Lost Light

detailing work she had done on different cases in just the month before her disappearance. Lindell and other agents working for him backtracked on these jobs, looking for anything that was a clue to why Gessler had disappeared. The closest it appeared they came to finding something was when they reviewed Gessler’s work on an investigation of an escort service that advertised women for hire on a website. Gessler’s work was part of the organized crime unit’s investigation into the eastern mob’s ties to prostitution in Los Angeles.
    According to what I read, Gessler was able to find Internet connections between websites advertising women in more than a dozen cities. Women were being moved from city to city and client to client. Money generated by the escort services flowed to Florida and then to New York. Seven weeks before Gessler disappeared a grand jury indicted nine men under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. Exactly one week before her disappearance, Gessler testified about her part in the investigation during a pretrial hearing in the case. Her testimony was described as effective and it was assumed she would testify when the case went to trial. She was not, however, a key witness. Her testimony was seemingly part of the linkage between the websites and the defendants. The key witness was one of the members of the ring who had cut a deal with prosecutors to escape a stiff sentence.
    The possibility that Gessler was targeted because she was a witness was a long shot but it seemed to be the best thing going. Lindell worked it hard, judging by the number of reports and the details they contained. But apparently nothing came of it. The last report in the file pertaining to the RICO case described this branch of the investigation as “open and active but without substantive leads at this time.” I recognized it as bureauspeak meaning this path of investigation had hit a dead end.
    I closed the file and checked my watch again. Lindell had been gone seventeen minutes. There was nothing in the file about Gessler filing a report or notifying a supervisor or colleague that she had run a computer cross-reference check on the currency numbers contained on the flier put out by Cross and Dorsey. Nothing that said she had gotten a hit and had called the LAPD to report that one of the numbers on the currency report was bad.
    After putting away my notebook I stood up and stretched my back and paced a little bit in the small room. I checked the door and found it unlocked. That was good. They weren’t holding me like a suspect. At least, not yet. After a few more minutes I got tired of waiting and stepped out into the hallway. I looked both ways and saw no one, not even Nunez. I went back into the room and picked up the file and then started walking out the way I had come in. I got all the way to the front waiting room without anyone stopping me or asking where I was going. I nodded to the receptionist through the glass and took the elevator down.

13
    Roy Lindell was sitting on the same bench I had used before entering the building. There were three cigarettes crushed on the pavement between his feet. A fourth was between his fingers.
    “You took your sweet-ass time,” he said.
    I sat down next to him and put the file between us.
    “Putting you in the OPR-isn’t that like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse?”
    I was thinking about the case I had met him on six years before. I’d had no clue he was law enforcement. This was mostly because he was running a strip club in Vegas and bedding the strippers two and three at a time. His front was so convincing that even after I learned he was an undercover I entertained the idea that he had crossed over. Eventually and completely, I was convinced otherwise.
    “Once a smart-ass always a smart-ass, eh, Bosch?”
    “Something like that, I guess. So who was listening to our little conversation up there?”
    “I was told to tape it. That the tape would be forwarded.”
    “To who?”
    He didn’t say anything. It was like he was still deciding something.
    “Come on, Roy, you want to give me a clue about what’s going on? I looked through your file. It’s pretty thin, not much that helps me.”
    “That’s just the highlights-stuff I kept in a backup file. The real file used to fill a whole drawer.”
    “Used to?”
    Lindell looked around as if realizing for the first time he was sitting outside a building that housed more agents and