do much to disguise a 9mm Glock 17 holstered on her right hip.

Billets had told him that she had worked with Rider in Pacific. Rider had worked robbery and fraud cases but was called out on occasion to work homicides in which there were overlying financial aspects. Billets had said Rider could break a crime scene down as well as most veteran homicide detectives. She had pulled strings to get Rider’s transfer approved but was already resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t stay long in the division. Rider was marked for travel. Her double minority status coupled with the facts that she was good at what she did and had a guardian angel-Billets wasn’t sure who-at Parker Center practically guaranteed her stay in Hollywood would be short. It was a bit of final seasoning before she headed downtown to the Glass House.

“What about the OPG?” Bosch asked.

“Held up on that,” Rider said. “Thought we’d be here a while before we moved the car.”

Bosch nodded. It was what he expected her to say. The official police garage was usually last on the call-out list. He was just stalling, trying to make a decision while asking questions he already knew the answers to.

Finally he made his decision on what to do.

“Okay, go ahead and call,” he said. “Tell them to come now. And tell them to bring a flatbed. Okay? Even if they’ve got a hook in the neighborhood, make ’em turn around. Tell ’em it’s gotta be a flat. There’s a phone in my briefcase.”

“Got it,” Rider said.

“Why the flatbed, Harry?” Edgar asked.

Bosch didn’t answer.

“We’re moving the whole show,” Rider said.

“What?” Edgar asked.

Rider went to the briefcase without answering. Bosch held back a smile. She knew what he was doing, and he began to see some of the promise Billets had talked about. He got out a cigarette and lit it. He put the burnt match into the cellophane around the pack and replaced it in the pocket of his coat.

He noticed as he smoked that the sound at the edge of the clearing, where he could look directly down into the Bowl, was much better. After a few moments he was even able to identify the piece being played.

“Sheherazade,” he said.

“What’s that, Harry?” Edgar asked.

“The music. It’s called Sheherazade. Ever heard it?”

“I’m not sure I’m hearing it now. All the echoes, man.”

Bosch snapped his fingers. Out of the blue a thought had pushed through. In his mind he saw the studio’s arched gate, the replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

“That address on Melrose,” Bosch said. “That’s near Paramount. One of those feeder-fish studios right nearby. I think it’s Archway.”

“Yeah? I think you’re right.”

Rider walked up then.

“We got a flat on the way,” she said. “ETA is fifteen. I checked on SID and ME. Also on the way. SID has somebody just wrapped up a home invasion in Nichols Canyon, so they should be right over.”

“Good,” Bosch said. “Either of you go over the story with the swinging stick, yet?”

“Not since the preliminary,” Edgar said. “Not our type. Thought we’d leave him for the three.”

The unspoken meaning of this was that Edgar had sensed the racist animosity Powers radiated toward himself and Rider.

“Okay, I’ll take him,” Bosch said. “I want you two to finish the charting, then do another sweep of the immediate area. Take different areas this time.”

He realized he had just told them things he didn’t need to tell them.

“Sorry. You know what to do. All I’m saying is let’s take this one by the numbers. I’ve got a feeling it’s going eight by ten on us.”

“What about OCID?” Edgar asked.

“I told you, not yet.”

“Eight by ten?” Rider said, a confused expression on her face.

“Eight by ten case,” Edgar told her. “Celebrity case. Studio case. If that’s a hotshot from the industry in that trunk, somebody from Archway, we’re going to get some media on this. More than some. A dead guy in the trunk of his Rolls is news. A dead industry guy in the trunk of his Rolls is bigger news.”

“Archway?”

Bosch left them there as Edgar filled her in on the facts of life when it came to murder, the media and the movie business in Hollywood.

Bosch licked his fingers to put the cigarette out and then put it with the used match in the cellophane wrapper. He slowly began walking the quarter mile back to Mulholland, once again searching the gravel road in a back-and-forth manner. But there was so much debris on the gravel and in the nearby brush that it was impossible to know if anything-a cigarette butt, a beer bottle, a used condom-was related to the Rolls or not. The one thing he looked closest for was blood. If there was blood on the road that could be linked to the victim, it could indicate that he was killed elsewhere and left in the clearing. No blood probably meant the killing had taken place right there.

He realized as he made the fruitless search that he was feeling relaxed, maybe even happy. He was back on the beat and following his mission once again. Mindful that the man in the trunk had to have perished for him to feel this way, Bosch quickly wrote that guilt off. The man would have ended up in the trunk whether Bosch had ever made it back to the homicide table or not.

When Bosch got to Mulholland he saw the fire trucks. There were two of them and a battalion of firefighters standing around them, seemingly waiting for something. He lit another cigarette and looked at Powers.

“You’ve got a problem,” the uniform cop said.

“What?”

Before Powers answered, one of the firefighters stepped up. He wore the white helmet of a battalion chief.

“You in charge?” he asked.

“That’s me.”

“Chief Jon Friedman,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“The show down in the Bowl is supposed to end in ninety minutes. After that we’ve got the fireworks. Problem is this fellow says you got yourself a dead body up there and a crime scene. That’s the problem. If we can’t get up there to set up a safety position for the fireworks, there isn’t going to be any fireworks. We can’t allow it. If we’re not in position, we could see the whole down slope of these hills go up with one errant missile. Know what I mean?”

Bosch noticed Powers smirking at his dilemma. Bosch ignored him and returned his attention to Friedman.

“Chief, how long do you need to set up?”

“Ten minutes max. We just got to be there before the first one goes up.”

“Ninety minutes?”

“About eighty-five now. There’s gonna be a lot of angry people down there if they don’t get their fireworks.”

Bosch realized he wasn’t as much making decisions as having them made for him.

“Chief, hold here. We’ll be out in an hour and fifteen. Don’t cancel the show.”

“You sure about that?”

“Count on it.”

“Detective?”

“What, Chief?”

“You’re breaking the law with that cigarette.”

He nodded toward the graffiti-covered sign.

“Sorry, Chief.”

Bosch walked out to the road to stamp out the smoke while Friedman headed back to his people to radio in that the show would go on. Bosch realized the danger and caught up to him.

“Chief, you can say the show will go on, but don’t put anything out on the air about the body. We don’t need the media out here, helicopters swooping over.”

“I gotcha.”

Bosch thanked him and turned his attention to Powers.

“You can’t clear a scene in an hour and fifteen,” Powers said. “The ME isn’t even here.”

“Let me worry about that, Powers. You write something up yet?”

“Not yet. Been dealing with these guys. Would’ve helped if one of you folks had a two-way with you up there.”

“Then why don’t you run it down for me from the start.”

“What about them?” Powers asked, nodding in the direction of the clearing. “Why isn’t one of them talking to me? Edgar and Rider?”

“Because they’re busy. You want to run it down for me or not?”

“I already told you.”

“From the start, Powers. You told me what you did once you checked the car out. What made you check it?”

“There’s nothin’ much to tell. I usually make a pass by here each watch, chase away the dirtbags.”

He pointed across Mulholland and up to the crest of the hill. There was a line of houses, most on cantilevers, clinging to the crestline. They looked like mobile homes suspended in air.

“People up there call the station all the time, say they got campfires going down here, beer parties, devil worship, who knows what. Guess it ruins their view. And they don’t want nothin’ to spoil that million-dollar view. So I come up and sweep out the trash. Mostly bored little pissants from the Valley. Fire Department used to have a lock on the gate here, but a deuce plowed through it. That was six months ago. Takes the city at least a year to repair anything ’round here. Shit, I requisitioned batteries for my Mag three weeks ago and I’m still waiting for them. If I didn’t buy them myself, I’d be working the fuckin’ night watch without a flashlight. City doesn’t care. This ci-”

“So what about the Rolls, Powers? Let’s stay on the subject.”

“Yeah, well, I usually make it by after dark, but because of the show in the Bowl I swung by early today. Saw the Rolls then.”

“You came on your own? No complaint from up the hill?”

“No. Today I just cruised it on my own. On account of the show. I figured there might be some trespassers.”

“Were there?”

“A few-people waiting to hear the music. Not the usual crowd, though. That’s refined music, I guess you’d call it. I chased ’em out anyway, and when they were gone, the Rolls was what was left. But there was no driver for it.”

“So you checked it out.”

“Yeah, and I know the smell, man. Popped it with the slim and there he was. The stiff. Then I backed out and called the pros.”

There was a note of sarcasm in the way he said the last word. Bosch ignored it.

“The people you chased, you get any names?”

“No, like I told you, I chased them, then noticed that nobody got in and drove away in the Rolls. It was too late by then.”

“What about last night?”

“What about it?”

“Did you make it by here?”

“I was off. I’m on Tuesday-Saturday but I switched with a buddy last night ’cause he had something to do tonight.”

“So then what about Friday night?”

He shook his head.

“Three watch is always busy Friday. I had no time for free cruising and we didn’t get a complaint as far as I know…so I never made it by.”

“Just chasin’ the radio?”

“I had calls backed up on me all night. I didn’t even get a ten-seven.”

“No dinner break, that’s dedication, Powers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bosch saw he had made a mistake. Powers was consumed by job frustrations and he had pushed him too far. Powers turned crimson again and slowly took off his Ray-Bans before speaking.

“Let me tell you something, big shot. You got in while the getting was good. The rest of us? We get shit. We-I’ve been trying for so many years I can’t count to get a gold shield and I’ve got about as much chance of getting one as whoever’s in the trunk of that Rolls-Royce. But I’m not laying down. I’m still out here five nights a week chasin’ the radio. Says ‘Protect and Serve’ on the car door and I’m doin’ it, man. So don’t give me any shit about dedication.”

Bosch hesitated until he was sure Powers was done.

“Look, Powers, I didn’t mean to give you shit. Okay? You want a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Okay, let’s try this again.” He waited a beat while Powers put the mirrors back on his eyes and seemed to calm down. “You always work alone?”

“I’m the Z car.”

Bosch nodded. Zebra unit. An officer of many stripes, meaning he handled a variety of calls, usually trash calls, while cars with two officers aboard handled the hotshots-the prime, possibly dangerous, calls. Zebras worked patrol alone and often had free rein of the entire division. They were in the supervisory level between the sergeants and the grunts who were assigned to patrol geographic slices of the division known as basic car areas.

“How often you chase people outta here?”

“Once or twice a month. Can’t say what happens on the other shifts or with the basic cars. But shit calls like this usually go to the Z car.”

“You got any shakes?”

Shakes were three-by-five cards formally called field interview, or FI, cards. Cops filled them out when they stopped suspicious people but did not have enough evidence to arrest them, or when making such an arrest-in this case, for trespassing-would be a waste of time. The American Civil Liberties Union called such stops shakedowns and an abuse of police powers. The name stuck, even with the cops.

“I’ve got some, yeah, at the station.”

“Good. We’d like to have a look if you could dig them out. Also, think you could ask the cops in the basic car if they’ve noticed the Rolls here the last few days?”

“Is this where I’m supposed to thank you for letting me have a part in the big bad investigation and ask you to put in a good word for me with the deputy chief of dicks?”

Bosch stared at him a few moments before answering.

“No, this is where I tell you to have the cards ready for us by nine tonight or I’ll put in a word about that with the patrol skipper. And never mind the basic car people. We’ll go ahead and talk to them ourselves. Don’t want you to miss your ten-seven two shifts in a row, Powers.

Bosch started back toward the crime scene, moving slowly again and checking the other side of the gravel road. Twice he had to step off the gravel and into the brush to let the official police garage truck pass and then the Scientific Investigation Division van.

By the time he got to the clearing, he again had come up with nothing during his search and was sure the victim had been murdered in the trunk while the Rolls was parked in the clearing. He saw Art Donovan, the SID tech, and Roland Quatro, the photographer who came with him, starting their work. Bosch walked up to Rider.

“Anything?” she asked.

“No. You?”

“Nothing. I think the Rolls must’ve been driven in with our guy in the trunk. Then the doer gets out, opens the lid and pops him twice. He closes the trunk and walks out. Somebody picks him up out on Mulholland. Clean scene back here.”

Bosch nodded.

“Him?”

“Well, I’m going with the percentages for now.”

Bosch walked over to Donovan, who was bagging the wallet and airline ticket in a clear plastic evidence envelope.

“Art, we’ve got a problem.”

“You’re telling me. I was just thinking I can rig some tarps over light tripods, but I don’t think you’ll be able to block the view for everybody in the Bowl. Some of them are going to get a show all right. I guess it will make up for canceling the fireworks. That is, unless you’re just planning to sit tight with it until after the show.”

“Nah, we do that and some defense lawyer will tear us new assholes in court for delaying things. Every lawyer went to school on O.J., Art. You know that.”

“So then what do we do?”

“Just do what you’ve got to do here with some speed and then we’ll take the whole thing to the print shed. You know if anybody’s in there right now?”

