“Your show, man. Whatever time you need.”
“I’ll need your help with the wand when I shoot pictures. Roland had to go to shoot another scene.”
Bosch nodded and watched as the SID tech screwed an orange filter onto a Nikon camera. He put the camera strap over his head and turned on the laser. It was a box about the size of a VCR with a cable attachment that led to a foot-long wand with a hand grip on it. From the end of the wand a strong orange beam was emitted.
Donovan opened a cabinet and took out several pairs of orange-tinted safety glasses which he handed to Bosch and the others. He put the last pair on himself. He gave Bosch a pair of latex gloves to put on as well.
“I’ll do a quick run around the outside of the trunk and then open her up,” Donovan said.
Just as Donovan moved to the switch box to cut off the overheads, the phone in Bosch’s pocket buzzed. Donovan waited while Bosch answered. It was Carbone.
“Bosch, we’re taking a pass.”
Harry didn’t say anything for a moment and neither did Carbone. Donovan hit the light switch and the room plunged into complete blackness.
“You’re saying you don’t have this guy.” Bosch finally spoke into the dark.
“I checked around, made some calls. Nobody seems to know this guy. Nobody’s working him. . . . Clean, as far as we know. . . . You said he was put in his trunk and capped twice, huh? . . . Bosch, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Yeah, capped twice in the trunk.”
“Trunk music.”
“What?”
“It’s a wise guy saying outta Chicago. You know, when they whack some poor slob they say, ‘Oh, Tony? Don’t worry about Tony. He’s trunk music now. You won’t see him no more.’ But the thing is, Bosch, this doesn’t seem to fit. We don’t know this guy. People I talked to, they think maybe somebody’s trying to make you think it’s OC connected, know what I mean?”
Bosch watched as the laser beam cut through the blackness and bombarded the rear of the trunk with searing light. With the glasses on, the orange was filtered out and the light was a bright, intense white. Bosch was ten feet away from the Rolls, but he could see glowing patterns on the trunk lid and the bumper. This always reminded him of those National Geographic shows in which a submersible camera moved through the ocean’s black depths, putting its light on sunken ships or aircraft. It was somehow eerie.
“Look, Carbone,” he said, “you aren’t even interested in coming out to take a look?”
“Not at this time. Of course, give me a call back if you come across anything, you know, that shows different than what I told you. And I’ll do some more checking tomorrow. I got your number.”
Bosch was secretly pleased that he wasn’t going to get bigfooted by the OCID, but he was also surprised at the brush-off. The quickness with which Carbone had dismissed the case seemed unusual.
“Any other details you want to give me, Bosch?”
“We’re just starting. But let me ask you, you ever hear of a hitter takes the vic’s shoes with him? Also, he unties the body afterward.”
“Takes his shoes . . . unties him. Uh, not offhand, no. Nobody specific. But like I said, I’ll ask around in the morning and I’ll put it on our box. Anything else cute about this one?”
Bosch didn’t like what was happening. Carbone seemed too interested while saying he wasn’t. He said Tony Aliso wasn’t connected, yet he still wanted the details. Was he just trying to be helpful or was there something more to it?
“That’s about all we got at the moment,” Bosch said, deciding not to give up anything else for free. “Like I said, we’re just getting going here.”
“Okay, then, give me the morning and I’ll do some more checking. I’ll call if I come up with anything, okay?”
“Right.”
“Check you later. But you know what I think you have there, Bosch? You’ve got a guy, he was probably making sandwiches with somebody’s wife. Lotta times things look like pro hits that aren’t, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll talk to you later.”
Bosch walked to the rear of the Rolls. Up close he could see the pattern swirls he had noticed in the laser light before appeared to be swipe marks made with a cloth. It looked like the whole car had been wiped down.
But when Donovan moved the wand over the bumper, the laser picked up a partial shoe print on the chrome.
“Did anybody—”
“No,” Bosch said. “Nobody put their foot there.”
