Trunk Music - Michael Connelly [141]
“We thought of that and Jerry checked with the watch office. Gomez was the CO Friday night. He says he remembers that Powers had such a busy shift he didn’t take a dinner break until ten. He doesn’t recall hearing from him until just before end of watch.”
Billets nodded again.
“What about the shoe prints recovered? Are they his?”
“Powers got lucky there,” Edgar said. “He’s wearing brand-new boots in there. Looks like he maybe just bought ’em today.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah,” Bosch said. “We figure he saw the shoe prints on the table last night at the Cat and Fiddle. He went out and got new ones today.”
“Oh, man…”
“Well, maybe there’s still a chance he didn’t get rid of the old ones. We’re working on a search warrant for his place. Oh, and our luck ain’t so bad, either. Jerry, tell her about the spray.”
Edgar leaned forward on the table.
“I went back to the supply post, took a look at the sheet. On Sunday Powers signed out an OC cartridge. Only I then went and looked at the fifty-one list in the watch loo’s office. No use-of-force reported by Powers in this deployment period.”
“So,” Billets said, “he somehow used his pepper spray, because he had to get a refill cartridge but he never reported using the spray to his watch commander.”
“Right.”
Billets thought about things for a few moments before speaking again.
“Okay,” she said, “what you’ve come up with quickly is all good stuff. But it’s not enough. It’s a circumstantial case and most of this can be explained away. Even if you could prove he and the widow have been meeting, it doesn’t prove murder. The fingerprint on the trunk can be explained by sloppy work at the crime scene. Who knows, maybe that’s all it really was.”
“I doubt it,” Bosch said.
“Well, your doubts aren’t good enough. Where do we go from here?”
“We still have some things in the fire. Jerry’s going for a warrant based on what we’ve got so far. If we get inside Powers’s house, maybe we find the shoes, maybe we find something else. We’ll see. I also have an angle in Vegas working. We figure that for them to have pulled this off, Powers had to have followed Tony over there once or twice, you know, to know about Goshen and pick him to hang it all on. If we’re lucky, Powers would’ve wanted to stay right on Tony. That would mean staying at the Mirage. You can’t stay there without a trail. You can pay cash but you’ve got to give a legit credit card imprint to cover room charges, phone calls, things like that. In other words, you can’t register under any name you don’t have on a credit card. I’ve got a guy checking.”
“Okay, it’s a start,” Billets said.
She nodded her head, cupped a hand over her mouth and lapsed into a contemplative silence for a long moment.
“What it all comes down to is that we need to break him, don’t we?” she finally asked.
Bosch nodded.
“Probably. Unless we get lucky with the warrant.”
“You’re not going to break him. He’s a cop, he knows the angles, he knows the rules of evidence.”
“We’ll see.”
She looked at her watch. Bosch looked at his and saw it was now one o’clock.
“We’re in trouble,” Billets said solemnly. “We won’t be able to contain this much past dawn. After that I will have to make proper notification of what we’ve done and what we’ve got going. If that happens, you can count on us not being involved, and worse.”
Bosch leaned forward.
“Go back home, Lieutenant,” he said. “You were never here. Let us have the night. Come back in at nine tomorrow. Bring a DA back with you if you want. Make sure it’s somebody who will go to the edge with you. If you don’t know one, I can call somebody. But give us till nine. Eight hours. Then you come in and we either have the complete package tied up for you or you go ahead and do what you have to do.”
She looked carefully at each one of them, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Good luck,” she said.
She nodded, got up and left them there.
Outside the door to interview room three, Bosch paused and composed his thoughts. He knew that everything would turn on what happened