“No, it should be free,” Donovan said slowly. “You mean you’re talking about the whole thing? The body, too?”

Bosch nodded.

“Besides, you can do a better job with it in the shed, right?”

“Absolutely. But what about the ME? They’ve got to sign off on something like this, Harry.”

“I’ll deal with that. Before we put it on the flatbed, though, make sure you guys have got stills and video in case things shift during transit. Also, run a print card off the guy and give it to me.”

“You got it.”

While Donovan went to Quatro to explain the drill, Bosch huddled with Edgar and Rider.

“Okay, for now we’re going to run with this one. If you had plans for the rest of the night, make your calls. It’s going to be a long one. This is how I want to break it up.”

He pointed up to the homes on the crestline.

“First, Kiz, I want you to go up there and do a house-to-house. You know the routine. See if anybody remembers seeing the Rolls or knows how long it’s been here. Maybe somebody heard the shots. They might’ve echoed up the side of the hill. We want to try to pin down the time this happened. After that, I-you got a phone?”

“No. I have a rover in the car.”

“No. I want to keep everything about this off the air.”

“I can use a phone in somebody’s house.”

“Okay, call me when you’re done or I’ll page you when I’m done. Depending on how things shake out, you and I will either do next of kin or his office after that.”

She nodded. Bosch turned to Edgar.

“Jerry, you go in and work from the station. You’ve got the paper on this one.”

“She’s the rookie.”

“Well, then, next time don’t show up in a T-shirt. You can’t go knocking on doors dressed like that.”

“I got a shirt in the car. I’ll change.”

“Next time. You’re on the paper on this one. But before you start, I want you to put Aliso through the box and see what you get on him. He’s got a DL issued last year, so they’ve got his thumb print on file through DMV. See if you can get somebody from prints to compare it to the print card Art’s getting for you right now. I want the ID confirmed as soon as possible.”

“There ain’t going to be anybody in prints t’night. Art’s the guy on call. He should do this.”

“Art’s going to be tied up. See if you can shake somebody at home loose. We need the ID.”

“I’ll try but I can’t prom-”

“Good. After that, I want you to call everybody who works a basic car in this area and see if anyone’s seen the Rolls. Powers-the guy up at the road-is going to pull shake cards on the kids who hang out here. I want you to start running them down, too. After that you can start the paper going.”

“Shit, with all this, I’ll be lucky if I start typing before next Monday.”

Bosch ignored his whining and appraised both his partners.

“I’ll stay with the body. If I get tied up, Kiz, you go on to check out the office address and I’ll handle next of kin. Okay, everybody know what’s what?”

Rider and Edgar nodded. Bosch could tell Edgar was still annoyed about something.

“Kiz, you head out now.”

She walked away and Bosch waited until she was out of earshot before speaking.

“Okay, Jerry, what’s the problem?”

“I just want to know if that’s how it’s going to be on this team. Am I going to get the shit work while the princess skates?”

“No, Jerry, it’s not going to be like that, and I think you know me well enough not to ask. What’s the real problem?”

“I don’t like your choices on this, Harry. We should be on the phone with Organized Crime right now. If anything looks like an OC case, this is it. I think you should call ’em, but I think ’cause you’re fresh back on the table and been waiting for a case so long, you’re not making the call. That’s the problem.”

Edgar held his hands out as if to indicate how obvious this was.

“You know, you’ve got nothing to prove here, Harry. And there’s never going to be a shortage of bodies to come along. This is Hollywood, remember? I think we should just turn this one over and wait for the next one.”

Bosch nodded.

“You may be right,” he said. “You probably are. About all of it. But I’m the three. So we do it my way for now. I’m going to call Bullets and tell her what we’ve got, then I’m going to call OCID. But even if they roll out, we’re going to keep a part of this. You know that. So let’s do it good. Okay?”

Edgar nodded reluctantly.

“Look,” Bosch said, “your objection is noted for the record, okay?”

“Sure, Harry.”

Bosch saw the blue ME’s van pull into the clearing then. The tech behind the wheel was Richard Matthews. It was a break. Matthews wasn’t as territorial as some of the others, and Bosch figured he could convince him to go along with the plan to move the whole package to the print shed. Matthews would understand that it was the only choice.

“Stay in touch,” Bosch said as Edgar walked off.

Edgar sullenly waved without looking back.

For the next few moments Bosch stood alone in the midst of the activities of the crime scene. He realized he truly reveled in his role. The start of a case always seemed to jazz him this way, and he knew how much he had missed it and craved it during the last year and a half.

Finally, he put his thoughts aside and walked toward the ME’s van to talk to Matthews. There was a burst of applause from the Bowl as Sheherazade ended.

The print shed was a World War II Quonset hut that sat in the City Services equipment yard behind the police headquarters at Parker Center. It had no windows and a double-wide garage door. The interior was painted black and every crack or crevice where light might come in was taped over. There were thick black curtains that could be pulled closed after the garage door was shut. When they were pulled, the interior was as black as a loan shark’s heart. The techs who worked there even referred to the place as “the cave.”

While the Rolls was being unloaded from the OPG truck, Bosch took his briefcase to a workbench inside the shed and got the phone out. The Organized Crime Investigation Division was a secret society within the greater closed society of the department. Bosch knew very little about OCID and was acquainted with few detectives assigned to the unit. The OCID was a mysterious force, even to those within the department. Not many knew exactly what it did. And this, of course, bred suspicions and jealousies.

Most OCID detectives were known in Detective Services as big-footers. They swooped down to take investigations away from detectives like Bosch, but they didn’t often make cases in return. Bosch had seen many investigations disappear under their door with not many prosecutions of OC wise guys resulting. They were the only division in the department with a black budget-approved in closed session by the chief and a police commission that largely followed his lead. From there, the money disappeared into the dark, to pay for informants, investigations and high-tech equipment. Many of their cases disappeared in that netherworld as well.

Bosch asked the communications operator to connect his call to the OCID supervisor on call for the weekend. As he waited for the patch through, he thought again about the body in the trunk. Anthony Aliso-if that was who it was-had seen it coming and closed his eyes. Bosch hoped it wouldn’t be that way for himself. He didn’t want to know.

“Hello,” a voice said.

“Yes, this is Harry Bosch. I’m the D-three on a homicide call out in Hollywood. Who am I speaking with?”

“Dom Carbone. I’ve got the weekend call out. You going to spoil it?”

“Maybe.” Bosch tried to think. The name was vaguely familiar but he could not place it. He was sure they had never worked together. “That’s why I’m calling. You might want to take a look at this.”

“Run it down for me.”

“Sure. White male found in the trunk of his Silver Cloud with two in the back of the head. Probably twenty-twos.”

“What else?”

“Car was on a fire road off Mulholland. Doesn’t look like a straight robbery. At least, not a personal robbery. I got cards and cash in the wallet and a Presidential on his wrist. Diamonds at every hour on the hour.”

“You’re not telling me who the stiff is. Who’s the stiff?”

“Nothing confirmed yet but-”

“Just give it to me.”

Bosch had trouble not being able to put a face with the voice over the phone.

“It looks like the ID is going to be Anthony N. Aliso, forty-eight years old. Lives up in the hills. Looks like he has some kind of company with an office at one of the studios down on Melrose near Paramount. TNA Productions is the name of his outfit. I think it’s over at Archway Studios. We’ll know more in a little while.”

He only got silence in return.

“Mean anything?”

“Anthony Aliso.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Anthony Aliso.”

Carbone repeated the name slowly, as if it were a fine wine he was tasting before deciding whether to accept the bottle or spit it out. He was then quiet for another long moment.

“Nothing hits me right away, Bosch,” he finally said. “I can make a couple calls. Where you going to be?”

“The print shed. He’s here with us and I’ll be here a while.”

“What do you mean, you got the guy’s body there in the shed?”

“It’s a long story. When do you think you can get back to me?”

“As soon as I make the calls. You been over to his office?”

“Not yet. We’ll get there sometime tonight.”

Bosch gave him the number of his cellular phone, then closed it and put it in his coat pocket. For a moment he thought about Carbone’s reaction to the victim’s name. He finally decided he could not read anything into it.

After the Cloud was rolled into place in the shed and the doors shut, Donovan pulled the curtains closed. There was fluorescent lighting overhead which he left on while he got his equipment ready. Matthews, the coroner’s tech, and his two assistants-the body movers-huddled over a workbench getting the tools they would need out of a case.

“Harry, I’m going to take my time with this, okay? First I’ll laser the trunk with the guy in it. Then we take him out. Then we glue it and laser it again. Then we worry about the rest of it.”

“Your show, man. Whatever time you need.”

“I’ll need your help with the wand when I shoot pictures. Roland had to go to shoot another scene.”

Bosch nodded and watched as the SID tech screwed an orange filter onto a Nikon camera. He put the camera strap over his head and turned on the laser. It was a box about the size of a VCR with a cable attachment that led to a foot-long wand with a hand grip on it. From the end of the wand a strong orange beam was emitted.

Donovan opened a cabinet and took out several pairs of orange-tinted safety glasses which he handed to Bosch and the others. He put the last pair on himself. He gave Bosch a pair of latex gloves to put on as well.

“I’ll do a quick run around the outside of the trunk and then open her up,” Donovan said.

Just as Donovan moved to the switch box to cut off the overheads, the phone in Bosch’s pocket buzzed. Donovan waited while Bosch answered. It was Carbone.

“Bosch, we’re taking a pass.”

Harry didn’t say anything for a moment and neither did Carbone. Donovan hit the light switch and the room plunged into complete blackness.

“You’re saying you don’t have this guy.” Bosch finally spoke into the dark.

“I checked around, made some calls. Nobody seems to know this guy. Nobody’s working him… Clean, as far as we know… You said he was put in his trunk and capped twice, huh?…Bosch, you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Yeah, capped twice in the trunk.”

“Trunk music.”

“What?”

“It’s a wise guy saying outta Chicago. You know, when they whack some poor slob they say, ‘Oh, Tony? Don’t worry about Tony. He’s trunk music now. You won’t see him no more.’ But the thing is, Bosch, this doesn’t seem to fit. We don’t know this guy. People I talked to, they think maybe somebody’s trying to make you think it’s OC connected, know what I mean?”

Bosch watched as the laser beam cut through the blackness and bombarded the rear of the trunk with searing light. With the glasses on, the orange was filtered out and the light was a bright, intense white. Bosch was ten feet away from the Rolls, but he could see glowing patterns on the trunk lid and the bumper. This always reminded him of those National Geographic shows in which a submersible camera moved through the ocean’s black depths, putting its light on sunken ships or aircraft. It was somehow eerie.

“Look, Carbone,” he said, “you aren’t even interested in coming out to take a look?”

“Not at this time. Of course, give me a call back if you come across anything, you know, that shows different than what I told you. And I’ll do some more checking tomorrow. I got your number.”

Bosch was secretly pleased that he wasn’t going to get bigfooted by the OCID, but he was also surprised at the brush-off. The quickness with which Carbone had dismissed the case seemed unusual.

“Any other details you want to give me, Bosch?”

“We’re just starting. But let me ask you, you ever hear of a hitter takes the vic’s shoes with him? Also, he unties the body afterward.”

“Takes his shoes…unties him. Uh, not offhand, no. Nobody specific. But like I said, I’ll ask around in the morning and I’ll put it on our box. Anything else cute about this one?”

Bosch didn’t like what was happening. Carbone seemed too interested while saying he wasn’t. He said Tony Aliso wasn’t connected, yet he still wanted the details. Was he just trying to be helpful or was there something more to it?

“That’s about all we got at the moment,” Bosch said, deciding not to give up anything else for free. “Like I said, we’re just getting going here.”

“Okay, then, give me the morning and I’ll do some more checking. I’ll call if I come up with anything, okay?”

“Right.”

“Check you later. But you know what I think you have there, Bosch? You’ve got a guy, he was probably making sandwiches with somebody’s wife. Lotta times things look like pro hits that aren’t, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll talk to you later.”

Bosch walked to the rear of the Rolls. Up close he could see the pattern swirls he had noticed in the laser light before appeared to be swipe marks made with a cloth. It looked like the whole car had been wiped down.

But when Donovan moved the wand over the bumper, the laser picked up a partial shoe print on the chrome.

“Did anybody-”

“No,” Bosch said. “Nobody put their foot there.”

“Okay, then. Hold the wand on the print.”

Bosch did so while Donovan bent over and took several photos, bracketing the exposure settings to make sure he had at least one clear shot. It was the forward half of the foot. There was a circle pattern at the ball of the foot with lines extending from it like the rays of a sun. There was a cross-cut pattern through the arch and then the print was cut off by the edge of the bumper.

“Tennis shoe,” Donovan said. “Maybe a work shoe.”

After he photographed it, he moved the wand around the trunk again, but there was nothing but wipe marks.

