Trunk Music

PART V

AS BOSCH AND Edgar were leaving the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, Bosch’s pager sounded and he checked the number. He didn’t recognize it but the 485 exchange told him the person paging him was in Parker Center. He took the phone out of his briefcase and returned the call. Lieutenant Billets answered.

“Detective, where are you?”

Her use of his rank instead of his name told him she probably wasn’t alone. The fact that she was calling from Parker Center rather than the bureau in Hollywood told him that something had gone wrong.

“At Men’s Central. What’s up?”

“Do you have Luke Goshen with you?”

“No, we just dropped him off. Why, what is it?”

“Give me the booking number.”

Bosch hesitated a moment but then held the phone under his chin while he reopened his briefcase and got the number from the booking receipt. He gave Billets the number and once again asked what was going on. She once again ignored the question.

“Detective,” she said, “I want you to come over to Parker right away. The sixth-floor conference room.”

The sixth floor was administration level. It was also where the Internal Affairs offices were. Bosch hesitated again before finally answering.

“Sure, Grace. You want Jerry, too?”

“Tell Detective Edgar to go back to Hollywood Division. I’ll contact him there.”

“We’ve only got the one car.”

“Then tell him to take a cab and put it on his expense account. Hurry it up, Detective. We are waiting for you here.”

“We? Who’s waiting?”

She hung up then and Bosch just stared at the phone for a moment.

“What is it?” Edgar asked.

“I don’t know.”

Bosch stepped off the elevator into the deserted sixth-floor hallway and proceeded toward the conference room he knew was behind the last door before the entrance to the police chief’s office at the end of the hall. The yellowed linoleum had been recently polished. As he walked toward his destiny with his head down, he saw his own dark reflection moving just in front of his steps.

The door to the conference room was open and as Bosch stepped in all eyes in the room were on him. He looked back at Lieutenant Billets and Captain LeValley from the Hollywood Division and the recognizable faces of Deputy Chief Irvin Irving and an IAD squint named Chastain. But the four remaining men gathered in chairs around the long conference table were strangers to Bosch. Nevertheless, he guessed from their conservative gray suits that they were feds.

“Detective Bosch, have a seat,” Irving said.

Irving stood up, ramrod straight in a tight uniform. The dome of his shaven head shone under the ceiling fluorescents. He motioned to the empty seat at the head of the table. Bosch pulled the chair out and sat down slowly as his mind raced. He knew that this kind of showing of brass and feds was too big to have been caused by his affair with Eleanor Wish. There was something else going on and it involved only him. Otherwise, Billets would have told him to bring Edgar along.

“Who died?” Bosch asked.

Irving ignored the question. When Bosch’s eyes traveled across the table to his left and up to Billets’s face, the lieutenant glanced away.

“Detective, we need to ask you some questions pertaining to your investigation of the Aliso case,” Irving said.

“What are the charges?” Bosch responded.

“There are no charges,” Irving replied calmly. “We need to clear some things up.”

“Who are these people?”

Irving introduced the four strangers. Bosch had been right, they were feds: John Samuels, an assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to the organized crime strike force, and three FBI agents from three different field offices. They were John O’Grady from L.A., Dan Ekeblad from Las Vegas and Wendell Werris from Chicago.

Nobody offered to shake Bosch’s hand, nobody even nodded. They just stared at Bosch with looks that transmitted their contempt for him. Since they were feds, their dislike of the LAPD was standard issue. Bosch still couldn’t figure out what was going on here.

“Okay,” Irving said. “We’re going to get some things cleared up first. I’m going to let Mr. Samuels take it from here.”

Samuels wiped a hand down his thick black mustache and leaned forward. He was in the chair at the opposite end of the table from Bosch. He had a yellow legal tablet on the table in front of him but it was too far away for Bosch to be able to read what was on it. He held a pen in his left hand and used it to hold his place in his notes. Looking down at the notes, he began.

“Let’s start with your search of Luke Goshen’s home in Las Vegas,” Samuels said. “Exactly who was it who found the firearm later identified as the weapon used in the killing of Anthony Aliso?”

Bosch narrowed his eyes. He tried looking at Billets again, but her eyes were focused on the table in front of her. As he scanned the other faces, he caught the smirk on Chastain’s face. No surprise there. Bosch had hooked up with Chastain before. He was known as Sustained Chastain by many in the department. When departmental charges are brought against an officer, an Internal Affairs investigation and Board of Rights hearing result in one of two findings: the allegations are either sustained or ruled unfounded. Chastain had a high ratio of sustained to unfounded cases-thus the departmental moniker which he wore like a medal.

“If this is the subject of a departmental investigation, I think I’m entitled to representation,” Bosch said. “I don’t know what this is about but I don’t have to tell you people anything.”

“Detective,” Irving said. He slid a sheet of paper across the table to Bosch. “That is a signed order from the chief of police telling you to cooperate with these gentlemen. If you choose not to, you will be suspended without pay forthwith. And you’ll be assigned your union rep then.”

Bosch looked down at the letter. It was a form letter and he had received them before. It was all part of the department’s way of backing you into the corner, to the point that you had to talk to them or you didn’t eat.

“I found the gun,” Bosch said without looking up from the order. “It was in the master bathroom, wrapped in plastic and secreted between the toilet tank and the wall. Somebody said the mobsters in The Godfather did that. The movie. But I don’t remember.”

“Were you alone when you supposedly found the weapon there?”

“Supposedly? Are you saying it wasn’t there?”

“Just answer the question, please.”

Bosch shook his head in disgust. He didn’t know what was going on but it was looking worse than he had imagined.

“I wasn’t alone. The house was full of cops.”

“Were they in the master bathroom with you?” O’Grady asked.

Bosch just looked at O’Grady. He was at least ten years younger than Bosch, with the clean-cut looks the bureau prized.

“I thought Mr. Samuels was going to handle the questioning,” Irving said.

“I am,” Samuels said. “Were any of these cops in that bathroom with you when you located this weapon?”

“I was by myself. As soon as I saw it, I called the uniform in the bedroom in to take a look before I even touched it. If this is about Goshen’s lawyer making some beef to you people about me planting the gun, it’s bullshit. The gun was there, and besides, we’ve got enough on him without the gun. We’ve got motive, prints…why would I plant a gun?”

“To make it a slam dunk,” O’Grady said.

Bosch blew out his breath in disgust.

“It’s typical of the bureau to drop everything and come after an L.A. cop just because some sleezeball gangster drops a dime. What, are they givin’ annual bonuses now if you guys nail a cop? Double if it’s an L.A. cop? Fuck you, O’Grady. Okay?”

“Yeah, fuck me. Just answer the questions.”

“Then ask them.”

Samuels nodded as if Bosch had scored a point and moved his pen a half inch down his pad.

“Do you know,” he asked, “did any other police officer enter that bathroom before you entered to search it and subsequently found the gun?”

Bosch tried to remember, picturing the movements of the Metro cops in the room. He was sure no one had gone into the bathroom other than to take a quick look to make sure no one was in there hiding.

“I don’t know for sure about that,” he said. “But I doubt it. If somebody did go in, there wasn’t enough time to plant the gun. The gun was already there.”

Samuels nodded again, consulted his legal pad and then looked at Irving.

“Chief Irving, I think that’s as far as we want to take it for the moment. We certainly appreciate your cooperation in this matter and I expect we’ll be talking again soon.”

Samuels made a move to stand up.

“Wait a minute,” Bosch said. “That’s it? You’re just going to get up and leave? What the fuck is going on here? I deserve an explanation. Who made the complaint, Goshen’s lawyer? Because I’m going to make a complaint right back at him.”

“Your deputy chief can discuss this with you, if he chooses to.”

“No, Samuels. You tell me. You’re asking the questions, now you answer a few.”

Samuels drummed his pen on his pad for a moment and looked at Irving. Irving opened his hands to show it was his choice. Samuels then leaned forward and looked balefully at Bosch.

“If you insist on an explanation, I’ll give you one,” he said. “I’m limited, of course, in what I can say.”

“Jesus, would you just tell me what the hell is going on?”

Samuels cleared his throat before going on.

“About four years ago, in a joint operation involving the FBI offices in Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the strike force instituted what we called Operation Telegraph. Personnel-wise it was a small operation but it had a large goal. Our goal was Joseph Marconi and the remaining tentacles of the mob’s influence in Las Vegas. It took us more than eighteen months but we managed to get someone inside. An agent on the inside. And in the two years since that was accomplished, that agent was able to rise to a level of prominence in Joseph Marconi’s organization, one in which he had the intended target’s complete confidence. Conservatively, we were four to five months from closing the operation and going to a grand jury to seek indictments for more than a dozen high-ranking members of the Cosa Nostra in three cities, not to mention an assortment of burglars, casino cheats, bust-out artists, cops, judges, lawyers and even a few Hollywood fringe players such as Anthony N. Aliso. This is not to mention that, largely through the efforts of this undercover agent and the wiretaps authorized with probable cause gathered through him, we now have a greater understanding of the sophistication and reach of organized crime entities such as Marconi’s.”

Samuels was talking as if he were addressing a press conference. He let a moment pass as he caught his breath. But he never took his eyes off Bosch.

“That undercover agent’s name is Roy Lindell. Remember it, because he’s going to be famous. No other agent was underground for so long and with such important results. You notice that I said was. He’s no longer under, Detective Bosch. And for that we can thank you. The name Roy used undercover was Luke Goshen. Lucky Luke Goshen. So I want to thank you for fucking up the end of a wonderful and important case. Oh, we’ll still get Marconi and all the others with what Roy’s good work got us, but now it’s all been marred by a…by you.”

Bosch felt anger backing up in his throat but tried to remain calm and he managed to speak in an even voice.

“Your suggestion then is-no, your accusation is-that I planted that gun. Well, you are wrong about that. Dead wrong. I should be angry and offended, but given the situation I understand how you made the mistake. But instead of pointing at me, maybe you folks ought to take a look at your man Goshen or whatever the hell his name is. Maybe you should question whether you left him under too long. Because that gun wasn’t planted. You-”

“Don’t you dare!” O’Grady blurted out. “Don’t you dare say a word about him. You, you’re nothing but a fucking rogue cop! We know about you, Bosch, all your baggage. This time you went too far. You planted evidence on the wrong man this time.”

“I take it back,” Bosch said, still calm. “I am offended. I am angry. So fuck you, O’Grady. You say I planted the gun, prove it. But first I guess you gotta prove that I was the one who put Tony Aliso in his trunk. Because how the hell else would I have the gun to plant?”

“Easy. You could’ve found it there in the bushes off the goddamned fire road. We already know you searched it by yourself. We-”

“Gentlemen,” Irving interjected.

“-will put you down for this, Bosch.”

“Gentlemen!”

O’Grady closed his mouth and everyone looked at Irving.

“This is getting out of hand. I’m ending this meeting. Suffice it to say, an internal investigation will be conducted and-”

“We are doing our own investigation,” Samuels said. “Meantime, we have to figure out how to salvage our operation.”

Bosch looked at him incredulously.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “There is no operation. Your star witness is a murderer. You left him in too long, Samuels. He turned, became one of them. He killed Tony Aliso for Joey Marks. His prints were on the body. The gun was found in his house. Not only that, he’s got no alibi. Nothing. He told me he spent all night in the office, but I know he wasn’t there. He left and he had time to get over here, do the job and get back.”