“Okay, then. Hold the wand on the print.”
Bosch did so while Donovan bent over and took several photos, bracketing the exposure settings to make sure he had at least one clear shot. It was the forward half of the foot. There was a circle pattern at the ball of the foot with lines extending from it like the rays of a sun. There was a cross-cut pattern through the arch and then the print was cut off by the edge of the bumper.
“Tennis shoe,” Donovan said. “Maybe a work shoe.”
After he photographed it, he moved the wand around the trunk again, but there was nothing but wipe marks.
“Okay,” Donovan said. “Open it.”
Using a penlight to guide his way, Bosch made it to the driver’s door and bent in to pull the trunk release. Shortly afterward, the smell of death flooded the shed.
It looked to Bosch as though the body had not shifted during the transport. But the victim took on a ghoulish look under the harsh examination of the laser, his face almost skeletal, like the monsters painted in Day-Glo in fun-house hallways. The blood seemed blacker and the bone chips in the jagged wound were luminescent in bright counterpoint.
On his clothes, small strands of hair and tiny threads glowed. Bosch moved in with a pair of tweezers and a plastic vial like the kind made to hold a stack of silver half dollars. He carefully picked these pieces of potential evidence off the clothing and collected them in the vial. It was painstaking work and there was nothing much there. He knew this kind of material could be found on anybody at anytime. It was common.
When he was done he said to Donovan, “The tail of the jacket. I flipped it up to check for a wallet.”
“Okay, pull it back down.”
Bosch did so, and there on Aliso’s hip was another footprint. It matched the footprint on the bumper but was more complete. On the heel was another circle pattern with off-shooting lines. In the lower arch was what looked like a brand name but it was unreadable.
Regardless of whether they could identify the shoe, Bosch knew it was a good find. It meant that a careful killer had made a mistake. At least one. If nothing else, it gave rise to the hope that there might be other mistakes, that they might eventually lead him to the killer.
“Take the wand.”
Bosch did so and Donovan did his thing with the camera again.
“I’m just shooting this to document it, but we’ll take the jacket off before the body goes,” he said.
Next Donovan moved the laser up around the inside of the trunk lid. Here the laser illuminated numerous fingerprints, mostly thumbprints, where a hand would have been placed to prop the lid open while loading things in or out. Many of the prints overlapped each other, a sign that they were old, and Bosch knew right away they probably belonged to the victim himself.
“I’ll shoot these, but don’t count on anything,” Donovan said.
“I know.”
When he was done, Donovan put the wand and the camera on top of the laser box and said, “Okay, why don’t we take this fellow out of there, lay ’im out and scan ’im real quick before he’s outta here?”
Without waiting for an answer, he flipped the fluorescents back on and everybody put their hands to their eyes as the harsh light blinded them. A few moments later the body movers and Matthews went to the trunk and started transferring the corpse to a black plastic body bag they had unfolded on a gurney.
“This guy is loose,” Matthews said as they put the corpse down.
“Yeah,?
?? Bosch said. “What do you think?”
“Forty-two to forty-eight. But let me do some stuff and see what we’ve got.”
But first Donovan put out the lights again and moved the wand over the body, from the head down. The tear pools in the eye sockets glowed white in the light. There were a few hairs and fibers on the dead man’s face and Bosch dutifully collected them. There was also a slight abrasion high on the right cheekbone, which had been hidden when the body was lying on its right side in the trunk.
“He could’ve been hit or it mighta been from being shoved into the trunk,” Donovan said.
As the beam moved down over the chest, Donovan got excited.
“Well lookee here.”
Glowing in the laser light were what looked like a complete handprint on the right shoulder of the leather jacket and two smudged thumbprints, one on each of the lapels. Donovan bent down very close to look.
“This is treated leather, it doesn’t absorb the acids in the prints. We caught a major break here, Harry. This guy wears anything else and forget it. The hand is excellent. These thumbs didn’t take . . . I think we can raise them up with some glue. Harry, bend one of the lapels over.”