“Okay,” Donovan said. “Open it.”

Using a penlight to guide his way, Bosch made it to the driver’s door and bent in to pull the trunk release. Shortly afterward, the smell of death flooded the shed.

It looked to Bosch as though the body had not shifted during the transport. But the victim took on a ghoulish look under the harsh examination of the laser, his face almost skeletal, like the monsters painted in Day-Glo in fun-house hallways. The blood seemed blacker and the bone chips in the jagged wound were luminescent in bright counterpoint.

On his clothes, small strands of hair and tiny threads glowed. Bosch moved in with a pair of tweezers and a plastic vial like the kind made to hold a stack of silver half dollars. He carefully picked these pieces of potential evidence off the clothing and collected them in the vial. It was painstaking work and there was nothing much there. He knew this kind of material could be found on anybody at anytime. It was common.

When he was done he said to Donovan, “The tail of the jacket. I flipped it up to check for a wallet.”

“Okay, pull it back down.”

Bosch did so, and there on Aliso’s hip was another footprint. It matched the footprint on the bumper but was more complete. On the heel was another circle pattern with off-shooting lines. In the lower arch was what looked like a brand name but it was unreadable.

Regardless of whether they could identify the shoe, Bosch knew it was a good find. It meant that a careful killer had made a mistake. At least one. If nothing else, it gave rise to the hope that there might be other mistakes, that they might eventually lead him to the killer.

“Take the wand.”

Bosch did so and Donovan did his thing with the camera again.

“I’m just shooting this to document it, but we’ll take the jacket off before the body goes,” he said.

Next Donovan moved the laser up around the inside of the trunk lid. Here the laser illuminated numerous fingerprints, mostly thumbprints, where a hand would have been placed to prop the lid open while loading things in or out. Many of the prints overlapped each other, a sign that they were old, and Bosch knew right away they probably belonged to the victim himself.

“I’ll shoot these, but don’t count on anything,” Donovan said.

“I know.”

When he was done, Donovan put the wand and the camera on top of the laser box and said, “Okay, why don’t we take this fellow out of there, lay ’im out and scan ’im real quick before he’s outta here?”

Without waiting for an answer, he flipped the fluorescents back on and everybody put their hands to their eyes as the harsh light blinded them. A few moments later the body movers and Matthews went to the trunk and started transferring the corpse to a black plastic body bag they had unfolded on a gurney.

“This guy is loose,” Matthews said as they put the corpse down.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “What do you think?”

“Forty-two to forty-eight. But let me do some stuff and see what we’ve got.”

But first Donovan put out the lights again and moved the wand over the body, from the head down. The tear pools in the eye sockets glowed white in the light. There were a few hairs and fibers on the dead man’s face and Bosch dutifully collected them. There was also a slight abrasion high on the right cheekbone, which had been hidden when the body was lying on its right side in the trunk.

“He could’ve been hit or it mighta been from being shoved into the trunk,” Donovan said.

As the beam moved down over the chest, Donovan got excited.

“Well lookee here.”

Glowing in the laser light were what looked like a complete handprint on the right shoulder of the leather jacket and two smudged thumbprints, one on each of the lapels. Donovan bent down very close to look.

“This is treated leather, it doesn’t absorb the acids in the prints. We caught a major break here, Harry. This guy wears anything else and forget it. The hand is excellent. These thumbs didn’t take…I think we can raise them up with some glue. Harry, bend one of the lapels over.”

Bosch reached for the left lapel and carefully turned the cloth over. There on the inside of the crease were four more fingerprints. He turned the right lapel and saw four more there. It appeared that someone had grabbed Tony Aliso by the lapels.

Donovan whistled.

“This looks like two different people. Look at the size of the thumbs on the lapel and the hand on the shoulder. I’d say the hand is smaller, Harry. Maybe a woman. I don’t know. But the hands that grabbed this guy by the lapels were big.”

Donovan got scissors from a nearby toolbox and carefully cut the sport coat off the body. Bosch then held it as Donovan went over it with the laser wand. Nothing else came up besides the shoe print and the fingerprints they had already sighted. Bosch carefully hung the jacket over a chair at the counter and came back to the body. Donovan was moving the laser over the lower extremities.

“What else?” Donovan said to no one except maybe the body. “Come on now, tell us a story.”

There were more fibers and some old stains on the pants. Nothing that stood out as possibly significant until they reached the cuffs. Bosch pulled open the cuff on the right leg and in the crease was a large buildup of dust and fibers. Also, five tiny pieces of gold glitter glowed in the laser beam. Bosch carefully tweezered these into a separate plastic vial. From the left cuff, he recovered two more similar pieces.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Got me. Looks like glitter or something.”

Donovan moved the wand over the bare feet. They were clean, which indicated to Bosch that the victim’s shoes had probably been removed after he was forced into the trunk of the Rolls.

“Okay, that’s it,” Donovan said.

The lights came back on and Matthews went to work with the corpse, rotating joints, opening the shirt to look at the lividity level of the blood, opening the eyes and swiveling the head. Donovan paced around, waiting for the coroner’s tech to finish so he could continue the laser show. He walked over to Bosch.

“Harry, you want the swag on this?”

“Swag?”

“Scientific wild ass guess.”

“Yeah,” Bosch said, amused. “Give me the swag.”

“Well, I think somebody gets the drop on this guy. Ties him up, dumps him in the trunk and drives him to that fire road. He’s still alive, okay? Then our doer gets out, opens the trunk, puts his foot on the bumper ready to do the job but can’t get all the way in there to put the muzzle against the bone, you know? That was important to him. To do the job right. So he sticks his big foot on this poor guy’s hip, leans further in and bam, bam, out go the headlights. What do you think?”

Bosch nodded.

“I think you are on to something.”

He had already been thinking along the same lines but was past those deductions to the problem.

“Then how does he get back?” he asked.

“Back to where?”

“If this guy was in the trunk the whole time, then the doer drove the Rolls. If he drove there in the Rolls, then how’s he get back to wherever he intercepted Tony?”

“The other one,” Donovan said. “We’ve got two different prints on the jacket. Somebody could’ve followed behind the Rolls. The woman. The one who put her hand on the vic’s shoulder.”

Bosch nodded. He had already been puzzling with this but didn’t like something about the scenario Donovan had woven. He wasn’t sure what it was.

“Okay, Bosch,” Matthews interrupted. “You want to hear this tonight or you want to wait for the report?”

“T’night,” Bosch said.

“Okay then, listen up. Lividity was fixed and unchanged. The body was never moved once the heart stopped pumping.” He referred to a clipboard. “Let’s see, what else. We’ve got ninety percent rigor mortis resolution, cornea clouding and we’ve got skin slippage. I think you take all of that and it’s forty-eight hours, maybe a couple hours less. Let us know if you come up with any markers and we might do better.”

“Will do,” Bosch said.

By markers he knew Matthews meant that if he traced the victim’s last day and found out what he had eaten last and when, the ME could get a better fix on time of death by studying the digestion of food in the stomach.

“He’s all yours,” Bosch said to Matthews. “Any idea on the post?”

“You caught the tail end of a holiday weekend. That’s bad luck for you. Last I heard, we’ve run on twenty-seven homicides in the county so far. We probably won’t cut this one until Wednesday, if you’re lucky. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”

But the delay didn’t really bother Bosch this time. In cases like this, the autopsy usually held few surprises. It was pretty clear how the victim died. The mystery was why and by whom.

Matthews and his assistants wheeled the corpse out, leaving Bosch and Donovan alone with the Rolls. Donovan stared at the car silently, contemplating it the way a matador looks at the bull he is going to fight.

“We’re going to get her secrets, Harry.”

Bosch’s phone buzzed then and he fumbled getting it out of his jacket and open. It was Edgar.

“We got the ID, Harry. It is Aliso.”

“You got this off the prints?”

“Yeah. Mossler’s got a fax at home. I sent him everything and he eyeballed it.”

Mossler was one of the SID’s latent-print men.

“This is with the DL thumbprint?”

“Right. Also, I pulled a full set of Tony’s prints from an old pop for soliciting. Mossler had those to look at, too. It’s Aliso.”

“Okay, good work. What else you got?”

“Like I said, I ran this guy. He’s pretty clean. Just the soliciting arrest back in seventy-five. Few other things, though. His name comes up as a victim on a burglary up at his house in March. And on the civil indexes I’ve got a few civil actions against the guy. Breach-of-contract stuff, it looks like. A trail of broken promises and pissed-off people, Harry, good motive stuff.”

“What were the cases about?”

“That’s all I’ve got for now, just the abstracts in the civil index. I’ll have to pull the actual cases when I can get into the courthouse.”

“Okay. Did you check Missing Persons?”

“Yeah, I did. He was never reported. You got anything there?”

“Maybe. We might’ve gotten lucky. Looks like we are going to get some prints off the body. Two sets.”

“Off the body? That’s very cool.”

“Off the leather jacket.”

Bosch could tell Edgar was excited. Both detectives knew that if the prints were not those of a suspect, then they would surely be fresh enough to belong to people who had seen the victim in the time shortly before his death.

“You call OCID?”

Bosch was waiting for him to ask.

“Yeah. They’re taking a pass.”

“What?”

“That’s what they said. At least for now. Until we find something they might be interested in.”

Bosch wondered if Edgar even believed he had made the call.

“That doesn’t figure, Harry.”

“Yeah, well, all we can do is our job. You hear from Kiz?”

“Not yet. Who’d you talk to over at Organized Crime?”

“Guy named Carbone. He was on call.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Well, neither had I. I gotta go, Jerry. Let me know what you know.”

As soon as Bosch hung up, the door to the shed opened and in stepped Lieutenant Grace Billets. She quickly scanned the room and saw Donovan working in the car. She asked Bosch to step outside and that was when he knew she was unhappy.

She closed the door after he stepped out. She was in her forties and had as many years on the job as Bosch, give or take a couple, but they had never worked together before her assignment as his commanding officer. She was of medium build, with reddish-brown hair she kept short. She wore no makeup. She was dressed entirely in black-jeans, T-shirt and blazer. She also wore black cowboy boots. Her only concession to femininity was the pair of thin gold hoop earrings. Her manner was no concession to anything.

“What’s going on, Harry? You moved the body in the car?”

“Had to. It was either that or dump it out of the car with about ten thousand people watching us instead of the fireworks they were supposed to see.”

Bosch explained the situation in detail and Billets listened silently. When he was done, she nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know the details. It looks like it was your only choice.”

Bosch liked that about her. She wasn’t always right and she was willing to admit it.

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“So what do we have?”

When Bosch and Billets stepped back into the shed, Donovan was at one of the worktables working with the leather jacket. He had hung it on a wire inside an empty one-hundred-gallon aquarium and then dropped in a Hard Evidence packet. The packet, when broken open, emitted cyanoacrylate fumes which would attach to the amino acids and oils of fingerprints and crystallize, thereby raising the ridges and whorls and making them more visible and photo-ready.

“How’s it look?” Bosch asked.

“Real good. We’re going to get something off this. Howdy, Lieutenant.”

“Hello there,” Billets said.

Bosch could tell she didn’t remember Donovan’s name.

“Listen, Art,” he said, “when you get those together, get them over to the print lab and then call me or Edgar and tell us. We’ll get somebody over there to do them code three.”

Code three was a patrol response code meaning lights and siren authorized. Bosch needed the prints to be handled quickly. So far, they were the best lead.

“Will do, Harry.”

“What about the Rolls? Can I get in it yet?”

“Well, I’m not quite through with it. You can go in. Just be careful.”

Bosch began searching the interior of the car, checking the door and seat pockets first and finding nothing. He checked the ashtray and found it empty, not even an ash. He made a mental note that the victim apparently didn’t smoke.

Billets stood nearby, watching but not helping. She had risen to detective bureau commander primarily on the success of her skills as an administrator, not as an investigator. She knew when to watch and not get in the way.

Bosch checked under the seats and found nothing of interest. He opened the glove compartment last and a small square piece of paper fell out. It was a receipt for an airport valet company. Holding it by the corner, Bosch walked it over to the workbench and told Donovan to check it for prints when he got the chance.

He went back to the glove compartment and found the lease agreement and registration of the car, its service records and a small tool kit with a flashlight. There was also a half-used tube of Preparation H, a hemorrhoid medication. It seemed like an odd place to keep it, but Bosch guessed that maybe Aliso kept the tube handy for long drives.

He bagged all of the items from the compartment separately and while doing so noticed an extra battery in the tool kit. It struck him as odd because the flashlight obviously took two batteries. Having one extra would not do much good.

He pressed the flashlight’s on/off switch. It was dead. He unscrewed the cap and one battery slid out. Looking into the barrel, Bosch saw a plastic bag. He used a pen to reach in and pull the bag out. It contained about two dozen brown capsules.

Billets stepped closer.