Bosch shook his head sadly and finished in a low voice.

“I agree with you, Samuels. Your operation is tainted now. But not because of me. It was you who left the guy in the oven too long. He got cooked. You were his handler. You fucked up.”

This time Samuels shook his head and smiled sadly. That was when Bosch realized the other shoe hadn’t dropped. There was something else. Samuels angrily flipped up the top page of his pad and read a notation.

“The autopsy concludes time of death was between eleven P.M. Friday and two A.M. Saturday. Is that correct, Detective Bosch?”

“I don’t know how you got the report, since I haven’t seen it myself yet.”

“Was the death between eleven and two?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have those documents, Dan?” Samuels asked Ekeblad.

Ekeblad took several pages folded lengthwise from the inside of his jacket and handed them to Samuels. Samuels opened the packet and glanced at its contents and then tossed it across the table to Bosch. Bosch picked it up but didn’t look at it. He kept his eyes on Samuels.

“What you have there are copies of a page from an investigative log as well as an interview report prepared Tuesday morning by Agent Ekeblad here. There are also two sworn affidavits from agents Ekeblad and Phil Colbert, who will be with us here shortly. What you’ll find if you look at those is that on Friday night at midnight, Agent Ekeblad was sitting behind the wheel of his bureau car in the back parking lot at Caesar’s, just off Industrial Road. His partner Colbert was there next to him and in the back seat, Agent Roy Lindell.”

He waited a beat and Bosch looked down at the papers in his hands.

“It was Roy’s monthly meeting. He was being debriefed. He told Ekeblad and Colbert that just that night he had put four hundred and eighty thousand dollars cash from Marconi’s various enterprises into Anthony Aliso’s briefcase and sent him back to L.A. to have it put in the wash. He also, by the way, mentioned that Tony had been in the club drinking and got a little out of line with one of the girls. In his role as enforcer for Joey Marks and manager of the club, he had to get tough with Tony. He cuffed him once and jerked him around by his collar. This, I think, you might agree, would account for the fingerprints recovered from the deceased’s jacket and the antemortem facial bruising noted in the autopsy.”

Bosch still refused to look up from the documents.

“Other than that, there was a lot to talk about, Detective Bosch. Roy stayed for ninety minutes. And there is no fucking way in the world he could have gotten to Los Angeles to kill Tony Aliso before two A.M., let alone three A.M. And just so you don’t leave here thinking all three of these agents were involved in the murder, you should know that the meeting was monitored by four additional agents in a chase car also parked in the lot for security reasons.”

Samuels waited a beat before delivering his closing argument.

“You don’t have a case. The prints can be explained and the guy you said did it was sitting with two FBI agents three hundred and fifty miles away when the shooting went down. You’ve got nothing. No, actually, that’s wrong. You do have one thing. A planted gun, that’s what you’ve got.”

As if on cue the door behind Bosch opened and he heard footsteps. Keeping his eyes on the documents in front of him, Bosch didn’t turn around to see who it was until he felt a hand grip his shoulder and squeeze. He looked up into the face of Special Agent Roy Lindell. He was smiling, standing next to another agent who Bosch assumed was Ekeblad’s partner, Colbert.

“Bosch,” Lindell said, “I owe you a haircut.”

Bosch was dumbfounded to see the man he had just locked up standing there but quickly assimilated what had happened. Irving and Billets had already been told about the meeting in the parking lot behind Caesar’s, had read the affidavits and believed the alibi. They had authorized Lindell’s release. That was why Billets had asked for the booking number when Bosch had returned her page.

Bosch looked away from Lindell to Irving and Billets.

“You believe this, don’t you? You think I found the gun out there in the weeds and planted it just to make the case a slam.”

There was a hesitation while each one left space for the other to answer. Finally, it was Irving.

“The only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Agent Lindell. His story is solid. I’m reserving judgment on everything else.”

Bosch looked at Lindell, who was still standing.

“Then why didn’t you tell me you were federal when we were in that room together at Metro?”

“Why do you think? For all I knew, you had already put a gun in my bathroom. You think I’m just going to tell you I’m an agent and everything would be cool after that? Yeah, right.”

“We had to play along, Bosch, to see what moves you’d make and to make sure Roy got out of the Metro jail in one piece,” O’Grady said. “After that, we were two thousand feet above you and two thousand behind you all the way across the desert. We were waiting. Half of us were betting you made a deal with Joey Marks. You know, in for a pinch, in for a pound?”

They were taunting him now. Bosch shook his head. It seemed to be the only thing he could do.

“Don’t you people see what is happening?” he said. “You’re the ones who made a deal with Joey Marks. Only you don’t know it. He is playing you like a symphony. Jesus! I can’t believe I’m sitting here and this is actually happening.”

“How is he playing us?” Billets asked, the first indication that she might not have gone all the way across to the other side on him.

Bosch answered, looking at Lindell.

“Don’t you see? They found out about you. They knew you were an agent. So they set this all up.”

Ekeblad snorted in derision.

“They don’t set things up, Bosch,” Samuels said. “If they thought Roy was an informant, they’d just take him out to the desert and put him under three feet of sand. End of threat.”

“No, because we’re not talking about an informant. I’m talking about them knowing specifically he was an agent and knowing that because of that they couldn’t just take him out to the desert. Not an FBI agent. If they did that, they’d have more heat on them than the Branch Davidians ever felt. No, so what they did was make a plan. They know he’s been around a couple years and knows more than enough to take them all down hard. But they can’t just kill him. Not an agent. So they’ve got to neutralize him, taint him. Make him look like he crossed, like he’s just as bad as they are. So when he testifies, they can take him apart with Tony Aliso’s hit. Make a jury think that he’d carry out a hit to maintain his cover. They sell a jury that and they could all walk away.”

Bosch thought he had planted the seeds of a pretty convincing story, even having pulled it together on the fly. The others in the room looked at him in silence for a few moments, but then Lindell spoke up.

“You give them too much credit, Bosch,” he said. “Joey’s not that smart. I know him. He’s not that smart.”

“What about Torrino? You going to tell me he couldn’t come up with this? I just thought of it sitting here. Who knows how long he had to come up with something? Answer one question, Lindell. Did Joey Marks know that Tony Aliso had the IRS on his back, that an audit was coming?”

Lindell hesitated and looked to Samuels to see if he could answer. Bosch felt the sweat of desperation breaking on his neck and back. He knew he had to convince them or he wouldn’t walk out of the room with his badge. Samuels nodded to Lindell.

“If he knew, he didn’t tell me,” Lindell said.

“Well maybe that’s it,” Bosch said. “Maybe he knew but he didn’t tell you. Joey knew he had a problem with Aliso and somehow he knew he had a bigger problem with you. And he and Torrino put their heads together and came up with this whole thing so they could kill two birds with the one stone.”

There was another pause, but Samuels shook his head.

“It doesn’t work, Bosch. You’re stretching. Besides we’ve got seven hundred hours of tapes. There’s enough on them to put Joey away without Roy even testifying one word.”

“First of all, they might not have known there were tapes,” Billets said. “And secondly, even if they did, it’s fruit of the poison tree. You wouldn’t have the tapes without Agent Lindell. You want to introduce them in court, you have to introduce him. They destroy him, they destroy the tapes.”

Billets had clearly shifted to Bosch’s side of the equation and that gave him hope. It also made Samuels see that the meeting was over. He gathered up his pad and stood up.

“Well,” he said, “I can see we aren’t going any further with this. Lieutenant, you’re listening to a desperate man. We don’t have to. Chief Irving, I don’t envy you. You have a problem and you have to do something about it. If on Monday I find out that Bosch is still carrying his badge, then I’m going to go to the sitting grand jury and get an indictment against him for evidence tampering and violating the civil rights of Roy Lindell. I will also ask our civil rights unit to look into every arrest this man has made in the last five years. A bad cop never plants evidence once, Chief. It’s a habit.”

Samuels made his way around the table toward the door. The others got up and were following. Bosch wanted to jump up and throttle him but he remained outwardly calm. His dark eyes followed Samuels as the federal attorney moved to the door. He never looked back at Bosch. But before stepping out, he took one last shot at Irving.

“The last thing I want to have to do is air your dirty laundry, Chief. But if you don’t take care of this, you’ll leave me no choice.”

With that, the federals filed out and those remaining sat in silence for a long moment, listening to the sound of the steps tracking down the polished linoleum in the hallway. Bosch looked at Billets and nodded.

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“For what?”

“Sticking up for me at the end there.”

“I just don’t believe you’d do it, is all.”

“I wouldn’t plant evidence on my worst enemy. If I did that I’d be lost.”

Chastain shifted in his seat while a small smile played on his face, but not small enough to pass Bosch’s notice.

“Chastain, you and I have hooked up a couple times before and you missed me both times,” Bosch said. “You don’t want to strike out, do you? You better sit this one out.”

“Look, Bosch, the chief asked me to sit in on this and I did that. It’s his call, but I think you and that story you just wove out of thin air are full of shit. I agree with the feds on this one. If it was my choice, I wouldn’t let you out of this room with a badge.”

“But it’s not your choice, is it?” Irving said.

When Bosch got to his house, he carried a bag of groceries to the door and knocked but there was no answer. He kicked over the straw mat and found the key he had given Eleanor there. A feeling of sadness came over him as he bent to pick it up. She was not there.

Upon entering he was greeted by the strong smell of fresh paint, which he thought was odd because it had now been four days since he had painted. He went directly into the kitchen and put away the groceries. When he was finished, he took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and leaned against the counter drinking it slowly, making it last. The smell of paint reminded him that now he would have plenty of time to finish all the work the house needed. He was strictly a nine-to-fiver at the moment.

He thought of Eleanor again and decided to look to see if there was a note from her or whether her suitcase might be in the bedroom. But he went no further than the living room, where he stopped and looked at the wall he had left half-painted after getting the call to the crime scene on Sunday. The wall was now completely painted. Bosch stood there a long moment, appraising the work as though it were a masterpiece in a museum. Finally he stepped to the wall and lightly touched it. It was fresh but dry. Painted just a few hours before, he guessed. Though no one was there to see it, a broad smile broke across his face. He felt a jolt of happiness break through the gray aura surrounding him. He didn’t need to look for her suitcase in the bedroom. He took the painted wall as a sign, as her note. She’d be back.

An hour later, he had unpacked his overnighter and the rest of her belongings from the car and was standing in the darkness on the rear deck. He held another bottle of beer and watched the ribbon of lights moving along the Hollywood Freeway at the bottom of the hill. He had no idea how long she had stood in the frame of the sliding door to the deck and watched him. When he turned around, she was just there.

“Eleanor.”

“Harry…I thought you wouldn’t be back until later.”

“Neither did I. But I’m here.”

He smiled. He wanted to go to her and touch her, but a cautious voice told him to move slowly.

“Thanks for finishing.”

He gestured toward the living room with his bottle.

“No problem. I like to paint. It relaxes me.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

They looked at each other a moment.

“I saw the print,” she said. “It looks good there.”

Bosch had taken her print of Hopper’s Nighthawks out of the trunk and hung it on the freshly painted wall. He knew that how she reacted to seeing it there would tell him a lot about where they were and where they might be headed.

“Good,” he said, nodding and trying not to smile.

“What happened to the one I sent you?”

That had been a long time ago.

“Earthquake,” he said.

She nodded.

“Where’d you just come from?”

