Lost Light

by Michael Connelly

  “Sure, no problem. I will.”

  “Okay, Harry, I’m going to go back in. Maybe talking to you will have changed my luck.”

  “I hope so, Eleanor. Thanks for doing this for me.”

  “No problem. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  She disconnected.

  “And good luck,” I said into the dead line.

  I hung the phone up again and tried to think about the conversation and what she had meant. Just give me a little more notice than you did today. So I’m ready. It was like she wanted a warning before I came out. So she could do what? What did she have to get ready for?

  I realized that I could drive myself nuts thinking and worrying about it. I put Eleanor and all of that aside and grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and took it out to the back deck. It was a cool and clear night and the lights of the freeway far below seemed to sparkle like a diamond necklace. I could hear a woman’s laughter carrying up the hillside from somewhere down below. I started thinking about Danny Cross and the song she had gently sung to her husband. In love and in loss the night is always sacred. It’s only a wonderful world if you can make it that way. There are no street signs pointing to Paradise Road.

  I decided that when all of this was over I would go to Vegas and not turn back. I would throw the dice. I would go see Eleanor and take my chances.

  27

  The next morning I spread the documents I had rescued from the engine compartment of Lawton Cross’s muscle car across the table. I went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee but found out I was out of coffee. I could go down the hill to the store but I didn’t want to leave the phone. I was expecting Janis Langwiser to call early. So I sat down at the table with a bottle of water and started in on the reports Cross had copied and taken home almost four years before.

  What I had was a copy of the currency report prepared by the bank which had loaned the cash to the movie company, and the time and location sheets that Lawton Cross and Jack Dorsey had been working on before their schedule became crowded with other cases.

  The currency report was four pages of typed serial numbers taken from randomly selected one-hundred-dollar bills contained in the shipment to the movie set. The report was prepared by two people listed as Linus Simonson and Jocelyn Jones. It was then signed off on by a bank vice president named Gordon Scaggs.

  Simonson was a name I knew. He had been one of the bank employees at the movie set on the day of the heist. He had been wounded during the shoot-out. Now I knew why he was there; he had helped prepare the money shipment and was most likely there to baby-sit it through the day of filming.

  Scaggs was also a name that was familiar to me. It was among the names given to me by Alexander Taylor when I had asked the film producer who specifically knew about the cash delivery to the movie set. I no longer had the list of nine names I had collected from Taylor. The FBI had taken that during the search of my home. But I remembered the name Scaggs.

  Committed to studying everything about the case I could get my hands on, I scanned the listings of currency numbers, thinking maybe something would stick out. But nothing grabbed me. The numbers were like an unbreakable code locking away the secret to the case. It was simply four pages of numbers in no particular sequence.

  Finally, I put the currency report aside and took up the alibi sheets. I first checked for the names Scaggs, Simonson and Jones and saw that Dorsey and Cross had indeed run out T&L checks on all three of the bank employees. Cross had taken Scaggs and Jones while Dorsey ran down Simonson. Their locations were checked against key times in the murder of Angella Benton and the subsequent movie set heist.

  All three were cleared by alibi of physical involvement in the crimes. Simonson, of course, was at the scene of the heist, but he was there as a representative of the bank. His being shot by one of the robbers also tended to add weight to his clearance. This did not, of course, clear them of ancillary involvement. Any one of them could have been the mastermind behind the heist who had stayed in the background as the plan was carried out. Or, at the very least, any one of them could have simply been the source of information on the delivery of money to the movie set.

  The same went for the other eight names in the T&L report. All were cleared by alibi of active involvement in the crimes. But I had no other files or reports to indicate what had been done to determine if they had a background connection to the crime.

  I realized I was spinning my wheels. I was trying to play solitaire without a full deck. The aces were gone and there was no way I could win. I had to get all the cards. I took a swig of water and wished it was coffee. I started thinking about how important the play with Peoples was. If it didn’t work, I was done. Angella Benton’s outstretched hands might haunt me for the rest of my life but there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do about it.

  As if on cue the telephone rang. I went into the kitchen and picked up. It was Janis Langwiser, though she didn’t identify herself.

  “It’s me,” she said. “We have to talk.”

  “Okay, I’m in the middle of something. I’ll call you right back.”

  “Good.”

  She hung up without a protest. I took that as a sign that she now believed what I had told her about my house and phone being bugged. I also took it as a sign that Peoples was acting in the way I had hoped he would. I grabbed my keys off the counter and went out the door.

