Lost Light (35 page)

“What was Agent Milton doing in your house if you weren’t there?” Rider repeated.

I looked back at her.

“He was waiting for me.”

“To do what?”

“I had told him to meet me there but I got delayed because I went and bought the coffee on my way home.”

“Why was he meeting you so late at night?”

“Because I had information that would clear some things up for him.”

“What was that information?”

“It was about how a terrorist involved in a case he was working ended up with a hundred-dollar bill that supposedly came from the movie set heist I was investigating and had been warned off of. I told him I had put things together and found that the two cases were actually unrelated. I invited him to come to my lawyer’s office in the morning when you two were going to come and I’d explain it all to everybody. But he didn’t want to wait so I told him to meet me at the house.”

“And what, you left him a key?”

“No, I didn’t. But I must’ve left the door unlocked because he was inside when I got home. I guess you could say he had permission because I invited him to the house but I didn’t exactly tell him to go inside. He just sort of did that on his own when he beat me to the house.”

“Agent Milton had a number of miniaturized listening devices in the pocket of his coat. Do you know anything about that or why he had them?”

My guess was that he had removed them from my house but I didn’t say this.

“No idea,” I said. “You would’ve had to ask him, I guess.”

“What about his car? It was found parked about a block north of your house on Woodrow Wilson. In fact, it was further away from your house than the car the four assailants used. Any idea why Milton would park so far from your house if he was invited to be there?”

“No, not really. Like I said, I guess he’s the only one who knew that.”

“Exactly.”

I could see her getting heated. Her eyes grew sharper and she seemed to be trying to read the looks I was giving Lindell. She knew there was a play on but she was smart enough not to mention anything on camera. I had taught her well.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what, Harry. You told us every detail about what happened last night but not how it fits into anything. Before all the shit hit the fan you called the big meeting for this morning in order to lay it all out for us. So go ahead and do it now. Tell us what you’ve got.”

“You mean from the beginning?”

“From the beginning.”

I nodded.

“Okay, well, I guess you could say it all started with Ray Vaughn and Linus Simonson deciding to rip off the cash shipment to the movie set. There was some sort of connection between them. One of their former colleagues at the bank said she thought Vaughn was gay and Simonson had said he was making a move on him. Anyway, whether Simonson drew Vaughn in or it was the other way around, they decided to take the money. They planned it out and then Simonson recruited his four pals for the heavy work. It went from there.”

“What about Angella Benton?” Rider asked.

“I’m getting to that. Without telling the others, Vaughn and Linus decided they needed a device, something that would make the cops think the heist came from inside the movie company, not the bank. So they picked her. She’d come to the bank as a liaison once with documents pertaining to the loan. So they knew a case could be made that she knew about the money. They picked her and probably watched her for a couple days and then figured out when she was most vulnerable and when to do it. They killed her and one of them put the semen on her so it would look like a sex case at first and it wouldn’t immediately reflect on the movie company or the plan to shoot scenes with real money. That would come later. After the heist.”

“So she was just a device is what you are saying,” Rider said dejectedly. “Her life taken simply because she fit into the plan.”

I nodded somberly.

“What a wonderful world, right?”

“Okay, go on. Did they both do it?”

“I don’t know, maybe. Simonson had an alibi for that night but it was cleared by Jack Dorsey, and we’ll get to him in a minute. But my guess is that they did it together. It would take two to completely overpower her without a struggle.”

“The jizz,” Rider said. “We can see if it matches one of them. Since Vaughn was killed during the robbery and Simonson was shot, it was never thought to type them against the semen collected at the murder scene.”

I shook my head.

“I have a feeling that it won’t match either one of them.”

“Then who did it come from?”

“We may never know. Remember the spatter evidence? We decided the semen was brought to the scene and dripped onto the body. Who knows where they got it. Maybe from one of themselves but if they were smart they wouldn’t have left their own. Why leave a direct tie to the crime?”

“So, what, they just go up to a stranger and ask him to jerk off in a cup for them?” Lindell asked incredulously.

“It wouldn’t be that hard to get,” Rider said. “Go into any alley in Hollywood and you’ll find a loaded condom. And if Vaughn was gay, then it could have come from one of his partners and the partner might not have ever known it.”

I nodded. I had been thinking the same thing.

“Exactly. And that’s probably why he was killed. Simonson double-crossed him. He told his guys to make sure they took him out during the robbery. It would mean more money for them and a link to the Benton case eliminated.”

“Jesus, these are cold-blooded fucks,” Lindell said.

I could tell he was thinking about Marty Gessler and her unknown fate.

“Simonson further secured the operation and the future use of the money by switching the currency report he and another BankLA employee had put together. You could say he unmarked the bills.”

“How?” Rider asked.

“I thought at first that he probably just put wrong currency numbers into the report he and another bank employee made in the vault. But I guess that would have been too risky because she wasn’t in on it and she might have decided to double-check the numbers. So I think what he did was create a second, phony report on his computer. It listed currency numbers he just made up. He then printed it out and forged his coworker’s signature on it and turned it in to the vice president for his signature. From there it went to the insurance company and then to the cops after the heist and eventually to the FBI.”

“You told me to bring the original to the meeting we were supposed to have this morning,” Rider said. “Why?”

“You know what forger’s tremor is? It’s something you can see in a signature that has been forged by tracing. He traced his coworker’s signature off the original or real currency report. In the photocopy of the one he turned in I could see hesitation marks. Her signature would have been one smooth, uninterrupted scrawl. But it looks like whoever signed that page never lifted the pen but stopped and started after almost every letter. It’s a tell and I think the original will show it beyond a doubt.”

“How was that missed?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe it wasn’t.”

“Dorsey and Cross.”