“Oh, I went and rented a car. You know, until I can figure out what I’m going to do. I left my car in Vegas.”

“I guess we could go over and get it, drive it back. You know, get in and out, not hang around.”

She nodded.

“Oh, I got a bottle of red wine, too. You want something? Or another beer?”

“I’ll have what you’re having.”

“I’m going to have a glass of wine. You sure you want that?”

“I’m sure. I’ll open it.”

He followed her into the kitchen and opened the wine and took down two glasses from a cabinet and rinsed them. He hadn’t had anyone who liked wine over in a long time. She poured and they touched glasses before drinking.

“So how’s the case going?” she asked.

“I don’t have a case anymore.”

She creased her brow and frowned.

“What happened? I thought you were bringing your suspect back.”

“I did. But it’s no longer my case. Not since my suspect turned out to be a bureau agent with an alibi.”

“Oh, Harry.” She looked down. “Are you in trouble?”

Bosch put his glass on the counter and folded his arms.

“I’m on a desk for the time being. I’ve got the squints investigating me. They think-along with the bureau-that I planted evidence against the agent. The gun. I didn’t. But I guess somebody did. When I figure out who, then I’ll be okay.”

“Harry, how did this-”

He shook his head, moved toward her and put his mouth on hers. He gently took the glass out of her hand and put it on the counter behind her.

After they made love, Bosch went into the kitchen to open a bottle of beer and make dinner. He peeled an onion and chopped it up along with a green pepper. He then cleared the cutting board into a frying pan and sautéed the mixture with butter, powdered garlic and other seasonings. He added two chicken breasts and cooked them until the meat was easy to shred and pull away from the bone with a fork. He added a can of Italian tomato sauce, a can of crushed tomatoes and more seasonings. He finished by pouring a shot of red wine from Eleanor’s bottle in. While it all simmered, he put a pot of water on to boil for rice.

It was the best dinner he knew how to cook in a kitchen. He would have preferred grilling something on the deck, but the grill had been hauled away when the original house was demolished after the earthquake. While he had replaced the house, he had not yet gotten around to getting a new grill. He decided as he mixed rice into the boiling water that if Eleanor chose to stay for a while, he would get the grill.

“Smells good.”

He turned and she was standing in the doorway. She was dressed in blue jeans and a denim shirt. Her hair was damp from the shower. Bosch looked at her and felt the desire to make love to her again.

“I hope it tastes good,” he said. “This is a new kitchen, but I don’t really know how to use it yet. Never did much cooking.”

She smiled.

“I can tell already it will be good.”

“Tell you what, will you stir this every few minutes while I take a shower?”

“Sure. I’ll set the table.”

“Okay. I was thinking we’d eat out on the deck. It doesn’t smell like paint out there.”

“Sorry.”

“No, I mean it will be nice out there. I’m not complaining about the paint. In fact, that was all a ruse, you know, to leave the wall half painted like that. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

She smiled.

“A regular Tom Sawyer, detective third grade.”

“Maybe not for long.”

His comment ruined the moment and she stopped smiling. He silently chastised himself on the way back to the bedroom.

After his shower, Bosch put the last part of his recipe into the frying pan. He took a handful of frozen peas and mixed them into the simmering chicken-and-tomato stew. As he brought the food and wine out to the picnic table on the deck, he told Eleanor, who was standing at the railing, to have a seat.

“Sorry,” he said as they settled in. “I forgot about a salad.”

“This is all I need.”

They started the meal in silence. He waited.

“I like it a lot,” she finally said. “What do you call this?”

“I don’t know. My mother just called it Chicken Special. I think that’s what it was called in a restaurant where she first had it.”

“A family recipe.”

“The only one.”

They ate quietly for a few minutes during which Bosch surreptitiously tried to watch her to see if she really enjoyed the food. He was pretty sure she did.

“Harry,” Eleanor said after a while, “who are the agents involved in this?”

“They’re from all over; Chicago, Vegas, L.A.”

“Who from L.A.?”

“Guy named John O’Grady? You know him?”

It had been more than five years since she had worked in the bureau’s L.A. field office. FBI agents moved around a lot. He doubted she would know O’Grady and she said she didn’t.

“What about John Samuels? He’s the AUSA on it. He’s from the OC strike force.”

“Samuels I know. Or knew. He was an agent for a while. Not a particularly good one. Had the law degree and when he figured out he wasn’t much of an investigator, he decided he wanted to prosecute.”

She started laughing and shook her head.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just something they used to say about him. It’s kind of gross.”

“What?”

“Does he still have his mustache?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they used to say that he could sure put a case together for prosecution, but as far as investigating it out on the street went, he couldn’t find shit if it was in his own mustache.”

She laughed again-a little too hard, Bosch thought. He smiled back.

“Maybe that’s why he became a prosecutor,” she added.

Something occurred to Bosch then and he quickly withdrew into his thoughts. Eventually he heard Eleanor’s voice.

“What?”

“You disappeared. I asked what you were thinking. I didn’t think it was that bad a joke.”

“No, I was just thinking about what a bottomless hole I’m in. About how it doesn’t really matter whether Samuels actually believes I’m dirty on this. He needs me to be dirty.”

“How so?”

“They’ve got cases to make with their undercover guy against Joey Marks and his crew. And they’ve got to be ready and able to explain how a murder weapon got to be in their guy’s house. Because if they can’t explain it, then Joey’s lawyers are going to shove it down their throats, make it look like their guy is tainted, is a killer worse than the people he was after. That gun has reasonable doubt written all over it. So the best way to explain away the gun is to blame it on the LAPD. On me. A bad cop from a bad department who found the gun in the weeds and planted it on the guy he thought did it. The jury will go along. They’ll make me out to be this year’s Mark Fuhrman.”

He saw the humor was long gone from her face now. There was obvious concern in her eyes but he thought there was also sadness. Maybe she understood, too, how well he was boxed in.

“The alternative is to prove that Joey Marks or one of his people planted the gun because they somehow knew Luke Goshen was an agent and needed to discredit him. Though that’s the likely truth, it’s a harder road to follow. It’s easier for Samuels just to throw the mud on me.”

He looked down at his half-finished dinner and put his knife and fork on the plate. He couldn’t eat anymore. He took a long drink of wine and then kept the glass in his hand, ready.

“I think I’m in big trouble, Eleanor.”

The gravity of his situation was finally beginning to weigh on him. He’d been operating on his faith that the truth would win out and now clearly saw how little truth would have to do with the outcome. He looked up at her. Their eyes connected and he saw that she was about to cry. He tried to smile.

“Hey, I’ll think of something,” he said. “I might be riding a desk for the time being, but I’m not taking both oars out of the water. I’m going to figure this out.”

She nodded but her face still looked distraught.

“Harry, remember when you found me in the casino that first night and we went to the bar at Caesar’s and you tried to talk to me? Remember what you said about doing things differently if you had the chance to go back?”

“Yes, I remember.”

She wiped her eyes with her palms, before any tears could show.

“I have to tell you something.”

“You can tell me anything, Eleanor.”

“What I told you about me paying Quillen and the street tax and all of that…, there’s more to it.”

She looked at him with intensity now, trying to read his reaction before going further. But Bosch sat stone still and waited.

“When I first went to Vegas after getting out of Frontera, I didn’t have a place or a car and I didn’t know anyone. I just thought I’d give it a shot. You know, playing cards. And there was a girl I knew from Frontera. Her name was Patsy Quillen. She told me to look up her uncle-that was Terry Quillen-and that he’d probably stake me after he checked me out and saw me play. Patsy wrote him and gave me an introduction.”

Bosch sat silently, listening. He now had an idea where this was going but couldn’t figure out why she was telling him.

“So he staked me. I got the apartment and some money to play with. He never said anything about Joey Marks, though I should have known the money came from somewhere. It always does. Anyway, later, when he finally told me who had really staked me, he said I shouldn’t worry because the organization he worked for didn’t want me to pay the nut back. What they wanted was just the interest. Two hundred a week. The tax. I didn’t think I had a choice. I’d already taken the money. So I started paying. In the beginning it was tough. I didn’t have it a couple times and it was double the next week plus that week’s regular tax. You get behind and there’s no way out.”

She looked down at her hands and clasped them on the table.

“What did they make you do?” Bosch asked quietly, also averting his eyes.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said. “I was lucky…they knew about me. I mean, that I had been an agent. They figured they could use my skills, as dormant as they were. So they had me just watch people. Mostly in casinos. But there were a few times I followed them outside. Most of the time I didn’t even know exactly who they were or why they wanted the information, but I just watched, sometimes played at the same tables, and reported to Terry what the guy was winning or losing, who he was talking to, any nuances of his game…you know, things like that.”

She was just rambling now, putting off the meat of what she had to tell him, but Bosch didn’t say anything. He let her go on.

“A couple days I watched Tony Aliso for them. They wanted to know how much he was dropping at the tables and where he was going, the usual stuff. But as it turned out, he wasn’t losing. He actually was quite good at cards.”

“Where did you watch him go?”

“Oh, he’d go out to dinner, to the strip club. He’d run errands, things like that.”

“You ever see him with a girl?”

“One time. I followed him on foot from the Mirage into Caesar’s and then into the shopping arcade. He went to Spago for a late lunch. He was alone and then the girl showed up. She was young. I thought at first it was like an escort thing, but then I could tell, he knew her. After lunch they went back to his hotel room for a while and when they came out, they took his rental and he took her to get a manicure and to buy cigarettes and to a bank while she opened an account. Just errands. Then they went to the strip club in North Vegas. When he left, he was alone. I figured then she was a dancer.”

Bosch nodded.

“Were you watching Tony last Friday night?” Bosch asked.

“No. That was just coincidence that we ended up at the same table. It was because he was waiting to go to the high-stakes table. I actually hadn’t done anything for them in a month or so, other than pay the weekly tax, until…Terry…”

Her voice trailed off. They were finally at the point of no return.

“Until Terry what, Eleanor?”

She looked toward the fading horizon. The lights across the Valley were coming on and the sky was pink neon mixed with gray paint. Bosch kept his eyes on her. She spoke while still watching the end of the day.

“Quillen came to my apartment after you took me home from Metro. He took me to the house where you found me. They wouldn’t tell me why and they told me not to leave. They said nobody would get hurt if I just did what I was told. I sat around that place for two days. They only put the handcuffs on me that last night. It was like they knew you’d be coming then.”

She let a beat of silence follow. It was there if Bosch wanted to use it but he didn’t say a word.

“I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that the whole thing was something less than an abduction.”

She looked back down at her hands now.

“And that’s obviously why you didn’t want us to call out Metro,” Bosch said quietly.

She nodded.

“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you everything before. I’m really sorry, Harry. I…”

Now Bosch felt his own words sticking in his throat. Her story was understandable and believable. He even felt for her and understood that she was in her own bottomless pit. He saw how she had believed she had no choices. What he couldn’t see, and what hurt him, was why she couldn’t tell him everything from the start.

“Why couldn’t you tell me, Eleanor?” he managed to get out. “I mean right away. Why didn’t you tell me that night?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I wanted…I guess I hoped it would just go away and you would never have to know.”

“Then why are you telling me now?”

She looked right at him.

“Because I hated not telling you everything…and because while I was there at that house I heard something that you need to know now.”

Bosch closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Harry. Very sorry.”