“Poppers,” Bosch said. “Amyl nitrate. Supposed to help you get it up and keep it there. You know, improve your orgasm.”

He suddenly felt the need to explain his knowledge was not based on personal experience.

“It’s come up in other cases before.”

She nodded. Donovan walked over with the valet ticket in a clear plastic envelope.

“A couple smudges. Nothing we can work with.”

Bosch took it back. He then carried the various plastic evidence bags he had to the counter.

“Art, I’m taking the receipt, the poppers and the car’s service records, okay?”

“You got it.”

“I’ll leave you the plane ticket and the wallet. You are also going to put some speed on the prints from the jacket and what else? Oh yeah, those sparkles. What do you think?”

“Hopefully tomorrow. The rest of the fiber stuff I’ll take a look at, but it’s probably going to be exclusionary.”

That meant most of the material they had collected would sit in storage after a quick examination by Donovan, and come into play only if a suspect was identified. It would then be used either to tie that suspect to the crime scene or to exclude him.

Bosch took a large envelope off a shelf over the counter, put all the pieces of evidence he was taking into it, then put it in his briefcase and snapped it closed. He headed for the curtain with Billets.

“Good to see you again, Art,” she said.

“Likewise, Lieutenant.”

“You want me to call OPG to come get the car?” Bosch asked.

“Nah, I’m, going to be here a while,” Donovan said. “Gotta use the vac and I might think of something else to do. I’ll take care of it, Harry.”

“Okay, man, later.”

Bosch and Billets stepped through the curtain and then through the door. Outside he lit a cigarette and looked up at the dark, starless sky. Billets lit one of her own.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Next of kin. You want to come? It’s always a fun thing.”

She smiled at his sarcasm.

“No, I think I’ll pass on that. But before you leave, what’s your gut on this, Harry? I mean, OCID passing without taking a look, that kind of bothers me.”

“Me, too,” He took a long drag and exhaled. “My gut is that this one’s going to be tough. Unless something good comes out of those prints. That’s our only real break so far.”

“Well, tell your people that I want everybody in at eight for a roundtable on what we’ve got so far.”

“Let’s make it nine, Lieutenant. I think by then we should have something back from Donovan on the prints.”

“Okay, nine then. I’ll see you then, Harry. And from now on, when we’re talking like this, you know, informally, call me Grace.”

“Sure, Grace. Have a nice night.”

She expelled her smoke in a short burst that sounded like the start of a laugh.

“You mean, what’s left of it.”

On the way up to Mulholland Drive and Hidden Highlands Bosch paged Rider and she called back from one of the houses she was visiting. She said it was the last of the houses overlooking the clearing where the Rolls was parked. She told him the best she could come up with was a resident who remembered seeing the white Rolls-Royce from the back deck of his home on Saturday morning about ten. The same resident also believed the car was not there on Friday evening when he was out on the deck to watch the sunset.

“That fits with the time frame the ME’s looking at and the plane ticket. I think we’re zeroing in on Friday night, sometime after he got in from Vegas. Probably on his way home from the airport. Nobody heard any shots?”

“Not that I’ve found. There’s two houses where I got no answer. I was going to go back and try them now.”

“Maybe you can catch them tomorrow. I’m heading up to Hidden Highlands. I think you should go with me.”

They made arrangements to meet outside the entrance to the development where Aliso had lived, and Bosch closed the phone. He wanted Kiz along when he told Aliso’s next of kin he was dead because it would be good for her to learn the grim routine and because the percentages called for whoever that next of kin was to be considered a possible suspect. It was always good to have a witness with you when you first spoke to the person who later could become your quarry.

Bosch looked at his watch. It was nearly ten. Taking care of the notification meant they probably wouldn’t be getting to the victim’s office until midnight. He called the communications center and gave the operator the address on Melrose and had her look it up in the cross directory. It came back to Archway Pictures, as Bosch had guessed. He knew they had caught a bit of a break. Archway was a midsize studio that largely rented offices and production facilities to independent filmmakers. As far as Bosch knew, it hadn’t made its own films since the 1960s. The break was that he knew someone in security over there. Chuckie Meachum was a former Robbery-Homicide bull who had retired a few years earlier and taken a job as assistant director of security at Archway. He would be useful in smoothing their way in. Bosch considered calling ahead and arranging for Chuckie Meachum to meet them at the studio but decided against it. He decided he didn’t want anyone to know he was coming until he got there.

He got to Hidden Highlands fifteen minutes later. Rider’s car was parked on the shoulder off Mulholland. Bosch pulled up and she got in his car. Then he pulled into the entrance lane next to the gatehouse. It was a small brick structure with a single guard inside. Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California.

A guard in a blue uniform stepped out of the gatehouse carrying a clipboard and Bosch had his badge wallet out and open. The guard was a tall, thin man with a worn, gray face. Bosch didn’t recognize him, though he had heard in the station that most of the guards working here were off-duty uniforms from Hollywood Division. In the past he had seen postings for part-time jobs on the bulletin board outside the roll call room.

The guard gave Bosch a once-over in a laconic manner, avoiding a look at the badge on purpose.

“Kenahepyou?” he finally said.

“I need to go to the home of Anthony Aliso.”

He gave the address on Hillcrest that had been on the victim’s driver’s license.

“Your names?”

“Detective Harry Bosch, LAPD. Says it right here. This is Detective Kizmin Rider.”

He proffered the badge wallet, but it was still ignored. The guard was writing on his clipboard. Bosch saw his name tag said Nash. He also saw that the tin badge said CAPTAIN across it.

“They expecting you at the Aliso place?”

“I don’t think so. It’s police business.”

“Okay, but I’ve got to call ahead. It’s the development’s rules, you know.”

“I prefer you didn’t do that, Captain Nash.”

Bosch hoped his use of the security guard’s title would win him over. Nash thought a moment.

“Tell you what,” he said. “You go on ahead and I’ll come up with a reason for delaying making the call a few minutes. I’ll just say I’m up here by myself t’night and I got kind of busy, if there’s a complaint.”

He stepped back and reached in the open door of the gatehouse. He pressed a button on the inside wall and the crossguard went up.

“Thanks, Captain. You work out of Hollywood?”

Bosch knew he didn’t. He could tell Nash wasn’t even a cop. He didn’t have the cold eyes of a cop. But Bosch was playing to him, just in case he became a useful source of information later on.

“Nah,” Nash said. “I’m full-time. That’s why they made me captain of the watch. Everybody else is part-time out of Hollywood or West Hollywood sheriffs. I run the schedule.”

“Then how’d you get stuck on the night shift on Sunday night?”

“Everybody can use some OT now and then.”

Bosch nodded.

“You’re right about that. Hillcrest, where’s that?”

“Oh, yeah, forgot. Take your second left. That’s Hillcrest. The Aliso place is about the sixth house on the right. Nice view of the city from the pool.”

“Did you know him?” Rider asked, leaning down so she could see Nash through Bosch’s window.

“Aliso?” Nash said, bending further to look in at her. He thought a moment. “Not really. Just like I know people when they come through here. I’m just the same to them as the pool man, I guess. I notice you asked did I know him. Am I not going to get the chance?”

“Smart man, Mr. Nash,” Rider said.

She straightened up, finished with the conversation. Bosch nodded his thanks and drove through the gate to Hillcrest. As he passed the broad, manicured lawns surrounding houses the size of apartment buildings, he filled Rider in on what he had learned at the print shed and from Edgar. He also admired the properties they were passing. Many of them were surrounded by walls or tall hedges that looked as though they were trimmed into sharp edges every morning. Walls within walls, Bosch thought. He wondered what the owners did with all of their space besides fearfully guard it.

It took them five minutes to find the Aliso house on a cul-de-sac at the top of the hill. He passed through the open gates of an estate with a Tudor-style mansion set behind a circular driveway made of gray paver stones. Bosch got out with his briefcase and looked up at the place. It was intimidating in its size, but its style was not much to speak of. He wouldn’t want it, even if he had the money.

After getting to the door and pushing the doorbell button, he looked at Rider.

“You ever done this before?”

“No. But I grew up in South L.A. A lot of drive-bys. I was around when people got the news.”

Bosch nodded.

“Not to belittle that experience, but this is different. What is important is not what you hear said, it’s what you observe.”

Bosch pushed the lighted button again. He could hear the bell sound from inside the house. He looked at Rider and could tell she was about to ask a question, when the door was opened by a woman.

“Mrs. Aliso?” Bosch asked.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Aliso, I’m Detective Harry Bosch with the LAPD. This is my partner, Detective Kizmin Rider. We need to speak with you concerning your husband.”

He held out his badge wallet and she took it from his hand. Usually, they didn’t do that. Usually, they recoiled from it or looked at it like it was some strange and fascinating object not to be touched.

“I don’t under-”

She stopped when the sound of a phone ringing began somewhere behind her in the big house.

“Would you excuse me a moment. I have to-”

“That’s probably Nash at the gate. He said he had to call ahead, but there was a lineup of cars behind us. I guess we beat him here. We need to come in to talk to you, ma’am.”

She stepped back in and opened the door wide for him. She looked about five to ten years younger than her husband had been. She was maybe forty, attractive, with dark straight hair and a trim build. She wore a lot of makeup on a face Bosch guessed had been sculpted at times by the surgeon’s knife. Still, through the makeup she looked tired, worn. He could see her face was flushed pink, as though she might have been drinking. She wore a light blue dress that showed off her legs. They were tan and the muscles still taut. Bosch could see she had been considered very beautiful at one time but was sliding into that stage when a woman believes her beauty may be leaving-even if it isn’t. Maybe that was why she had all the makeup on, Bosch guessed. Or maybe it was because she was still expecting her husband to show up.

Bosch closed the door after they entered and they followed the woman into a large living room with an incongruous mix of modern prints on the walls and French antiques on the thick white carpet. The phone was still ringing. She told Bosch and Rider to sit down and then walked through the living room into another hallway, which she crossed to what looked like a den. He heard her answer the phone, tell Nash that the delay was all right and hang up.

She came back into the living room then and sat on a couch with a muted flower print. Bosch and Rider took nearby chairs with a matching pattern. Bosch took a quick look around and saw no photographs in frames. Only the artwork. It was always one of the first things he looked for when he had to quickly judge a relationship.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t get your name.”

“Veronica Aliso. What about my husband, Detective? Is he hurt?”

Bosch leaned forward in his chair. No matter how many times he did this, he never got used to it and he was never sure he was doing it the right way.

“Mrs. Aliso…I am very sorry, but your husband is dead. He was the victim of a homicide. I am sorry to have to tell you this.”

He watched her closely and she said nothing at first. She instinctively crossed her arms in front of her and brought her face down in a pained grimace. There were no tears. Not yet. In his experience, Bosch had seen them come either right away-as soon as they opened the door and saw him and knew-or much later, when it sank in that the nightmare was reality.

“I don’t…How did this happen?” she asked, her eyes staring down at the floor.

“He was found in his car. He’d been shot.”

“In Las Vegas?”

“No. Here. Not far. It looks like he was coming home from the airport when…when he was somehow stopped by somebody. We’re not sure yet. His car was found off Mulholland Drive. Down by the Bowl.”

He watched her a little more. She still had not looked up. Bosch felt a sense of guilt pass over him. Guilt because he was not watching this woman with sympathy. He had been in this place too many times for that. Instead, he watched her with an eye for false mannerisms. In these situations his suspicion outweighed his compassion. It had to.

“Can I get you anything, Mrs. Aliso?” Rider asked. “Water? Do you have coffee? Do you want something stronger?”

“No. I’m fine. Thank you. It’s just a terrible shock.”

“Do you have any children in the house?” Rider asked.

“No, we…no children. Do you know what happened? Was he robbed?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Bosch said.

“Of course…Can you tell me, was there much pain?”

“No, there was no pain,” Bosch said.

He thought of the tears welled in Tony Aliso’s eyes. He decided not to tell her about that.

“It must be hard, your job,” she said. “Telling people this sort of thing.”

He nodded and looked away. For a moment he thought of the old squad room joke about the easiest way to do next-of-kin notification. When Mrs. Brown opens the door, you say, “Are you the widow Brown?”

He looked back at the widow Aliso.

“Why did you ask if it happened in Las Vegas?”

“Because that was where he was.”

“How long was he supposed to be there?”

“I don’t know. He never scheduled it with a return. He always bought open-ended tickets so he could come back when he wanted to. He always said he’d be back when his luck changed. For the worse.”

“We have reason to believe he came back to Los Angeles on Friday night. His car wasn’t found until this evening. That’s two days, Mrs. Aliso. Did you try to call him in Las Vegas during that time?”

“No. We usually didn’t speak when he was over there.”

“And how often was it that he went?”

“Once or twice a month.”

“For how long each time?”

“Anywhere from two days to once he spent a week. Like I said, it all depended on how he was doing.”

