Michael Connelly: Lost Light

“Nobody’s come here and talked to me about the case, Harry. You’re the only one. I mean that.”

“I believe you. I was wrong about that. But what was it that you forgot before? Why were you going to call me?”

He closed his eyes for a moment but then opened them. They were clear and focused.

“I told you that Taylor insured the money, right?”

“Right, you told me that.”

“What I forgot was that the insurance company-offhand I can’t remember the name of -”

“Global Underwriters. You remembered the other day.”

“Right. Global Underwriters. As a condition of contract Global required that the lender-that was BankLA-scan all the bills.”

“Scan the bills? What do you mean?”

“Record the serial numbers.”

I remembered the paragraph I had circled on the newspaper clip. It had apparently been true. I started doing the math in my head. Two million divided by a hundred. I almost had it and then lost the number.

“That would be a lot of numbers.”

“I know. The bank balked-said it would take four people a week, something like that. So they negotiated and compromised. They sampled. They took ten numbers from every one of the stacks.”

I remembered from the Times story that the money was delivered in $25,000 bundles. That math I could do. Eighty bundles made $2 million.

“So they took eight hundred numbers. Still a lot.”

“Yeah, I remember the printout was like six pages long.”

“And what did you do with it?”

“Let me have another taste of that Black Bush, would you?”

I gave it to him. I could tell the flask was just about empty. I needed to get what he had and get out of there. I was getting sucked into his miserable world and I didn’t like it.

“Did you put out the numbers?”

“Yeah, we put out the list. Gave it to the feds. And used the robbery guys to get the list out to all the banks in the county. I also sent it to Vegas Metro so they could get it into the casinos.”

I nodded, waiting for more.

“But you know how that goes, Harry. A list like that is only good if the people are checking it. Believe it or not, there are a hell of a lot of hundred-dollar bills out there, and if you use them in the right places people don’t raise an eyebrow. They aren’t going to take the time to run the number down a six-page list. They don’t have the time or the inclination.”

It was true. Recorded money was most often used as evidence when it was found in the possession of a suspect in a financial crime such as a bank robbery. I could not remember working on or even hearing about a case where marked or recorded money was actually traced by transaction to a suspect.

“You were going to call me back because you forgot to tell me that?”

“No, not just that. There’s more. Anything left in that little flask of yours?”

I shook the flask so he could hear that it was almost empty. I gave him what was left and then capped it and put it back in my pocket.

“That’s it, Law. Until next time. Finish what you were going to tell me.”

His tongue poked out of his horrible hole of a mouth and licked a drop of whiskey from the corner. It was pathetic and I turned away as if to check the time on the television so he didn’t have to know I saw it. On the tube was a financial news report. A graph with a red line trending down was on the screen to the side of the anchorman’s concerned and puffy face.

I looked back at Cross and waited.

“Well,” he said, “about, I don’t know, ten months or so into the case, close to a year-this is after me and Jack had moved on and were working other things-Jack got a call from Westwood about the serial numbers. It all came back to me the other day after you left.”

I assumed Cross was talking about an FBI agent calling his partner. It was not an uncommon practice within the LAPD for investigators to never refer to FBI agents as FBI agents, as if denying them their title somehow knocked them down a notch or two. There had never been any love lost between the two competing organizations. But the main federal building in Los Angeles was on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood and it housed the whole sandbox of federal law enforcement. All jurisdictional biases aside, I needed to be sure.

“An FBI agent?” I asked.

“Yeah, an agent. A woman, in fact.”

“Okay. What did she tell you guys?”

“She only spoke to Jack, and then Jack told me. The agent said that one of the serial numbers was wrong and Jack said, ‘Is that right? How so?’ And the agent told him that the list had wound through the building and eventually across her desk and she’d taken the time to scan the numbers into her computer and there was a problem with one of them.”

He stopped as if to catch his breath. He licked his lips again and it reminded me of some sort of underwater creature poking out of a crevice.

“I sure wish you had more in that flask, Harry.”

“Sorry, I don’t. Next time. What was the problem with the number?”

“Well, as far as I remember, this gal, she told Jack that she collects numbers. Know what I mean? Whenever a flier comes across the desk with currency numbers on it, she puts them into her computer, adds them to the data bank. She can run cross-matches, things like that. It was a new program she was working on. She’d been doing it for a few years and had a lot of numbers in the box. Tell you what, I need some water. My throat-too much talking.”

“I’ll go get Danny.”

“No, no, that’s not-tell you what, just go to the sink and put some water in that thing you got and I can drink from that. That’ll be fine. Don’t bother Danny. She’s been bothered enough.”

In the bathroom I filled the flask halfway with water from the faucet. I shook it and brought it out to him. He took it all. After a few moments he finally continued the story.

“She said one of the numbers on our list was on somebody else’s list and that was impossible.”

“What do you mean? I’m not tracking this.”

“Let me see if I remember this right. She said that one of the hundreds that was on our list had a serial number that belonged to a hundred that was part of a bait packet taken in a bank robbery about six months before our movie set robbery went down.”

“Where was the bank robbery?”

“Marina del Rey, I think. I’m not sure about that, though.”

“Okay, so what was the problem? Why couldn’t the hundred from the earlier bank robbery get recirculated, land back in a bank and then become part of the two million sent to the movie set?”

“That’s what I said and Jack told me that it was impossible. He said the agent said the guy who took that bill in Marina del Rey in the first place got caught. He had the bait pack on him and he went to the federal clink and the bill was held as evidence.”

I nodded and thought about this, trying to get it right.

“You’re saying that she was telling you that it would have been impossible for the hundred on your list to have been part of the movie delivery because at that time that hundred-dollar bill was in evidence lockup in regard to the Marina del Rey bank robbery.”

“Exactly. She even went in and checked the evidence to make sure the hundred was still there. It was.”

I tried to think about what this could mean, if it meant anything at all.

“What did you and Jack do?”

“Well, not much. There were a lot of numbers-six pages’ worth. We figured maybe we just got a bad one. You know, maybe the guy who recorded it all had messed up, transposed a number or whatever. We were running on a new case by then. Jack said he’d make some calls to the bank and Global Underwriters. But I don’t know if he did. Then, soon after that, we walked into the shit in that bar and everything else sort of drifted away… until I thought about Angella Benton and called you. Things are starting to come back to me now, you know?”