“Easy. You could’ve found it there in the bushes off the goddamned fire road. We already know you searched it by yourself. We-”
“Gentlemen,” Irving interjected.
“-will put you down for this, Bosch.”
“Gentlemen!”
O’Grady closed his mouth and everyone looked at Irving.
“This is getting out of hand. I’m ending this meeting. Suffice it to say, an internal investigation will be conducted and-”
“We are doing our own investigation,” Samuels said. “Meantime, we have to figure out how to salvage our operation.”
Bosch looked at him incredulously.
“Don’t you understand?” he said. “There is no operation. Your star witness is a murderer. You left him in too long, Samuels. He turned, became one of them. He killed Tony Aliso for Joey Marks. His prints were on the body. The gun was found in his house. Not only that, he’s got no alibi. Nothing. He told me he spent all night in the office, but I know he wasn’t there. He left and he had time to get over here, do the job and get back.”
Bosch shook his head sadly and finished in a low voice.
“I agree with you, Samuels. Your operation is tainted now. But not because of me. It was you who left the guy in the oven too long. He got cooked. You were his handler. You fucked up.”
This time Samuels shook his head and smiled sadly. That was when Bosch realized the other shoe hadn’t dropped. There was something else. Samuels angrily flipped up the top page of his pad and read a notation.
“The autopsy concludes time of death was between eleven P.M. Friday and two A.M. Saturday. Is that correct, Detective Bosch?”
“I don’t know how you got the report, since I haven’t seen it myself yet.”
“Was the death between eleven and two?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have those documents, Dan?” Samuels asked Ekeblad.
Ekeblad took several pages folded lengthwise from the inside of his jacket and handed them to Samuels. Samuels opened the packet and glanced at its contents and then tossed it across the table to Bosch. Bosch picked it up but didn’t look at it. He kept his eyes on Samuels.
“What you have there are copies of a page from an investigative log as well as an interview report prepared Tuesday morning by Agent Ekeblad here. There are also two sworn affidavits from agents Ekeblad and Phil Colbert, who will be with us here shortly. What you’ll find if you look at those is that on Friday night at midnight, Agent Ekeblad was sitting behind the wheel of his bureau car in the back parking lot at Caesar’s, just off Industrial Road. His partner Colbert was there next to him and in the back seat, Agent Roy Lindell.”
He waited a beat and Bosch looked down at the papers in his hands.
“It was Roy’s monthly meeting. He was being debriefed. He told Ekeblad and Colbert that just that night he had put four hundred and eighty thousand dollars cash from Marconi’s various enterprises into Anthony Aliso’s briefcase and sent him back to L.A. to have it put in the wash. He also, by the way, mentioned that Tony had been in the club drinking and got a little out of line with one of the girls. In his role as enforcer for Joey Marks and manager of the club, he had to get tough with Tony. He cuffed him once and jerked him around by his collar. This, I think, you might agree, would account for the fingerprints recovered from the deceased’s jacket and the antemortem facial bruising noted in the autopsy.”
Bosch still refused to look up from the documents.
“Other than that, there was a lot to talk about, Detective Bosch. Roy stayed for ninety minutes. And there is no fucking way in the world he could have gotten to Los Angeles to kill Tony Aliso before two A.M., let alone three A.M. And just so you don’t leave here thinking all three of these agents were involved in the murder, you should know that the meeting was monitored by four additional agents in a chase car also parked in the lot for security reasons.”
Samuels waited a beat before delivering his closing argument.
“You don’t have a case. The prints can be explained and the guy you said did it was sitting with two FBI agents three hundred and fifty miles away when the shooting went down. You’ve got nothing. No, actually, that’s wrong. You do have one thing. A planted gun, that’s what you’ve got.”
As if on cue the door behind Bosch opened and he heard footsteps. Keeping his eyes on the documents in front of him, Bosch didn’t turn around to see who it was until he felt a hand grip his shoulder and squeeze. He looked up into the face of Special Agent Roy Lindell. He was smiling, standing next to another agent who Bosch assumed was Ekeblad’s partner, Colbert.
“Bosch,” Lindell said, “I owe you a haircut.”
Bosch was dumbfounded to see the man he had just locked up standing there but quickly assimilated what had happened. Irving and Billets had already been told about the meeting in the parking lot behind Caesar’s, had read the affidavits and believed the alibi. They had authorized Lindell’s release. That was why Billets had asked for the booking number when Bosch had returned her page.
Bosch looked away from Lindell to Irving and Billets.
“You believe this, don’t you? You think I found the gun out there in the weeds and planted it just to make the case a slam.”
There was a hesitation while each one left space for the other to answer. Finally, it was Irving.
“The only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Agent Lindell. His story is solid. I’m reserving judgment on everything else.”
Bosch looked at Lindell, who was still standing.
“Then why didn’t you tell me you were federal when we were in that room together at Metro?”
“Why do you think? For all I knew, you had already put a gun in my bathroom. You think I’m just going to tell you I’m an agent and everything would be cool after that? Yeah, right.”
“We had to play along, Bosch, to see what moves you’d make and to make sure Roy got out of the Metro jail in one piece,” O’Grady said. “After that, we were two thousand feet above you and two thousand behind you all the way across the desert. We were waiting. Half of us were betting you made a deal with Joey Marks. You know, in for a pinch, in for a pound?”
They were taunting him now. Bosch shook his head. It seemed to be the only thing he could do.
“Don’t you people see what is happening?” he said. “You’re the ones who made a deal with Joey Marks. Only you don’t know it. He is playing you like a symphony. Jesus! I can’t believe I’m sitting here and this is actually happening.”
“How is he playing us?” Billets asked, the first indication that she might not have gone all the way across to the other side on him.
Bosch answered, looking at Lindell.
“Don’t you see? They found out about you. They knew you were an agent. So they set this all up.”
Ekeblad snorted in derision.
“They don’t set things up, Bosch,” Samuels said. “If they thought Roy was an informant, they’d just take him out to the desert and put him under three feet of sand. End of threat.”
“No, because we’re not talking about an informant. I’m talking about them knowing specifically he was an agent and knowing that because of that they couldn’t just take him out to the desert. Not an FBI agent. If they did that, they’d have more heat on them than the Branch Davidians ever felt. No, so what they did was make a plan. They know he’s been around a couple years and knows more than enough to take them all down hard. But they can’t just kill him. Not an agent. So they’ve got to neutralize him, taint him. Make him look like he crossed, like he’s just as bad as they are. So when he testifies, they can take him apart with Tony Aliso’s hit. Make a jury think that he’d carry out a hit to maintain his cover. They sell a jury that and they could all walk away.”
Bosch thought he had planted the seeds of a pretty convincing story, even having pulled it together on the fly. The others in the room looked at him in silence for a few moments, but then Lindell spoke up.
“You give them too much credit, Bosch,” he said. “Joey’s not that smart. I know him. He’s not that smart.”
“What about Torrino? You going to tell me he couldn’t come up with this? I just thought of it sitting here. Who knows how long he had to come up with something? Answer one question, Lindell. Did Joey Marks know that Tony