“And you never called him there?” Rider asked.

“Rarely. Not at all this time.”

“Was it business or pleasure that took him there?” Bosch asked.

“He always told me it was both. He said he had investors to see. But it was an addiction. That’s what I believed. He loved to gamble and could afford to do it. So he went.”

Bosch nodded but didn’t know why.

“This last time, when did he go?”

“He went Thursday. After leaving the studio.”

“You saw him last then?”

“Thursday morning. Before he went to the studio. He left for the airport from there. It’s closer.”

“And you had no idea when to expect him back.”

He said it as a statement. It was out there for her to challenge if she wanted to.

“To be honest, I was just beginning to wonder tonight. It usually doesn’t take long for that place to separate a man from his money. I thought it was a little long, yes. But I didn’t try to track him down. And then you came.”

“What did he like to play over there?”

“Everything. But poker the most. It was the only game where you weren’t playing against the house. The house took a cut, but you were playing against the other players. That’s how he explained it to me once. Only he called the other players schmucks from Iowa.”

“Was he always alone over there, Mrs. Aliso?”

Bosch looked down at his notebook and acted as if he was writing something important and that her answer wasn’t. He knew it was cowardly.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Did you ever go with him at all?”

“I don’t like to gamble. I don’t like that city. That city is a horrible place. They can dress it up all they want, it’s still a city of vices and whores. Not just the sexual kind.”

Bosch studied the cool anger in her dark eyes.

“You didn’t answer the question, Mrs. Aliso,” Rider said.

“What question?”

“Did you ever go to Las Vegas with him?”

“At first, yes. But I found it boring. I haven’t been in years.”

“Was your husband in any kind of serious debt?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t know. If he was, he didn’t tell me. You can call me Veronica.”

“You never asked if he was getting into trouble?” Rider asked.

“I just assumed that he would tell me if he was.”

She turned the hard dark eyes on Rider now, and Bosch felt a weight lift off him. Veronica Aliso was challenging them to disagree.

“I know this probably makes me some kind of a suspect, but I don’t care,” she said. “You have your job to do. It must be obvious to you that my husband and I…let’s just say we coexisted here. So as to your questions about Nevada, I couldn’t tell you whether he was a million up or a million down. Who knows, he could’ve beaten the odds. But I think he would have bragged about it if he had.”

Bosch nodded and thought about the body in the trunk. It didn’t seem like that of a man who had beaten any odds.

“Where did he stay in Las Vegas, Mrs. Aliso?”

“Always at the Mirage. I do know that. You see, not all of the casinos have poker tables. The Mirage has a classy one. He always said that if I needed to call, call there. Ask for the poker pit if there is no answer in the room.”

Bosch took a few moments to write this down. He found that often silence was the best way to get people to talk and reveal themselves. He hoped Rider realized that he was leaving holes of silence in the interview on purpose.

“You asked if he went there alone.”

“Yes?”

“Detectives, in the course of your investigation I believe you will undoubtedly learn that my husband was a philanderer. I ask only one thing of you, please do your best to keep that information from me. I simply don’t want to know.”

Bosch nodded and was silent a moment while he composed his thoughts. What kind of woman wouldn’t want to know, he wondered. Maybe one who already did. He looked back at her and their eyes connected again.

“Aside from gambling, was your husband in any other kind of trouble as far as you know?” he asked. “Work-related, financial?”

“As far as I know he wasn’t. But he kept the finances. I could not tell you what our situation is at the moment. When I needed money I asked him, and he always said cash a check and tell him the amount. I have a separate account for household expenses.”

Without looking up from the notebook, Bosch said, “Just a few more and we’ll leave you alone for now. Did your husband have any enemies that you know of? Anybody who would want to harm him?”

“He worked in Hollywood. Back stabbing is considered an art form there. Anthony was as skilled at it as anyone else who has been in the industry twenty-five years. Obviously that means there could always be people who were unhappy with him. But who would do this, I don’t know.”

“The car…the Rolls-Royce is leased to a production company over at Archway Studios. How long had he worked there?”

“His office was there, but he didn’t work for Archway per se. TNA Productions is his…was his own company. He simply rented an office and a parking spot on the Archway lot. But he had about as much to do with Archway as you do.”

“Tell us about his production company,” Rider said. “Did he make films?”

“In a manner of speaking. You could say he started big and ended small. About twenty years ago he produced his first film. The Art of the Cape. If you saw it, you were one of the few. Bullfight movies are not popular. But it was critically acclaimed, played the film festival circuit and then the art houses and it was a good start for him.”

She said that Aliso had managed to make a couple more films for general release. But after that his production and moral values steadily declined, until he was producing a procession of exploitative dreck.

“These films, if you want to call them that, are notable only for the number of exposed breasts in them,” she said. “In the business, it’s called straight-to-video stock. In addition to that Tony was quite successful in literary arbitrage.”

“What is that?”

“He was a speculator. Mostly scripts, but he did manuscripts, books on occasion.”

“And how would he speculate on them?”

“He’d buy them. Wrap up the rights. Then when they became valuable or the author became hot, he’d go to market with them. Do you know who Michael St. John is?”

The name sounded familiar but Bosch could not place it. He shook his head. Rider did the same.

“He’s one of the screenwriters of the moment. He’ll be directing studio features within a year or so. He’s the flavor-of-the-month, so to speak.”

“Okay.”

“Well, eight years ago when he was in the USC film school and was hungry and was trying to find an agent and trying to catch the attention of the studios, my husband was one of the vultures who circled overhead. You see, my husband’s films were so low-budget that he’d get students to shoot them, direct them, write them. So he knew the schools and he knew talent. Michael St. John was one he knew had talent. Once when he was desperate, he sold Anthony the rights to three of his student screenplays for two thousand dollars. Now, anything with St. John’s name on it goes for at least six figures.”

“What about these writers, how do they take this?”

“Not well. St. John was trying to buy his scripts back.”

“You think he could have harmed your husband?”

“No. You asked me what he did and I told you. If you are asking who would kill him, I don’t know.”

Bosch jotted a couple of notes down.

“You mentioned that he said that he saw investors when he went to Las Vegas,” Rider said.

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us who they were?”

“Schmucks from Iowa, I would assume. People he would meet and persuade to invest in a movie. You’d be surprised how many people jump at a chance to be part of a Hollywood movie. And Tony was a good salesman. He could make a two-million budget flick sound like the sequel to Gone With the Wind. He convinced me.”

“How so?”

“He talked me into being in one of his movies once. That’s how I met him. Made it sound like I was going to be the new Jane Fonda. You know, sexy but smart. It was a studio picture. Only the director was a coke addict and the writer couldn’t write and the movie was so bad it was never released. That was it for my career and Tony never made a studio picture again. He spent the rest of his life making video garbage.”

Looking around the tall-ceilinged room at the paintings and furniture, Bosch said, “Doesn’t look like he did too badly at it.”

“No, he didn’t,” she responded. “I guess we have those people from Iowa to thank for that.”

Her bitterness was stifling. Bosch looked down at his notebook just so he could avert his eyes from her.

“All this talk,” she said then. “I need some water. Do either of you want something?”

“Water would be fine,” Bosch said. “We’re not going to be much longer.”

“Detective Rider?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“I’ll be right back.”

While she was gone Bosch stood up and looked around the living room in a manner that suggested he wasn’t really interested. He said nothing to Rider. He was standing near a side table looking at a carved glass figurine of a nude woman when Veronica Aliso came back in with two glasses of ice water.

“I just want to ask you a few more questions about this past week,” Bosch said.

“Fine.”

He sipped from his glass and remained standing.

“What would your husband have taken with him to Las Vegas as far as luggage went?”

“Just his overnighter.”

“What did it look like?”

“It was a hanging bag that, you know, folded over. It was green with brown leather trim and straps. He had a name tag on it.”

“Did he take a briefcase or any work with him?”

“Yes, his briefcase. It was one of those aluminum shell kind. You know, they are lightweight but impossible to break into or something. Is the luggage missing?”

“We’re not sure. Do you know where he kept the key to the briefcase?”

“On his key chain. With the car keys.”

There had been no car keys in the Rolls or on Aliso’s body. Bosch realized that the reason they might have been taken was to open the briefcase. He put the glass down next to the figurine and looked at it again. He then began writing the descriptions of the briefcase and hanging bag in his notebook.

“Did your husband wear a wedding ring?”

“No. He did wear quite an expensive watch, though. It was a Rolex. I gave it to him.”

“The watch was not taken.”

“Oh.”

Bosch looked up from his notebook.

“Do you remember what your husband was wearing on Thursday morning? When you last saw him?”

“Um, just clothes…uh, he had on his white pants and a blue shirt and his sport coat.”

“His black leather sport coat?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Aliso, do you remember if you hugged him or kissed him good-bye?”

This seemed to fluster her, and Bosch immediately regretted the way he had phrased the question.

“I’m sorry. What I meant was that we found some fingerprints on the jacket. On the shoulder. And if you might have touched him there on the day he left, it could explain this piece of evidence.”

She was quiet a moment and Bosch thought that she was finally going to begin to cry. But instead, she said, “I might have but I don’t remember… I don’t think I did.”

Bosch opened his briefcase and looked for a print screen. He found one in one of the pockets. It looked like a photo slide but the center was a double-sided screen with ink between the screens. A thumb could be pressed on the A side and a fingerprint would be imprinted on a card held against the B side.

“I want to take your thumbprint so we can compare it to the print taken off the jacket. If you did not touch him there, then it might be a good lead for us.”

She stepped over to him and he pressed her right thumb down on the print screen. When he was done she looked at her thumb.

“No ink.”

“Yes, that’s nice. No mess. We just started using these a few years ago.”

“The print on the jacket, did it belong to a woman?”

He looked at her and held her eyes for a moment.

“We won’t know for sure until we get a match.”

As he put the card and the print screen back in the briefcase, he noticed the evidence bag containing the poppers. He took it out and held it up for her to look at.

“Do you know what these are?”

She narrowed her eyes and shook her head no.

“Amyl nitrate poppers. Some people use them to enhance sexual performance and satisfaction. Do you know if your husband ever used these?”

“You found them with him?”

“Mrs. Aliso, I’d rather that you’d just answer my questions. I know this is difficult, but there are some things I can’t tell you yet. I will when I can. I promise.”

“No, he didn’t use them…with me.”

“I’m sorry that I have to be so personal, but we want to catch the person who did this. We both want that. Now, your husband was about ten or twelve years older than you.” He was being charitable here. “Did he have problems performing sexually? Is there any chance he might have been using poppers without your knowledge?”

She turned to go back to her chair. When she was seated again she said, “I wouldn’t know.”

Now Bosch narrowed his eyes. What was she trying to say? His silence worked. She answered before he had to ask, but as she spoke she looked directly at Rider, the unspoken message being that as a woman Rider might sympathize.

“Detective, I haven’t had…I guess, sexual relations is the way it is said in these matters. My husband and I…not in almost two years.”

Bosch nodded and looked down at his notebook. The page was blank but he couldn’t bring himself to write this latest piece of information down with her watching them. He folded the notebook closed and put it away.

“You want to ask me why, don’t you?”

He just looked at her and she answered with a measure of defiance in her face and voice.

“He had lost interest.”

“Are you sure?”

“He told me that to my face.”

Bosch nodded.

“Mrs. Aliso, I’m sorry for the loss of your husband. I’m also sorry for the intrusion and the personal questions. I’m afraid, though, that there will be more as the investigation progresses.”

“I understand.”

“There is one other thing I’d like to cover.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Did your husband have a home office?”

“Yes.”

“Could we take a quick look at it?”

She stood up and they followed her down the second hallway to the office. They both stepped into the room and Bosch looked around. It was a small room with a desk and two file cabinets. There was a TV on a cart in front of a wall of shelves. Half were filled with books and the rest stacked with scripts, the titles written with Magic Markers on the edges of the pages. There was a golf bag leaning in the corner.

Bosch walked over and studied the desk. It was spotless. He came around and saw that the desk contained two file drawers. He opened these and found one empty and one containing several files. He quickly looked through the file tabs and saw that they apparently were files containing personal finance records and tax documents. He closed the drawers, deciding that a search of the office could probably keep.

“It’s late,” he said. “This is not the time. I want you to understand, though, that investigations like this often shoot off into many directions. But we have to follow up on everything. We’re going to need to come in here tomorrow and go through your husband’s things. We’ll probably take a lot with us. We’ll have a warrant so everything will be perfectly legal.”

“Yes. Of course. But can’t I just give you permission to take what you need?”

“You could, but it would be better this way. I’m talking about check books, savings account records, credit card statements, insurance, everything. We’ll probably need the records on your household account, too.”

“I understand. What time?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll call first. Or someone will. Do you know, did your husband leave a will?”

“Yes. Both of us made wills. They’re with our attorney.”