He nodded. He was, too. He washed his hands over his face. He didn’t want to hear this but knew he had to. His mind raced, jumping between feelings of betrayal and confusion and sympathy. One moment his thoughts were of Eleanor and the next they were on the case. They knew. Someone had told Joey Marks about Eleanor and him. He thought of Felton and Iverson, then Baxter and every cop he had seen at Metro. Someone had fed Marks the information and they used Eleanor as bait for him. But why? Why the whole charade? He opened his eyes and looked at Eleanor with a blank stare.

“What was it that you heard and that I need to know?”

“It was the first night. I was kept in that back room, where the TV was, where you came and got me. I was kept in there and the Samoans were there, in and out. But from time to time there were people in other parts of the house. I heard them talking.”

“Gussie and Quillen?”

“No, Quillen left. I know his voice and it wasn’t him. And I don’t think it was Gussie. I think it was Joey Marks and someone else, probably the lawyer, Torrino. Whoever it was, I heard the one man call the other Joe at one point. That’s how come I think it was Marks.”

“Okay. Go on, what did they say?”

“I couldn’t hear all of it. But one man was telling the other, the one he called Joe, what he had learned about the police investigation. About the Metro side of things, I think. And I heard the one called Joe get very angry when he was told the gun had been found at Luke Goshen’s house. And I remember his words. Very clearly. He was yelling. He said, ‘How the hell did they find the gun there when we didn’t do the goddamned hit?’ And then he said some more things about the cops planting the gun and he said, ‘You tell our guy that if this is some kind of shakedown, then he can fuck off, he can forget it.’ I didn’t hear much after that. They lowered their voices and the first guy was just trying to calm the other guy down.”

Bosch stared at her for a few moments, trying to analyze what she had overheard.

“Do you think it was a show?” he asked. “You know, put on for your benefit because they figured you’d turn around and tell me what you heard?”

“I did at first, and that’s another reason I didn’t tell you this right away,” she said. “But now I’m not so sure. When they first took me, when Quillen was driving me out there and I was asking a lot of questions, he wouldn’t answer them. But he did say one thing. All he would tell me was that they needed me for a day or two to run a test on somebody. He would explain no further. A test, that’s all he said.”

“A test?”

Bosch looked confused.

“Listen to me, Harry. I’ve done nothing but think about this since you got me out of there.”

She held up a finger.

“Let’s start with what I overheard. Let’s say it was Joey Marks and his lawyer, and let’s say it wasn’t a show but what they said was true. They didn’t put the hit on Tony Aliso, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Look at it from their perspective. They had nothing to do with this, but one of their in-close guys gets picked up for it. And from what they hear from their source in Metro, it’s looking like a slam-bang case. I mean, the cops have fingerprints and the murder weapon found right there in Goshen’s bathroom. Joey Marks has to be thinking either it’s all been planted by the cops or maybe Goshen went and did this on his own for some unknown reason. Either way, what do you think his immediate concern would be?”

“Damage control.”

“Right. He has to figure out what is going on with Goshen and what’s the damage. But he can’t because Goshen has gone and gotten himself his own attorney. Torrino has no access to him. So what Joey does instead is he and Torrino set up a test to see if the reason Goshen’s gotten his own attorney is because he’s going to talk.”

“Make a deal.”

“Right. Now, let’s say that from their source in Metro they know that the lead cop on the case has a relationship with someone they know of and have their hooks in. Me.”

“So they just take you to the safe house and wait. Because they know that if I find out where the safe house is and show up to get you, or if I call up Metro and say I know where you are, then they know Goshen is the only one who could have told me. It means he’s talking. That was the test Quillen was talking about. If I don’t show, they’re cool. It means Goshen is standing up. If I do show up, then they know they’ve got to get to Goshen in Metro right quick and put a hit on him.”

“Right, before he can talk. That’s how I figured it, too.”

“So that would mean that Aliso wasn’t really a hit-at least by Marks and his people-and that they had no idea Goshen was an agent.”

She nodded. Bosch felt the surge of energy that comes with making a huge step through the murky darkness of an investigation.

“There was no trunk music,” he said.

“What?”

“The whole Las Vegas angle, Joey Marks, all of that, it was all a diversion. We went completely down the wrong path. It had to be engineered by someone very close to Tony. Close enough to know what he was doing, to know about the money washing, and to know how to make his killing look mob connected. To pin it on Goshen.”

She nodded.

“And that’s why I had to tell you everything. Even if it meant we…”

Bosch looked at her. She didn’t finish the line and neither did he.

Bosch took a cigarette out of his pocket and put it in his mouth but didn’t light it. He leaned across the table and picked up her plate and his own. He spoke to her as he slid off the bench.

“I don’t have any dessert, either.”

“That’s okay.”

He took the plates into the kitchen and rinsed them and put them into the dishwasher. He had never used the new appliance before and spent some time leaning over it and trying to figure out how to operate it. Once he got it going, he started cleaning the frying pan and the pot in the sink. The simple work began to relax him. Eleanor came into the kitchen with her wineglass and watched him for a few moments before speaking.

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

“It’s okay. You were in a bad situation and you did what you had to do, Eleanor. Nobody can be blamed for that. I probably would have done everything you did.”

It was a few moments before she spoke again.

“Do you want me to go?”

Bosch turned off the water and looked into the sink. He could make out his dark image reflected in the new stainless steel.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Bosch arrived at the station at seven Friday morning with a box of glazed doughnuts from the Fairfax Farmers Market. He was the first one in. He opened the box and put it on the counter near the coffee machine. He took one of the doughnuts and put it on a napkin and left it at his spot on the homicide table while he went up to the watch office to get coffee from the urn. It was much better than what came out of the detective bureau’s machine.

Once he had his coffee, he took his doughnut and moved to the desk that was behind the bureau’s front counter. His assignment to desk duty meant that he would handle most of the walk-ins as well as the sorting and distribution of overnight reports. The phones he wouldn’t have to worry about. They were answered by an old man from the neighborhood who donated his time to the department.

Bosch was alone in the squad room for at least fifteen minutes before the other detectives started to trickle in. Six different times he was asked by a new arrival why he was at the front desk, and each time he told the detective who asked that it was too complicated to get into but that the word would be out soon enough. Nothing remained a secret for long in a police station.

At eight-thirty the lieutenant from the A.M. watch brought the morning reports in before going off shift and smiled when he saw Bosch. His name was Klein and he and Bosch had known each other in a surface way for years.

“Who’d you beat up this time, Bosch?” he kidded.

It was well known that the detective who sat at the desk where Bosch now sat was either there by fate of the bureau rotation or on a desk duty assignment while the subject of an internal investigation. More often than not it was the latter. But Klein’s sarcasm revealed that he had not yet heard that Bosch actually was under investigation. Bosch played off the question with a smile but didn’t answer. He took the two-inch-thick stack of reports from Klein and gave him a mock salute back.

The stack Klein had given him constituted nearly all crime reports filed by Hollywood Division patrol officers in the last twenty-four hours. There would be a second, smaller delivery of stragglers later in the morning, but the stack in his hands constituted the bulk of the day’s work in the bureau.

Keeping his head down and ignoring the buzz of conversations around him, it took Bosch a half hour to sort all the reports into piles according to crimes. Next he had to scan them all, using his experienced eye to possibly make connections between robberies and burglaries or assaults and so on, and then deliver the individual piles to the detective tables assigned to that particular classification of crime.

When he looked up from his work, he saw that Lieutenant Billets was in her office on the phone. He hadn’t noticed that she had come in. Part of his desk job would be to give her a morning briefing on the reports, informing her of any significant or unusual crimes or anything else she should be aware of as the detective bureau commander.

He went back to work and weeded through the auto-theft reports first because they made up the largest pile he had culled from the stack of reports. There had been thirty-three cars reported stolen in Hollywood in the last twenty-four hours. Bosch knew that this was probably a below-average tally. After reading the summaries in the reports and checking for other similarities, he found nothing of significance and took the pile to the detective in charge of the auto-theft table. As he was heading back to the front of the squad room, he noticed that Edgar and Rider were standing at the homicide table putting things into a cardboard box. As he approached, he realized they were packing up the murder book and the ancillary files and evidence bags relating to the Aliso case. It was all being sent to the feds.

“Morning, guys,” Bosch said, unsure of how to start.

“Harry,” Edgar said.

“How are you doing, Harry?” Rider said, genuine concern in her voice.

“I’m hangin’ in… Uh, listen, I just…I just want to say that I’m sorry you guys have been pulled into this, but I wanted you to know there is no way I-”

“Forget it, Harry,” Edgar said. “You don’t have to say one damn thing to us. We both know the whole thing is bullshit. In all my years on the job you are the most righteous cop I know, man. All the rest is bullshit.”

Bosch nodded, touched by Edgar’s words. He didn’t expect such sentiments from Rider because it had been their first case together. But she spoke anyway.

“I haven’t worked with you long, Harry, but from what I do know I agree with what Jerry says. You watch, this will blow over and we’ll be back at it again.”

“Thanks.”

Bosch was about to head back to his new desk when he looked down into the box they were packing. He reached in and pulled out the two-inch-thick murder book that Edgar had been charged with preparing and keeping up to date on the Aliso case.

“Are the feds coming here or you just sending it out?”

“S’posed to have somebody come pick it up at ten,” Edgar said.

Bosch looked up at the clock on the wall. It was only nine.

“Mind if I copy this? Just so we have something in case the whole thing drops into that black hole they keep over there at the bureau.”

“Be my guest,” Edgar said.

“Did Salazar ever send over a protocol?” Bosch asked.

“The autopsy?” Rider asked. “No, not yet. Unless it’s in dispatch.”

Bosch didn’t tell them that if it was in transit, then the feds had somehow intercepted it. He took the murder book to the copy machine, unhooked the three rings and removed the stack of reports. He set the machine to copy both sides of the original documents and put the stack into the automatic feed tray. Before starting he checked to make sure the paper tray was filled with three-hole paper. It was. He pressed the start button and stood back to watch. There was a copying franchise chain in town that had donated the machine and regularly serviced it. It was the one thing in the bureau that was modern and could be counted on to work most of the time. Bosch finished the job in ten minutes. He put the original binder back together and returned it to the box on Edgar’s desk. He then took a fresh binder from the supply closet, put his copies of the reports on the rings and dropped it into a file cabinet drawer that had his business card taped to it. He then told his two partners where it was if they needed it.

“Harry,” Rider said in a low voice, “you’re thinking of doing a little freelancing on it, aren’t you?”

He looked at her a moment, unsure of how to answer. He thought about her relationship with Billets. He had to be careful.

“If you are,” she said, perhaps sensing his indecision, “I’d like to be in on it. You know the bureau isn’t going to work it with any due diligence. They’re going to let it drop.”

“Count me in, too,” Edgar added.

Bosch hesitated again, looked from one to the other and then nodded.

“How ’bout we meet at Musso’s at twelve-thirty?” he said. “I’m buying.”

“We’ll be there,” Edgar said.

When he got back to the front of the bureau, he saw through the glass window of her office that Billets was off the phone and looking at some paperwork. Her door was open and Bosch stepped in, knocking on the doorjamb as he entered.

“Good morning, Harry.” There was a wistfulness to her voice and demeanor, as if maybe she was embarrassed that he was her front-desk man. “Anything happening I should know about right away?”