  I drove down the hill. At the place where Mulholland wraps around the other side of the hill and meets Woodrow Wilson at Cahuenga I saw a vintage yellow Corvette waiting at the light across from me. I knew the driver, sort of. Every now and then I’d see him jogging or driving the ’vette past my house. And I’d seen and spoken to him in the police station on occasion, too. He was a private eye who lived on the other side of the ridge from me. I put my arm out the window and gave him the sweeping palm-down salute. He did likewise back to me. Smooth sailing, my brother. I was going to need it. The light changed and he went south on Cahuenga while I went north.

  I bought a cup of coffee in a convenience store and used a pay phone next to the Poquito Mas to call Langwiser back on her cell. She answered right away.

  “They came in last night,” she said. “Just like you predicted.”

  “Did you get it on the camera?”

  “Yes! It’s perfect. Clear as day. It was the same guy in the first surveillance. Milton.”

  I nodded to myself. The call to my house the night before in which Janis said she’d locked the memory card in her office safe had been the bait and Milton had taken it. Before leaving her office I had set up another one of Biggar & Biggar’s cameras—the radio—on her desk and trained it toward the bookcase which hid the safe.

  “He stumbled around looking for a while but then he found it. He took the whole safe out of the wall. It’s gone.”

  She had emptied everything from the safe the night before. I had put in a folded piece of paper. It said, “Fuck you, with a capital F.” I imagined Milton unfolding it and reading it—if he had managed to get the safe open.

  “Anything else hit in the offices?”

  “A couple drawers pulled out here and there. The quarter jar in the coffee room. All just cover to make it look like a regular burglary.”

  “Anybody call the police to report it?”

  “Yes, but nobody’s shown up yet. Typical.”

  “Keep the surveillance out of it. For now.”

  “I know. Like we said. What should I do now?”

  “You still have Peoples’s e-mail address?”

  “Sure do.”

  The night before, she had gotten the e-mail address rather easily from a former colleague who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s office.

  “Okay, send Peoples another e-mail. Attach the latest surveillance and tell him I’ve changed the deadline to noon today. I hear from him by then or he can start watching CNN for the results. Send it as soon as you can.”

  “I’m on-line now.”


  “Good.”

  I sipped coffee while listening to her type. Andre Biggar had included in the briefcase I borrowed the computer attachment Langwiser would need to view the memory card taken from the radio camera. She could now attach a file containing the surveillance recording to an e-mail.

  “It’s away,” she finally said. “Good luck, Harry.”

  “I’ll probably need it.”

  “Remember, call me tonight by midnight or I’ll follow the instructions.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I hung up and went back to the convenience store for a second cup of coffee. I was already wired from Langwiser’s report but I figured I might be needing the spare caffeine before the day was finished.

  When I got back to the house the phone was ringing. I got the door unlocked and got inside just in time to grab the phone off the kitchen counter.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Bosch? John Peoples here.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Not really. When can you come in?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  28

  Special Agent Peoples was waiting for me in the first-floor lobby of the federal building in Westwood. He was standing when I got there. Maybe he’d been standing there the whole time since he’d made the call.

  “Follow me,” he said. “We’re going to make this quick.”

  “Whatever works.”

  After giving a uniformed guard the nod he led me through a security door using a card key and then he used it again to access the elevator I was already familiar with.

  “You guys got your own elevator and everything,” I said. “Pretty cool.”

  Peoples wasn’t impressed. He turned so he was looking right at me.

  “I’m doing this because I have no choice. I’ve decided to agree to this extortion because I believe in the greater good of what I’m trying to accomplish here.”

  “Is that why you sent Milton into my lawyer’s office last night? Was that all part of the greater good you’re talking about?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Look, you can hate me and that’s fine. That’s your option. But let’s not bullshit each other. Don’t hide behind that stuff, because we both know what’s going on here. Your guy crossed the line and got caught. Now it’s just time to pay the price. That’s what this is about. It’s that simple.”

  “And meantime an investigation is compromised and lives may be at stake.”

  “We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  The elevator opened on the ninth floor. He led me out without answering. The ever handy card key got us through another door and into a squad room where several agents were working at desks. As we passed through, most of them stopped what they were doing to look at me. I assumed that they had either been briefed on who I was and what I was doing or just the occurrence of a non-agent in the inner sanctum was worth noting.

  When I was halfway across the room I spotted Milton sitting at a desk near the back. He was leaning back in his chair giving me his best show of being relaxed. But I could sense the anger pulsing beneath the façade. I winked at him and turned my attention away.

