Lost Light (2003)

by Michael Connelly

  I put the two sheets back in the file and put it back in the drawer. I wrote no further notes—there was nothing to write—on the page from my file. I put it back inside the file and lifted out the murder book. I was just about to start into it when the door to the room opened and there was Milton. I said nothing. I waited for him to make the first move. He stepped in and looked around the room as though it was the size of a warehouse. He finally spoke without looking at me.

  “You have some balls on you, Bosch. Doing what you’re doing and thinking you’re going to just walk away from it. Away from me.”

  “I guess I could say the same thing about you.”

  “If it was me I would have called your bluff.”

  “Then you would have called it wrong.”

  He leaned down and put both hands on the table and looked right at me.

  “You are a has-been, Bosch. The world’s passed you by, but here you are, grabbing at straws, fucking with people who are trying to protect the future.”

  I was unimpressed and hoped I showed it. I leaned back and looked up at him.

  “Why don’t you relax, man? You’ve got nothing to worry about as far as I can tell. You’ve got a boss who’s more interested in a cover-up than a cleanup. You’ll do okay on this, Milton. I think he’s mad because you got caught, not because of what you did.”

  He pointed a finger at me.

  “Don’t fucking go there. Don’t. The day I want career advice from you is the day I turn in my badge.”

  “Fine. Then what do you want?”

  “I want to give you a warning. Watch out for me, Bosch. ’Cause I’m coming.”

  “Then I’ll be ready.”

  He turned and walked out, leaving the door open. A few seconds later Peoples was back.

  “You ready?”

  “Been ready.”

  “Where’s the file I gave you?”

  “It’s back in the drawer.”

  He leaned over the desk and slid open the drawer to make sure. He even opened the file to make sure I hadn’t pulled a fast one.

  “Okay, let’s go. Bring your box.”

  I followed him through a couple security doors and I was once again in the hallway of cells. But before we got close to the doors with the mirrored windows he used his card key to open a door and he ushered me into an interview room. There was a table and two chairs. Mousouwa Aziz was already sitting in one of them. An agent I had not seen before was leaning against the corner to the left of the door. Peoples moved into the other corner.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

  I put the box I carried down on the floor, pulled out the remaining chair and sat down across the table from Aziz. He looked weak and thin. A line of dark hair had grown in below the blond dye job. His hooded eyes were bloodshot and I wondered if they ever turned the light out in his cell. Things had certainly changed in his world. Two years ago his arrival and identification at LAX had brought a custody hold for a few hours while an agent attempted to interview him. Now a border stop got him an interminable hold in the FBI’s inner sanctum.

  I wasn’t expecting much from the interview but felt I needed the face-to-face before proceeding or disposing of Aziz as a suspect. After viewing the intelligence reports a few minutes earlier, I was leaning toward the latter. All I had that connected the diminutive would-be terrorist to Angella Benton was the money. At the time of his arrest at the border he’d had in his possession one of the hundred-dollar bills that had come from the movie set heist. Only one. There were probably a lot of explanations for this and I was beginning to think that his involvement in the murder and heist was not one of them.

  Reaching down to the cardboard box I pulled up my file on Angella Benton and opened it on my lap, where Aziz could not see it. I took out the photo of Angella that had been provided by her family. It showed her in a studio portrait taken at the time of her graduation from Ohio State, less than two years before her death. I looked up at Aziz.

  “My name is Harry Bosch. I am investigating the death of Angella Benton four years ago. Does she look familiar to you?”

  I slid the photo across the table and studied his face and eyes for any tell, any giveaway. His eyes moved over the photograph but I saw nothing in the way of a reaction. He said nothing.

  “Did you know her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “She worked for a movie company that was robbed. You ended up with some of the money. How?”

  Nothing.

  “Where did the money come from?”

  He raised his eyes from the photo to mine. He said nothing.

  “Did these agents tell you not to talk to me?”

  Nothing.

  “Did they? Look, if you didn’t know her, then tell me.”

  Aziz dropped his sad eyes to the table again. He appeared to be looking at the photo again but I could tell he wasn’t. He was looking at something far away. I knew it was useless, just as I had probably known before sitting down.

  I got up and turned to Peoples.

  “You can keep the rest of the fifteen minutes.”

  He pushed off the wall and looked up at an overhead camera. He made the little swirling motion with a finger and the door’s electronic lock snapped open. Without thinking I moved toward the door and pushed it open. Almost immediately I heard a banshee cry from behind me and Aziz was up and over the table. He hit me in the upper back with all his weight—maybe 130 pounds tops—and I went through the door and into the hallway.

