Trunk Music

access to until he was dead. She wasn’t a signatory on it. So my guess is that it’s in Vegas. It’s the only place he’s been outside of L.A. for the last year. And that if one day he was taking his girlfriend to open a bank account somewhere, he’d just go ahead and take her to the same bank he used.”
    Eleanor nodded.
    “It’s funny,” Bosch said.
    “What is?”
    “That what all of this really came down to was a bank caper. It’s not really about Tony Aliso’s murder, it’s about the money he skimmed and hid. A bank caper with his murder sort of a side effect. And that’s how you and I met. On a bank job.”
    She nodded, her eyes going far off as she thought about it. Bosch immediately wished he hadn’t brought the memory up.
    “Sorry,” he said. “I guess it’s not really that funny.”
    Eleanor looked up at him from the couch.
    “Harry, I’m going with you to Las Vegas.”

PART VIII
    THE SILVER STATE National Bank branch where Tony Aliso had taken his girlfriend while Eleanor Wish had watched was in the corner of a small shopping plaza between a Radio Shack and a Mexican restaurant called La Fuentes. The parking lot was largely empty at dawn on Monday morning when the FBI agents and LAPD detectives came to set up. The bank didn’t open until nine and the other businesses would follow beginning at ten.
    Because the businesses were closed, the agents had a problem in locating their surveillance points. It would be too obvious to stick four government cars in the lot. They would be too noticeable because there were only five other cars in the entire block-long parking lot, four parked on the outer fringes and an old Cadillac parked in the first row nearest the bank. There were no license plates on the Caddy, which had a spider web crack in the windshield, its windows left open and the trunk sprung and held closed by a chain and padlock through one of its many rusted-out spots. It had the sad appearance of having been abandoned, its owner probably another Las Vegas casualty. Like someone lost in the desert and dying of thirst just a few feet from an oasis, the Caddy had stopped for the final time just a few feet from the bank and all the money inside it.
    The agents, after cruising by the location a few times to get the lay of the land, decided to use the Caddy as a blind, by popping the hood and sticking an agent in a greasy T-shirt under it and ostensibly working on the dead engine. They complemented this agent with a panel van parked right next to the Caddy. Four agents were in the van. At seven that morning they had taken it to the federal utilities shop and had a painter stencil La Fuentes Mexican Restaurant-Established 1983 on the side panels in red paint. The paint was still drying when they drove the van into the lot at eight.
    Now at nine, the lot was slowly beginning to fill, mostly with employees of the stores and a few Silver State customers who needed to take care of business as soon as the bank opened its doors. Bosch watched all of this from the backseat of a federal car. Lindell and an agent named Baker were in the front seat. They were parked in the service bay of a gas station across Flamingo Road from the shopping center where the bank was located. Edgar and Rider were in another bureau car parked further up Flamingo. There were two other bureau cars in the area, one static and one roving. The plan was for Lindell to move his car into the bank parking lot once it became more crowded with cars and the bureau car would not stand out. This plan included a bureau helicopter making wide arcs around the shopping center.
    “They’re opening up,” a voice from the car radio reported.
    “Gotcha, La Fuentes,” Lindell said back.
    The bureau cars were each equipped with a radio pedal and overhead mike on the windshield visor, meaning the driver of each car simply depressed the foot pedal and spoke, avoiding having to raise a microphone to his mouth and possibly being noticed and identified as law enforcement. Bosch had heard that the LAPD was finally getting such equipment, but the narcotics units and specialized surveillance teams were getting it first.
    “Lindell,” he said, “you ever go to talk on the radio and slam on the brakes by mistake?”
    “Not yet, Bosch. Why?”
    “Just curious how all this fancy equipment works.”
    “It’s only as good as the people who work it.”
    Bosch yawned. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept. They had driven through the