Trunk Music

the story while pacing in front of her desk. He was too tired to sit for very long without being overcome with fatigue.
    “Anyway, that was what the second trip was for. Powers went over and watched Tony one more time. It was research. He also tailed the guy Tony made the pickups from. Luke Goshen, who he obviously had no idea was an agent. They decided Goshen would be the patsy and worked out the plan to make it look like a mob hit. Trunk music.”
    “It’s pretty complicated.”
    “Yeah, that it is. He says the planning was all hers, and I kind of think he might be telling the truth there. You ask me, Powers is smart but not that smart. This whole thing was Veronica’s plan and he became a willing player. Only she had a backdoor built into it that Powers didn’t know about.”
    “He was the backdoor.”
    “Yeah. She set him up to take the fall, but only if we got too close. He said he’d given her a key to his place. It’s a bungalow over on Sierra Bonita. She must’ve gone over there sometime this week, shoved the photos under the mattress and stuck the box of money in the attic. Smart woman. Nice setup. When Jerry and Kiz get her in here, I know just what she’ll say. She’s going to say it was all him, that he became infatuated with her, that they had an affair and that she broke it off. He went ahead and knocked off her husband. When she realized what had happened, she couldn’t say anything. He forced her to go along with it. She had no choice. He was a cop and he told her he could pin it all on her if she didn’t go along.”
    “It’s a good story. In fact, it still might work with a jury. She could walk on this.”
    “Maybe. We still have some things to do.”
    “What about the skim?”
    “Good question. Nothing like the kind of money he’s talking about showed up on Aliso’s bank accounts. Powers said she said it was in a safe deposit box but she never told him where. It’s got to be somewhere. We’ll find it.”
    “If it exists.”
    “I think it does. She planted a half million in Powers’s place to put him in the frame. That’s a lot of money to spend on setting him up, unless you happen to have a couple million more stashed someplace. That’s what we-”
    Bosch looked through the glass into the squad room. Edgar and Rider were walking toward the lieutenant’s office. Veronica Aliso was not with them. They came into the office with urgent looks on their faces and Bosch knew what they were going to say.
    “She’s gone,” Edgar said.
    Bosch and Billets just stared at them.
    “Looks like she split last night,” Edgar said. “Her cars are still there but there was nobody at the house. We slipped in a back door and it’s empty, man.”
    “She take her clothes, jewelry?” Bosch asked.
    “Doesn’t look like it. She’s just gone.”
    “You check the gate?”
    “Yeah, we checked at the gate. She had two visitors yesterday. First was a courier at four-fifteen. Legal Eagle Messenger Service. Guy was there about five minutes, in and out. Then a visitor last night. Late. Guy gave the name John Galvin. She had already called the gate and given the same name and told them to let him through when he showed up. They took his plate down and we ran it. It’s Hertz out of Vegas. We’ll put a call in. Anyway, Galvin stayed until one this morning. Just about the time we were in the woods hooking up Powers, he split. She probably went with him.”
    “We called the guard on duty at the time,” Rider said. “He couldn’t remember if Galvin left alone or not. He doesn’t specifically remember seeing Mrs. Aliso last night, but she could have been down in the backseat.”
    “Do we know who her attorney is?” Billets asked.
    “Yes,” Rider said, “Neil Denton, Century City.”
    “Okay, Jerry, you work the trace on the Hertz rental and, Kiz, you try to run down Denton and see if you can find out what was so important that he had to messenger it over to her on Saturday.”
    “All right,” Edgar said. “But I got a bad feeling. I think she’s in the wind.”
    “Well, then we have to go into the wind to find her,” Billets said. “Go to it.”
    Edgar and Rider went back out to the homicide table and Bosch stood silent for a few moments, thinking about this latest development.
    “Should we have put people on her?” Billets asked.
    “Well, looking back, it seems that way. But we were off the books. We didn’t have the people. Besides, we didn’t really have anything on