Trunk Music - Michael Connelly [34]
“For now we’ve struck out. He put them on AFIS, NCIC, the whole works, and got blanked.”
“Damn.”
“They’re still valuable. We come up with a suspect, the prints could be a clincher.”
“Anything else from the car?”
“No,” Bosch said.
“Yes,” Rider said.
Billets raised her eyebrows at the contradiction.
“One of the prints Donovan found on the inside lip of the trunk lid,” Rider said. “It came back to Ray Powers. He’s the P–3 who found the body. He overstepped when he popped the trunk. He obviously left his print when he opened it. We caught it and no harm, no foul, but it was sloppy work and he should have never opened the trunk in the first place. He should’ve called us.”
Billets glanced at Bosch and he guessed she was wondering why he hadn’t brought this to her attention. He looked down at her desk.
“Okay, I’ll take care of it,” Billets said. “I know Powers. He’s been around and he should certainly know procedure.”
Bosch could have defended Powers with the explanation the cop had given the day before but he let it go. Powers wasn’t worth it. Billets went on.
“So where do we go from here?”
“Well, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” Bosch said. “I once heard this story about a sculptor and somebody asked him how he turned a block of granite into a beautiful statue of a woman. And he said that he just chips away everything that isn’t the woman. That’s what we have to do now. We’ve got this big block of information and evidence. We’ve got to chip away everything that doesn’t count, that doesn’t fit.”
Billets smiled and Bosch suddenly felt embarrassed about the analogy, though he believed it was accurate.
“What about Las Vegas?” she asked. “Is that part of the statue or the part we need to chip away?”
Now Rider and Edgar were smiling.
“Well, we’ve got to go there, for one thing,” Bosch said, hoping he didn’t sound defensive. “Right now all we know is that this victim went there and was dead pretty soon after he came back. We don’t know what he did there, whether he won, lost, whether somebody tailed him back here from there. For all we know, he could’ve hit a jackpot there and was followed back here and ripped off. We’ve got a lot of questions about Las Vegas.”
“Plus, there’s the woman,” Rider said.
“What woman?” Billets asked.
“Right,” Bosch said. “The last call made on Tony Aliso’s office line was to a club in North Las Vegas. I called it and got the name of a woman I think he was seeing over there. Layla. There was —”
“Layla? Like that song?”
“I guess. There also was a message from an unnamed woman on his office line. I think it might have been this Layla. We’ve got to talk to her.”
Billets nodded, made sure Bosch was done and then laid down the battle plan.
“All right,” Billets said. “First off, all media inquiries are to be directed to me. The best way to control information on this is to have it come from one mouth. For the moment, we’ll tell the reporters it is obviously under investigation and we are leaning toward a possible carjacking or robbery scenario. It’s innocuous enough and will probably appease them. Everyone okay with that?”
The three detectives nodded.
“Okay, I’m going to make a case with the captain to keep the case here with us. It looks to me like we have three or four avenues which need to be pursued vigorously. Granite that we have to chip away at, as Harry would say.
“Anyway, it will also help me with the captain if we are already scrambling on these things. So, Harry, I want you to get on a plane as soon as possible and get to Vegas. I want you on that end of it. But if there’s nothing there, I want you to get in and get out. We’ll need you back here. Okay?”
Bosch nodded. It would have been his choice if he were the one making the decisions, but he felt a pang of discomfort that she was doing it.
“Kiz, you stick with the financial trail. I want to be in a position of knowing everything about this guy Anthony Aliso by tomorrow morning. You’re also going