  Peoples led me into a small room with a desk and two chairs. On the desk was a cardboard box. I looked into it and recognized my own notebook and the file I had kept on Angella Benton. There was also the file from Lawton Cross’s garage and a black binder full of documents two inches thick. I assumed it was the copy of the LAPD’s murder book. I got excited just looking at it. It was the full deck of cards I had been looking for.

  “Where’s the rest?” I asked.

  Peoples walked around behind the desk and opened the middle drawer. He removed a file and dropped it on the top of the desk.

  “In there you will find subject location reports covering the two dates you requested. I don’t think they will help you but it’s what you wanted. You can look at them here but you cannot take them with you. They will not leave this office. Do you understand that?”

  I nodded, deciding not to push it.

  “What about Aziz?”

  “When you are ready I will put you in a room with him. But he won’t talk to you. You’ll be wasting your time.”

  “Well, it’s mine to waste.”

  “Then, before you leave here, you will call your attorney and instruct her to turn over to me the original and all copies of the surveillance recordings you have from last night and the night before.”

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry, that’s not the deal.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “No, I never said I would turn over the recordings. What I said was that I would not go public with them. There’s a difference. I’m not going to turn over the only leverage I’ve got. I’m not stupid, John.”

  “We had a deal,” he said, his cheeks beginning to quiver with anger.

  “And I’m keeping the deal. Exactly as offered.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cassette tape. I held it out to him.

  “If you don’t believe me you can listen for yourself. I was wearing a wire last night in the booth.”

  I watched his eyes register that I now even had him directly tied in.

  “Take it, John. Call it a goodwill gesture. It’s the original. No copies were made.”

  He slowly reached up and took the tape. I moved around behind the desk.

  “Why don’t I take a look at what you’ve got in the file while you go do whatever you have to do to get Aziz ready?”

  Peoples pocketed the tape and nodded.

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he said. “If anyone comes in here and asks what you are doing, close that file and tell them to see me.”

  “One last thing. What about the money?”

  “What about it?”

  “How much money from the movie set heist did Aziz have under his car seat?”

  I thought I saw a small smile start to play on Peoples’s face, but then it went away.

  “He had a hundred bucks. One bill traced to the heist.”

  He stayed long enough to see the disappointment on my face, then turned to the door.

  After he left the room I sat down at the desk and opened the file. It contained two pages that had security stamps on them and had words in the middle of paragraphs and then whole paragraphs blocked out with black ink. Peoples clearly wasn’t going to let me see anything I had not bargained for—or extorted from him, as he had put it.

  The pages were taken from what I assumed was a larger file. There was a coding in small print at the top left corner. I reached into the cardboard box and opened my file. I took out one of the loose sheets of note paper and wrote the code number from each page down. I then read what Peoples was allowing me to read.

  The first page had two dated paragraphs.

  5-11-99—SUBJECT confirmed in Hamburg at •••• in company with •••• and ••••. SUBJECT seen in restaurant by •••• approximately 20:00 until 23:30 hours. No further detail.

  7-1-99—SUBJECT passport scan at Heathrow at 14:40 hours. Follow up determination arrival on Lufthansa Flight 698 from Frankfurt. No further detail.

  The paragraphs before and after these two were completely blacked out. What I was looking at was the log in which tabs on Aziz had been kept over the years by the feds. He was on the watch list. This is what it amounted to. Sightings by informants or agents and airport passport checks.

  The two dates on the page were on either side of the murder of Angella Benton and the movie set heist. It by no means cleared Aziz of active or background involvement in the crimes. Yet, if I believed the document in front of me, he was in Europe both before and after the occurrence of the crimes I was investigating. But it was no alibi. Aziz was known, according to the Times article I had read, to travel with false identification. It was possible he had slipped into this country to commit the crimes and then slipped out.

  I went on to the next page. This one had only one paragraph that was not black
ed out. But the date was a direct hit.

  3-19-00—SUBJECT passport scan at LAX-CA. Arrival on Qantas Flight 88 from Manilla at 18:11 hrs. Security check and search. Questioned by •••• ••••, Los Angeles field office. See transcript #00-44969. Released at 21:15 hrs.

  Aziz had what appeared to be a perfect alibi for the night Agent Martha Gessler disappeared. He was being questioned by an FBI agent at Los Angeles International Airport until 9:15 P.M., which put him in federal custody at the same time Gessler disappeared while on her way home from work.