“I don’t think so. It looks pretty tame. Uh, there’s a hot prowler working the strip hotels again, though. At least it looks like one guy. Did one at the Chateau and another at the Hyatt last night. People never woke up. Looks like the same MO on both.”

“Were the vics anybody we should know and care about?”

“I don’t think so but I don’t read People magazine. I might not recognize a celebrity if they came up and bit me.”

She smiled.

“How much were the losses?”

“I don’t know. I’m not done with that pile yet. That’s not why I came in. I just wanted to say thanks again for sticking up for me like you did yesterday.”

“That was hardly sticking up for you.”

“Yes it was. In those kinds of circumstances what you said and did was sticking your neck way out. I appreciate it.”

“Well, like I said, I did it because I don’t believe it. And the sooner IAD and the bureau get on with it, the sooner they won’t believe it. When’s your appointment, by the way?”

“Two.”

“Who is your defense rep going to be?”

“Guy I know from RHD. Name’s Dennis Zane. He’s a good guy and he’ll know what to do for me. You know him?”

“No. But listen, let me know if there is anything else I can do.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“Grace.”

“Right. Grace.”

When Bosch went back to his desk he thought about his appointment with Chastain. In accordance with departmental procedures, Bosch would be represented by a union defense rep who was actually a fellow detective. He would act almost as an attorney would, counseling Bosch on what to say and how to say it. It was the first formal step of the internal investigation and disciplinary process.

When he looked up, he saw a woman standing at the counter with a young girl. The girl had red-rimmed eyes and a marble-sized swelling on her lower lip that looked like it might have been the result of a bite. She was disheveled and stared at the wall behind Bosch with a distance in her eyes that suggested that a window was there. But there wasn’t.

Bosch could have asked how he could help them without moving from his desk, but it didn’t take a detective to guess why they were there. He got up, came around the desk and approached the counter so they could speak confidentially. Rape victims were the people who evoked the most sadness in Bosch. He knew he wouldn’t be able to last a month on a rape squad. Every victim he had ever seen had that stare. It was a sign that all things in their lives were different now and forever. They would never get back to what they had had before.

After speaking briefly to the mother and daughter, Bosch asked if the girl needed immediate medical attention and the mother said she didn’t. He opened the half door in the counter and ushered them both back to one of the three interview rooms off the hallway to the rear of the bureau. He then went to the sex crimes table and approached Mary Cantu, a detective who had been handling for years what Bosch knew he couldn’t handle for a month.

“Mary, you’ve got a walk-in back in room three,” Bosch said. “She’s fifteen. Happened last night. She got too curious about the pusher who works the nearby corner. He grabbed her and sold her and a rock to his next customer. She’s with her mother.”

“Thanks, Bosch. Just what I needed on a Friday. I’ll go right back. You ask if she needed medical?”

“She said no, but I think the answer is yes.”

“Okay, I’ll handle it. Thanks.”

Back at the front desk, it took Bosch a few minutes to clear his thoughts about the girl from his mind and another forty-five to finish reading through the reports and deliver them to the appropriate detective squads.

When he was done, he checked on Billets through the window and saw she was on the phone with a pile of paperwork in front of her. Bosch got up and went to his file cabinet and took out the copy of the murder book he had put there earlier. He lugged the thick binder back to his desk at the front counter. He had decided that in his free time between his duties at the front desk he would begin reviewing the murder book. The case had taken off so quickly earlier in the week that he had not had the time he usually liked to spend reviewing the paperwork. He knew from experience that command of the details and the nuances of an investigation was often the key to closing it out. He had just started turning through the pages in a cursory review when a vaguely familiar voice addressed him from the counter.

“Is that what I think it is?”

Bosch looked up. It was O’Grady, the FBI agent. Bosch felt his face burn with embarrassment that he’d been caught red-handed with the file and with his growing dislike for the agent.

“Yeah, it’s what you think it is, O’Grady. You were supposed to be here a half hour ago to pick it up.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t run on your time. I had things to do.”

“Like what, get your buddy Roy a new ponytail?”

“Just give me the binder, Bosch. And all the rest.”

Bosch still had not gotten up and made no move to now.

“What do you want it for, O’Grady? We all know you’re going to let the thing drop. You people don’t care who killed Tony Aliso and you don’t want to know.”

“That’s bullshit. Give me the file.”

O’Grady reached over the counter and was reaching around blindly for the release button on the half door.

“Hold your fucking horses, man,” Bosch said as he stood up. “Just wait there. I’ll get it all.”

Carrying the binder, Bosch walked back to the homicide table and, using his back to shield O’Grady’s view, placed the binder on the table and picked up the box containing the original binder and the ancillary reports and evidence bags that Edgar and Rider had put in with it. He carried it back and dropped it on the counter in front of O’Grady.

“You gotta sign for it,” he said. “We’re extra careful about how we handle evidence and who gets to handle it.”

“Yeah, right. The whole world knows that from the O.J. case, don’t they?”

Bosch grabbed O’Grady’s tie and jerked his upper body down over the counter. The agent could not find a purchase with his hands that would give him the leverage to pull back. Bosch bent down so that he was talking directly into his ear.

“Excuse me?”

“Bosch, you-”

“Harry!”

Bosch looked up. Billets was standing in the door of her office. Bosch let go of the tie and O’Grady’s body sprang backward as he straightened up. His face was crimson with embarrassment and anger. As he jerked his tie loose from around his neck he yelled, “You’re certifiable, you know that? You’re a fucking asshole!”

“I didn’t know you agents used that kind of language,” Bosch said.

“Harry, just sit down,” Billets commanded. “I’ll take care of this.”

She had come up to the counter now.

“He’s got to sign the receipt.”

“I don’t care! I’ll handle it!”

Bosch went back to his desk and sat down. He stared dead-eyed at O’Grady while Billets dug through the box until she found the inventory list and receipt Edgar had prepared. She showed O’Grady where to sign and then told him to go.

“You better watch him,” he said to Billets as he picked the box up off the counter.

“You better watch yourself, Agent O’Grady. If I hear anything else about this little disagreement here, I’ll file a complaint against you for inciting it.”

“He’s the one who-”

“I don’t care. Understand? I don’t care. Now leave.”

“I’m leaving. But you watch your boy there. Keep him away from this.”

O’Grady pointed to the contents of the box. Billets didn’t answer. O’Grady picked the box up and made a move to step away from the counter but stopped and looked once more at Bosch.

“Hey, Bosch, by the way, I got a message from Roy.”

“Agent O’Grady, would you please leave!” Billets said angrily.

“What is it?” Bosch said.

“He just wanted to ask, who’s the meat now?”

With that he turned around and headed down the hall to the exit. Billets watched him until he was gone and then turned around and looked at Bosch with anger in her eyes.

“You just don’t know how to help yourself, do you?” she said. “Why don’t you grow up and quit these little pissing wars?”

She didn’t wait for his reply because he didn’t have one. She walked quickly back into her office and shut the door. She then closed the blinds over the interior window. Bosch leaned back with his hands laced behind his neck, looked up at the ceiling and exhaled loudly.

After the O’Grady incident Bosch almost immediately became busy with a walk-in case involving an armed robbery. At the time, the entire robbery crew was out on a carjacking that had involved a high-speed chase, and that meant Bosch, as the desk man, had to interview the walk-in victim and type up a report. The victim was a young Mexican boy whose job it was to stand on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard at Sierra Bonita and sell maps to the homes of movie stars up in the hills. At ten that morning, shortly after he had set up his plywood sign and begun waving down cars, an old American-made sedan had pulled up with a man driving and a woman in the passenger seat. After asking how much the maps cost and whether he had sold very many of them, the woman had pointed a gun at the boy and robbed him of thirty-eight dollars. He had come in to report the crime with his mother. As it turned out, he had sold only one map that day before the robbery, and nearly all of the money taken from him was his own-he had brought it with him to make change. His loss was about what he made for a whole day of standing on the corner and waving his arm like a windmill.

Because of the small take and sloppy method used by the robbers, Bosch immediately thought the suspects were a couple of hypes looking for a quick score to buy their next balloon of heroin. They had not even bothered to hide the car’s license plate, which the boy had spotted and memorized as they drove away.

After he was finished with the boy and his mother, he went to the teletype machine and put out a wanted on the car with a description of the suspects. He found when he did this that there was already a wanted out on the vehicle for its use in two prior robberies in the last week. A lot of good that did the kid who lost a day’s pay, Bosch thought. The robbers should have been picked up before they got to the boy. But this was the big city, not a perfect world. Disappointments like that didn’t stay long with Bosch.

By this time the squad room had pretty much cleared out for lunch. Bosch saw only Mary Cantu at the sex crimes table, probably working on the paper from that morning’s walk-in job.

Edgar and Rider were gone, apparently having decided it would be better to go separately to Musso’s. As Bosch got up to leave, he noticed that the blinds were still drawn over the window to the lieutenant’s office. Billets was still in there, he knew. He went to the homicide table and put the copy of the murder book into his briefcase and then went and knocked on her door. Before she could answer, he opened the door and stuck his head in.

“I’m going to go catch some lunch and then go downtown for the IAD thing. You won’t have anybody out on the counter.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll put Edgar or Rider up there after lunch. They’re just waiting around for a case, anyway.”

“Okay then, I’ll see you.”

“Uh, Harry?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry for what happened earlier. Not for what I said. I meant what I said, but I should have taken you in here and spoken to you. Doing it out there in front of the others was wrong. I apologize.”

“Don’t worry about it. Have a nice weekend.”

“You, too.”

“I’ll try, Lieutenant.”

“Grace.”

“Grace.”

Bosch got to Musso and Frank’s Restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard at exactly twelve-thirty and parked in the back. The restaurant was a Hollywood landmark, having been on the Boulevard since 1924. In its heyday it had been a popular destination for Hollywood’s elite. Fitzgerald and Faulkner held forth. Chaplin and Fairbanks once raced each other down Hollywood Boulevard on horseback, the loser having to pick up the dinner tab. The restaurant now subsisted mostly on its past glory and faded charm. Its red leather padded booths still filled every day for lunch and some of the waiters looked and moved as if they had been there long enough to have served Chaplin. The menu hadn’t changed in all the years Bosch had been eating there-this in a town where the hookers out on the Boulevard lasted longer than most restaurants.

Edgar and Rider were waiting in one of the prized round booths, and Bosch slid in after they were pointed out by the maître d’-he was apparently too old and tired to walk Bosch over himself. They were both drinking iced tea and Bosch decided to go along with that, though privately he lamented that they were in the place that made the best martini in the city. Only Rider was looking at the menu. She was new in the division and hadn’t been to Musso’s enough times to know what the best thing was to order for lunch.

“So what are we doing?” Edgar asked while she looked.

“We’ve got to start over,” Bosch said. “The Vegas stuff was all misdirection.”

Rider glanced over the top of the menu at Bosch.

“Kiz, put that down,” he said. “If you don’t get the chicken pot pie you’re making a mistake.”

She hesitated, nodded and put the menu aside.

“What do you mean, misdirection?” she asked.

“I mean whoever killed Tony wanted us to go that way. And they planted the gun out there to make sure we stayed out there. But they screwed up. They didn’t know the guy they planted the gun on was a fed who would have a bunch of other feds as an alibi. That was the screwup. Now, once I learned that our suspect was an agent, I thought Joey Marks and his people must have figured out he was a fed and set the whole thing up to taint him.”

