guy wore gloves.”
“Okay.”
Bosch involuntarily yawned and Edgar and Rider followed suit. He drank from the cup of stale coffee he had brought into the office with him. He had long had the caffeine jitters but knew if he stopped feeding the beast now he would quickly crash.
“And the theory on what this intruder was retrieving?” Billets asked.
“The broken mug puts him at the desk rather than the files,” Rider said. “Nothing in the desk seemed disturbed. No empty files, nothing like that. We think it was a bug. Somebody put a bug in Aliso’s phone and couldn’t afford to let us find it. The phone was right next to the mug in the pictures on Aliso’s walls. The intruder somehow knocked it over. Funny thing is, we never checked the phone for a bug. If whoever this guy was had left well enough alone, we probably would have never tumbled to it.”
“I’ve been to Archway,” Billets said. “It’s got a wall around it. It’s got its own private security force. How’s this guy get in? Or are you suggesting an inside job?”
“Two things,” Bosch said. “There was a film shooting in progress at the studio on the New York Street set. That meant a lot of people in and out of the front gate. Maybe this guy was able to slip through with part of the shooting crew. The direction in which he walks off in the video is to the north. That’s where New York Street is. The gate is to the south. Also, the north side of the studio butts up against the Hollywood Cemetery. You’re right, there is a wall. But at night, after the cemetery is closed, it’s dark and secluded. Our guy could’ve climbed the wall there. Whatever way he did it, he had practice.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he was taking a bug out of Tony Aliso’s phone, it had to have been planted there in the first place.”
Billets nodded.
“Who do you think he was?” she asked quietly.
Bosch looked at Rider to see if she wanted to answer. When she didn’t speak, he did.
“Hard to say. The timing is the catch. Aliso’s probably been dead since Friday night, his body’s not found till about six last night. Then this break-in comes at eight-thirteen. That’s after Aliso’s been found and after people start finding out about it.”
“But eight-thirteen, that’s before you talked to the wife?”
“Right. So that kind of threw a wrench into it. I mean, I was all set to say let’s go full speed on the wife and see what we get. Now, I’m not so sure. See, if she’s involved, this break-in doesn’t make sense.”
“Explain.”
“Well, first you’ve got to figure out why he was being bugged. And what’s the most likely answer? The wife put a PI or somebody on Tony to see if he was screwing around. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now, saying that’s the case, if the wife was involved in putting her husband down into that trunk, why would she or her PI or whoever wait until last night-this is after the body’s been found-to pull the bug out of there? It doesn’t make sense. It only makes sense if the two things were not related, if the killing and the bug are separate. Understand?”
“I think so.”
“And that’s why I’m not ready to chuck everything and just look at the wife. Personally, I think she might be good for this. But there’s too much we don’t know right now. It doesn’t feel right to me. There’s something else running through all of this, and we don’t know what yet.”
Billets nodded and looked at all the investigators.
“This is good. I know there isn’t a lot that is solid yet, but it’s still good work. Anything else? What about the prints Art Donovan pulled off the victim’s jacket last night?”
“For now we’ve struck out. He put them on AFIS, NCIC, the whole works, and got blanked.”
“Damn.”
“They’re still valuable. We come up with a suspect, the prints could be a clincher.”
“Anything else from the car?”
“No,” Bosch said.
“Yes,” Rider said.
Billets raised her eyebrows at the contradiction.
“One of the prints Donovan found on the inside lip of the trunk lid,” Rider said. “It came back to Ray Powers. He’s the P-3 who found the body. He overstepped when he popped the trunk. He obviously left his print when he opened it. We caught it and no harm, no foul, but it was sloppy work and he should have never opened the trunk in the first place. He should’ve called us.”
Billets glanced at Bosch and he guessed she was wondering why he hadn’t brought this to her attention. He looked down at her desk.
“Okay, I’ll take care of it,” Billets said. “I know Powers. He’s been around and he should certainly know procedure.”
Bosch could have defended Powers with the explanation the cop had given the day before but he let it go. Powers wasn’t worth it. Billets went on.
“So where do we go from here?”
“Well, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” Bosch said. “I once heard this story about a sculptor and somebody asked him how he turned a block of granite into a beautiful statue of a woman. And he said that he just chips away everything that isn’t the woman. That’s what we have to do now. We’ve got this big block of information and evidence. We’ve got to chip away everything that doesn’t count, that doesn’t fit.”
Billets smiled and Bosch suddenly felt embarrassed about the analogy, though he believed it was accurate.
“What about Las Vegas?” she asked. “Is that part of the statue or the part we need to chip away?”
Now Rider and Edgar were smiling.
“Well, we’ve got to go there, for one thing,” Bosch said, hoping he didn’t sound defensive. “Right now all we know is that this victim went there and was dead pretty soon after he came back. We don’t know what he did there, whether he won, lost, whether somebody tailed him back here from there. For all we know, he could’ve hit a jackpot there and was followed back here and ripped off. We’ve got a lot of questions about Las Vegas.”
“Plus, there’s the woman,” Rider said.
“What woman?” Billets asked.
“Right,” Bosch said. “The last call made on Tony Aliso’s office line was to a club in North Las Vegas. I called it and got the name of a woman I think he was seeing over there. Layla. There was-”
“Layla? Like that song?”
“I guess. There also was a message from an unnamed woman on his office line. I think it might have been this Layla. We’ve got to talk to her.”
Billets nodded, made sure Bosch was done and then laid down the battle plan.
“All right,” Billets said. “First off, all media inquiries are to be directed to me. The best way to control information on this is to have it come from one mouth. For the moment, we’ll tell the reporters it is obviously under investigation and we are leaning toward a possible carjacking or robbery scenario. It’s innocuous enough and will probably appease them. Everyone okay with that?”
The three detectives nodded.
“Okay, I’m going to make a case with the captain to keep the case here with us. It looks to me like we have three or four avenues which need to be pursued vigorously. Granite that we have to chip away at, as Harry would say.
“Anyway, it will also help me with the captain if we are already scrambling on these things. So, Harry, I want you to get on a plane as soon as possible and get to Vegas. I want you on that end of it. But if there’s nothing there, I want you to get in and get out. We’ll need you back here. Okay?”
Bosch nodded. It would have been his choice if he were the one making the decisions, but he felt a pang of discomfort that she was doing it.
“Kiz, you stick with the financial trail. I want to be in a position of knowing everything about this guy Anthony Aliso by tomorrow morning. You’re also going to have to go up to the house with the search warrant, so while you are there, take another shot at the wife, see what else you can get about the marriage when you’re picking up the
