of place as Bosch felt in the suite he stood in.
“Dolphins in the desert,” he said out loud.
The room was plush by any standards in any city and obviously was kept for high rollers. Bosch stood by the bed for a few moments and just looked around. There was nothing that seemed out of place and the thick carpet had the uniformed waves left by a recent vacuuming. He guessed that if there had been anything of evidentiary value in the room it was gone now. But still he went through the motions. He looked under the bed and in the drawers. Behind the bureau he found a matchbook from a local Mexican restaurant called La Fuentes, but there was no telling how long it had been there.
The bathroom was tiled in pink marble floor to ceiling. The fixtures were polished brass. Bosch looked around for a moment but saw nothing of interest. He opened the glass door to the shower stall and looked in and also found nothing. But as he was closing the door his eyes caught on something on the drain. He reopened the door and looked down, then pressed his finger on the tiny speck of gold caught in the rubber sealant around the drain fitting. He raised his finger and found the tiny piece of glitter stuck to his finger. He guessed that it was a match to the pieces of glitter found in the cuffs of Tony Aliso’s pants. Now all he needed was to figure out what they were and where they had come from.
The Metro Police Department was on Stewart Street in downtown. Bosch stopped at the front desk and explained he was an out-of-town investigator wanting to make a courtesy check-in with the homicide squad. He was directed to the third-floor detective bureau, where a desk man escorted him through a deserted squad room to the commander’s office. Captain John Felton was a thick-necked, deeply tanned man of about fifty. Bosch figured he had probably given the welcome speech to at least a hundred cops from all over the country in the last month alone. Las Vegas was that kind of place. Felton asked Bosch to sit down and he gave him the standard spiel.
“Detective Bosch, welcome to Las Vegas. Lucky for you I decided to come in on the holiday to take care of some of this paperwork that haunts me. Otherwise, there’d be nobody here. Anyway, I hope you find your stay enjoyable and productive. If there is anything you need, don’t hesitate to call. I can promise you nothing, but if you request something that is within my power to provide, I will be more than happy to provide it. So, that out of the way, why don’t you tell me what brings you here?”
Bosch gave him a quick rundown on the case. Felton wrote down the name Tony Aliso and the last days he was known to have stayed in Las Vegas and where.
“I’m just trying to run down his activities on the days he was here.”
“You think he was followed from here and then taken off in L.A.?”
“I don’t think anything at the moment. We don’t have evidence of that.”
“And I hope you won’t find any. That’s not the kind of press we want to get in L.A. What else you got?”
Bosch pulled his briefcase onto his lap and opened it.
“I’ve got two sets of prints taken off the body. We-”
“The body?”
“He was wearing a treated leather jacket. We got the prints with the laser. Anyway, we ran them on AFIS, NCIC, California DOJ, the works, but got nothing. I thought maybe you’d run them through your own computer, see what happens.”
While the Automated Fingerprint Identification System used by the LAPD was a computer network of dozens of fingerprint databases across the country, it didn’t connect them all. And most big-city police departments had their own private databases. In Vegas they would be prints taken from people who applied for jobs for the city or the casinos. They were also prints taken from people on the sly, prints the department shouldn’t legally have because their owners had simply fallen under the suspicion of the department but had never been arrested. It was against this database that Bosch was hopeful Felton would check the sets from the Aliso case.
“Well, let me see what you have,” Felton said. “I can’t promise anything. We’ve probably gotta few that the national nets don’t, but it’s a long shot.”
Bosch handed over print cards Art Donovan had prepared for him.
“So you are starting at the Mirage?” the captain asked after he put the cards to the side of his desk.
“Yeah. I’ll show his picture around, go through the motions, see what I can come up with.”
“You’re telling me everything you know, right?”
“Right,” Bosch lied.
“Okay.” Felton opened a desk drawer and took out a business card and handed it over to Bosch. “That’s got my office and pager on it. Call me if anything comes up. I’ve got the pager with me at all times. Meantime, I’ll get back to you about the prints, one way or the other, by tomorrow morning.”
Bosch thanked him and left. In the lobby of the police station he called the SID office at LAPD and asked Donovan if he’d had time to check out the tiny pieces of glitter they had found in the cuffs of Tony Aliso’s pants.
“Yeah, but you aren’t going to like it,” Donovan said. “It’s just glitter. Tinted aluminum. You know, like they use in costuming and in celebrations. Your guy probably went to a party or something, they were throwing this stuff around, maybe popping it out of party favors or something, and some of it got on him. He could brush off what he could see, but he didn’t see the particles that fell into the cuffs of his pants. They stayed.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Uh, no. Not on the evidence at least.”
“Then on what?”
“Well, Harry, you know the guy from OCID that you were talking on the phone with last night while we were in the shed?”
“Carbone?”
“Yeah, Dominic Carbone. Well, he dropped by the lab today. He was asking questions about what we found last night.”
Bosch’s vision darkened. He said nothing and Donovan continued.
“He said he was here on something else and was just acting curious. But, Harry, I don’t know. It seemed more than just a passing interest, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. How much did you tell him?”
“Well, before I caught on and started wondering what was going on, I sort of let slip we pulled prints off the jacket. Sorry, Harry, but I was proud. It’s rare that we pull righteous prints off a dead guy’s jacket, and I guess I was sort of braggin’ about it.”
“It’s okay. You tell him we didn’t get anything with them?”
“Yeah, I said they came back clean. But then…then he asked for a copy of the set, said he might be able to do something with them, whatever that means.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you think, I gave him a set.”
“You what?”
“Just kidding, Harry. I told him to call you if he wanted a set.”
“Good. What else you tell him?”
“That’s it, Harry.”
“Okay, Art, it’s cool. I’ll check you later.”
“See you, Harry. Hey, where are you, anyway?”
“Vegas.”
“Really? Hey, put down a five for me on seven on the roulette wheel. Do it one time. I’ll pay you when you get back. Unless I win. Then you pay me.”
Bosch got back to his room forty-five minutes before his appointment with Hank Meyer. He used the time to shower, shave and change into one of his fresh shirts. He felt refreshed, ready to go back into the desert heat.
Meyer had arranged to have the sports book clerks and dealers who worked the poker pit on the previous Thursday and Friday evening shifts to be interviewed one at a time in his office. There were six men and three women. Eight were dealers and one was the clerk Aliso always placed his sports bets with. During any shift, the poker dealers rotated around the casino’s six poker tables every twenty minutes. This meant that all eight had dealt cards to Aliso during his last visit to Las Vegas, and by virtue of his regular trips to the casino, they readily recognized him and knew him.
With Meyer sitting by watching, Bosch quickly moved through the interviews with the poker dealers in an hour.