  Aziz was still on me and as I started to go down I felt his arms and legs flailing for purchase. He then jumped off and started running down the hall. Peoples and the other agent were quickly down the hall after him. As I got up I saw them corner Aziz at a dead end. Peoples held back while the other agent moved in and roughly wrestled the smaller man to the ground.

  Once Aziz was controlled Peoples turned and came back to me.

  “Bosch, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I stood up and made a show of straightening my clothes. I was embarrassed. I had been taken by surprise by Aziz and I knew it would probably be the talk of the squad room at the other end of the hall.

  “I wasn’t ready for that. I guess being out of the life so long, I got rusty.”

  “Yes. You never can turn your back on them.”

  “My box. I forgot it.”

  I went back into the interview room and got the photo off the table and the box. Just as I came back out Aziz was being walked by, his wrists cuffed behind his back.

  I watched him go by and then Peoples and I followed at a safe distance.

  “And so,” Peoples said, “all of this was for naught.”

  “Probably.”

  “And it all could have been avoided if . . .”

  He didn’t finish so I did.

  “Your agent hadn’t committed those crimes on camera. Yeah.”

  Peoples stopped in the hallway and I did, too. He waited for the other agent and Aziz to go through the door.

  “I’m not comfortable with this arrangement,” he said. “I have no guarantees. You could walk out of here and get hit by a truck. Does that mean those recordings will end up on the news?”

  I thought for a moment, then nodded.

  “Yeah, it does. You better hope that truck misses me.”

  “I don’t want to live and work under the weight of that.”

  “I don’t blame you. What are you going to do about Milton?”

  “What I told you. He’s out. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Well, let me know when that happens. Then we can talk about the weight again.”

  He looked like he was about to say something more but then thought better of it and started walking again. He led me through the security doors to the elevator. He used his card key to summon it and then to push the button for the lobby. He held his hand on the door’s bumper.

  “I’m not going down with you,” he said. “
I think we’ve said enough.”

  I nodded and he stepped back through the door. He stood there and watched, maybe to make sure I didn’t sneak off the elevator and try to spring the incarcerated terrorists.

  Just as the door started closing I hit the bumper with the side of my hand and it slowly reopened.

  “Remember, Agent Peoples, my lawyer has taken steps to secure herself and the recordings. If something happens to her it’s the same as it happening to me.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Bosch. I will make no move against her or you.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  The door closed as we were holding each other’s eyes in a pointed stare.

  “I understand,” I heard him say through the doors.

  29

  My dance with the federales was not totally for naught as I had led Peoples to believe. Yes, my chasing down of the tiny terrorist may have been a false lead but in any case there are always false leads. It is part of the mission. At the end of the day what I had was the full record of the investigation and I was happy with that. I was playing with a full deck—the murder book—and it allowed me to write off in my mind all that had occurred in the two days leading up to the point I got it, including my hours in lockdown. For I knew that if I was to find Angella Benton’s killer, the answer, or at least the key that would turn the case, would likely be sitting somewhere in the middle of that black plastic binder.

  I got home from the federal building and came into the house like a man who thinks he may have won the lottery but needs to check the numbers in the newspaper to be sure. I went directly to the dining room table with my cardboard box and spread out everything I carried in it. Front and center was the murder book. The Holy Grail. I sat down and started reading from page one. I didn’t get up for coffee, water or beer. I didn’t turn on music. I concentrated fully on the pages I was turning. On occasion I jotted notes down on my notepad. But for the most part I just read and absorbed. I got in the car with Lawton Cross and Jack Dorsey and I rode through their investigation.

  Four hours later I turned the last page in the binder. I had carefully read and studied every document. Nothing struck me as the key, the obvious strand to pursue, but I wasn’t discouraged. I still believed it was in there. It always was. I would just have to sift it from a different angle.

  The one thing that struck me from the intense immersion into the documented part of the case was the difference in personalities of Cross and Dorsey. Dorsey was a good ten years older than Cross and had been the mentor in the relationship. But in their writing and handling of reports I sensed strong differences in their personalities. Cross was more descriptive and interpretive in his reports. Dorsey was the opposite. If three words summed up an interview or a lab report, then he went with the three words. Cross was more likely to put down the three words and then add another ten sentences of interpretation of what the lab report or the witness’s demeanor meant. I preferred Cross’s method. It had always been my philosophy to put everything in the book. Because sometimes cases go months and even years long and nuances can be lost in time if not set down as part of the record.

