The Overlook - Michael Connelly [69]
“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