Bosch nodded and Salazar proceeded to open the skullcap and examine the brain.

“The bullets mushed this puppy,” he said.

After a few minutes he used a pair of long tweezers to pick out two bullet fragments and drop them in a dish. Bosch stepped over and looked at them and frowned. At least one of the bullets had fragmented upon impact. The pieces were probably worthless for comparison purposes.

Then Salazar pulled out a complete bullet and dropped it in the tray.

“You might be able to work with this one,” he said.

Bosch took a look. The bullet had mushroomed on impact but about half the shaft was still intact, and he could see the tiny scratches made when it was fired through the barrel of a gun. He felt a twinge of encouragement.

“This might work,” he said.

The autopsy wrapped up in about ten more minutes. Overall, Aliso had gotten fifty minutes of Salazar’s time. It was more than most. Bosch checked a clipboard that was on the counter and saw that it was the eleventh autopsy of the day for Salazar.

Salazar cleaned the bullets and put them in an evidence envelope. As he handed it to Bosch, he told the detective that he would be informed of the results of the analysis of the samples retrieved from the body as soon as it was completed. The only other thing that he thought was worth mentioning was that the bruise on Aliso’s cheek was antemortem by four or five hours. This Bosch found to be very curious. He didn’t know how it fit in. It would mean that someone had roughed Aliso up while he was in Las Vegas, yet he had been killed here in L.A. He thanked Salazar, calling him Sally as many people did, and headed out. He was in the hallway before he remembered something and went back to the door of the autopsy suite. When he stuck his head in, he saw Salazar tying the sheet around the body, making sure the toe tag hung free and could be read.

“Hey, Sally, the guy had hemorrhoids, right?”

Salazar looked back at him with a quizzical look on his face.

“Hemorrhoids? No. Why do you ask?”

“I found a tube of Preparation H in his car. In the glove box. It was half used.”

“Hmmm…well, no hemorrhoids. Not on this one.”

Bosch wanted to ask him if he was sure but knew that would be insulting. He let it go for the moment and left.

Details fueled any investigation. They were important and not to be misplaced or forgotten. As he headed toward the glass exit doors of the coroner’s office, Bosch found himself bothered by the detail of the tube of Preparation H found in the glove box of the Silver Cloud. If Tony Aliso hadn’t suffered from hemorrhoids, then whom did the tube belong to and why was it in his car? He could dismiss it as probably being unimportant, but that wasn’t his way. Everything had its place in an investigation, Bosch believed. Everything.

His deep concentration on this problem caused Bosch to go through the glass doors and down the stairs to the parking lot before he saw Carbone standing there smoking a cigarette and waiting. When Bosch had dropped him off earlier, the OCID detective had begged for a couple of hours to get the tapes together. Bosch had agreed but hadn’t told him that he was heading to an autopsy. So he now assumed that Carbone had called the bureau in Hollywood and been told by Billets or someone else that he was at the coroner’s office. Bosch wouldn’t check this with Carbone because he didn’t want to show any kind of concern that the OCID detective had so easily found him.

“Bosch.”

“Yeah.”

“Somebody wants to talk.”

“Who? When? I want the tapes, Carbone.”

“Cool your jets for a couple minutes. Over here in the car.”

He led Bosch to the second parking row, where there was a car with its engine running and its dark-tinted windows all the way up.

“Hop in the back,” Carbone said.

Bosch nonchalantly walked to the door, still showing no concern. He opened it and ducked in. Leon Fitzgerald was sitting in the back. He was a tall man-more than six and a half feet-and his knees were pressed hard against the back of the driver’s seat. He wore a beautiful suit of blue silk and held the stub of a cigar between his fingers. He was almost sixty and his hair was a jet-black dye job. His eyes, behind steel-rimmed glasses, were pale gray. His skin was pasty white. He was a night man.

“Chief,” Bosch said, nodding.

He had never met Fitzgerald before but had seen him often enough at cop funerals and on television news reports. He was the embodiment of the OCID. No one else from the secretive division ever went on camera.

“Detective Bosch,” Fitzgerald said. “I know of you. Know of your exploits. Over the years you have been suggested to me more than once as a candidate for our unit.”

“Why didn’t you call?”

Carbone had come around and gotten in the driver’s seat. He started moving the car slowly through the lot.

“Because like I said, I know of you,” Fitzgerald was saying. “And I know you would not leave homicide. Homicide is your calling. Am I correct?”

“Pretty much.”

“Which brings us to the current homicide case you are pursuing. Dom?”

With one hand, Carbone passed a shoebox over the seat. Fitzgerald took it and put it on Bosch’s lap. Bosch opened it and found it full of audiocassette tapes with dates written on tape stuck to the cases.

“From Aliso’s phone?” he asked.

“Obviously.”

“How long were you on it?”

“We’d only been listening for nine days. It hadn’t been productive, but the tapes are yours.”

“And what do you want in return, Chief?”

“What do I want?”

Fitzgerald looked out the window, down at the railroad switching yard in the valley below the parking lot.

“What do I want?” he asked again. “I want the killer, of course. But I also want you to be careful. The department’s been through a lot these past few years. No need to hang our dirty laundry in public once again.”

“You want me to bury Carbone’s extracurricular activities.”

Neither Fitzgerald nor Carbone said anything but they didn’t have to. Everybody in the car knew that Carbone did what he did on orders. Probably orders from Fitzgerald himself.

“Then you’ve got to answer some questions.”

“Of course.”

“Why was there a bug on Tony Aliso’s phone?”

“Same reason there’s a bug on anyone’s phone. We heard things about the man and set about finding out if they were true.”

“What did you hear?”

“That he was dirty, that he was a scumbag, that he was a launderer for the mob in three states. We opened a file. We had just begun when he was killed.”

“Then when I called, why did you pass on it?”

Fitzgerald took a long pull on his cigar and the car filled with its smell.

“There’s a complicated answer to that question, Detective. Suffice it to say that we thought it best if we remained uninvolved.”

“The tap was illegal, wasn’t it?”

“It is extremely difficult under state law to gather the required information needed for a wiretap. The feds, they can get it done on a whim. We can’t and we don’t want to work with the feds all the time.”

“It still doesn’t explain why you passed. You could’ve taken the case from us and then controlled it, buried it, done whatever you wanted with it. No one would have known about illegal wiretaps or anything else.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it was a wrong choice.”

Bosch realized they had underestimated himself and his crew. Fitzgerald had believed the break-in would go unnoticed and therefore his unit’s involvement would not be discovered. Bosch understood the tremendous leverage he held over Fitzgerald. Word about the illegal wiretap would be all the police chief would need to rid himself of Fitzgerald.

“So what else do you have on Aliso?” he asked. “I want everything. If I hear at any point you held something back, then your little-black-bag job is going to get known. You know what I mean? It will get known.”