  It also made me conclude that maybe the two partners had not been close. They were close now, inextricably linked in department mythology as keepers of the ultimate bad luck. But maybe if they had been close that moment in the bar, things would have been different.

  Thinking about what could have been made me remember Danny Cross singing to her husband. I finally got up and went to the CD player and put in a disc of the collected works of Louis Armstrong. It had been put out in unison with the Ken Burns documentary on jazz. Most of it was the very early stuff but I knew it ended with “What a Wonderful World,” his last hit.

  Back at the table I looked at my notepad. I had written down only three things during my first read-through.

  $100K

  Sandor Szatmari

  The money, stupid

  The company that had insured the money on the movie set, Global Underwriters, had put up a $100,000 reward for an arrest and conviction in the case. I hadn’t known about the reward and was surprised that Lawton Cross hadn’t told me. I guessed that it was just another detail that had escaped from his mind due to trauma and the passage of time.

  The fact that there was a reward was of little personal consequence to me. I assumed that since I was a former cop who at one time was involved in the case, albeit before the heist that spawned the reward, I would not be eligible for it if my efforts resulted in an arrest and conviction. I also knew that it was likely that the small print on the reward proclamation said that full recovery of the $2 million was required for collection of the hundred thousand, with the amount prorated according to the amount of recovery. And four years after the crime the chances of there being anything left to recover were small. Still, the reward was good to know about. It might be useful as a tool of leverage or coercion. I might not be eligible but I might encounter someone useful who would be. I was glad I found out about it.

  Next on the notepad was the name Sandor Szatmari. He or she—I didn’t know which—was listed as the case investigator for Global Underwriters. He or she was someone I needed to talk to. I opened the murder book to the first page, where investigators usually kept a page of most often called phone numbers. There was no listing for Szatmari but there was for Global. I went into the kitchen to get the phone, turned down Louis Armstrong on the CD player and made the call. I was transferred twice before I finally got a woman who answered with “Investigations.”

  I had trouble with Szatmari’s name and she corrected me and then told me to hold. In less than a minute Szatmari picked up. The name belonged to a he. I explained my situation and asked if we could meet. He seemed skeptical, but that might have just been because he had an accent from Eastern Europe that made him hard to read. He declined to discuss the case over the phone with a stranger but ultimately agreed to meet me in person at ten o’clock the next morning at his office in Santa Monica. I told him I’d be there and hung up.

  I looked at the last line I had written on the notepad. It was just a reminder of an old adage good for almost any investigation. Follow the money, stupid. It always leads to the truth. In this case the money was gone and the trail—other than blips on the radar in Phoenix and involving Mousouwa Aziz and Martha Gessler—had gone cold. I knew that left me one alternative. To go backwards. Trace the money backwards and see what came up.

  To do that I needed to start at the bank. I checked the phone number page in the murder book again and called Gordon Scaggs, the vice president at BankLA who had arranged the one-day loan of $2 million to Alexander Taylor’s film company.

  Scaggs was a busy man, he told me. He wanted to put off meeting with me until the following week. But I was persistent and got him to squeeze me in for fifteen minutes the next afternoon at three. He asked me for a callback number so his secretary could confirm in the morning. I made up a number and gave it to him. I wasn’t going to give him the opportunity to have the secretary call me back and tell me the meeting had been canceled.

  I hung up and weighed my options. It was late afternoon and at the moment I was clear until ten the following morning. I wanted to take another run at the murder book but knew I didn’t need to be sitting in the house to do that. I could just as easily be sitting on a plane.

  I called Southwest Airlines and reserved a flight from Burbank to Las Vegas, arriving at 7:15, and a return flight leaving early the next morning and arriving at 8:30 back at Burbank.

  Eleanor answered her cell phone on the second ring and seemed to be whispering.

  “It’s Harry. Is something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  She spoke up.

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was. What’s going on?”

  “I’m thinking about coming over there tonight to get my bag and my credit cards.”

  When she did not respond right away, I asked, “Are you go
ing to be around?”

  “Well, I was going to play tonight. Later.”

  “My plane gets in at seven-fifteen. I could come by around eight. Maybe we could have dinner before you go to play.”

  I waited and again it seemed like she was taking too long to respond.

  “Dinner would be nice. Are you staying overnight?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got an early flight out. I have some things to do over here in the morning.”