“I think Dorsey. I don’t know about Cross. Cross helped me with this. In fact, he called me and gave me the jump start on it.”

Lindell leaned forward. We were getting to the part about Marty Gessler and he wanted to get it right.

“So Simonson turns in a report with made-up numbers and then his buddies go and rip off the delivery and kill Vaughn in the process. Intentionally.”

“That’s right.”

“What about Simonson? He got shot, too. Were they trying to cut him out, too?”

“No, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Not according to Fazio. At least that was what he was saying to me before he got nailed last night. It sounded like Simonson getting shot was just dumb luck. A ricochet. If Banks comes out of his sleep with his brain intact maybe he can tell you about that. I have a feeling he’ll want to talk. He’ll want to spread the blame around.”

“Don’t worry, if he comes out of it, we’ll be there. But the early word from the hospital is that that’s a big if.”

“The thing about that ricochet is that it actually helped them. It gave Simonson a valid out from the bank. No suspicion there. Then he hid the purchase and renovation of the bars behind a settlement from the bank. The truth was he didn’t make enough off the settlement to put in a new beer cooler.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know.”

“All right, let’s get back to the heist for a minute,” Lindell said. “So other than Simonson taking a slug in the ass, the heist goes off as planned. All the cops —”

“Not exactly,” Rider said. “Harry was there. He nailed one of the robbers.”

I nodded.

“And he apparently died in the van during the getaway. Simonson told me the others took him out on a boat or something and buried him at sea. His name was Cozy. They named one of the bars after him.”

“Okay,” Lindell said. “But when the dust settles from this thing, all the cops have is Angella Benton dead and a phony list of numbers that nobody knows is phony. Then nine months sail by and lo and behold one of those numbers scores a hit when Marty Gessler puts it into her computer.”

I nodded. Lindell knew where it was going.

“Wait a minute,” Rider said. “I’m not tracking this part.”

Lindell and I took five minutes to fill her in on Marty Gessler’s computer program that tracked currency numbers and what her discovery meant.

“Got it,” Rider said. “She came up with the first inference that something was wrong. She came up with a hit that didn’t work because the hundred-dollar bill in question was already in evidence lockup. It could not have been taken during the movie set heist.”

“Exactly,” I said. “One of the numbers Simonson made up just happened to be on a bill already accounted for. The same thing would later happen when they arrested Mousouwa Aziz at the border. One of the hundreds he was carrying matched Simonson’s phony list. That brought Milton and the Homeland Security heavies into it and it was all bullshit. The truth was, there was no connection between the two cases.”

Which meant I had spent the night in federal lockup for nothing and Milton had been killed while pursuing what amounted to nothing, a wild goose chase. I tried not to think about this and moved on with the story.

“When Marty Gessler got that hit, she called up Jack Dorsey because his name was on the list when it was circulated to other law enforcement agencies. It went from there.”

“You’re saying that Dorsey then put two and two together and came up with Simonson,” Lindell said. “Maybe he knew about the forgery or maybe he knew about something else. But he knew enough to know. He went to Simonson and cut himself in.”

I noticed that we were all nodding. The story worked.

“Dorsey had money problems,” I added. “The insurance investigator on this did routine background checks on all the cops involved. Dorsey was in debt up to his neck, had two kids in college and two still to go.”

“Everybody’s got money problems,” Rider said angrily. “It’s no excuse.”

That made us all silent for a long moment and then I took up the story again.

“There was just one problem at that point.”

“Agent Gessler,” Rider said. “She knew too much. She had to disappear.”

Rider didn’t know anything about Lindell’s relationship with Gessler, and Lindell did little to reveal it. He just sat quietly, his eyes down. I moved the story forward.

“My guess is that Simonson and his guys played Dorsey along while they took care of the Gessler problem. Dorsey knew what they did, but what could he do or say about it? He was in too deep. Then Simonson took care of him in Nat’s. Cross and the bartender were window dressing.”

Rider squinted her eyes and shook her head.

“What?” Lindell asked.

“Doesn’t work for me,” she said. “There’s a disconnect there. With Gessler, she’s gone without a trace. Very smooth. Three years later and who knows where the body is?”

I was cringing for Lindell’s sake but tried not to show it.

“But with Dorsey, it’s a shoot-out at the OK Corral. Dorsey, Cross, the bartender. Two completely different styles. One smooth as smoke, the other a blood bath.”

“Well,” I said, “with Dorsey, they wanted it to look like a robbery gone wrong. If he just disappeared, then the obvious thing to do would be to go back over the old cases. Simonson didn’t want that. So he orchestrated the big blowout so the investigators would think robbery.”

“I still don’t buy it. I think they’re different. Look, I don’t remember all the details but didn’t Marty Gessler disappear while driving home through the Sepulveda Pass?”

“That’s right. Somebody bumped her and she pulled over.”

“Okay, then here’s an armed and trained agent. Are you going to tell me Simonson and these guys got her to pull over by bumping her car and then they got the best of her? Uh-uh, guys. I say, no way. Not without a fight. Not without somebody seeing something. I think she stopped because she felt safe. She stopped for a cop.”

She pointed at me and nodded when she said the last line. Lindell brought a fist down hard on the table. Rider had convinced him. I had defended my theory but now saw the cracks in it. I started thinking Rider might be right.

I noticed Rider looking at Lindell. She was finally picking up the vibe.

“You really knew her, didn’t you?” she asked.

Lindell just nodded to the question. Then he brought his eyes up to stare angrily at me.

“And you blew it, Bosch,” he said.

“I blew it? What are you talking about?”

“With your little stunt last night. Going in there like fucking Steve McQueen. What did you think, that they’d be so spooked they’d march right down to Parker Center and turn themselves in?”

“Roy,” Rider said, “I think we —”