“How long ago was that?”

“The will? Oh, a long time. Years.”

“In the morning, I’d like you to call the attorney and tell him we’ll need a copy of it. Are you up to doing that?”

“Of course.”

“What about insurance?”

“Yes, we have policies. The attorney, Neil Denton in Century City, will have them also.”

“Okay, we’ll worry about that tomorrow. I need to seal this room now.”

They stepped back into the hallway and Bosch closed the door. From his briefcase he took a sticker that said

CRIME SCENE

DO NOT ENTER PREMISES

CALL LAPD 213 485-4321

Bosch pressed the sticker across the door jamb. If anyone entered the room now, they would have to cut the sticker or peel it off. Bosch would know.

“Detective?” Veronica Aliso said quietly from behind him.

Bosch turned around.

“I am the suspect, aren’t I?”

Bosch put the two papers he had peeled off the back of the sticker in his pocket.

“I suppose everyone and no one is a suspect at this point. We’re looking at everything. But, yes, Mrs. Aliso, we’re going to be looking at you.”

“I guess I shouldn’t have been so candid before, then.”

Rider said, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, the truth shouldn’t hurt you.”

Bosch knew from long experience never to say such a thing. He knew the words were false before they were out of her mouth. Judging by the small, thin smile on Veronica Aliso’s face, she knew it as well.

“Are you new at this, Detective Rider?” she asked while looking at Bosch with that smile.

“No, ma’am, I’ve been a detective for six years.”

“Oh. And I guess I don’t have to ask Detective Bosch.”

“Mrs. Aliso?” Bosch asked.

“Veronica.”

“There is one last thing you could clear up for us tonight. We do not know yet exactly when your husband was killed. But it would help us concentrate on other matters if we could quickly eliminate routine avenues of-”

“You want to know if I have an alibi, is that it?”

“We just want to know where you were the last few days and nights. It’s a routine question, nothing else.”

“Well, I hate to bore you with my life’s details, because I’m afraid that’s what they are, boring. But other than a trip to the mall and supermarket Saturday afternoon, I haven’t left the house since I had dinner with my husband Wednesday night.”

“You’ve been here alone?”

“Yes…but I think you can verify this with Captain Nash at the gate. They keep records of who comes in as well as out of Hidden Highlands. Even the residents. Also, on Friday our pool man was here in the afternoon. I gave him his check. I can get you his name and number.”

“That won’t be necessary right now. Thank you. And again, I’m sorry for your loss. Is there anything we can do for you right now?”

She seemed to be withdrawing into herself. He was not sure she had heard his question.

“I’m fine,” she finally said.

He picked up his briefcase and headed down the hallway with Rider. It ran behind the living room and took them directly to the front door. All the way along the hallway there were no photographs on the wall. It didn’t seem right to him, but he guessed nothing had been right in this house for a while. Bosch studied dead people’s rooms the way scholars studied dead people’s paintings at the Getty. He looked for the hidden meanings, the secrets of lives and deaths.

At the door Rider went out first. Bosch then stepped out and looked back down the hall. Veronica Aliso was framed at the other end in the light. He hesitated for a beat. He nodded and walked out.

They drove in silence, digesting the conversation, until they got to the gatehouse and Nash came out.

“How’d it go?”

“It went.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he? Mr. Aliso.”

“Yeah.”

Nash whistled quietly.

“Captain Nash, you keep records here of when cars come in and out?” Rider asked.

“Yes. But this is private property. You’d need a-”

“Search warrant,” Bosch said. “Yes, we know. But before we go to all that trouble, tell me something. Say I come back with a warrant, are your gate records going to tell me when exactly Mrs. Aliso came in and out of here the last few days?”

“Nope. It’ll only tell you when her car did.”

“Gotcha.”

Bosch dropped off Rider at her car and they drove separately down out of the hills to the Hollywood Division station on Wilcox. On the way Bosch thought about Veronica Aliso and the fury she seemed to hold in her eyes for her dead husband. He didn’t know how it fit or if it even fit at all. But he knew they would be coming back to her.

Rider and Bosch stopped briefly in the station to update Edgar and pick up cups of coffee. Bosch then called Archway and arranged for the security office to call in Chuckie Meachum from home. Bosch did not tell the duty officer who took the call what it was about or what office inside the studio they would be going to. He just told the officer to get Meachum there.

At midnight they went out the rear door of the station house, past the fenced windows of the drunk tank and to Bosch’s car.

“So what did you think of her?” Bosch finally asked as he pulled out of the station lot.

“The embittered widow? I think there wasn’t much to their marriage. At least at the end. Whether that makes her a killer or not, I don’t know.”

“No pictures.”

“On the walls? Yeah, I noticed that.”

Bosch lit a cigarette and Rider didn’t say anything about it, although it was a violation of department policy to smoke in the detective car.

“What do you think?” Rider asked.

“I’m not sure yet. There’s what you said. The bitterness you could almost put in a glass if you ever ran out of ice. Couple other things I’m still thinking about.”

“Like what?”

“Like all the makeup she had on and the way she took my badge out of my hand. Nobody’s ever done that before. It’s like…I don’t know, like maybe she was waiting for us.”

When they got to the entrance of Archway Pictures, Meachum was standing under the half-size replica of the Arc de Triomphe smoking a cigarette and waiting. He was wearing a sport coat over a golf shirt and had a bemused smile on his face when he recognized Bosch pulling up. Bosch had spent time with Meachum in the Robbery-Homicide Division ten years before. Never partnered, but they worked a few of the same task forces. Meachum had gotten out when the getting out was good. He pulled the pin a month after the Rodney King tape hit the news. He knew. He told everybody it was the beginning of the end. Archway hired him as the assistant director of security. Nice job, nice pay, plus he was pulling in the twenty-year pension of half pay. He was the one they talked about when they talked about smart moves. Now, with all the baggage the LAPD carried-the King beating, the riots, the Christopher Commission, O.J. Simpson and Mark Fuhrman-a retiring dick would be lucky if a place like Archway hired him to work the front gate.

“Harry Bosch,” Meachum said, leaning down to look in. “What it is, what it is?”

The first thing Bosch had noticed was that Meachum had gotten his teeth capped since he’d last seen him.

“Chuckie. Long time. This is my partner, Kiz Rider.”

Rider nodded and Meachum nodded and studied her a moment. Black female detectives were a rarity in his day, even though he hadn’t been off the job more than five years.

“So what’s shaking, Detectives? Why’d you want to go and pull me out of the hot tub?”

He smiled, showing off the teeth. Bosch guessed he knew that they had been noticed.

“We got a case. We want to take a look at the vic’s office.”

“It’s here? Who’s the stiff?”

“Anthony N. Aliso. TNA Productions.”

Meachum crinkled his eyes. He had the deep tan of a golfer who never misses his Saturday morning start and usually gets away for at least nine once or twice during the week.

“Doesn’t do anything for me, Harry. You sure he-”

“Look it up, Chuck. He’s here. Was.”

“All right, tell you what, park the car over in the main lot and we’ll go back to my office, grab a cup and look this guy up.”

He pointed toward a lot directly through the gate and Bosch did as instructed. The lot was almost empty and was next to a huge soundstage with an outside wall painted powder blue with puffs of white clouds. It was used for shooting exteriors when the real sky was too brown with smog.

They followed Meachum on foot to the studio security offices. Entering the suite, they passed by a glass-walled office in which a man in a brown Archway Security outfit sat at a desk surrounded by banks of video monitors. He was reading the Times sports page, which he quickly dropped into a trash can next to the desk when he saw Meachum.

Bosch saw that Meachum didn’t seem to notice because he had been holding the door open for them. When he turned, he casually saluted the man in the glass office and led Bosch and Rider back to his office.

Meachum slid in behind his desk and turned to his computer. The monitor screen depicted an intergalactic battle among assorted space ships. Meachum hit one key and the screen saver disappeared. He asked Bosch to spell Aliso’s name and he punched it into the computer. He then tilted the monitor so Bosch and Rider couldn’t see the screen. Bosch was annoyed by this but he didn’t say anything. After a few moments, Meachum did.

“You’re right. He was here. Tyrone Power Building. Had one of the little cubbyholes they rent to nonplayers. Three-office suite. Three losers. They share a secretary who comes with the rent.”

“How long’s he been here? That say?”

“Yeah. Almost seven years.”

“What else you got there?”

Meachum looked at the screen.

“Not much. No record of problems. He complained once about somebody dinging his car in the parking lot. Says here he drove a Rolls-Royce. Probably the last guy in Hollywood who hadn’t traded in his Rolls on a Range Rover. That’s tacky, Bosch.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you and Detective Riley go out there and grab a cup of joe while I make a call about that. I’m not sure what our procedure is for this.”

“First of all, Chuck, it’s Rider, not Riley. And second, we’re running a homicide investigation here. Whatever your procedures are, we are expecting you to allow us access.”

“You’re on private property here, buddy. You’ve got to keep that in mind.”

“I will.” Bosch stood up. “And when you make your call, the thing you should keep in mind is that so far the media haven’t gotten wind of any of this. I didn’t think it would be good to pull Archway into this sort of thing, especially since we don’t know for sure what’s involved here. You can tell whoever you’re calling that I’ll try to keep it that way.”

Meachum smirked and shook his head.

“Still the same old Bosch. Your way or the highway.”

“Something like that.”

While waiting, Bosch had time to gulp down a cup of lukewarm coffee from a pot that had been on a warmer in the outer office for the better part of the night. It was bitter, but he knew the cup he’d had at the station would not take him through the night. Rider passed on the coffee, instead drinking water from a dispenser in the hallway.

After nearly ten minutes Meachum came out of his office.

“Okay, you got it. But I’ll tell you right now that me or one of my people gotta be in there the whole time as observers. That going to be a problem for you, Bosch?”

“No problem.”

“Okay, let’s go. We’ll take a cart.”

On the way out he opened the door to the glass room and stuck his head in.

“Peters, who’s roving?”

“Uh, Serrurier and Fogel.”

“Okay, get on the air and tell Serrurier to meet us at Tyrone Power. He’s got keys, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, do it.” Meachum made a motion to close the door but stopped. “And Peters? Leave the sports page in the trash can.”

They took a golf cart to the Tyrone Power Building because it was on the other side of the lot from the security offices. Along the way Meachum waved to a man dressed entirely in black who was coming out of one of the buildings they passed.

“We’ve got a shoot on New York Street tonight, otherwise I’d take you through there. You’d swear you were in Brooklyn.”

“Never been,” Bosch said.

“Me neither,” Rider added.

“Then it doesn’t matter, unless you wanted to see them shooting.”

“The Tyrone Power Building will be just fine.”

“Fine.”

When they got there, another uniformed man was waiting. Serrurier. At Meachum’s instructions he first unlocked a door to reception area that served the three separate offices of the suite, then the door to the office Aliso had used. Meachum then told him to go back out on roving patrol of the studio.

Meachum’s calling it a closet was not too far off. Aliso’s office was barely large enough for Bosch, Rider and Meachum to stand in together without having to smell each other’s breath. It contained a desk with a chair behind it and two more close in front of it. Against the wall behind the desk was a four-drawer file cabinet. The left wall was hung with framed one-sheets advertising two classic films: Chinatown and The Godfather, both of which had been made down the street at Paramount. Aliso had countered these on the right wall with framed posters of his own efforts, The Art of the Cape and Casualty of Desire. There were also smaller frames of photos depicting Aliso with various celebrities, many of the shots taken in the same office with Aliso and the celebrity of the moment standing behind the desk smiling.

Bosch first studied the two posters. Each one carried the imprimatur along the top Anthony Aliso Presents. But it was the second poster, for Casualty of Desire, that caught his attention. The artwork beneath the title of the film showed a man in a white suit carrying a gun down at his side, a desperate look on his face. In larger scale, a woman with flowing dark hair that framed the image looked down on him with sultry eyes. The poster was a rip-off of the scene depicted in the Chinatown poster on the other wall. But there was something entrancing about it. The woman, of course, was Veronica Aliso, and Bosch knew that was one reason why.

“Nice-looking woman,” Meachum said from behind him.

“His wife.”

“I see that. Second billing. Only I never heard of her.”

Bosch nodded at the poster.

“I think this was her shot.”

“Well, like I said, nice-looking gal. I doubt she looks like that anymore.”

Bosch studied the eyes again and remembered the woman he had seen just an hour ago. The eyes were still as dark and gleaming, a little cross of light at the center of each.

Bosch looked away and began to study the framed photos. He immediately noticed that one of them was of Dan Lacey, the actor who had portrayed Bosch eight years earlier in a mini-series about the search for a serial killer. The studio that had produced it had paid Bosch and his then partner a lot of money to use their names and technical advice. His partner took the money and ran, retired to Mexico. Bosch bought a house in the hills. He couldn’t run. He knew the job was his life.