“I still think that sounds good,” Edgar said.

“It does, or it did until last night,” Bosch said as an ancient waiter in a red coat came to the table.

“Three chicken pot pies,” Bosch said.

“Do you want something to drink?” the waiter asked.

Hell with it, Bosch decided.

“Yeah, I’ll have a martini, three olives. You can bring them some more iced tea. That’s it.”

The waiter nodded and slowly glided away without writing anything on his pad.

“Last night,” Bosch continued, “I learned from a source that Joey Marks did not know the man he thought was named Luke Goshen was a plant. He had no idea he was an informant, let alone an agent. In fact, once we picked Goshen up, Joey was engaged in a plan to try to find out whether Goshen was going to stand up or talk. This was because he had to decide whether to put a contract on him in the Metro jail.”

He waited a moment to let them think about this.

“So, you can see with that information in the mix now, the second theory no longer works.”

“Well, who’s the source?” Edgar asked.

“I can’t tell you that, guys. But it’s solid. It’s the truth.”

He watched their eyes float down to the table. He knew they trusted him, but they also knew how informants were often the most skilled liars in the game. It was a tough call to base everything from here on out on an informant.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “The source was Eleanor Wish. Jerry, have you told Kiz about all of that?”

Edgar hesitated, then nodded.

“Okay, then you know who she is. She overheard all of what I told you while they had her in that house. Before we got there, both Joey and the lawyer, Torrino, were there. She overheard them and from what she heard, they didn’t know about Goshen. See, that whole abduction was part of the test. They knew the only way I could find out where the safe house was would be to get it from Goshen. That was the test, to see if he was talking or not.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes while Edgar and Rider digested this.

“Okay,” Edgar finally said. “I see what you’re saying. But if Vegas was one big fucking red herring, how does the gun get over there in the agent’s house?”

“That’s what we have to figure out. What if there was someone outside of Tony’s mob connections but close enough to him to know he was washing money and the reason why he made all the trips to Vegas? Someone who either had personal knowledge or maybe followed Tony to Vegas and watched how he worked, how he picked up the money from Goshen, everything? Someone who knew exactly how he did it, who knew Goshen could be set up to take the fall, and that Tony’d be coming back on Friday with a lot of money in his briefcase?”

“They would be able to set the whole thing up, as long as they could get into the agent’s house to plant the gun,” Edgar answered.

“Right. And getting into the house would be no problem. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. He was away at the club for long stretches at a time. Anybody could get in, plant the gun, and get out. The question is who?”

“You’re talking about either his wife or his girlfriend,” Edgar said. “Both could have had that kind of access.”

Bosch nodded.

“So which one do we set up on? The three of us can’t do both, not on a freelance like this.”

“We don’t need to,” Bosch said. “I think the choice is obvious.”

“Which?” Edgar said. “The girlfriend?”

Bosch looked at Rider, giving her the chance to answer. She saw his look and then her eyes narrowed as she went to work.

“It…it can’t be the girlfriend because…because she called Tony on Sunday morning. On the voice mail. Why would she call the guy if she knew he was dead?”

Bosch nodded. She was good.

“Could have been part of a setup,” Edgar said. “Another misdirection.”

“Could be but I doubt it,” Bosch said. “Plus, we know she worked Friday night. That would make it kind of tough for her to be over here whacking Tony.”

“So then it’s the wife,” Edgar said. “Veronica.”

“Right,” Bosch said. “I think she was lying to us, acting like she didn’t know anything about her husband’s business when she knew everything. I think this whole thing was her plan. She wrote the letters to the IRS and to the OCID. She wanted to get something going against Tony, then when he ended up dead it would point toward a mob hit. Trunk music. Planting the gun on Goshen was just icing. If we found it, fine. If we didn’t, then we’d be sniffing around Vegas until we shelved the case.”

“You’re saying she did this all on her own?” Edgar asked.

“No,” Bosch said. “I’m just saying I think this was her plan. But she had to have had help. An accomplice. It took two to do the actual hit and she sure didn’t take the gun to Vegas. After the kill, she stays at the house and waits while the accomplice goes to Vegas and plants the gun while Luke Goshen’s at the club.”

“But wait a minute,” Rider said. “We’re forgetting something. Veronica Aliso had it very cushy in her existing life. Tony was raking in the bread with his washing machine. They had the big house in the hills, the cars…why would she want to kill the cash cow? How much was in that briefcase?”

“According to the feds, four hundred and eighty thousand,” Bosch said.

Edgar whistled softly. Rider shook her head.

“I still don’t see it,” she said. “That’s a hell of a lot of money, but Tony was making at least that much a year. In business terms, killing him was a short-term gain/long-term loss for her. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Then there is something else running through all of this that we don’t know about yet,” Bosch said. “Maybe he was about to dump her. Maybe that old lady in Vegas who said Tony was going to go away with Layla was telling the truth. Or maybe there’s money somewhere we don’t know about. But for now I can’t see anybody else fitting into this picture but her.”

“But what about the gatehouse?” Rider said. “The log shows she never left Friday, the whole night. And she had no visitors.”

“Well, we’ve got to work on that,” Bosch said. “There had to have been a way for her to get in and out.”

“What else?” Edgar asked.

“We start over,” Bosch said. “I want to know everything about her. Where’d she come from, who are her friends, what does she do in that house all day long and what did she do and who did she do it with all those times Tony was away?”

Rider and Edgar nodded.

“There’s got to be an accomplice. And my guess is that it’s a man. And I’ll bet we’ll find him through her.”

The waiter came up with a tray and put it down on a folding cart. They watched silently as he prepared the meal. There were three separate chicken pot pies on the tray. The waiter used a fork and spoon to take the top crust off each and put it on a plate. Next he scooped the contents of each pie out and put it on the crust, served the three cops their dishes and put down fresh glasses of iced tea for Edgar and Rider. He then poured Bosch’s martini from a small glass carafe and floated away without a word.

“Obviously,” Bosch said, “we have to do this quietly.”

“Yeah,” Edgar said, “and Bullets also put us on the top of the rotation. Next call comes in, me and Kiz get it. And we hafta work it without you. That’s going to take us away from this.”

“Well, do what you can. If you get a body you get a body, nothing we can do about that. Meantime, this is what I propose. You two work on Veronica’s background, see what you can find. You got any sources at the Times or the trades?”

“I know a couple at the Times,” Rider said. “And there’s a woman I once had a case with-she was a vic-who’s a receptionist or something at Variety.”

“You trust ’em?”

“I think I can.”

“See if they’ll pull a search on Veronica for you. She had a brief flash of fame a while back. Her fifteen minutes. Maybe there were some stories about her, stories that would have names of people we could talk to.”

“What about talking to her again?” Edgar asked.

“I don’t think we should do it yet. I want to have something to talk to her about.”

“What about neighbors?”

“You can do that. Maybe she’ll look out the window and see you, give her something to think about. If you go up there, see if you can take another look at the gate log. Talk to Nash. I’m sure you can turn him without needing another search warrant. I’d like to take a look at the whole year, know who has been going in to see her, especially while Tony was out of town. We have Tony’s credit records and can construct his travel history. You’ll be able to know when she was in that house alone.”

Bosch raised his fork. He hadn’t had a bite of food yet, but his mind was too full of the case and what needed to be done.

“The other thing is we need as much of the case file as we can get. All we’ve got is the copy of the murder book. I’m going down to Parker Center for my little chat with the IAD. I’ll swing by USC and get a copy of the autopsy. The feds already have it. I’ll also go talk to Donovan in SID and see if he came up with anything we pulled out of the car. Also, he’s got the shoe prints. I’ll get copies, hopefully before the feds come in and take everything. Anything else I’m missing?”

The other two shook their heads.

“You want to see what we get and then put our heads together after work?”

They nodded.

“Cat and Fiddle, about six?”

They nodded again. They were too busy eating to talk. Bosch took his first bite of food, which was already getting cold. He joined them in their silence, thinking about the case.

“It’s in the details,” he said after a few moments.

“What?” Rider asked.

“The case. When you get one like this, the answer is always in the details. You watch, when we break it, the answer will have been sitting in the files, in the book. It always happens.”

The interview with Chastain at Internal Affairs began as Bosch expected it would. He sat with Zane, his defense rep, at a gray government table in one of the IAD interview rooms. An old Sony cassette player was turned on and everything said in the room was recorded. In police parlance, Chastain was locking up Bosch’s story. Getting his words and explanation in as much detail as possible down on tape. Chastain really wouldn’t begin his investigation until after Bosch’s story was locked in. He would then hunt for flaws in it. All he had to do was catch Bosch in a single lie and he could take him to a Board of Rights hearing. Depending on the size and import of the lie, he could seek a penalty ranging from suspension to dismissal.

In a dull and laborious drone, Chastain read prepared questions from a legal pad and Bosch slowly and carefully answered them with as few words as possible. It was a game. Bosch had played it before. In the fifteen minutes they had before reporting to IAD, Zane had counseled Bosch on how it would go and how they should proceed. Like a good criminal defense lawyer, he never directly asked Harry if he had planted the gun. Zane didn’t really care. He simply looked at IAD as the enemy, as a group of bad cops with the sole purpose of going after good cops. Zane was part of the old school who thought all cops were inherently good and though sometimes the job turned them bad, they should not be persecuted by their own.

Everything was routine for a half hour. But then Chastain threw an unexpected pitch at them.

“Detective Bosch, do you know a woman named Eleanor Wish?”

Zane reached out a hand in front of Bosch to stop him from answering.

“What is this shit, Chastain?”

“Who have you been talking to, Chastain?” Bosch added.

“Wait a minute, Harry,” Zane said. “Don’t say anything. Where’s this going, Chastain?”

“It’s very clear from the orders from the chief. I’m investigating Bosch’s conduct during this investigation. As far as who I have been talking to or where I get my information, you are not privy to that at this point in the process.”

“This is supposed to be about a supposedly planted gun that we all know is bullshit. That’s what we are here to answer.”

“Do you wish to read the order from the chief again? It’s quite clear.”

Zane looked at him a moment.

“Give us five minutes so we can talk about this. Why don’t you go get the points of your teeth filed?”

Chastain stood up and reached over and turned the tape recorder off. As he stepped to the door, he looked back at them with a smile.

“This time I got you both. You won’t get out from under this one, Bosch. And Zane, well, I guess you can’t win them all, can you?”

“You ought to know that better than me, you sanctimonious asshole. Get out of here and leave us alone.”

After Chastain was gone, Zane bent over the tape recorder to make sure it was off. He then got up and checked the thermostat on the wall to make sure it wasn’t a secret listening device. After he was satisfied their conversation was private, he sat back down and asked Bosch about Eleanor Wish. Bosch told him about his encounters with Eleanor over the past few days but left out mention of the abduction and her subsequent confession.

“One of those cops over there in Metro must’ve told him you shacked up with her,” Zane said. “That’s all he’s got. He’s going for an associating beef. If you admit it here, then he’s got you. But if that’s all he gets, then it’s a slap on the wrist at best. As long as he gets nothing else. But if you lie about it and say you weren’t with her when you were, and he can prove you were, then you’ve got a problem. So my advice is that you tell him, yeah, you know her and you’ve been with her. Fuck it, it’s nothing. Tell him it’s over, and if that’s all he’s got, then he’s a chickenshit asshole.”

“I don’t know if it is or it isn’t.”

“What?”

