Bosch nodded. She was good.

“Could have been part of a setup,” Edgar said. “Another misdirection.”

“Could be but I doubt it,” Bosch said. “Plus, we know she worked Friday night. That would make it kind of tough for her to be over here whacking Tony.”

“So then it’s the wife,” Edgar said. “Veronica.”

“Right,” Bosch said. “I think she was lying to us, acting like she didn’t know anything about her husband’s business when she knew everything. I think this whole thing was her plan. She wrote the letters to the IRS and to the OCID. She wanted to get something going against Tony, then when he ended up dead it would point toward a mob hit. Trunk music. Planting the gun on Goshen was just icing. If we found it, fine. If we didn’t, then we’d be sniffing around Vegas until we shelved the case.”

“You’re saying she did this all on her own?” Edgar asked.

“No,” Bosch said. “I’m just saying I think this was her plan. But she had to have had help. An accomplice. It took two to do the actual hit and she sure didn’t take the gun to Vegas. After the kill, she stays at the house and waits while the accomplice goes to Vegas and plants the gun while Luke Goshen’s at the club.”

“But wait a minute,” Rider said. “We’re forgetting something. Veronica Aliso had it very cushy in her existing life. Tony was raking in the bread with his washing machine. They had the big house in the hills, the cars…why would she want to kill the cash cow? How much was in that briefcase?”

“According to the feds, four hundred and eighty thousand,” Bosch said.

Edgar whistled softly. Rider shook her head.

“I still don’t see it,” she said. “That’s a hell of a lot of money, but Tony was making at least that much a year. In business terms, killing him was a short-term gain/long-term loss for her. Doesn’t make sense.”

“Then there is something else running through all of this that we don’t know about yet,” Bosch said. “Maybe he was about to dump her. Maybe that old lady in Vegas who said Tony was going to go away with Layla was telling the truth. Or maybe there’s money somewhere we don’t know about. But for now I can’t see anybody else fitting into this picture but her.”

“But what about the gatehouse?” Rider said. “The log shows she never left Friday, the whole night. And she had no visitors.”

“Well, we’ve got to work on that,” Bosch said. “There had to have been a way for her to get in and out.”

“What else?” Edgar asked.

“We start over,” Bosch said. “I want to know everything about her. Where’d she come from, who are her friends, what does she do in that house all day long and what did she do and who did she do it with all those times Tony was away?”

Rider and Edgar nodded.

“There’s got to be an accomplice. And my guess is that it’s a man. And I’ll bet we’ll find him through her.”

The waiter came up with a tray and put it down on a folding cart. They watched silently as he prepared the meal. There were three separate chicken pot pies on the tray. The waiter used a fork and spoon to take the top crust off each and put it on a plate. Next he scooped the contents of each pie out and put it on the crust, served the three cops their dishes and put down fresh glasses of iced tea for Edgar and Rider. He then poured Bosch’s martini from a small glass carafe and floated away without a word.

“Obviously,” Bosch said, “we have to do this quietly.”

“Yeah,” Edgar said, “and Bullets also put us on the top of the rotation. Next call comes in, me and Kiz get it. And we hafta work it without you. That’s going to take us away from this.”

“Well, do what you can. If you get a body you get a body, nothing we can do about that. Meantime, this is what I propose. You two work on Veronica’s background, see what you can find. You got any sources at the Times or the trades?”

“I know a couple at the Times,” Rider said. “And there’s a woman I once had a case with-she was a vic-who’s a receptionist or something at Variety.”

“You trust ’em?”

“I think I can.”

“See if they’ll pull a search on Veronica for you. She had a brief flash of fame a while back. Her fifteen minutes. Maybe there were some stories about her, stories that would have names of people we could talk to.”

“What about talking to her again?” Edgar asked.

“I don’t think we should do it yet. I want to have something to talk to her about.”

“What about neighbors?”

“You can do that. Maybe she’ll look out the window and see you, give her something to think about. If you go up there, see if you can take another look at the gate log. Talk to Nash. I’m sure you can turn him without needing another search warrant. I’d like to take a look at the whole year, know who has been going in to see her, especially while Tony was out of town. We have Tony’s credit records and can construct his travel history. You’ll be able to know when she was in that house alone.”

Bosch raised his fork. He hadn’t had a bite of food yet, but his mind was too full of the case and what needed to be done.

“The other thing is we need as much of the case file as we can get. All we’ve got is the copy of the murder book. I’m going down to Parker Center for my little chat with the IAD. I’ll swing by USC and get a copy of the autopsy. The feds already have it. I’ll also go talk to Donovan in SID and see if he came up with anything we pulled out of the car. Also, he’s got the shoe prints. I’ll get copies, hopefully before the feds come in and take everything. Anything else I’m missing?”

The other two shook their heads.

“You want to see what we get and then put our heads together after work?”

They nodded.

“Cat and Fiddle, about six?”

They nodded again. They were too busy eating to talk. Bosch took his first bite of food, which was already getting cold. He joined them in their silence, thinking about the case.

“It’s in the details,” he said after a few moments.

“What?” Rider asked.

“The case. When you get one like this, the answer is always in the details. You watch, when we break it, the answer will have been sitting in the files, in the book. It always happens.”

The interview with Chastain at Internal Affairs began as Bosch expected it would. He sat with Zane, his defense rep, at a gray government table in one of the IAD interview rooms. An old Sony cassette player was turned on and everything said in the room was recorded. In police parlance, Chastain was locking up Bosch’s story. Getting his words and explanation in as much detail as possible down on tape. Chastain really wouldn’t begin his investigation until after Bosch’s story was locked in. He would then hunt for flaws in it. All he had to do was catch Bosch in a single lie and he could take him to a Board of Rights hearing. Depending on the size and import of the lie, he could seek a penalty ranging from suspension to dismissal.

In a dull and laborious drone, Chastain read prepared questions from a legal pad and Bosch slowly and carefully answered them with as few words as possible. It was a game. Bosch had played it before. In the fifteen minutes they had before reporting to IAD, Zane had counseled Bosch on how it would go and how they should proceed. Like a good criminal defense lawyer, he never directly asked Harry if he had planted the gun. Zane didn’t really care. He simply looked at IAD as the enemy, as a group of bad cops with the sole purpose of going after good cops. Zane was part of the old school who thought all cops were inherently good and though sometimes the job turned them bad, they should not be persecuted by their own.

Everything was routine for a half hour. But then Chastain threw an unexpected pitch at them.

“Detective Bosch, do you know a woman named Eleanor Wish?”

Zane reached out a hand in front of Bosch to stop him from answering.

“What is this shit, Chastain?”

“Who have you been talking to, Chastain?” Bosch added.