Trunk Music - Michael Connelly [37]
The bathroom was tiled in pink marble floor to ceiling. The fixtures were polished brass. Bosch looked around for a moment but saw nothing of interest. He opened the glass door to the shower stall and looked in and also found nothing. But as he was closing the door his eyes caught on something on the drain. He reopened the door and looked down, then pressed his finger on the tiny speck of gold caught in the rubber sealant around the drain fitting. He raised his finger and found the tiny piece of glitter stuck to his finger. He guessed that it was a match to the pieces of glitter found in the cuffs of Tony Aliso’s pants. Now all he needed was to figure out what they were and where they had come from.
The Metro Police Department was on Stewart Street in downtown. Bosch stopped at the front desk and explained he was an out-of-town investigator wanting to make a courtesy check-in with the homicide squad. He was directed to the third-floor detective bureau, where a desk man escorted him through a deserted squad room to the commander’s office. Captain John Felton was a thick-necked, deeply tanned man of about fifty. Bosch figured he had probably given the welcome speech to at least a hundred cops from all over the country in the last month alone. Las Vegas was that kind of place. Felton asked Bosch to sit down and he gave him the standard spiel.
“Detective Bosch, welcome to Las Vegas. Lucky for you I decided to come in on the holiday to take care of some of this paperwork that haunts me. Otherwise, there’d be nobody here. Anyway, I hope you find your stay enjoyable and productive. If there is anything you need, don’t hesitate to call. I can promise you nothing, but if you request something that is within my power to provide, I will be more than happy to provide it. So, that out of the way, why don’t you tell me what brings you here?”
Bosch gave him a quick rundown on the case. Felton wrote down the name Tony Aliso and the last days he was known to have stayed in Las Vegas and where.
“I’m just trying to run down his activities on the days he was here.”
“You think he was followed from here and then taken off in L.A.?”
“I don’t think anything at the moment. We don’t have evidence of that.”
“And I hope you won’t find any. That’s not the kind of press we want to get in L.A. What else you got?”
Bosch pulled his briefcase onto his lap and opened it.
“I’ve got two sets of prints taken off the body. We —”
“The body?”
“He was wearing a treated leather jacket. We got the prints with the laser. Anyway, we ran them on AFIS, NCIC, California DOJ, the works, but got nothing. I thought maybe you’d run them through your own computer, see what happens.”
While the Automated Fingerprint Identification System used by the LAPD was a computer network of dozens of fingerprint databases across the country, it didn’t connect them all. And most big-city police departments had their own private databases. In Vegas they would be prints taken from people who applied for jobs for the city or the casinos. They were also prints taken from people on the sly, prints the department shouldn’t legally have because their owners had simply fallen under the suspicion of the department but had never been arrested. It was against this database that Bosch was hopeful Felton would check the sets from the Aliso case.
“Well, let me see what you have,” Felton said. “I can’t promise anything. We’ve probably gotta few that the national nets don’t, but it’s a long shot.”
Bosch handed over print cards Art Donovan had prepared for him.
“So you are starting at the Mirage?” the captain asked after he put the cards to the side of his desk.
“Yeah. I’ll show his picture around, go through the motions, see what I can come up with.”
“You’re telling me everything you know, right?”
“Right,” Bosch lied.
“Okay.” Felton opened a desk