“Over.”

“Well, don’t tell him nothin’ about that unless he asks for it. Then use your best judgment. Ready?”

Bosch nodded and Zane opened the door. Chastain was sitting outside at a desk.

“Where ya been, Chastain?” Zane complained. “We’re waiting in here.”

Chastain didn’t answer. He came in, turned the recorder back on and continued the Q and A.

“Yes, I know Eleanor Wish,” Bosch said. “Yes, I’ve spent time with her over the last few days.”

“How much time?”

“I don’t know exactly. A couple of nights.”

“While you were conducting the investigation?”

“Not while I was conducting it. At night, when I was done for the day. We all don’t work around the clock like you, Chastain.”

Bosch smiled at him without humor.

“Was she a witness in this case?” Chastain asked with a tone that denoted that he was shocked that Bosch would cross that line.

“Initially, I thought she might be a witness. After I located her and talked to her, I learned pretty quickly that she was not an evidentiary witness of any kind.”

“But you did initially encounter her while you were in your capacity as an investigator on this case.”

“That’s correct.”

Chastain consulted his pad for a long moment before asking the next question.

“Is this woman, that’s the convicted felon Eleanor Wish I am still talking about, is she living in your home at this time?”

Bosch felt the bile rising in his throat. The personal invasion and Chastain’s tone were getting to him. He struggled to remain calm.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.

“You don’t know if someone is living in your house or not?”

“Look, Chastain, she was there last night, okay? Is that what you want to hear? She was there. But whether she’ll be there tonight I don’t know. She’s got her own place in Vegas. She may have gone back today, I don’t know. I didn’t check. You want me to call and ask her if she is officially living in my home at this time, I will.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary. I think I have everything I need for the time being.”

He then went directly into the standard IAD end-of-interview spiel.

“Detective Bosch, you will be informed of the results of the ongoing investigation into your conduct. If departmental charges are filed, you will be informed of the scheduling of a Board of Rights hearing in which three captains will hear evidence. You will be allowed to choose one of those captains, I will select a second and the third will be chosen at random. Any questions?”

“Just one. How can you call yourself a cop when all you do is sit up here and conduct these bullshit investigations into bullshit?”

Zane reached over and put a hand on Bosch’s forearm to quiet him.

“No, that’s okay,” Chastain said, waving off Zane’s effort to calm things. “I don’t mind answering. In fact, I get that question a lot, Bosch. Funny, but it always seems I get it from the cops I happen to be investigating. Anyway, the answer is that I take pride in what I do because I represent the public, and if there is no one to police the police then there is no one to keep the abuse of their wide powers in check. I serve a valuable purpose in this society, Detective Bosch. I’m proud of what I do. Can you say the same?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bosch said. “I’m sure that sounds great on tape for whoever listens to it. I get the feeling you probably sit alone at night and listen to it yourself. Over and over again. After a while, you believe it. But let me ask you this, Chastain. Who polices the police who police the police?”

Bosch stood up and Zane followed. The interview was over.

After leaving IAD and thanking Zane for his help, Bosch went down to the SID lab on the third floor to see Art Donovan. The criminologist had just come back from a crime scene and was sorting through evidence bags and checking the material against an evidence list. He looked up as Bosch was approaching.

“How’d you get in here, Harry?”

“I know the combination.”

Most detectives who worked RHD knew the door-lock combo. Bosch hadn’t worked RHD in five years and they still hadn’t changed it.

“See,” Donovan said. “That’s how the trouble starts.”

“What trouble?”

“You coming in here while I’m handling evidence. Next thing you know some wiseass defense lawyer says it got tainted and I look like an asshole on national TV.”

“You’re paranoid, Artie. Besides, we’re not due for another trial of the century for at least a few years.”

“Funny. What do you want, Harry?”

“You’re the second guy who said I was funny today. What happened with my shoe prints and all the rest of the stuff?”

“The Aliso case?”

“No, the Lindbergh case. What do you think?”

“Well, I heard that Aliso wasn’t yours anymore. I’m supposed to have everything ready for the FBI to pick up.”

“When is that?”

Donovan looked up from what he was doing for the first time.

“They just said they’d send somebody by five.”

“Then it’s still my case until they show up. What about the shoe prints you pulled?”

“There’s nothing about them. I sent copies to the bureau’s crime lab in D.C. to see if they could ID the make and model.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I haven’t heard back. Bosch, every department in the country sends shit to them. You know that. And last I heard, they don’t drop everything they’re doing when a package from the LAPD comes in. It will probably be next week sometime before I hear back. If I’m lucky.”

“Shit.”

“It’s too late to call the East Coast now, anyway. Maybe Monday. I didn’t know they suddenly became so important to you. Communication, Harry, that’s the secret. You ought to try it sometime.”

“Never mind that, do you still have a set of copies?”

“Yup.”

“Can I get a set?”

“Sure can, but you’re going to have to wait about twenty minutes or so till I’m done with this.”

“Come on, Artie, it’s probably just sitting in a file cabinet or something. It’ll take you thirty seconds.”

“Would you leave me alone?” Donovan said with exasperation. “I’m serious, Harry. Yes, it’s sitting in a file and it would only take me half a minute to get it for you. But if I leave what I’m doing here, I could get crucified when I testify in this case. I can see it now, some shyster all righteous and angry and saying, ‘You are telling this jury that while in the middle of handling evidence from this case you got up and handled evidence from another?’ And you don’t have to be F. Lee Bailey anymore to make it sound good to a jury. Now leave me alone. Come back in a half hour.”

“Fine, Artie, I’ll leave you alone.”

“And buzz me when you come back. Don’t just come in. We gotta get that combination changed.”

The last line he said more to himself than to Bosch.

Bosch left the way he had come in and took the elevator down to go outside and have a smoke. He had to walk out to the curb and light up because it was now against departmental rules to stand outside the front door of Parker Center and smoke. So many cops working there were addicted to cigarettes that there had often been a crowd outside the building’s main doors and a permanent haze of blue smoke had begun to hang over the entrance. The chief thought this was unsightly and instituted the rule that if you left the building to smoke, you had to leave the property as well. Now the front sidewalk along Los Angeles Street often looked like the scene of a labor action, with cops, some even in uniform, pacing back and forth in front of the building. The only thing missing from the scene was picket signs. The word was that the police chief had consulted with the city attorney to see if he could outlaw smoking on the sidewalk as well, but he was told that the sidewalk was beyond the bounds of his control.

As Bosch was lighting a second cigarette off the first, he saw the huge figure of FBI agent Roy Lindell waltzing leisurely out of the glass doors of the police headquarters. When he got to the sidewalk, he turned right and headed toward the federal courthouse. He was coming directly toward Bosch. Lindell didn’t see Bosch until he was a few feet away. It startled him.

“What is this? Are you waiting for me?”

“No, I’m having a cigarette, Lindell. What are you doing?”

“None of your business.”

He made a move to pass but Bosch stopped him with the next line.

“Have a nice chat with Chastain?”

“Look, Bosch, I was asked to come over and give a statement and I obliged. I told the truth. Let the chips fall.”

“Trouble is you don’t know the truth.”

“I know you found that gun and I didn’t put it there. That’s the truth.”

“Part of it, at least.”

“Well, it’s the only part I know, and that’s what I told him. So have a good day.”

He passed by Bosch and Harry turned around to watch him go. Once again he stopped him.

“You people might be satisfied with only part of the truth. But I’m not.”

Lindell turned around and stepped back to Bosch.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Figure it out.”

“No, you tell me.”

“We were all used, Lindell. I’m going to find out by who. When I do, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“Look, Bosch, you don’t have the case anymore. We’re working it and you better stay the fuck away from it.”

“Yeah, you guys are working the case, all right,” Bosch said sarcastically. “I’m sure you’re pounding the pavement on this one. Let me know when you figure it out.”

“Bosch, it’s not like that. We care about it.”

“Give me one answer, Lindell.”

“What?”

“In the time you were under, did Tony Aliso ever bring his wife over there to make a pickup?”

Lindell was quiet a moment while he decided whether to answer. He finally shook his head.

“Not once,” he said. “Tony always said she hated the place. Too many bad memories, I guess.”

Bosch tried to remain cool.

“Memories of Vegas?”

Lindell smiled.

“For somebody who supposedly has all the answers, you don’t know much, do you, Bosch? Tony met her in the club something like twenty years ago. Long before my time. She was a dancer and Tony was going to make her a movie star. Same story he was using on ’em to the end. Only, after her I guess he got wise and learned not to marry every one of them.”

“Did she know Joey Marks?”

“Your one question is now up to three, Bosch.”

“Did she?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was her name back then?”

“That’s another one I don’t know. I’ll see you around, Bosch.”

He turned and walked away. Bosch threw his cigarette into the street and walked back toward the Glass House. A few minutes later, after being properly buzzed through the door into the SID offices, Bosch found Donovan at his desk again. The criminalist lifted a thin file from the desk and handed it to Harry.

“You got copies in there,” he said. “Same thing I sent the bureau. What I did was shoot a copy of the negative and then shot the new negative and printed it in black-and-white contrast for comparison purposes. I also blew it up to actual size.”

Bosch didn’t understand what Donovan had just said except for the last part. He opened the file. There were two pages of copy paper with the shoe prints in black. Both were partial prints of the same right shoe. But between the two partials almost all of the shoe was there. Donovan got up and looked at the open file. He pointed to a tread ridge on one of the copies. It was a curving line on the heel. But the line was broken.

“Now, if you find the shooter and he still has the shoes, this is where you’ll get him. See how that line is broken there? That does not appear to be a manufacturer’s design. This guy stepped on glass or something at some point and it cut the tread there. It’s either that or a flaw in manufacturing. But if you find the shoe, we’ll be able to make an ID match that should send the boy away.”

“Okay,” Bosch said, still looking at the copies. “Now, did you get anything even preliminary from the bureau on this?”

“Not really. I’ve got a guy I go to pretty regularly with this kind of stuff. I know him, seen him at a couple of the SID conventions. Anyway, he called just to let me know he got the package and he’d get on it as soon as he could. He said that off the top of his head he thought it was one of those lightweight boots that are popular now. You know, they’re like work boots but they’re comfortable and wear like a pair of Nikes.”

“Okay, Artie, thanks.”

Bosch drove over to the County-USC Medical Center and around to the parking lot by the railroad yard. The coroner’s office was located at the far end of the medical center property, and Bosch went in through the back door after showing his badge to a security guard.

He checked Dr. Salazar’s office first but it was empty. He then went down to the autopsy floor and looked in the first suite, where the lowered table that Salazar always used was located. Salazar was there, working on another body. Bosch stepped in and Salazar looked up from the open chest cavity of what looked like the remains of a young black man.

“Harry, what are you doing here? This is a South Bureau case.”

“I wanted to ask about the Aliso case.”

“Kind of got my hands full at the moment. And you shouldn’t be in here without a mask and gown.”

“I know. You think you could have your assistant dub off a copy of the protocol for me?”

“No problem. I heard the FBI took an interest in the case, Harry. Is that true?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Funny thing, those agents didn’t bother talking to me. They just came in and got a copy of the protocol. The protocol only has conclusions, none of the ruminating we doctors like to do.”

“So what would you have ruminated about with them if they had talked to you?”

“I would have told them my hunch, Harry.”

“Which is?”

