Trunk Music

Tony Aliso and the last days he was known to have stayed in Las Vegas and where.
    “I’m just trying to run down his activities on the days he was here.”
    “You think he was followed from here and then taken off in L.A.?”
    “I don’t think anything at the moment. We don’t have evidence of that.”
    “And I hope you won’t find any. That’s not the kind of press we want to get in L.A. What else you got?”
    Bosch pulled his briefcase onto his lap and opened it.
    “I’ve got two sets of prints taken off the body. We-”
    “The body?”
    “He was wearing a treated leather jacket. We got the prints with the laser. Anyway, we ran them on AFIS, NCIC, California DOJ, the works, but got nothing. I thought maybe you’d run them through your own computer, see what happens.”
    While the Automated Fingerprint Identification System used by the LAPD was a computer network of dozens of fingerprint databases across the country, it didn’t connect them all. And most big-city police departments had their own private databases. In Vegas they would be prints taken from people who applied for jobs for the city or the casinos. They were also prints taken from people on the sly, prints the department shouldn’t legally have because their owners had simply fallen under the suspicion of the department but had never been arrested. It was against this database that Bosch was hopeful Felton would check the sets from the Aliso case.
    “Well, let me see what you have,” Felton said. “I can’t promise anything. We’ve probably gotta few that the national nets don’t, but it’s a long shot.”
    Bosch handed over print cards Art Donovan had prepared for him.
    “So you are starting at the Mirage?” the captain asked after he put the cards to the side of his desk.
    “Yeah. I’ll show his picture around, go through the motions, see what I can come up with.”
    “You’re telling me everything you know, right?”
    “Right,” Bosch lied.
    “Okay.” Felton opened a desk drawer and took out a business card and handed it over to Bosch. “That’s got my office and pager on it. Call me if anything comes up. I’ve got the pager with me at all times. Meantime, I’ll get back to you about the prints, one way or the other, by tomorrow morning.”
    Bosch thanked him and left. In the lobby of the police station he called the SID office at LAPD and asked Donovan if he’d had time to check out the tiny pieces of glitter they had found in the cuffs of Tony Aliso’s pants.
    “Yeah, but you aren’t going to like it,” Donovan said. “It’s just glitter. Tinted aluminum. You know, like they use in costuming and in celebrations. Your guy probably went to a party or something, they were throwing this stuff around, maybe popping it out of party favors or something, and some of it got on him. He could brush off what he could see, but he didn’t see the particles that fell into the cuffs of his pants. They stayed.”
    “Okay. Anything else?”
    “Uh, no. Not on the evidence at least.”
    “Then on what?”
    “Well, Harry, you know the guy from OCID that you were talking on the phone with last night while we were in the shed?”
    “Carbone?”
    “Yeah, Dominic Carbone. Well, he dropped by the lab today. He was asking questions about what we found last night.”
    Bosch’s vision darkened. He said nothing and Donovan continued.
    “He said he was here on something else and was just acting curious. But, Harry, I don’t know. It seemed more than just a passing interest, if you know what I mean.”
    “Yeah, I know what you mean. How much did you tell him?”
    “Well, before I caught on and started wondering what was going on, I sort of let slip we pulled prints off the jacket. Sorry, Harry, but I was proud. It’s rare that we pull righteous prints off a dead guy’s jacket, and I guess I was sort of braggin’ about it.”
    “It’s okay. You tell him we didn’t get anything with them?”
    “Yeah, I said they came back clean. But then…then he asked for a copy of the set, said he might be able to do something with them, whatever that means.”
    “What did you do?”
    “What do you think, I gave him a set.”
    “You what?”
    “Just kidding, Harry. I told him to call you if he wanted a set.”
    “Good. What else you tell him?”
    “That’s it, Harry.”
    “Okay, Art, it’s cool. I’ll check you later.”
    “See you, Harry. Hey, where are you, anyway?”
    “Vegas.”
    “Really? Hey, put down a five for me