Trunk Music

four more fingerprints. He turned the right lapel and saw four more there. It appeared that someone had grabbed Tony Aliso by the lapels.
    Donovan whistled.
    “This looks like two different people. Look at the size of the thumbs on the lapel and the hand on the shoulder. I’d say the hand is smaller, Harry. Maybe a woman. I don’t know. But the hands that grabbed this guy by the lapels were big.”
    Donovan got scissors from a nearby toolbox and carefully cut the sport coat off the body. Bosch then held it as Donovan went over it with the laser wand. Nothing else came up besides the shoe print and the fingerprints they had already sighted. Bosch carefully hung the jacket over a chair at the counter and came back to the body. Donovan was moving the laser over the lower extremities.
    “What else?” Donovan said to no one except maybe the body. “Come on now, tell us a story.”
    There were more fibers and some old stains on the pants. Nothing that stood out as possibly significant until they reached the cuffs. Bosch pulled open the cuff on the right leg and in the crease was a large buildup of dust and fibers. Also, five tiny pieces of gold glitter glowed in the laser beam. Bosch carefully tweezered these into a separate plastic vial. From the left cuff, he recovered two more similar pieces.
    “What is it?” he asked.
    “Got me. Looks like glitter or something.”
    Donovan moved the wand over the bare feet. They were clean, which indicated to Bosch that the victim’s shoes had probably been removed after he was forced into the trunk of the Rolls.
    “Okay, that’s it,” Donovan said.
    The lights came back on and Matthews went to work with the corpse, rotating joints, opening the shirt to look at the lividity level of the blood, opening the eyes and swiveling the head. Donovan paced around, waiting for the coroner’s tech to finish so he could continue the laser show. He walked over to Bosch.
    “Harry, you want the swag on this?”
    “Swag?”
    “Scientific wild ass guess.”
    “Yeah,” Bosch said, amused. “Give me the swag.”
    “Well, I think somebody gets the drop on this guy. Ties him up, dumps him in the trunk and drives him to that fire road. He’s still alive, okay? Then our doer gets out, opens the trunk, puts his foot on the bumper ready to do the job but can’t get all the way in there to put the muzzle against the bone, you know? That was important to him. To do the job right. So he sticks his big foot on this poor guy’s hip, leans further in and bam, bam, out go the headlights. What do you think?”
    Bosch nodded.
    “I think you are on to something.”
    He had already been thinking along the same lines but was past those deductions to the problem.
    “Then how does he get back?” he asked.
    “Back to where?”
    “If this guy was in the trunk the whole time, then the doer drove the Rolls. If he drove there in the Rolls, then how’s he get back to wherever he intercepted Tony?”
    “The other one,” Donovan said. “We’ve got two different prints on the jacket. Somebody could’ve followed behind the Rolls. The woman. The one who put her hand on the vic’s shoulder.”
    Bosch nodded. He had already been puzzling with this but didn’t like something about the scenario Donovan had woven. He wasn’t sure what it was.
    “Okay, Bosch,” Matthews interrupted. “You want to hear this tonight or you want to wait for the report?”
    “T’night,” Bosch said.
    “Okay then, listen up. Lividity was fixed and unchanged. The body was never moved once the heart stopped pumping.” He referred to a clipboard. “Let’s see, what else. We’ve got ninety percent rigor mortis resolution, cornea clouding and we’ve got skin slippage. I think you take all of that and it’s forty-eight hours, maybe a couple hours less. Let us know if you come up with any markers and we might do better.”
    “Will do,” Bosch said.
    By markers he knew Matthews meant that if he traced the victim’s last day and found out what he had eaten last and when, the ME could get a better fix on time of death by studying the digestion of food in the stomach.
    “He’s all yours,” Bosch said to Matthews. “Any idea on the post?”
    “You caught the tail end of a holiday weekend. That’s bad luck for you. Last I heard, we’ve run on twenty-seven homicides in the county so far. We probably won’t cut this one until Wednesday, if you’re lucky. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard