The Overlook

by Michael Connelly

  “Never mind the hospital,” he said. “Take me back to the Kent house.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll get checked out later. Go to the Kent house. Here’s the turn. Go!”

  She slipped into the left-turn lane.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m fine. I’m okay.”

  “What are you telling me, that that little fainting spell back there was—”

  “I had to get you away from the crime scene and away from Brenner so I could check this out and talk to you. Alone.”

  “Check what out? Talk about what? Do you realize what you just did? I thought I was saving your life. Now Brenner or one of those other guys will take the credit for the recovery of the cesium. Thanks a lot, asshole. That was my crime scene.”

  He opened his jacket and pulled out the rolled-up and folded yoga poster.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You can get the credit for the arrests. You just might not want it.”

  He opened the poster, letting the top half flop over his knees. He was only interested in the bottom half.

  “Dhanurasana,” he said.

  Walling glanced over at him and then down at the poster.

  “Would you start telling me what’s going on?”

  “Alicia Kent practices yoga. I saw the mats in the workout room at the house.”

  “I saw them, too. So what?”

  “Did you see the sun discoloration on the wall where a picture or a calendar or maybe a poster had been taken down?”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  Bosch held up the poster.

  “I’m betting that we go in there and this will be a perfect fit. This is a poster Gonzalves found with the cesium.”

  “And what will that mean?—if it’s a perfect fit.”

  “It will mean that it was almost a perfect crime. Alicia Kent conspired to kill her husband and, if it hadn’t been for Digoberto Gonzalves just happening to find the tossed-out evidence, she would have gotten away with it.”

  Walling shook her head dismissively.

  “Come on, Harry. Are you saying she conspired with international terrorists to kill her husband in exchange for the cesium? I can’t believe I am even doing this. I need to get back to the crime scene.”

  She started checking her mirrors, getting ready to make a U-turn. They were going up Lake Hollywood Drive now and would be at the house in two minutes.

  “No, keep going. We’re almost there. Alicia Kent conspired with someone but it wasn’t a terrorist. The cesium being dumped in the trash proves that. You said it yourself, there is no way that Moby and El-Fayed would steal this stuff to just dump it. So what does that tell you? This wasn’t a heist. It actually was a murder. The cesium was just a red herring. Just like Ramin Samir. And Moby and El-Fayed? They were part of the misdirection as well. This poster will help prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Dhanurasana, the rocking bow.”

  He held the poster up and over so she could glance at the yoga pose depicted in the bottom corner. It showed a woman with her arms behind her back, holding her ankles and creating a bow with the front of her body. She looked like she was hog-tied.

  Walling glanced back at the curving road and then took another long look at the poster and the pose.

  “We go into the house and see if this fits that space on the wall,” Bosch said. “If it fits, that means she and the killer took it off the wall because they didn’t want to risk that we might see it and connect it with what happened to her.”

  “It’s a stretch, Harry. A huge one.”

  “Not when you put it in context.”

  “Which you, of course, can do.”

  “As soon as we get to the house.”

  “Hope you still have a key.”

  “You bet I do.”

  Walling turned onto Arrowhead Drive and punched the accelerator. But after a block she took her foot off, slowed down and shook her head again.

  “This is ridiculous. She gave us the name Moby. There is no way she could have known he was in this country. And then up on the overlook, your own witness said that the shooter called out to Allah as he pulled the trigger. How can—”

  “Let’s just try the poster on the wall. If it fits, I’ll lay the whole thing out for you. I promise. If it doesn’t fit, then I will quit—bothering you with it.”

  She relented and drove the remaining block to the Kent house without another word. There was no longer a bureau car sitting out front. Bosch guessed that it was all hands on deck at the cesium recovery scene.

  “Thank God I don’t have to deal with Maxwell again,” he said.

  Walling didn’t even smile.

  Bosch got out with the poster and his file containing the crime scene photos. He used Stanley Kent’s keys to open the front door and they proceeded to the workout room. They took positions on either side of the rectangular sun-discoloration mark and Bosch unrolled the poster. They each took a side and held the top corner of the poster to the top corner of the mark. Bosch put his other hand on the center of the poster and flattened it against the wall. The poster was a perfect fit over the mark on the wall. What was more was that the tape marks on the wall matched up with tape marks and old tape on the poster. To Bosch there was no doubt. The poster found by Digoberto Gonzalves in a Dumpster off Cahuenga had definitely come from Alicia Kent’s home yoga studio.

  Rachel let go of her side of the poster and headed out of the room.

  “I’ll be in the living room. I can’t wait to hear you put this together.”

  Bosch rolled the poster up and followed. Walling took a seat in the same chair Bosch had put Maxwell in a few hours earlier. He remained standing in front of her.

  “The fear was that the poster could be a tip-off,” he said. “Some smart agent or detective would see the rocking-bow pose and start thinking, This woman does yoga, maybe she could handle being hog-tied like that, maybe it was her idea, maybe she did it to help sell the misdirection. So they couldn’t take the chance. The poster had to go. It went into the Dumpster with the cesium, the gun and everything else they used. Except for the ski masks and the phony map they planted with the car at Ramin Samir’s house.”

  “She’s a master criminal,” Walling said sarcastically.

  Bosch was undeterred. He knew he’d convince her.

  “If you get your people out there to check that line of Dumpsters, you’ll find the rest—the Coke-bottle silencer, the gloves, the first set of snap ties, every—”

  “The first set of snap ties?”

  “That’s right. I’ll get to that.”

  Walling remained unimpressed.

  “You better get to a lot of it. Because there are big gaps in this thing, man. What about the name Moby? What about the citing of Allah by the shooter? What—”

  Bosch held up a hand.

  “Just hold on,” he said. “I need some water. My throat is raw from all of this talking.”

  He went into the kitchen, remembering that he saw bottles of chilled water in the refrigerator while searching the kitchen earlier in the day.

  “You want anything?” he called out.

  “No,” she called back. “It’s not our house, remember?”

  He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water and drank half of it while standing in front of the open door. The cool air felt good, too. He closed the door but then immediately reopened it. He had seen something. On the top shelf was a plastic bottle of grape juice. He took it out and looked at it, remembering that when he went through the trash bag in the garage he had found paper towels with grape juice on them.

  Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. He put the bottle back in the refrigerator and then returned to the living room, where Rachel was waiting for the story. Once again, he remained standing.

  “Okay, when was it that you captured the terrorist known as Moby on video at the port?”

  “What does—”

  “Please, just answer the
question.”

  “August twelfth last year.”

  “Okay, August twelfth. Then what, some sort of alert went out through the bureau and all of Homeland Security?”

  She nodded.

  “Not for a while, though,” she said. “It took almost two months of video analysis to confirm it was Nassar and El-Fayed. I wrote the bulletin. It went out October ninth as a confirmed domestic sighting.”

  “Out of curiosity, why didn’t you go public with it?”

  “Because we have—actually, I can’t tell you.”

  “You just did. You must have someone or someplace where you think these two might show up under surveillance. If you go public, they might just go underground and never show up again.”

  “Can we go back to your story, please?”

  “Fine. So the bulletin went out October ninth. That was the day the plan to kill Stanley Kent began.”

  Walling folded her arms across her chest and just stared at him. Bosch thought that maybe she was beginning to see where he was going with the story and she didn’t like it.

  “It works best if you start from the end and go backwards,” Bosch said. “Alicia Kent gave you the name Moby. How could she have gotten that name?”

  “She overheard one of them calling the other one by that name.”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “No, she told you she overheard it. But if she was lying, how would she know the name to lie about it? Just coincidence that she gives the nickname of a guy who less than six months ago was confirmed as being in the country—in L.A. County, no less? I don’t think so, Rachel, and neither do you. The odds of that probably can’t be calculated.”

  “Okay, so you’re saying that somebody in the bureau or another agency that received the FBI bulletin I wrote gave her the name.”

  Bosch nodded and pointed at her.

  “Right. He gave her the name so she could come out with it while being questioned by the FBI’s master interrogator. That name along with the plan to dump the car in front of Ramin Samir’s house would act in concert to send this whole thing down the wrong road with the FBI and everybody else chasing after terrorists who had nothing to do with it.”

  “He?”

  “I’m getting to that now. You are right, anybody who got a look at that bulletin would have been able to give her that name. My guess is that would be a lot of people. A lot of people just in L.A. alone. So how would we narrow it down to one?”

  “You tell me.”

  Bosch opened the bottle and drank the rest of the water. He held the empty bottle in his hand as he continued.

  “You narrow it down by continuing to go backwards. Where would Alicia Kent’s life have intersected with one of those people in the agencies who knew about Moby?”

  Walling frowned and shook her head.

  “That could have been anywhere with those kinds of parameters. In line at the supermarket, or when she was buying fertilizer for her roses. Anywhere.”

  Bosch now had her right where he wanted her to be.

  “Then narrow the parameters,” he said. “Where would she have intersected with someone who knew about Moby but also knew that her husband had access to the sort of radioactive materials Moby might be interested in?”

  Now she shook her head in a dismissive way.

  “Nowhere. It would take a monumental coincidence to—”

  She stopped when it came to her. Enlightenment. And shock as she fully understood where Bosch was going.

  “My partner and I visited the Kents to warn them early last year. I guess what you’re saying is that that makes me a suspect.”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “I said ‘he,’ remember? You didn’t come here alone.”

  Her eyes fired when she registered the implication.

  “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way. I can’t believe you would . . .”

  She didn’t finish as her mind snagged on something, some memory that undermined her trust and loyalty to her partner. Bosch picked up on the tell and moved in closer.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Look,” she insisted, “take my advice and tell no one this theory of yours. You’re lucky you told me first. Because this makes you sound like some kind of crackpot with a vendetta. You have no evidence, no motive, no incriminating statements, nothing. You just have this thing you’ve spun out of . . . out of a yoga poster.”