He turned and took in the rest of the small office. There were shelves against the wall near the door and these were piled with scripts and videotapes, no books save for a couple of directories of actors and directors.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Chuckie, you stand back by the door and observe like you said. Kiz, why don’t you start with the desk and I’ll start with the files.”

The files were locked and it took Bosch ten minutes to open them with the picks he got out of his briefcase. It then took an hour just to make a cursory study of the files. The drawers were stocked with notes and financial records regarding the development of several films that Bosch had never heard of. This did not seem curious to him after what Veronica Aliso had said and because he knew little about the film business anyway. But it seemed from his understanding of the files he was quickly scanning that large sums of money had been paid to various film services companies during the production of the films. And what struck Bosch the most was that Aliso seemed to have financed a hell of a nice lifestyle from this little office.

After he was finished going through the fourth and bottom drawer, Bosch stood and straightened his back, his vertebrae popping like dominoes clicking together. He looked at Rider, who was still going through the drawers of the desk.

“Anything?”

“A few things of interest but no smoking gun, if that’s what you mean. Aliso’s got a flag here from the IRS. His corporation was going to be audited next month. Other than that, there is some correspondence between Tony Aliso and St. John, the flavor-of-the-month Mrs. Aliso mentioned. Heated words but nothing overtly threatening. I’ve still got one drawer to go.”

“There’s a lot in the files. Financial stuff. We’re going to have to go through it all. I’d like you to be the one. You going to be up for it?”

“No problem. What I’m seeing so far is a lot of routine, if not sloppy, business records. It just happens to be the movie business here.”

“I’m going outside to catch a smoke. When you’re done there, why don’t we switch and you take the files, I’ll take the desk.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Before going out he ran his eyes along the shelves by the door and read the titles of the videotapes. He stopped when he came to the one he was looking for. Casualty of Desire. He reached up and took it down. The cover carried the same artwork as the movie poster.

He stepped back and put it on the desk so it would be gathered with things they would be taking. Rider asked what it was.

“It’s her movie,” he said. “I want to watch it.”

“Oh, me too.”

Outside, Bosch stood in the small courtyard by a bronze statue of a man he guessed was Tyrone Power and lit a cigarette. It was a cool night and the smoke in his chest warmed him. The studio grounds were very quiet now.

He walked over to a trash can next to a bench in the courtyard and used it to tip his ashes. He noticed a broken coffee mug at the bottom of the can. There were several pens and pencils scattered in the can as well. He recognized the Archway insignia, the Arc de Triomphe with the sun rising in the middle of the arch, on one of the fragments. He was about to reach into the trash can to pick out what looked like a gold Cross pen when he heard Meachum’s voice and turned around.

“She’s going places, isn’t she? I can tell.”

He was lighting his own cigarette.

“Yeah, that’s what I hear. It’s our first case together. I don’t really know her, and from what I hear I shouldn’t try. She’s going to the Glass House as soon as the time is right.”

Meachum nodded and flicked his ashes onto the pavement. Bosch watched him glance up toward the roofline above the second floor and give another one of his casual salutes. Bosch looked up and saw the camera moored to the underside of the roof eave.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bosch said. “He can’t see you. He’s reading about the Dodgers last night.”

“S’pose you’re right. Can’t get good people these days, Harry. I get guys who like driving around in the carts all day, hoping they’re going to be discovered like Clint Eastwood or something. Had a guy run into a wall the other day ’cause he was so intent on talking with a couple creative execs walking by. There’s one of them oxymorons for you. Creative executive…”

Bosch was silent. He didn’t care about anything that Meachum had just said.

“You ought to come work here, Harry. You’ve gotta have your twenty in by now. You should pull the pin and then come work for me. Your lifestyle will rise a couple of notches. I guarantee it.”

“No thanks, Chuck. Somehow I just don’t see myself tooling around in one of your golf carts.”

“Well, the offer’s there. Anytime, buddy. Anytime.”

Bosch put his cigarette out on the side of the trash can and dropped the dead butt inside. He decided that he didn’t want to go picking through the can with Meachum watching. He told Meachum he was heading back in.

“Bosch, I gotta tell you something.”

Bosch looked back at him and Meachum raised his hands.

“We’re going to have a problem if you want to take anything out of that office without a warrant. I mean, I heard what you said about that tape and now she’s in there stacking stuff on the desk to go. But I can’t let you take anything.”

“Then you are going to be here all night, Chuck. There are a lot of files in there and a lot of work to do. It’d be a lot easier for us to haul it all back to the bureau now.”

“I know that. I’ve been there. But this is the position I’ve been instructed to take. We need the warrant.”

Bosch used the phone on the receptionist’s desk to call Edgar, who was still in the detective bureau just beginning the paperwork the case would generate. Bosch told him to drop that work for the moment and start drawing up search warrants for all financial records in Aliso’s home and the Archway offices and any being held by his attorney.

“You want me to call the duty judge tonight?” Edgar asked. “It’s almost two in the morning.”

“Do it,” Bosch said. “When you have ’em signed, bring them out here to Archway. And bring some boxes.”

Edgar groaned. He was getting all the shit work. Nobody liked waking up a judge in the middle of the night.

“I know, I know, Jerry. But it’s got to be done. Anything else going on?”

“No. I called the Mirage, talked to a guy in security. The room Aliso used was rebooked over the weekend. It’s open now and he’s got a hold on it, but it’s spoiled.”

“Probably… Okay, man, next time you’ll eat the bear. Get on those warrants.”

In Aliso’s office, Rider was already looking through the files. Bosch told her Edgar was working on a warrant and that they would have to draw up an inventory for Meachum. He also told her to take a break if she wanted but she declined.

Bosch sat down behind the desk. It had the usual clutter. There was a phone with a speaker attachment, a Rolodex, a blotter, a magnetic block that held paper clips to it and a wood carving that said TNA Productions in script. There was also a tray stacked with paperwork.

Bosch looked at the phone and noticed the redial button. He lifted the handset and pushed the button. He could tell by the quick procession of tones that the last call made on the phone had been long distance. After two rings it was answered by a female voice. There was loud music in the background.

“Hello?” she said.

“Yes, hello, who’s this?”

She giggled.

“I don’t know, who’s this?”

“I might have the wrong number. Is this Tony’s?”

“No, it’s Dolly’s.”

“Oh, Dolly’s. Okay, uh, then where are you located?”

She giggled again.

“On Madison, where do you think? How do you think we got the name?”

“Where’s Madison?”

“We’re in North Las Vegas. Where are you coming from?”

“The Mirage.”

“Okay, just follow the boulevard out front to the north. You go all the way past downtown and past a bunch of cruddy areas and into North Las Vegas. Madison is your third light after you go under the overpass. Take a left and we’re a block down on the left. What’s your name again?”

“It’s Harry.”

“Well, Harry, I’m Rhonda. As in…”

Bosch said nothing.

“Come on, Harry, you’re supposed to say, ‘Help me, Rhonda, help, help me, Rhonda.’”

She sang the line from the old Beach Boys song.

“Actually, Rhonda, there is something you can help me with,” Bosch said. “I’m looking for a buddy of mine. Tony Aliso. He been in there lately?”

“Haven’t seen him this week. Haven’t seen him since Thursday or Friday. I was wondering how you got the dressing room number.”

“Yeah, from Tony.”

“Well, Layla isn’t here tonight, so Tony wouldn’t be coming in anyway, I don’t think. But you can come on out. He don’t have to be here for you to have a good time.”

“Okay, Rhonda, I’ll try to swing by.”

Bosch hung up. He took a notebook out of his pocket and wrote down the name of the business he had just called, the directions to it and the names Rhonda and Layla. He drew a line under the second name.

“What was that?” Rider asked.

“A lead in Vegas.”

He recounted the call and the inference made about the person named Layla. Rider agreed that it was something to pursue, then went back to the files. Bosch went back to the desk. He studied the things on top of it before going to the things in it.

“Hey, Chuckie?” he asked.

Meachum, leaning against the door with his arms folded in front of him, raised his eyebrows by way of response.

“He’s got no phone tape. What about when the receptionist isn’t out there? Do phone calls go to the operator or some kind of a phone service?”

“Uh, no, the whole lot’s on voice mail now.”

“So Aliso had voice mail? How do I get into it?”

“Well, you’ve got to have his code. It’s a three-digit code. You call the voice mail computer, punch in the code and you pick up your messages.”

“How do I get his code?”

“You don’t. He programmed it himself.”

“There’s no master code I can break in with?”

“Nope. It’s not that sophisticated a system, Bosch. I mean, what do you want, it’s phone messages.”

Bosch took out his notebook again and checked the notes for Aliso’s birthday.

“What’s the voice mail number?” he asked.

Meachum gave him the number and Bosch called the computer. After a beep he punched in 721 but the number was rejected. Bosch drummed his fingers on the desk, thinking. He tried 862, the numbers corresponding with TNA, and a computer voice told him he had four messages.

“Kiz, listen to this,” he said.

He put the phone on speaker and hung up. As the messages were played back Bosch took a few notes, but the first three messages were from men reporting on technical aspects of a planned film shoot, equipment rental and costs. Each call was followed by the electronic voice which reported when on Friday the call had come in.

The fourth message made Bosch lean forward and listen closely. The voice belonged to a young woman and it sounded like she was crying.

“Hey, Tone, it’s me. Call me as soon as you get this. I almost feel like calling your house. I need you. That bastard Lucky says I’m fired. And for no reason. He just wants to get his dick into Modesty. I’m so…I don’t want to have to work at the Palomino or any of those other places. The Garden. Forget it. I want to come out there to L.A. Be with you. Call me.”

The electronic voice said the call had come in at 4 A.M. on Sunday-long after Tony Aliso was dead. The caller had not given her name. It was therefore obviously someone Aliso would have known. Bosch wondered if it was the woman Rhonda had mentioned, Layla. He looked at Rider and she just shook her shoulders. They knew too little to judge the significance of the call.

Bosch sat in the desk chair contemplating things a few moments. He opened a drawer but didn’t start through it. His eyes traveled up the wall to the right of the desk and roamed across the photos of the smiling Tony Aliso posed with celebrities. Some of them had written notes on the photos but they were hard to read. Bosch studied the photo of his celluloid alter ego, Dan Lacey, but couldn’t read the small note scrawled across the bottom of the photo. Then he looked past the ink and realized what he was looking at. On Aliso’s desk in the photo was an Archway mug crammed with pens and pencils.

Bosch took the photo off the wall and called Meachum’s name. Meachum came over.

“Somebody was in here,” Bosch told him.

“What are you talking about?”

“When was the trash can emptied outside?”

“How the hell would I know? What are-”

“The surveillance camera out there on the roof, how long you keep the tapes?”

Meachum hesitated a second but then answered.

“We roll ’em over every week. We’d have seven days off that camera. It’s all stop action, ten frames a minute.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

Bosch didn’t get home until four. That left him only three hours to sleep before an agreed-upon breakfast meeting with Edgar and Rider at seven-thirty, but he was too strung out on coffee and adrenaline to even think about shutting his eyes.

The house had the sour tang of a fresh-paint smell and he opened the sliders onto the back deck to let in the cool night air. He checked out the Cahuenga Pass below and watched the cars on the Hollywood Freeway cutting through. He was always amazed at how there were always cars on the freeway, no matter what the hour. In L.A. they never stopped.

He thought about putting on a CD, some saxophone music, but instead just sat down on the couch in the dark and lit a cigarette. He thought about the different currents running through the case. Going by the preliminary take on the victim, Anthony Aliso had been a financially successful man. That kind of success usually brought with it a thick insulation from violence and murder. The rich were seldom murdered. But something had gone wrong for Tony Aliso.

Bosch remembered the tape and went to his briefcase, which he had left on the dining room table. Inside it there were two video cassettes, the Archway surveillance tape and the copy of Casualty of Desire. He turned on the TV and put the movie in the video player. He began watching in the dark.

After viewing the tape it was obvious to Bosch that the movie deserved the fate it had received. It was badly lit and in some frames the end of a boom microphone hovered above the players. This was particularly jarring in scenes shot in the open desert where there should have been nothing above but blue sky. It was basic filmmaking gone wrong. And added to the amateurish look of the film were the poor performances of the players. The male lead, an actor Bosch had never seen before, was woodenly ineffective in portraying a man desperate to hold on to his young wife, who used sexual frustration and taunting to coerce him into committing crimes, eventually including murder, all for her morbid satisfaction. Veronica Aliso played the wife and was not much better an actor than the male lead.

When lighted well, she was stunningly beautiful. There were four scenes in which she appeared partially nude and Bosch watched these with a voyeuristic fascination. But overall it was not a good role for her, and Bosch also understood why her career, like her husband’s, had not moved forward. She might blame her husband and harbor resentment toward him, but the bottom line was that she was like thousands of beautiful women who came to Hollywood every year. Her looks could put a pause in your heart, but she could not act to save her life.

