Michael Connelly - The Overlook

“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.”

Walling came away from the window, sat back down and folded her arms. Bosch finally sat down on a chair directly across from her. He continued.

“But how would the witness know it was the shooter and not the victim who yelled?” he asked. “He was more than fifty yards away. It was dark. How would he know that it wasn’t Stanley Kent yelling out his last word before execution? The name of the woman he loved, because he was about to die not even knowing that she’d betrayed him.”

“Alicia.”

“Exactly. Alicia interrupted by a gunshot becomes Allah .”

Walling relaxed her arms and leaned forward. As body language went, it was a good sign. It told Bosch he was pushing through.

“You said the first set of snap ties before,” she said. “What were you talking about?”

Bosch nodded and handed across the file containing the crime scene photos. He had saved the best for last.

“Look at the photos,” he said. “What do you see?”

She opened the file and started looking at the crime scene photos. They depicted the master bedroom in the Kent house from all angles.

“It’s the master bedroom,” she said. “What am I missing?”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“It’s what you don’t see. There are no clothes in the shot. She told us they told her to sit on the bed and take off her clothes. What are we supposed to believe, that they let her put the clothes away before they hog-tied her? They let her put them in the hamper? Look at the last shot. It’s the e-mail photo Stanley Kent got.”

Walling looked through the file until she found the printout of the e-mail photo. She stared intently at it. He saw recognition break in her eyes.

“Now what do you see?”

“The robe,” she said excitedly. “When we let her get dressed, she went to the closet to get her robe. There was no robe on that lounge chair!”

Bosch nodded and they started trading pieces of the story back and forth.

“What does that tell us?” he asked. “That these considerate terrorists hung the robe up in the closet for her after taking the photo?”

“Or that maybe Mrs. Kent was tied up twice and the robe was moved in between?”

“And look again at the picture. The clock on the bed table is unplugged.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know but maybe they didn’t want to worry about having any sort of time stamp on the photo. Maybe the first photo wasn’t even taken yesterday. Maybe it came from a dry run two days ago or even two weeks.”

Rachel nodded and Bosch knew she was committed. She was a believer.

“She was tied up once for the photo and then once again for the rescue,” she said.

“Exactly. And that left her free to help carry out the plan on the overlook. She didn’t kill her husband but she was up there in the other car. And once Stanley was dead and the cesium was dumped and the car was ditched at Samir’s she and her partner came back home and she was tied up all over again.”

“She wasn’t passed out when we got there. That was an act and part of the plan. And her wetting the bed was a nice little touch to help sell it to us.”

“The smell of urine also covered up the smell of grape juice.”

“What do you mean?”

“The purple bruises on her wrists and ankles. Now we know she wasn’t tied up for hours. But she still had those bruises. There’s an opened bottle of grape juice in the fridge and paper towels soaked with it out in the trash can. She used grape juice to create the bruises.”

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe this.”