  “There is no other explanation that fits with the facts. And I’m talking about the facts of the case. Not the fact that the bureau and Homeland Security and the rest of the federal government would love this to be a terrorism event so they can justify their existence and deflect criticism from other failings. Contrary to what you want to think, there is evidence and there are incriminating statements. If we put Alicia Kent on a lie detector, you’ll find out that everything she told me, you and the master interrogator downtown is a lie. The real master was Alicia Kent. As in master manipulator.”

  Walling leaned forward and looked down at the floor.

  “Thank you, Harry. That master interrogator you love deriding happens to have been me.”

  Bosch’s mouth dropped open for a moment before he spoke.

  “Oh . . . well . . . then, sorry . . . but it doesn’t matter. The point is, she is a master liar. She lied about everything and now that we know the story, it will be easy to smoke her out.”

  Walling got up from her seat and walked over to the front picture window. The vertical blinds were closed but she split them with a finger and stared out into the street. Bosch could see her working the story over, grinding it down.

  “What about the witness?” she asked without turning around. “He heard the shooter yell Allah. Are you saying he’s part of this? Or are you saying they just happened to know he was there and yelled Allah as part of this master manipulation?”

  Bosch gently tried to clear his throat. It was burning and making it difficult for him to talk.

  “No, on that I think it’s just a lesson in hearing what you want to hear. I plead guilty to not being much of a master interrogator myself. The kid told me that he heard the shooter yell it as he pulled the trigger. He said he wasn’t sure but that it sounded like Allah and that, of course, worked with what I was thinking at the time. I heard what I wanted to hear.”

  Walling came away from the window, sat back down and folded her arms. Bosch finally sat down on a chair directly across from her. He continued.

  “But how would the witness know it was the shooter and not the victim who yelled?” he asked. “He was more than fifty yards away. It was dark. How would he know that it wasn’t Stanley Kent yelling out his last word before execution? The name of the woman he loved, because he was about to die not even knowing that she’d betrayed him.”

  “Alicia.”

  “Exactly. Alicia interrupted by a gunshot becomes Allah.”

  Walling relaxed her arms and leaned forward. As body language went, it was a good sign. It told Bosch he was pushing through.

  “You said the first set of snap ties before,” she said. “What were you talking about?”

  Bosch nodded and handed across the file containing the crime scene photos. He had saved the best for last.

  “Look at the photos,” he said. “What do you see?”

  She opened the file and started looking at the crime scene photos. They depicted the master bedroom in the Kent house from all angles.

  “It’s the master bedroom,” she said. “What am I missing?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What?”

  “It’s what you don’t see. There are no clothes in the shot. She told us they told her to sit on the bed and take off her clothes. What are we supposed to believe, that they let her put the clothes away before they hog-tied her? They let her put them in the hamper? Look at the last shot. It’s the e-mail photo Stanley Kent got.”

  Walling looked through the file until she found the printout
of the e-mail photo. She stared intently at it. He saw recognition break in her eyes.

  “Now what do you see?”

  “The robe,” she said excitedly. “When we let her get dressed, she went to the closet to get her robe. There was no robe on that lounge chair!”

  Bosch nodded and they started trading pieces of the story back and forth.

  “What does that tell us?” he asked. “That these considerate terrorists hung the robe up in the closet for her after taking the photo?”

  “Or that maybe Mrs. Kent was tied up twice and the robe was moved in between?”

  “And look again at the picture. The clock on the bed table is unplugged.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know but maybe they didn’t want to worry about having any sort of time stamp on the photo. Maybe the first photo wasn’t even taken yesterday. Maybe it came from a dry run two days ago or even two weeks.”

  Rachel nodded and Bosch knew she was committed. She was a believer.

  “She was tied up once for the photo and then once again for the rescue,” she said.

  “Exactly. And that left her free to help carry out the plan on the overlook. She didn’t kill her husband but she was up there in the other car. And once Stanley was dead and the cesium was dumped and the car was ditched at Samir’s she and her partner came back home and she was tied up all over again.”

  “She wasn’t passed out when we got there. That was an act and part of the plan. And her wetting the bed was a nice little touch to help sell it to us.”

  “The smell of urine also covered up the smell of grape juice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The purple bruises on her wrists and ankles. Now we know she wasn’t tied up for hours. But she still had those bruises. There’s an opened bottle of grape juice in the fridge and paper towels soaked with it out in the trash can. She used grape juice to create the bruises.”

  “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this.”

  “What?”

  “When I was in the room with her at TIU. That small space. I thought I smelled grape in the room. I thought somebody had been in there before us and had been drinking grape juice. I smelled it!”

  “There you go.”

  There was no doubt now. Bosch had her. But then a shadow of concern and doubt moved across Walling’s face like a summer cloud.