Michael Connelly: Trunk Music

“Maybe.” Bosch tried to think. The name was vaguely familiar but he could not place it. He was sure they had never worked together. “That’s why I’m calling. You might want to take a look at this.”

“Run it down for me.”

“Sure. White male found in the trunk of his Silver Cloud with two in the back of the head. Probably twenty-twos.”

“What else?”

“Car was on a fire road off Mulholland. Doesn’t look like a straight robbery. At least, not a personal robbery. I got cards and cash in the wallet and a Presidential on his wrist. Diamonds at every hour on the hour.”

“You’re not telling me who the stiff is. Who’s the stiff?”

“Nothing confirmed yet but-”

“Just give it to me.”

Bosch had trouble not being able to put a face with the voice over the phone.

“It looks like the ID is going to be Anthony N. Aliso, forty-eight years old. Lives up in the hills. Looks like he has some kind of company with an office at one of the studios down on Melrose near Paramount. TNA Productions is the name of his outfit. I think it’s over at Archway Studios. We’ll know more in a little while.”

He only got silence in return.

“Mean anything?”

“Anthony Aliso.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Anthony Aliso.”

Carbone repeated the name slowly, as if it were a fine wine he was tasting before deciding whether to accept the bottle or spit it out. He was then quiet for another long moment.

“Nothing hits me right away, Bosch,” he finally said. “I can make a couple calls. Where you going to be?”

“The print shed. He’s here with us and I’ll be here a while.”

“What do you mean, you got the guy’s body there in the shed?”

“It’s a long story. When do you think you can get back to me?”

“As soon as I make the calls. You been over to his office?”

“Not yet. We’ll get there sometime tonight.”

Bosch gave him the number of his cellular phone, then closed it and put it in his coat pocket. For a moment he thought about Carbone’s reaction to the victim’s name. He finally decided he could not read anything into it.

After the Cloud was rolled into place in the shed and the doors shut, Donovan pulled the curtains closed. There was fluorescent lighting overhead which he left on while he got his equipment ready. Matthews, the coroner’s tech, and his two assistants-the body movers-huddled over a workbench getting the tools they would need out of a case.

“Harry, I’m going to take my time with this, okay? First I’ll laser the trunk with the guy in it. Then we take him out. Then we glue it and laser it again. Then we worry about the rest of it.”

“Your show, man. Whatever time you need.”

“I’ll need your help with the wand when I shoot pictures. Roland had to go to shoot another scene.”

Bosch nodded and watched as the SID tech screwed an orange filter onto a Nikon camera. He put the camera strap over his head and turned on the laser. It was a box about the size of a VCR with a cable attachment that led to a foot-long wand with a hand grip on it. From the end of the wand a strong orange beam was emitted.

Donovan opened a cabinet and took out several pairs of orange-tinted safety glasses which he handed to Bosch and the others. He put the last pair on himself. He gave Bosch a pair of latex gloves to put on as well.

“I’ll do a quick run around the outside of the trunk and then open her up,” Donovan said.

Just as Donovan moved to the switch box to cut off the overheads, the phone in Bosch’s pocket buzzed. Donovan waited while Bosch answered. It was Carbone.

“Bosch, we’re taking a pass.”

Harry didn’t say anything for a moment and neither did Carbone. Donovan hit the light switch and the room plunged into complete blackness.

“You’re saying you don’t have this guy.” Bosch finally spoke into the dark.

“I checked around, made some calls. Nobody seems to know this guy. Nobody’s working him… Clean, as far as we know… You said he was put in his trunk and capped twice, huh?…Bosch, you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Yeah, capped twice in the trunk.”

“Trunk music.”

“What?”

“It’s a wise guy saying outta Chicago. You know, when they whack some poor slob they say, ‘Oh, Tony? Don’t worry about Tony. He’s trunk music now. You won’t see him no more.’ But the thing is, Bosch, this doesn’t seem to fit. We don’t know this guy. People I talked to, they think maybe somebody’s trying to make you think it’s OC connected, know what I mean?”

Bosch watched as the laser beam cut through the blackness and bombarded the rear of the trunk with searing light. With the glasses on, the orange was filtered out and the light was a bright, intense white. Bosch was ten feet away from the Rolls, but he could see glowing patterns on the trunk lid and the bumper. This always reminded him of those National Geographic shows in which a submersible camera moved through the ocean’s black depths, putting its light on sunken ships or aircraft. It was somehow eerie.

“Look, Carbone,” he said, “you aren’t even interested in coming out to take a look?”

“Not at this time. Of course, give me a call back if you come across anything, you know, that shows different than what I told you. And I’ll do some more checking tomorrow. I got your number.”

Bosch was secretly pleased that he wasn’t going to get bigfooted by the OCID, but he was also surprised at the brush-off. The quickness with which Carbone had dismissed the case seemed unusual.

“Any other details you want to give me, Bosch?”

“We’re just starting. But let me ask you, you ever hear of a hitter takes the vic’s shoes with him? Also, he unties the body afterward.”

“Takes his shoes…unties him. Uh, not offhand, no. Nobody specific. But like I said, I’ll ask around in the morning and I’ll put it on our box. Anything else cute about this one?”

Bosch didn’t like what was happening. Carbone seemed too interested while saying he wasn’t. He said Tony Aliso wasn’t connected, yet he still wanted the details. Was he just trying to be helpful or was there something more to it?

“That’s about all we got at the moment,” Bosch said, deciding not to give up anything else for free. “Like I said, we’re just getting going here.”

“Okay, then, give me the morning and I’ll do some more checking. I’ll call if I come up with anything, okay?”

“Right.”

“Check you later. But you know what I think you have there, Bosch? You’ve got a guy, he was probably making sandwiches with somebody’s wife. Lotta times things look like pro hits that aren’t, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll talk to you later.”

Bosch walked to the rear of the Rolls. Up close he could see the pattern swirls he had noticed in the laser light before appeared to be swipe marks made with a cloth. It looked like the whole car had been wiped down.

But when Donovan moved the wand over the bumper, the laser picked up a partial shoe print on the chrome.

“Did anybody-”

“No,” Bosch said. “Nobody put their foot there.”

“Okay, then. Hold the wand on the print.”

Bosch did so while Donovan bent over and took several photos, bracketing the exposure settings to make sure he had at least one clear shot. It was the forward half of the foot. There was a circle pattern at the ball of the foot with lines extending from it like the rays of a sun. There was a cross-cut pattern through the arch and then the print was cut off by the edge of the bumper.

“Tennis shoe,” Donovan said. “Maybe a work shoe.”

After he photographed it, he moved the wand around the trunk again, but there was nothing but wipe marks.