Michael Connelly - Trunk Music

“Because I know.”

Bosch thought of something and looked out through the kitchen door to the living room. Eleanor was still watching the movie and she looked over at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Bosch shook his head to show his dissatisfaction with the person on the other end.

“I’m going to Vegas, Lindell. And I think I know where they’ll be. You want to get your people involved? I sure as hell can’t call Metro on this.”

“How are you so sure she’s even there?”

“Because she sent up a distress signal. Are you in or out?”

“We’re in, Bosch. Let me give you a number. You call it when you get over there.”

After Bosch hung up, he went into the living room. Eleanor had already turned off the tape.

“I can’t watch any more of that. It’s terrible. What’s going on?”

“That time you followed Tony Aliso around in Vegas, you said he went to a bank with the girlfriend, right?”

“Right.”

“Which bank? Where?”

“I, uh…it was on Flamingo, east of the Strip, east of Paradise Road. I can’t remember the name. I think it was Silver State National. Yes, that’s it. Silver State.”

“The Silver State on Flamingo, are you sure now?”

“Right, yes.”

“And it looked like she was opening an account?”

“Yes, but I can’t be sure. That’s the problem with a one-man tail. It’s a small branch bank and I couldn’t hang around inside too long. It looked like she was signing account papers and Tony was just watching. But I had to go out and wait outside until they were done. Remember, Tony knew me. If he even saw me, the tail would be blown.”

“Okay, I’m going.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight. I have to make some calls first.”

Bosch went back into the kitchen and called Grace Billets. While filling her in on what he had learned and his hunch about what it all meant, he got a pot of coffee going. After getting her approval to travel, he next called Edgar and then Rider and made arrangements to pick them up at the station in one hour.

He poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter in deep thought. Felton. There was a contradiction, it seemed to Bosch. If the Metro captain was the Joey Marks organization’s inside man, why had he moved so quickly to go after Goshen when he got the match on the fingerprints Bosch had provided? Bosch played with this for a while and finally decided that Felton must have seen an opportunity in moving Goshen out of the way. He must have believed that his position in the Las Vegas underworld would rise if Goshen were out of the picture. Perhaps he even planned to arrange Goshen’s assassination, thereby ensuring the indebtedness of Joey Marks. Bosch realized that for this plan to work, Felton either didn’t know that Goshen knew he was the organization’s inside man, or he planned to get rid of Goshen before he got a chance to tell anyone.

Bosch took a sip of the scalding coffee and put these thoughts aside. He went back into the living room. Eleanor was still on the couch.

“Are you going?”

“Yeah. I’ve got to pick up Jerry and Kiz.”

“Why tonight?”

“Got to be there before the bank opens tomorrow.”

“You think Veronica is going to be there?”

“It’s a hunch. I think Joey Marks finally figured out just like we did that if he didn’t whack Tony, then somebody else did and that person had to have been close to him. And that that person now has his money. He knew Veronica from way back and would figure she was up to it. I think he sent Felton over to check into it and to get his money back and take care of her if she was dirty on it. But she must’ve talked him out of it somehow. Probably by mentioning she had two million in skim in a safe deposit box in Vegas. I think that’s what stopped Felton from killing her and instead made him take her with him. She’s probably only alive until they get into that box. I think she gave Felton her husband’s last betting slip because she knew he might cash it and we’d be watching for it.”

“What makes you think it’s at the bank where I saw him go?”

“Because we know about everything he had over here, all his accounts. It’s not over here. Powers told me Veronica had told him that Tony dropped the skim into a safe deposit box that she wouldn’t have access to until he was dead. She wasn’t a signatory on it. So my guess is that it’s in Vegas. It’s the only place he’s been outside of L.A. for the last year. And that if one day he was taking his girlfriend to open a bank account somewhere, he’d just go ahead and take her to the same bank he used.”

Eleanor nodded.

“It’s funny,” Bosch said.

“What is?”

“That what all of this really came down to was a bank caper. It’s not really about Tony Aliso’s murder, it’s about the money he skimmed and hid. A bank caper with his murder sort of a side effect. And that’s how you and I met. On a bank job.”

She nodded, her eyes going far off as she thought about it. Bosch immediately wished he hadn’t brought the memory up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess it’s not really that funny.”

Eleanor looked up at him from the couch.

“Harry, I’m going with you to Las Vegas.”

THE SILVER STATE National Bank branch where Tony Aliso had taken his girlfriend while Eleanor Wish had watched was in the corner of a small shopping plaza between a Radio Shack and a Mexican restaurant called La Fuentes. The parking lot was largely empty at dawn on Monday morning when the FBI agents and LAPD detectives came to set up. The bank didn’t open until nine and the other businesses would follow beginning at ten.

Because the businesses were closed, the agents had a problem in locating their surveillance points. It would be too obvious to stick four government cars in the lot. They would be too noticeable because there were only five other cars in the entire block-long parking lot, four parked on the outer fringes and an old Cadillac parked in the first row nearest the bank. There were no license plates on the Caddy, which had a spider web crack in the windshield, its windows left open and the trunk sprung and held closed by a chain and padlock through one of its many rusted-out spots. It had the sad appearance of having been abandoned, its owner probably another Las Vegas casualty. Like someone lost in the desert and dying of thirst just a few feet from an oasis, the Caddy had stopped for the final time just a few feet from the bank and all the money inside it.

The agents, after cruising by the location a few times to get the lay of the land, decided to use the Caddy as a blind, by popping the hood and sticking an agent in a greasy T-shirt under it and ostensibly working on the dead engine. They complemented this agent with a panel van parked right next to the Caddy. Four agents were in the van. At seven that morning they had taken it to the federal utilities shop and had a painter stencil La Fuentes Mexican Restaurant-Established 1983 on the side panels in red paint. The paint was still drying when they drove the van into the lot at eight.

Now at nine, the lot was slowly beginning to fill, mostly with employees of the stores and a few Silver State customers who needed to take care of business as soon as the bank opened its doors. Bosch watched all of this from the backseat of a federal car. Lindell and an agent named Baker were in the front seat. They were parked in the service bay of a gas station across Flamingo Road from the shopping center where the bank was located. Edgar and Rider were in another bureau car parked further up Flamingo. There were two other bureau cars in the area, one static and one roving. The plan was for Lindell to move his car into the bank parking lot once it became more crowded with cars and the bureau car would not stand out. This plan included a bureau helicopter making wide arcs around the shopping center.