Bosch reached for the left lapel and carefully turned the cloth over. There on the inside of the crease were four more fingerprints. He turned the right lapel and saw four more there. It appeared that someone had grabbed Tony Aliso by the lapels.
Donovan whistled.
“This looks like two different people. Look at the size of the thumbs on the lapel and the hand on the shoulder. I’d say the hand is smaller, Harry. Maybe a woman. I don’t know. But the hands that grabbed this guy by the lapels were big.”
Donovan got scissors from a nearby toolbox and carefully cut the sport coat off the body. Bosch then held it as Donovan went over it with the laser wand. Nothing else came up besides the shoe print and the fingerprints they had already sighted. Bosch carefully hung the jacket over a chair at the counter and came back to the body. Donovan was moving the laser over the lower extremities.
“What else?” Donovan said to no one except maybe the body. “Come on now, tell us a story.”
There were more fibers and some old stains on the pants. Nothing that stood out as possibly significant until they reached the cuffs. Bosch pulled open the cuff on the right leg and in the crease was a large buildup of dust and fibers. Also, five tiny pieces of gold glitter glowed in the laser beam. Bosch carefully tweezered these into a separate plastic vial. From the left cuff, he recovered two more similar pieces.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Got me. Looks like glitter or something.”
Donovan moved the wand over the bare feet. They were clean, which indicated to Bosch that the victim’s shoes had probably been removed after he was forced into the trunk of the Rolls.
“Okay, that’s it,” Donovan said.
The lights came back on and Matthews went to work with the corpse, rotating joints, opening the shirt to look at the lividity level of the blood, opening the eyes and swiveling the head. Donovan paced around, waiting for the coroner’s tech to finish so he could continue the laser show. He walked over to Bosch.
“Harry, you want the swag on this?”
“Swag?”
“Scientific wild ass guess.”
“Yeah,” Bosch said, amused. “Give me the swag.”
“Well, I think somebody gets the drop on this guy. Ties him up, dumps him in the trunk and drives him to that fire road. He’s still alive, okay? Then our doer gets out, opens the trunk, puts his foot on the bumper ready to do the job but can’t get all the way in there to put the muzzle against the bone, you know? That was important to him. To do the job right. So he sticks his big foot on this poor guy’s hip, leans further in and bam, bam, out go the headlights. What do you think?”
Bosch nodded.
“I think you are on to something.”
He had already been thinking along the same lines but was past those deductions to the problem.
“Then how does he get back?” he asked.
“Back to where?”
“If this guy was in the trunk the whole time, then the doer drove the Rolls. If he drove there in the Rolls, then how’s he get back to wherever he intercepted Tony?”
“The other one,” Donovan said. “We’ve got two different prints on the jacket. Somebody could’ve followed behind the Rolls. The woman. The one who put her hand on the vic’s shoulder.”
Bosch nodded. He had already been puzzling with this but didn’t like something about the scenario Donovan had woven. He wasn’t sure what it was.
“Okay, Bosch,” Matthews interrupted. “You want to hear this tonight or you want to wait for the report?”
“T’night,” Bosch said.
“Okay then, listen up. Lividity was fixed and unchanged. The body was never moved once the heart stopped pumping.” He referred to a clipboard. “Let’s see, what else. We’ve got ninety percent rigor mortis resolution, cornea clouding and we’ve got skin slippage. I think you take all of that and it’s forty-eight hours, maybe a couple hours less. Let us know if you come up with any markers and we might do better.”
“Will do,” Bosch said.
By markers he knew Matthews meant that if he traced the victim’s last day and found out what he had eaten last and when, the ME could get a better fix on time of death by studying the digestion of food in the stomach.
“He’s all yours,” Bosch said to Matthews. “Any idea on the post?”