Salazar looked up from the body but kept his rubber-gloved and bloody hands over the open chest so they wouldn’t drip on anything else.

“My hunch is that you’re looking for a woman.”

“Why’s that?”

“The material in and below the eyes.”

“Preparation H?”

“What?”

“Nothing, never mind. What did you find?”

“The substance was analyzed and it came back oleo capsicum. Found it on the nasal swabs, too. Know what oleo capsicum is better known as, Harry?”

“Pepper spray.”

“Shit, Harry, you ruin my fun.”

“Sorry. So somebody sprayed him with pepper spray?”

“Right again. That’s why I think it’s a woman. Someone who was either having problems controlling him or afraid of problems. That makes me think it’s a woman. Besides, all these women around here, they all carry that stuff in their purses.”

Bosch wondered if Veronica Aliso was one of those women.

“That’s good, Sally. Anything else?”

“No surprises. Tests came back clean.”

“No amyl nitrate?”

“Nope, but that has a short retention. We don’t find it that often. Did you get anywhere with the slugs?”

“Yeah, we did all right. Can you call your guy?”

“Take me to the intercom.”

While Salazar held his hands up in front of himself so they wouldn’t touch anything, Bosch pushed his wheelchair to the nearby counter, where there was a phone with an intercom attachment. Salazar told Bosch which button to push and then ordered someone to make a copy of the protocol immediately for Bosch.

“Thanks,” Bosch said.

“No problem. Hope it helps. Remember, look for a woman who carries pepper spray in her purse. Not mace. Pepper spray.”

“Right.”

The end-of-the-week traffic was intense and it took Bosch nearly an hour to get out of downtown and back to Hollywood. When he got to the Cat amp; Fiddle pub on Sunset it was after six, and as he walked through the gate he saw Edgar and Rider already sitting at a table in the open-air courtyard. There was a pitcher of beer on their table. And they weren’t alone. Sitting at the table with them was Grace Billets.

The Cat amp; Fiddle was a popular drinking spot with the Hollywood cops because it was only a few blocks from the station on Wilcox. So Bosch didn’t know as he approached the table whether Billets happened to be there by coincidence or because she knew of their freelance operation.

“Howdy, folks,” Bosch said as he sat down.

There was one empty glass on the table and he filled it from the pitcher. He then held the glass up to the others and toasted to the end of another week.

“Harry,” Rider said, “the lieutenant knows what we’ve been doing. She’s here to help.”

Bosch nodded and slowly looked at Billets.

“I’m disappointed that you didn’t come to me first,” she said. “But I understand what you are doing. I agree that it might be in the bureau’s best interest to let this lie and not endanger their case. But a man was murdered. If they’re not going to look for the killer, I don’t see why we shouldn’t.”

Bosch nodded. He was almost speechless. He’d never had a boss who wasn’t a rigid by-the-book man. Grace Billets was a major change.

“Of course,” she said, “we have to be very careful. We screw this up and we’ll have more than just the FBI mad at us.”

The unspoken message was that their careers were at stake here.

“Well, my position’s already pretty much shot,” Bosch said. “So if anything goes wrong, I want you all to lay it on me.”

“That’s bullshit,” Rider said.

“No, it’s not. You all are going places. I’m not going anywhere. Hollywood is it for me and all of us here know it. So if this thing hits the fan, back out. I’ll take the heat. If you can’t agree to that, I want you to back out now.”

There was silence for a few moments, and then one by one the other three nodded.

“Okay, then,” he said, “you may have told the lieutenant what you’ve been doing, but I’d like to hear it myself.”

“We’ve come up with a few things, not a lot,” Rider said. “Jerry went up the hill to see Nash while I worked the computer and talked to a friend at the Times. First off, I ran Tony Aliso’s TRW credit report and got Veronica’s Social Security number off that. I then ran that through the Department of Social Security computer to try and get a work history and found out that Veronica is not her real name. The Social comes back to Jennifer Gilroy, born forty-one years ago in Las Vegas, Nevada. No wonder she said she hated Vegas. She grew up there.”

“Any work history?”

“Nothing until she came out here and worked for TNA Productions.”

“What else?”

Before she could answer, there was a loud commotion near the glass door to the interior bar. The door opened and a large man in a bartender’s jacket pushed a smaller man through. The smaller man was disheveled and drunk and yelling something about the lack of respect he was getting. The bartender roughly walked him to the courtyard gate and pushed him through. As soon as the bartender turned to go back to the bar, the drunk spun around and started back in. The bartender turned around and pushed him so hard he fell backward onto the seat of his pants. Now embarrassed, he threatened to come back and get the bartender. A few people at some of the outside tables snickered. The drunk got up and staggered out to the street.

“They start early around here,” Billets said. “Go ahead, Kiz.”

“Anyway, I did an NCIC run. Jennifer Gilroy got picked up twice in Vegas for soliciting. This is going back more than twenty years. I called over there and had them ship us the mugs and reports. It’s all on fiche and they have to dig it out, so we won’t get it till next week. There probably won’t be much there, anyway. According to the computer, neither case went to court. She pleaded out and paid a fine each time.”

Bosch nodded. It sounded like a routine disposal of routine cases.

“That’s all I’ve got on that. As far as the Times goes, there was nothing on the search. And my friend at Variety didn’t do much better. Veronica Aliso was barely mentioned in the review of Casualty of Desire. Both she and the movie were panned, but I’d like to see it anyway. Do you still have the tape, Harry?”

“On my desk.”

“Does she get naked in it?” Edgar asked. “If she does, I’d like to see it, too.”

He was ignored.

“Okay, what else?” Rider said. “Uh, Veronica also got a couple mentions in stories about movie premieres and who attended. It wasn’t a lot. When you said she had fifteen minutes, I think you confused minutes with seconds. Anyway, that’s it from me. Jerry?”

Edgar cleared his throat and explained that he had gone up to the gatehouse at Hidden Highlands and run into a problem when Nash insisted on a new search warrant to look at the complete gate log. Edgar said he then spent the afternoon typing up the search warrant and hunting for a judge who hadn’t left early for the weekend. He eventually was successful and had a signed warrant which he planned to deliver the next morning.

“Kiz and I are goin’ up there in the morning. We’ll get a look at the gate log and then we’re probably going to hit some of the neighbors, do some interviews. Like you said, we’re hopin’ the widow will look out her window and catch our act, maybe get a little spooked. Maybe panic, make a mistake.”

It was then Bosch’s turn, and he recounted his afternoon efforts, including his run-in with Roy Lindell and the agent’s recollection that Veronica Aliso had started her show business career as a stripper in Vegas. He also discussed Salazar’s finding that Tony Aliso had been hit in the face with a blast of pepper spray shortly before his death and shared the deputy coroner’s hunch that it might have been a woman who sprayed him.

“Does he think she could have pulled this off by herself after hitting him with the pepper spray?” Billets asked.

“It doesn’t matter, because she wasn’t alone,” Bosch answered.

He pulled his briefcase onto his lap and took out the copies of the shoe prints Donovan had recovered from the body and the bumper of the Rolls. He slid the pages to the middle of the table so the three others could look.

“That’s a size eleven shoe. It belongs to a man, Artie says. A big man. So the woman, if she was there, could have sprayed him with the pepper, but this guy finished the job.”

Bosch pointed to the shoe prints.

“He put his foot right on the victim so he could lean in close and do the job point-blank. Very cool and very efficient. Probably a pro. Maybe someone she knew since her Vegas days.”

“Probably the one who planted the gun in Vegas?” Billets asked.

“That’s my guess.”

Bosch had been keeping his eye on the front gate of the courtyard, just in case the drunk who had been tossed out decided to come back and make his point. But when he glanced over now, he didn’t see the drunk. He saw Officer Ray Powers, wearing mirrored glasses despite the lateness of the day, entering the courtyard and being met halfway across by the bartender. Waving his arms in an animated fashion, the bartender told the big cop about the drunk and the threats. Powers glanced around at the tables and saw Bosch and the others. When he had disengaged from the bartender he sauntered over.

“So, the detective bureau brain trust takes five,” he said.

“That’s right, Powers,” Edgar said. “I think the guy you’re looking for is out there pissing in the bushes.”

“Yes, suh, I’ll jus’ go out there ’n’ fetch him, boss.”

Powers looked around the table at the others with a satisfied smirk on his face. He saw the copies of the shoe prints on the table and pointed at them with his chin.

“Is this what you dicks call an investigative strategy session? Well, I’ll give you a tip. Those there are what they call shoe prints.”

He smiled at his remark, proud of it.

“We’re off duty, Powers,” Billets said. “Why don’t you go do your job and we’ll worry about ours.”

Powers saluted her.

“Somebody’s got to do the job, don’t they?”

He walked away and out through the gate without waiting for a reply.

“He’s got one hell of a bug up his ass,” Rider said.

“He’s just mad because I told his lieutenant about the fingerprint he left on our car,” Billets said. “I think he got his ass chewed. Anyway, back to business. What do you think, Harry? Do we have enough to take a hard run at Veronica?”

“I think we almost do. I’m going to go up there with these guys tomorrow, see what’s on the gate log. Maybe we’ll pay her a visit. I just wish we had something concrete to talk to her about.”

Billets nodded.

“I want to be kept informed tomorrow. Call me by noon.”

“Will do.”

“The more time that goes by on this, the harder it will be to keep this investigation among just us. I think by Monday we’re going to have to take stock and decide whether to turn what we have over to the bureau.”

“I don’t see that,” Bosch said, shaking his head. “Whatever we give them, they’re just going to sit on. If you want to clear this, you’ve got to let us alone, keep the bureau off us.”

“I will try, Harry, but there will come a point where that will be impossible. We’re running a full-scale investigation off the books here. Word’s going to get out. It has to. And all I’m saying is that it will be better if that word comes from me and can be controlled.”

Bosch nodded reluctantly. He knew she was right but he had to fight her suggestion. The case belonged to them. It was his. And all that had happened to him in the last week made it all the more personal. He didn’t want to give it up.

He gathered up the copies of the shoe prints and put them back in his briefcase. He finished the last of his glass of beer and asked who and what he owed for it.

“It’s on me,” Billets said. “The next one, after we clear this, is on you.”

“It’s a deal.”

When Bosch got to his house he found the door locked, but the key he had given Eleanor Wish was under the front mat. The first thing he checked when he got inside was the Hopper print. It was still there on the wall. But she was gone. He made a quick scan of the rooms and found no note. He checked the closet and her clothes were gone. So was her suitcase.

He sat on the bed and thought about her leaving. That morning they had left things open. He had risen early and, while she was still in bed, watching him get ready for the day, he’d asked her what she was going to do during the day. She had told him she didn’t know.

Now she was gone. He rubbed a hand over his face. He was already beginning to feel the loss of her and he replayed in his mind their conversations of the night before. He had played it wrong, he decided. It had cost her something to tell him of her complicity. And he had only evaluated it in terms of what it meant to him and to his case. Not to her. Not to them.

Bosch leaned back until he was lying across the bed. He spread his arms and stared up at the ceiling. He could feel the beer working inside him, making him tired.

“Okay,” he said out loud.

He wondered if she would call or if another five years would go by before he saw her again by happenstance. He thought about how much had happened to him in the past five years and how long a wait that had been. His body ached. He closed his eyes.

“Okay.”

He fell asleep and dreamed about being alone in a desert with no roads and miles of open, desolate country ahead of him in every direction he looked.