In the climactic scene of the film, in which the husband was apprehended and the wife cut him loose with the cops, she delivered her lines with the conviction and weight of a blank page of typing paper.

“It was him. He’s crazy. I couldn’t stop him until it was too late. Then I couldn’t tell anyone because it…it would look like I was the one who wanted them all dead.”

Bosch watched all the way through the credits and then rewound the tape by using the remote. He never got off the couch. He then turned the TV off and put his feet up on the couch. Looking through the open sliders he could see the light of dawn etching the ridgeline across the Pass. He still wasn’t tired. He kept thinking about the choices people make with their lives. He wondered what would have happened if the performances had been at least passable and the film had found a distributor. He wondered if that would have changed things now, if it would have kept Tony Aliso out of that trunk.

The meeting at the station with Billets didn’t start until nine-thirty. Though the squad room was deserted because of the holiday, they all rolled chairs into the lieutenant’s office and closed the door. Billets started things off by saying that members of the local media, apparently having picked up on the case by checking the coroner’s overnight log, were already beginning to take a more than routine interest in the Aliso murder. Also, she said, the department weight all the way up the line was questioning whether the investigation should be turned over to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. This, of course, grated on Bosch. Earlier in his career he had been assigned to RHD. But then a questionable on-duty shooting resulted in his demotion to Hollywood. And so it was particularly upsetting to him to think of turning over the case to the big shots downtown. If OCID had been interested, that would have been easier to accept. But Bosch told Billets that he could not accept turning the case over to RHD after his team had spent almost an entire night without sleep on it and had produced some viable leads. Rider jumped in and agreed with him. Edgar, still riding his sulk over being put on the paperwork, remained silent.

“Your point is well taken,” Billets said. “But when we’re done here, I have to call Captain LeValley at home and convince her we’ve got a handle on this. So let’s go over what we have. You convince me, I’ll convince her. She’ll then let them know how we feel about it downtown.”

Bosch spent the next thirty minutes talking for the team and carefully recounting the night’s investigation. The detective squad’s only television/VCR was kept in the lieutenant’s office because it wasn’t safe to leave it unlocked, even in a police station. He put in the tape Meachum had dubbed off the Archway surveillance tape and queued up the part that included the intruder.

“The surveillance camera this was shot from turns a frame every six seconds, so it’s pretty quick and jerky but we’ve got the guy on it,” Bosch said.

He hit the play button and the screen depicted a grainy black and white view of the courtyard and front of the Tyrone Power Building. The lighting made it appear to be late dusk. The time counter on the bottom of the screen showed the time and date to be eight-thirteen the evening before.

Bosch put the machine on slow motion, but still the sequence he wanted to show Billets was over very quickly. In six quick frames they showed a man go to the door of the building, hunch over the knob and then disappear inside.

“Actual time at the door was about thirty to thirty-five seconds,” Rider said. “It may look from the tape like he had a key, but that’s too long to open a door with a key. The lock was picked. Somebody good and fast.”

“Okay, here he comes back out,” Bosch said.

When the time counter hit eight-seventeen, the man was captured on the video emerging from the doorway. The video jumped and the man was in the courtyard heading toward the trash can, then it jumped and the man was walking away from the trash can. Then he was gone. Bosch backed the tape up and froze it on the last image of the man as he walked from the trash can. It was the best image. It was dark and the man’s face was blurred but still possibly recognizable if they ever found someone to compare it to. He was white, with dark hair and a stocky, powerful build. He wore a golf shirt with short sleeves, and the watch on his right wrist, visible just above one of the black gloves he wore, had a chrome band that glinted with the reflection of the courtyard light. Above the wrist was the dark blur of a tattoo on the man’s forearm. Bosch pointed these things out to Billets and added that he would be taking the tape to SID to see if this last frame, the best of those showing the intruder, could be sharpened in any way by computer enhancement.

“Good,” Billets said. “Now, what do you think he was doing in there?”

“Retrieving something,” Bosch said. “From the time he goes in until he comes out, we’ve got less than four minutes. Not a lot of time. Plus he had to pick the interior door to Aliso’s office. Whatever he is doing in there, he knocks an Archway mug off the desk and it breaks on the floor. He does what he was there to do, then gathers up the broken mug and the pens and dumps them in the trash can on his way out. We found the broken mug and the pens in the can last night.”

“Any prints?” Billets asked.

“Once we figured there was a break-in, we backed out and had Donovan come on out when he was done with the Rolls. He got prints but nothing we can use. He got Aliso’s and mine and Kiz’s. As you can see on the video, the guy wore gloves.”

“Okay.”

Bosch involuntarily yawned and Edgar and Rider followed suit. He drank from the cup of stale coffee he had brought into the office with him. He had long had the caffeine jitters but knew if he stopped feeding the beast now he would quickly crash.

“And the theory on what this intruder was retrieving?” Billets asked.

“The broken mug puts him at the desk rather than the files,” Rider said. “Nothing in the desk seemed disturbed. No empty files, nothing like that. We think it was a bug. Somebody put a bug in Aliso’s phone and couldn’t afford to let us find it. The phone was right next to the mug in the pictures on Aliso’s walls. The intruder somehow knocked it over. Funny thing is, we never checked the phone for a bug. If whoever this guy was had left well enough alone, we probably would have never tumbled to it.”

“I’ve been to Archway,” Billets said. “It’s got a wall around it. It’s got its own private security force. How’s this guy get in? Or are you suggesting an inside job?”

“Two things,” Bosch said. “There was a film shooting in progress at the studio on the New York Street set. That meant a lot of people in and out of the front gate. Maybe this guy was able to slip through with part of the shooting crew. The direction in which he walks off in the video is to the north. That’s where New York Street is. The gate is to the south. Also, the north side of the studio butts up against the Hollywood Cemetery. You’re right, there is a wall. But at night, after the cemetery is closed, it’s dark and secluded. Our guy could’ve climbed the wall there. Whatever way he did it, he had practice.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he was taking a bug out of Tony Aliso’s phone, it had to have been planted there in the first place.”

Billets nodded.

“Who do you think he was?” she asked quietly.

Bosch looked at Rider to see if she wanted to answer. When she didn’t speak, he did.

“Hard to say. The timing is the catch. Aliso’s probably been dead since Friday night, his body’s not found till about six last night. Then this break-in comes at eight-thirteen. That’s after Aliso’s been found and after people start finding out about it.”

“But eight-thirteen, that’s before you talked to the wife?”

“Right. So that kind of threw a wrench into it. I mean, I was all set to say let’s go full speed on the wife and see what we get. Now, I’m not so sure. See, if she’s involved, this break-in doesn’t make sense.”

“Explain.”

“Well, first you’ve got to figure out why he was being bugged. And what’s the most likely answer? The wife put a PI or somebody on Tony to see if he was screwing around. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, saying that’s the case, if the wife was involved in putting her husband down into that trunk, why would she or her PI or whoever wait until last night-this is after the body’s been found-to pull the bug out of there? It doesn’t make sense. It only makes sense if the two things were not related, if the killing and the bug are separate. Understand?”

“I think so.”

“And that’s why I’m not ready to chuck everything and just look at the wife. Personally, I think she might be good for this. But there’s too much we don’t know right now. It doesn’t feel right to me. There’s something else running through all of this, and we don’t know what yet.”

Billets nodded and looked at all the investigators.

“This is good. I know there isn’t a lot that is solid yet, but it’s still good work. Anything else? What about the prints Art Donovan pulled off the victim’s jacket last night?”

“For now we’ve struck out. He put them on AFIS, NCIC, the whole works, and got blanked.”

“Damn.”

“They’re still valuable. We come up with a suspect, the prints could be a clincher.”

“Anything else from the car?”

“No,” Bosch said.

“Yes,” Rider said.

Billets raised her eyebrows at the contradiction.

“One of the prints Donovan found on the inside lip of the trunk lid,” Rider said. “It came back to Ray Powers. He’s the P-3 who found the body. He overstepped when he popped the trunk. He obviously left his print when he opened it. We caught it and no harm, no foul, but it was sloppy work and he should have never opened the trunk in the first place. He should’ve called us.”

Billets glanced at Bosch and he guessed she was wondering why he hadn’t brought this to her attention. He looked down at her desk.

“Okay, I’ll take care of it,” Billets said. “I know Powers. He’s been around and he should certainly know procedure.”

Bosch could have defended Powers with the explanation the cop had given the day before but he let it go. Powers wasn’t worth it. Billets went on.

“So where do we go from here?”

“Well, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” Bosch said. “I once heard this story about a sculptor and somebody asked him how he turned a block of granite into a beautiful statue of a woman. And he said that he just chips away everything that isn’t the woman. That’s what we have to do now. We’ve got this big block of information and evidence. We’ve got to chip away everything that doesn’t count, that doesn’t fit.”

Billets smiled and Bosch suddenly felt embarrassed about the analogy, though he believed it was accurate.

“What about Las Vegas?” she asked. “Is that part of the statue or the part we need to chip away?”

Now Rider and Edgar were smiling.

“Well, we’ve got to go there, for one thing,” Bosch said, hoping he didn’t sound defensive. “Right now all we know is that this victim went there and was dead pretty soon after he came back. We don’t know what he did there, whether he won, lost, whether somebody tailed him back here from there. For all we know, he could’ve hit a jackpot there and was followed back here and ripped off. We’ve got a lot of questions about Las Vegas.”

“Plus, there’s the woman,” Rider said.

“What woman?” Billets asked.

“Right,” Bosch said. “The last call made on Tony Aliso’s office line was to a club in North Las Vegas. I called it and got the name of a woman I think he was seeing over there. Layla. There was-”

“Layla? Like that song?”

“I guess. There also was a message from an unnamed woman on his office line. I think it might have been this Layla. We’ve got to talk to her.”

Billets nodded, made sure Bosch was done and then laid down the battle plan.

“All right,” Billets said. “First off, all media inquiries are to be directed to me. The best way to control information on this is to have it come from one mouth. For the moment, we’ll tell the reporters it is obviously under investigation and we are leaning toward a possible carjacking or robbery scenario. It’s innocuous enough and will probably appease them. Everyone okay with that?”

The three detectives nodded.

“Okay, I’m going to make a case with the captain to keep the case here with us. It looks to me like we have three or four avenues which need to be pursued vigorously. Granite that we have to chip away at, as Harry would say.

“Anyway, it will also help me with the captain if we are already scrambling on these things. So, Harry, I want you to get on a plane as soon as possible and get to Vegas. I want you on that end of it. But if there’s nothing there, I want you to get in and get out. We’ll need you back here. Okay?”

Bosch nodded. It would have been his choice if he were the one making the decisions, but he felt a pang of discomfort that she was doing it.

“Kiz, you stick with the financial trail. I want to be in a position of knowing everything about this guy Anthony Aliso by tomorrow morning. You’re also going to have to go up to the house with the search warrant, so while you are there, take another shot at the wife, see what else you can get about the marriage when you’re picking up the records. I don’t know, if you get a chance, sit down with her, try to get a heart-to-heart.”

“I don’t know,” Rider said. “I think we’re past the heart-to-heart. She’s a smart woman, smart enough to already know we’re taking a look at her. I almost think that to be safe we’ve got to advise her next time any of us talk to her. It was pretty close last night.”

“Use your judgment on that,” Billets said. “But if you advise, she’s probably going to call her lawyer.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“And Jerry, you-”

“I know, I know, I’ve got the paper.”

It was the first time he had spoken in fifteen minutes. Bosch thought he was carrying his sulk to the limit.

“Yes, you have the paper. But I also want you on the civil cases and this screenwriter guy who was having the dispute with Aliso. It sounds to me to be the longest shot, but we’ve got to cover everything. Get that cleared up and it will help narrow our focus.”

Edgar mock-saluted her.

“Also,” she said, “while Harry’s putting together the trail in Vegas, I want you to put it together from the airport here. We’ve got his parking stub. I think you should start there. When I talk to the media I’ll also give a detailed description of the car-can’t be that many white Clouds around-and say we’re looking for anyone who might’ve seen it Friday night. I’ll say we’re trying to re-create the victim’s ride from the airport. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get some help from the John Qs out there.”

“Maybe,” Edgar said.

“Okay then, let’s do it,” Billets said.

The three of them stood up while Billets stayed seated. Bosch took his time taking the tape out of the VCR so that the other two were out of the office when he was done, and he was alone with Billets.

“I’d heard that you didn’t have any actual time on a homicide table while you were coming up,” he said to her.

“That’s true. My only job as an actual detective was working sexual crimes in Valley Bureau.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I would have assigned things just the way you just did.”

“But did it annoy you that I did it instead of you?”

Bosch thought a moment.

“I’ll get over it.”