Trunk Music - Michael Connelly [120]
“What else?” Edgar asked.
“We start over,” Bosch said. “I want to know everything about her. Where’d she come from, who are her friends, what does she do in that house all day long and what did she do and who did she do it with all those times Tony was away?”
Rider and Edgar nodded.
“There’s got to be an accomplice. And my guess is that it’s a man. And I’ll bet we’ll find him through her.”
The waiter came up with a tray and put it down on a folding cart. They watched silently as he prepared the meal. There were three separate chicken pot pies on the tray. The waiter used a fork and spoon to take the top crust off each and put it on a plate. Next he scooped the contents of each pie out and put it on the crust, served the three cops their dishes and put down fresh glasses of iced tea for Edgar and Rider. He then poured Bosch’s martini from a small glass carafe and floated away without a word.
“Obviously,” Bosch said, “we have to do this quietly.”
“Yeah,” Edgar said, “and Bullets also put us on the top of the rotation. Next call comes in, me and Kiz get it. And we hafta work it without you. That’s going to take us away from this.”
“Well, do what you can. If you get a body you get a body, nothing we can do about that. Meantime, this is what I propose. You two work on Veronica’s background, see what you can find. You got any sources at the Times or the trades?”
“I know a couple at the Times,” Rider said. “And there’s a woman I once had a case with — she was a vic — who’s a receptionist or something at Variety.”
“You trust ’em?”
“I think I can.”
“See if they’ll pull a search on Veronica for you. She had a brief flash of fame a while back. Her fifteen minutes. Maybe there were some stories about her, stories that would have names of people we could talk to.”
“What about talking to her again?” Edgar asked.
“I don’t think we should do it yet. I want to have something to talk to her about.”
“What about neighbors?”
“You can do that. Maybe she’ll look out the window and see you, give her something to think about. If you go up there, see if you can take another look at the gate log. Talk to Nash. I’m sure you can turn him without needing another search warrant. I’d like to take a look at the whole year, know who has been going in to see her, especially while Tony was out of town. We have Tony’s credit records and can construct his travel history. You’ll be able to know when she was in that house alone.”
Bosch raised his fork. He hadn’t had a bite of food yet, but his mind was too full of the case and what needed to be done.
“The other thing is we need as much of the case file as we can get. All we’ve got is the copy of the murder book. I’m going down to Parker Center for my little chat with the IAD. I’ll swing by USC and get a copy of the autopsy. The feds already have it. I’ll also go talk to Donovan in SID and see if he came up with anything we pulled out of the car. Also, he’s got the shoe prints. I’ll get copies, hopefully before the feds come in and take everything. Anything else I’m missing?”
The other two shook their heads.
“You want to see what we get and then put our heads together after work?”
They nodded.
“Cat and Fiddle, about six?”
They nodded again. They were too busy eating to talk. Bosch took his first bite of food, which was already getting cold. He joined them in their silence, thinking about the case.
“It’s in the details,” he said after a few moments.
“What?” Rider asked.
“The case. When you get one like this, the answer is always in the details. You watch, when we break it, the answer will have been sitting in the files, in the book. It always happens.”
The interview with Chastain at Internal Affairs began as Bosch expected it would. He sat with Zane, his defense rep, at a gray government table in one of the IAD interview rooms. An old Sony cassette player was turned on and everything said in the room was recorded. In police parlance, Chastain was locking up Bosch’s story. Getting his words and explanation in as much detail as possible down on tape. Chastain