comes in here and asks what you are doing, close that file and tell them to see me.”
“One last thing. What about the money?”
“What about it?”
“How much money from the movie set heist did Aziz have under his car seat?”
I thought I saw a small smile start to play on Peoples’s face, but then it went away.
“He had a hundred bucks. One bill traced to the heist.”
He stayed long enough to see the disappointment on my face, then turned to the door.
After he left the room I sat down at the desk and opened the file. It contained two pages that had security stamps on them and had words in the middle of paragraphs and then whole paragraphs blocked out with black ink. Peoples clearly wasn’t going to let me see anything I had not bargained for—or extorted from him, as he had put it.
The pages were taken from what I assumed was a larger file. There was a coding in small print at the top left corner. I reached into the cardboard box and opened my file. I took out one of the loose sheets of note paper and wrote the code number from each page down. I then read what Peoples was allowing me to read.
The first page had two dated paragraphs.
5-11-99—SUBJECT confirmed in Hamburg at •••• in company with •••• and ••••. SUBJECT seen in restaurant by •••• approximately 20:00 until 23:30 hours. No further detail.
7-1-99—SUBJECT passport scan at Heathrow at 14:40 hours. Follow up determination arrival on Lufthansa Flight 698 from Frankfurt. No further detail.
The paragraphs before and after these two were completely blacked out. What I was looking at was the log in which tabs on Aziz had been kept over the years by the feds. He was on the watch list. This is what it amounted to. Sightings by informants or agents and airport passport checks.
The two dates on the page were on either side of the murder of Angella Benton and the movie set heist. It by no means cleared Aziz of active or background involvement in the crimes. Yet, if I believed the document in front of me, he was in Europe both before and after the occurrence of the crimes I was investigating. But it was no alibi. Aziz was known, according to the Times article I had read, to travel with false identification. It was possible he had slipped into this country to commit the crimes and then slipped out.
I went on to the next page. This one had only one paragraph that was not blacked out. But the date was a direct hit.
3-19-00—SUBJECT passport scan at LAX-CA. Arrival on Qantas Flight 88 from Manilla at 18:11 hrs. Security check and search. Questioned by •••• ••••, Los Angeles field office. See transcript #00-44969. Released at 21:15 hrs.
Aziz had what appeared to be a perfect alibi for the night Agent Martha Gessler disappeared. He was being questioned by an FBI agent at Los Angeles International Airport until 9:15 P.M., which put him in federal custody at the same time Gessler disappeared while on her way home from work.
I put the two sheets back in the file and put it back in the drawer. I wrote no further notes—there was nothing to write—on the page from my file. I put it back inside the file and lifted out the murder book. I was just about to start into it when the door to the room opened and there was Milton. I said nothing. I waited for him to make the first move. He stepped in and looked around the room as though it was the size of a warehouse. He finally spoke without looking at me.
“You have some balls on you, Bosch. Doing what you’re doing and thinking you’re going to just walk away from it. Away from me.”
“I guess I could say the same thing about you.”
“If it was me I would have called your bluff.”
“Then you would have called it wrong.”
He leaned down and put both hands on the table and looked right at me.
“You are a has-been, Bosch. The world’s passed you by, but here you are, grabbing at straws, fucking with people who are trying to protect the future.”
I was unimpressed and hoped I showed it. I leaned back and looked up at him.
“Why don’t you relax, man? You’ve got nothing to worry about as far as I can tell. You’ve got a boss who’s more interested in a cover-up than a cleanup. You’ll do okay on this,