Michael Connelly - The Overlook

She started checking her mirrors, getting ready to make a U-turn. They were going up Lake Hollywood Drive now and would be at the house in two minutes.

“No, keep going. We’re almost there. Alicia Kent conspired with someone but it wasn’t a terrorist. The cesium being dumped in the trash proves that. You said it yourself, there is no way that Moby and El-Fayed would steal this stuff to just dump it. So what does that tell you? This wasn’t a heist. It actually was a murder. The cesium was just a red herring. Just like Ramin Samir. And Moby and El-Fayed? They were part of the misdirection as well. This poster will help prove it.”

“How?”

“Dhanurasana, the rocking bow.”

He held the poster up and over so she could glance at the yoga pose depicted in the bottom corner. It showed a woman with her arms behind her back, holding her ankles and creating a bow with the front of her body. She looked like she was hog-tied.

Walling glanced back at the curving road and then took another long look at the poster and the pose.

“We go into the house and see if this fits that space on the wall,” Bosch said. “If it fits, that means she and the killer took it off the wall because they didn’t want to risk that we might see it and connect it with what happened to her.”

“It’s a stretch, Harry. A huge one.”

“Not when you put it in context.”

“Which you, of course, can do.”

“As soon as we get to the house.”

“Hope you still have a key.”

“You bet I do.”

Walling turned onto Arrowhead Drive and punched the accelerator. But after a block she took her foot off, slowed down and shook her head again.

“This is ridiculous. She gave us the name Moby. There is no way she could have known he was in this country. And then up on the overlook, your own witness said that the shooter called out to Allah as he pulled the trigger. How can-”

“Let’s just try the poster on the wall. If it fits, I’ll lay the whole thing out for you. I promise. If it doesn’t fit, then I will quit-bothering you with it.”

She relented and drove the remaining block to the Kent house without another word. There was no longer a bureau car sitting out front. Bosch guessed that it was all hands on deck at the cesium recovery scene.

“Thank God I don’t have to deal with Maxwell again,” he said.

Walling didn’t even smile.

Bosch got out with the poster and his file containing the crime scene photos. He used Stanley Kent’s keys to open the front door and they proceeded to the workout room. They took positions on either side of the rectangular sun-discoloration mark and Bosch unrolled the poster. They each took a side and held the top corner of the poster to the top corner of the mark. Bosch put his other hand on the center of the poster and flattened it against the wall. The poster was a perfect fit over the mark on the wall. What was more was that the tape marks on the wall matched up with tape marks and old tape on the poster. To Bosch there was no doubt. The poster found by Digoberto Gonzalves in a Dumpster off Cahuenga had definitely come from Alicia Kent’s home yoga studio.

Rachel let go of her side of the poster and headed out of the room.

“I’ll be in the living room. I can’t wait to hear you put this together.”

Bosch rolled the poster up and followed. Walling took a seat in the same chair Bosch had put Maxwell in a few hours earlier. He remained standing in front of her.

“The fear was that the poster could be a tip-off,” he said. “Some smart agent or detective would see the rocking-bow pose and start thinking, This woman does yoga, maybe she could handle being hog-tied like that, maybe it was her idea, maybe she did it to help sell the misdirection. So they couldn’t take the chance. The poster had to go. It went into the Dumpster with the cesium, the gun and everything else they used. Except for the ski masks and the phony map they planted with the car at Ramin Samir’s house.”

“She’s a master criminal,” Walling said sarcastically.

Bosch was undeterred. He knew he’d convince her.

“If you get your people out there to check that line of Dumpsters, you’ll find the rest-the Coke-bottle silencer, the gloves, the first set of snap ties, every-”

“The first set of snap ties?”

“That’s right. I’ll get to that.”

Walling remained unimpressed.

“You better get to a lot of it. Because there are big gaps in this thing, man. What about the name Moby? What about the citing of Allah by the shooter? What-”

Bosch held up a hand.

“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.”