The Overlook

“Just hold on,” he said. “I need some water. My throat is raw from all of this talking.”

He went into the kitchen, remembering that he saw bottles of chilled water in the refrigerator while searching the kitchen earlier in the day.

“You want anything?” he called out.

“No,” she called back. “It’s not our house, remember?”

He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water and drank half of it while standing in front of the open door. The cool air felt good, too. He closed the door but then immediately reopened it. He had seen something. On the top shelf was a plastic bottle of grape juice. He took it out and looked at it, remembering that when he went through the trash bag in the garage he had found paper towels with grape juice on them.

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. He put the bottle back in the refrigerator and then returned to the living room, where Rachel was waiting for the story. Once again, he remained standing.

“Okay, when was it that you captured the terrorist known as Moby on video at the port?”

“What does-”

“Please, just answer the question.”

“August twelfth last year.”

“Okay, August twelfth. Then what, some sort of alert went out through the bureau and all of Homeland Security?”

She nodded.

“Not for a while, though,” she said. “It took almost two months of video analysis to confirm it was Nassar and El-Fayed. I wrote the bulletin. It went out October ninth as a confirmed domestic sighting.”

“Out of curiosity, why didn’t you go public with it?”

“Because we have-actually, I can’t tell you.”

“You just did. You must have someone or someplace where you think these two might show up under surveillance. If you go public, they might just go underground and never show up again.”

“Can we go back to your story, please?”

“Fine. So the bulletin went out October ninth. That was the day the plan to kill Stanley Kent began.”

Walling folded her arms across her chest and just stared at him. Bosch thought that maybe she was beginning to see where he was going with the story and she didn’t like it.

“It works best if you start from the end and go backwards,” Bosch said. “Alicia Kent gave you the name Moby. How could she have gotten that name?”

“She overheard one of them calling the other one by that name.”

Bosch shook his head.

“No, she told you she overheard it. But if she was lying, how would she know the name to lie about it? Just coincidence that she gives the nickname of a guy who less than six months ago was confirmed as being in the country-in L.A. County, no less? I don’t think so, Rachel, and neither do you. The odds of that probably can’t be calculated.”

“Okay, so you’re saying that somebody in the bureau or another agency that received the FBI bulletin I wrote gave her the name.”

Bosch nodded and pointed at her.

“Right. He gave her the name so she could come out with it while being questioned by the FBI’s master interrogator. That name along with the plan to dump the car in front of Ramin Samir’s house would act in concert to send this whole thing down the wrong road with the FBI and everybody else chasing after terrorists who had nothing to do with it.”

“He?”

“I’m getting to that now. You are right, anybody who got a look at that bulletin would have been able to give her that name. My guess is that would be a lot of people. A lot of people just in L.A. alone. So how would we narrow it down to one?”

“You tell me.”

Bosch opened the bottle and drank the rest of the water. He held the empty bottle in his hand as he continued.

“You narrow it down by continuing to go backwards. Where would Alicia Kent’s life have intersected with one of those people in the agencies who knew about Moby?”

Walling frowned and shook her head.

“That could have been anywhere with those kinds of parameters. In line at the supermarket, or when she was buying fertilizer for her roses. Anywhere.”

Bosch now had her right where he wanted her to be.

“Then narrow the parameters,” he said. “Where would she have intersected with someone who knew about Moby but also knew that her husband had access to the sort of radioactive materials Moby might be interested in?”

Now she shook her head in a dismissive way.

“Nowhere. It would take a monumental coincidence to-”

She stopped when it came to her. Enlightenment. And shock as she fully understood where Bosch was going.

“My partner and I visited the Kents to warn them early last year. I guess what you’re saying is that that makes me a suspect.”

Bosch shook his head.

“I said ‘he,’ remember? You didn’t come here alone.”

Her eyes fired when she registered the implication.

“That’s ridiculous. There’s no way. I can’t believe you would…”

She didn’t finish as her mind snagged on something, some memory that undermined her trust and loyalty to her partner. Bosch picked up on the tell and moved in closer.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Look,” she insisted, “take my advice and tell no one this theory of yours. You’re lucky you told me first. Because this makes you sound like some kind of crackpot with a vendetta. You have no evidence, no motive, no incriminating statements, nothing. You just have this thing you’ve spun out of… out of a yoga poster.”

“There is no other explanation that fits with the facts. And I’m talking about the facts of the case. Not the fact that the bureau and Homeland Security and the rest of the federal government would love this to be a terrorism event so they can justify their existence and deflect criticism from other failings. Contrary to what you want to think, there is evidence and there are incriminating statements. If we put Alicia Kent on a lie detector, you’ll find out that everything she told me, you and the master interrogator downtown is a lie. The real master was Alicia Kent. As in master manipulator.”

Walling leaned forward and looked down at the floor.

“Thank you, Harry. That master interrogator you love deriding happens to have been me.”

Bosch’s mouth dropped open for a moment before he spoke.

“Oh… well… then, sorry… but it doesn’t matter. The point is, she is a master liar. She lied about everything and now that we know the story, it will be easy to smoke her out.”

Walling got up from her seat and walked over to the front picture window. The vertical blinds were closed but she split them with a finger and stared out into the street. Bosch could see her working the story over, grinding it down.

“What about the witness?” she asked without turning around. “He heard the shooter yell Allah. Are you saying he’s part of this? Or are you saying they just happened to know he was there and yelled Allah as part of this master manipulation?”

Bosch gently tried to clear his throat. It was burning and making it difficult for him to talk.

“No, on that I think it’s just a lesson in hearing what you want to hear. I plead guilty to not being much of a master interrogator myself. The kid told me that he heard the shooter yell it as he pulled the trigger. He said he wasn’t sure but that it sounded like Allah and that, of course, worked with what I was thinking at the time. I heard what I wanted to hear.”