Peoples pocketed the tape and nodded.
“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he said. “If anyone comes in here and asks what you are doing, close that file and tell them to see me.”
“One last thing. What about the money?”
“What about it?”
“How much money from the movie set heist did Aziz have under his car seat?”
I thought I saw a small smile start to play on Peoples’s face, but then it went away.
“He had a hundred bucks. One bill traced to the heist.”
He stayed long enough to see the disappointment on my face, then turned to the door.
After he left the room I sat down at the desk and opened the file. It contained two pages that had security stamps on them and had words in the middle of paragraphs and then whole paragraphs blocked out with black ink. Peoples clearly wasn’t going to let me see anything I had not bargained for-or extorted from him, as he had put it.
The pages were taken from what I assumed was a larger file. There was a coding in small print at the top left corner. I reached into the cardboard box and opened my file. I took out one of the loose sheets of note paper and wrote the code number from each page down. I then read what Peoples was allowing me to read.
The first page had two dated paragraphs.
5-11-99-SUBJECT confirmed in Hamburg at •••• in company with •••• and ••••. SUBJECT seen in restaurant by •••• approximately 20:00 until 23:30 hours. No further detail.
7-1-99-SUBJECT passport scan at Heathrow at 14:40 hours. Follow up determination arrival on Lufthansa Flight 698 from Frankfurt. No further detail.
The paragraphs before and after these two were completely blacked out. What I was looking at was the log in which tabs on Aziz had been kept over the years by the feds. He was on the watch list. This is what it amounted to. Sightings by informants or agents and airport passport checks.
The two dates on the page were on either side of the murder of Angella Benton and the movie set heist. It by no means cleared Aziz of active or background involvement in the crimes. Yet, if I believed the document in front of me, he was in Europe both before and after the occurrence of the crimes I was investigating. But it was no alibi. Aziz was known, according to the Times article I had read, to travel with false identification. It was possible he had slipped into this country to commit the crimes and then slipped out.
I went on to the next page. This one had only one paragraph that was not blacked out. But the date was a direct hit.
3-19-00-SUBJECT passport scan at LAX-CA. Arrival on Qantas Flight 88 from Manilla at 18:11 hrs. Security check and search. Questioned by •••• ••••, Los Angeles field office. See transcript #00-44969. Released at 21:15 hrs.
Aziz had what appeared to be a perfect alibi for the night Agent Martha Gessler disappeared. He was being questioned by an FBI agent at Los Angeles International Airport until 9:15 P.M., which put him in federal custody at the same time Gessler disappeared while on her way home from work.
I put the two sheets back in the file and put it back in the drawer. I wrote no further notes-there was nothing to write-on the page from my file. I put it back inside the file and lifted out the murder book. I was just about to start into it when the door to the room opened and there was Milton. I said nothing. I waited for him to make the first move. He stepped in and looked around the room as though it was the size of a warehouse. He finally spoke without looking at me.
“You have some balls on you, Bosch. Doing what you’re doing and thinking you’re going to just walk away from it. Away from me.”
“I guess I could say the same thing about you.”
“If it was me I would have called your bluff.”
“Then you would have called it wrong.”
He leaned down and put both hands on the table and looked right at me.
“You are a has-been, Bosch. The world’s passed you by, but here you are, grabbing at straws, fucking with people who are trying to protect the future.”
I was unimpressed and hoped I showed it. I leaned back and looked up at him.
“Why don’t you relax, man? You’ve got nothing to worry about as far as I can tell. You’ve got a boss who’s more interested in a cover-up than a cleanup. You’ll do okay on this, Milton. I think he’s mad because you got caught, not because of what you did.”
He pointed a finger at me.
“Don’t fucking go there. Don’t. The day I want career advice from you is the day I turn in my badge.”
“Fine. Then what do you want?”
“I want to give you a warning. Watch out for me, Bosch. ’Cause I’m coming.”
“Then I’ll be ready.”
He turned and walked out, leaving the door open. A few seconds later Peoples was back.
“You ready?”
“Been ready.”
“Where’s the file I gave you?”
“It’s back in the drawer.”
He leaned over the desk and slid open the drawer to make sure. He even opened the file to make sure I hadn’t pulled a fast one.
“Okay, let’s go. Bring your box.”
I followed him through a couple security doors and I was once again in the hallway of cells. But before we got close to the doors with the mirrored windows he used his card key to open a door and he ushered me into an interview room. There was a table and two chairs. Mousouwa Aziz was already sitting in one of them. An agent I had not seen before was leaning against the corner to the left of the door. Peoples moved into the other corner.
“Have a seat,” he said. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
I put the box I carried down on the floor, pulled out the remaining chair and sat down across the table from Aziz. He looked weak and thin. A line of dark hair had grown in below the blond dye job. His hooded eyes were bloodshot and I wondered if they ever turned the light out in his cell. Things had certainly changed in his world. Two years ago his arrival and identification at LAX had brought a custody hold for a few hours while an agent attempted to interview him. Now a border stop got him an interminable hold in the FBI’s inner sanctum.
I wasn’t expecting much from the interview but felt I needed the face-to-face before proceeding or disposing of Aziz as a suspect. After viewing the intelligence reports a few minutes earlier, I was leaning toward the latter. All I had that connected the diminutive would-be terrorist to Angella Benton was the money. At the time of his arrest at the border he’d had in his possession one of the hundred-dollar bills that had come from the movie set heist. Only one. There were probably a lot of explanations for this and I was beginning to think that his involvement in the murder and heist was not one of them.
Reaching down to the cardboard box I pulled up my file on Angella Benton and opened it on my lap, where Aziz could not see it. I took out the photo of Angella that had been provided by her family. It showed her in a studio portrait taken at the time of her graduation from Ohio State, less than two years before her death. I looked up at Aziz.
“My name is Harry Bosch. I am investigating the death of Angella Benton four years ago. Does she look familiar to you?”
I slid the photo across the table and studied his face and eyes for any tell, any giveaway. His eyes moved over the photograph but I saw nothing in the way of a reaction. He said nothing.
“Did you know her?”
He didn’t answer.
“She worked for a movie company that was robbed. You ended up with some of the money. How?”
