'Where'd that Brinks truck come from?' Dahlia wanted to know.
Jeb had called in the plates and now confirmed that it was the armored car that went missing from Wilshire Boulevard in 1983 with fifteen million in gold bullion. He filled Dahlia in on the cold case.
'The third guard is probably in back,' he concluded.
Dahlia sighed after he finished. She could see the trap we were in if this got out. 'Til keep it quiet until Chase gets back,' she said, but wasn't happy about it.
We called two crime-scene photographers to the scene and six CSIs. Alexa and Jeb handpicked everyone. We worked fast. There wasn't any useful trace evidence inside the well house because over the years heavy rainwater had seeped in and anything that might have been there was long gone.
A police flatbed truck arrived at six and backed up the narrow drive.
The assistant coroner, Ray Tsu, pulled in at six thirty. The quiet Asian ME was called Fey Ray by almost everyone because he was rail thin and never spoke above a whisper. He'd worked half a dozen of my cases in the past.
He looked through the window at the two skeletons in the front seat. Because it was impossible to get inside the truck without torches, he made the decision to leave them in the armored car for transport back to the ambulance bay in the empty hospital in North Hollywood and remove the remains there.
As the sun came up, the tow drivers inflated the tires and winched the armored car out of the well house onto the flatbed. They tied a new tarp over the top to hide it from the neighbors, then drove the flatbed down the drive onto the street below.
Twenty-five minutes later we were pulling into the covered ambulance bay in the back of the old North Hollywood Medical Center.
The building was a big stucco four-story fifties-style rectangle with mismatching additions that architecturally resembled a bunch of shoeboxes. White with peeling green trim, it looked pretty run-down.
By ten A. M., our handpicked CSI team along with two forensic tech welders were hard at work in the ambulance bay opening the truck. The armored car was made of bulletproof steel so the techs had to use oxyfuel torches to cut through it. The door lock was finally freed.
Jeb had already assigned the armored car heist and its resulting murders to Hitch and me. As the new primaries on this three-decade-old cold case, we stepped up onto the truck s back bumper to open the rear door.
Because I now suspected that my new partner was afraid of ghosts, and because we were expecting to uncover a third skeleton inside, I did the honors.
I gloved up and pulled the door wide.
Chapter 38
The truck was empty.
No third guard in the back, an interesting development.
'So the third guard probably did the deed,' Hitch reasoned. 'He jumped his buddies and made off with the fifteen mil in gold bullion.'
He was visibly relieved a third skeleton wasn't lying around in the truck like some gruesome special effect from Pirates of the Caribbean.
'We need to get the identities of all three Brinks guards from the old case file and compare dental charts so we can identify the missing one,' Jeb said. 'That should tell us which one of these guys was the potential doer.'
He turned to Ray Tsu. 'You can remove the two guys from the front compartment now.'
We were just getting set to let the CSIs eome in to do a trace evidence sweep when I noticed four closed strongboxes pushed up next to the bench at the front of the compartment.
'I wonder why they didn't take those,' I said. 'Be easier to carry.'
'Because you'd need a forklift to move fifteen million in gold bullion. The killer probably took it out in individual bricks,' Hitch replied. 'What would that much gold weigh anyway?' He reached down with a gloved hand and opened the top of the nearest box.
That's when we got the first big surprise.
Resting inside the strongbox were at least twenty-five gold bricks. They glittered brilliantly in the fluorescent light.
'Get the fuck outta here,' Hitch whispered.
We opened the second box and, like the first, it was also filled to the top with bullion. So were the last two.
'Let's back out of here and think this over,' 1 said.
We jumped down and told Jeb, Alexa, and Dahlia what we had just found. After they had all looked at the gold, everyone stood behind the truck talking at once.
The question was, why steal an armored car, kill at least two of the guards, and then leave fifteen million in bullion behind, parked with two skeletons in a concrete well house for over twenty-five years?
'Unless this gold is bogus,' I offered. 'Maybe somebody switched it out with painted lead or something.'
'I'll get a metallurgist out here right away and find out,' Alexa said. 'The Jewelry Mart should have somebody who can assay this. I'll get someone who's bonded and sworn to secrecy.'
While she was working on that, the rest of us tried to come to grips with this new find. It changed all my theories.
'What is going on here?' Dahlia said. It was the second time in two days I'd seen her off balance. 'Was this a gold bullion heist or not?'
'We'll know more once these bars are tested,' Jeb told her.
Ten minutes later I saw Hitch getting some coffee from a portable urn one of the CSIs had brought in. He carried an extra cup over to me behind the armored car. We stood, blowing steam across the cup rims, considering the new developments.
'I think you're wrong,' I finally told him, pointing at the gold. 'That's our Act Two complication.'
He smiled widely at me. 'You're absolutely right, dawg, and since we have Act One in place and this kick-ass complication in Act Two, now it's all about…'
ACT THREE
Chapter 39
An hour later, Alexa had returned to her office and Dahlia to her trial in progress at the downtown courthouse. There were now fifteen men and women from the MEs office and CSI assembled inside the deserted hospital building. Some wore CSI jumpsuits and carried satchels full of equipment, others were from the lab or the ME s office and wore white coats. None of them had been told why they were here. They stood listening as Captain Calloway filled them in on the old armored car case.
Hitch and I stood behind Jeb and listened. He finished with the briefing and then launched into a rant on security precautions.
'It s extremely important that you protect the confidentiality of this investigation,' he said to the roomful of earnest-looking geeks. 'You cannot tell anyone about this. Not your wife, not your brother nobody.
Because, while you may think you can impress upon them the severity of the situation, my experience has been once you tell anything to anyone outside the immediate scope of the investigation, it always leaks.'
The tech team looked solemn, but who knew how seriously any of them were actually taking this warning.
Ray Tsu, as a supervising coroner, had agreed to personally wrangle the ME staff for us. He stood off to one
