The Overlook

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