“You caught the tail end of a holiday weekend. That’s bad luck for you. Last I heard, we’ve run on twenty-seven homicides in the county so far. We probably won’t cut this one until Wednesday, if you’re lucky. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”
But the delay didn’t really bother Bosch this time. In cases like this, the autopsy usually held few surprises. It was pretty clear how the victim died. The mystery was why and by whom.
Matthews and his assistants wheeled the corpse out, leaving Bosch and Donovan alone with the Rolls. Donovan stared at the car silently, contemplating it the way a matador looks at the bull he is going to fight.
“We’re going to get her secrets, Harry.”
Bosch’s phone buzzed then and he fumbled getting it out of his jacket and open. It was Edgar.
“We got the ID, Harry. It is Aliso.”
“You got this off the prints?”
“Yeah. Mossler’s got a fax at home. I sent him everything and he eyeballed it.”
Mossler was one of the SID’s latent-print men.
“This is with the DL thumbprint?”
“Right. Also, I pulled a full set of Tony’s prints from an old pop for soliciting. Mossler had those to look at, too. It’s Aliso.”
“Okay, good work. What else you got?”
“Like I said, I ran this guy. He’s pretty clean. Just the soliciting arrest back in seventy-five. Few other things, though. His name comes up as a victim on a burglary up at his house in March. And on the civil indexes I’ve got a few civil actions against the guy. Breach-of-contract stuff, it looks like. A trail of broken promises and pissed-off people, Harry, good motive stuff.”
“What were the cases about?”
“That’s all I’ve got for now, just the abstracts in the civil index. I’ll have to pull the actual cases when I can get into the courthouse.”
“Okay. Did you check Missing Persons?”
“Yeah, I did. He was never reported. You got anything there?”
“Maybe. We might’ve gotten lucky. Looks like we are going to get some prints off the body. Two sets.”
“Off the body? That’s very cool.”
“Off the leather jacket.”
Bosch could tell Edgar was excited. Both detectives knew that if the prints were not those of a suspect, then they would surely be fresh enough to belong to people who had seen the victim in the time shortly before his death.
“Yo
u call OCID?”
Bosch was waiting for him to ask.
“Yeah. They’re taking a pass.”
“What?”
“That’s what they said. At least for now. Until we find something they might be interested in.”
Bosch wondered if Edgar even believed he had made the call.
“That doesn’t figure, Harry.”
“Yeah, well, all we can do is our job. You hear from Kiz?”
“Not yet. Who’d you talk to over at Organized Crime?”
“Guy named Carbone. He was on call.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, neither had I. I gotta go, Jerry. Let me know what you know.”
As soon as Bosch hung up, the door to the shed opened and in stepped Lieutenant Grace Billets. She quickly scanned the room and saw Donovan working in the car. She asked Bosch to step outside and that was when he knew she was unhappy.
She closed the door after he stepped out. She was in her forties and had as many years on the job as Bosch, give or take a couple, but they had never worked together before her assignment as his commanding officer. She was of medium build, with reddish-brown hair she kept short. She wore no makeup. She was dressed entirely in black— jeans, T-shirt and blazer. She also wore black cowboy boots. Her only concession to femininity was the pair of thin gold hoop earrings. Her manner was no concession to anything.
“What’s going on, Harry? You moved the body in the car?”
“Had to. It was either that or dump it out of the car with about ten thousand people watching us instead of the fireworks they were supposed to see.”
Bosch explained the situation in detail and Billets listened silently. When he was done, she nodded.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know the details. It looks like it was your only choice.”
Bosch liked that about her. She wasn’t always right and she was willing to admit it.
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“So what do we have?”
When Bosch and Billets stepped back into the shed, Donovan was at one of the worktables working with the leather jacket. He had hung it on a wire inside an empty one-hundred-gallon aquarium and then dropped in a Hard Evidence packet. The packet, when broken open, emitted cyanoacrylate fumes which would attach to the amino acids and oils of fingerprints and crystallize, thereby raising the ridges and whorls and making them more visible and photo-ready.