The Night Fire (Harry Bosch #22) - Michael Connelly Page 0,52
was to the right of the counter. A man sat on a stool on the other side of the glass. He nodded at Ballard in recognition.
“How’s it going, Marko?” she said.
The man leaned forward, pushed a button, and spoke into a microphone.
“All is okay, Officer,” he said.
Ballard had heard a story about Marko Linkov having ordered the sign out front many years ago and then accepting the misspelled sign that arrived at half price. She didn’t know if it was true.
“You sell Tito’s vodka?” Ballard asked.
“Yes, sure,” Marko said. “Got it in back.”
He started to slip off his stool.
“No, I don’t want any,” Ballard said. “I just want to know. You sell a bottle of it the other night? Monday night?”
Marko thought about it for a moment and slowly nodded.
“Maybe,” he said. “I think so.”
“I need to look at your video,” Ballard said.
Marko got off the stool.
“Sure thing,” he said. “You come in.”
He disappeared to his left and Ballard heard the locks on the steel door being opened. She had expected no pushback on her request, no questions about search warrants or other legalities. Marko depended on the police to keep an eye on his business and to respond to his many calls about belligerent or suspicious customers. He knew that if he expected that kind of service it was a two-way street.
Ballard entered and Marko locked the door behind her. She noticed that in addition to the bolt locks he flipped down a metal burglar bar across the door. He wasn’t taking chances.
He led her past the display shelves to a back room used for storage and as an office. A computer stood on a small crowded desk that was pushed against a wall. A back door led to the alley behind the plaza; it, too, was steel and equipped with two burglar bars.
“Okay, so …,” Marko said.
He didn’t finish. He just opened up a screen that was quartered into four camera views, two outside the front, showing the parking lot and the front door of the shop, a third in the alley showing the back door, and the fourth a camera over the ATM in the front room. Ballard saw the patrol car still positioned outside the donut shop. Marko pointed at it.
“Those are good guys,” he said. “They hang around, watch out for me.”
Ballard still thought the donuts might be the draw but didn’t say so.
“Okay, Monday night,” she said.
Ballard had no idea when Edison Banks Jr. received the bottle of Tito’s his fellow encampment inhabitants saw him with, or how long it would have taken him to consume it. So she asked Marko to start running the playback fast, beginning at dusk on Monday. Every time a customer entered the store he would slow the video to normal speed until Ballard determined that the customer was not purchasing what she was looking for.
Twenty minutes into the playback they got a hit on Tito’s vodka but it wasn’t what Ballard expected: a Mercedes Benz coupe pulled into the lot and parked in front of Mako’s. A woman with long black hair, in stiletto heels and all-black leather pants and jacket, got out and entered the store. Inside, she bought a bottle of Tito’s after first withdrawing cash from the ATM. Mako’s was a cash-only business.
“Is she a regular?” Ballard asked.
“Her, no,” Marko said. “Never seen her. She don’t look like a working girl, you know? They different.”
“Yeah, they don’t drive Mercedes.”
Ballard watched as the woman returned to the car, got in, and drove out of the plaza’s lot, heading west on Santa Monica—the direction away from the city park where Edison Banks Jr. would burn to death about four hours later. Ballard committed the car’s license plate number to memory, which was easy because it was a California vanity plate—14U24ME.
“What is that?” Marko said.
“One for you, two for me,” Ballard said.
“Oh. That’s good.”
“Whose ATM is that?”
“It’s mine,” Marko said. “I mean, it’s a company that has them but they pay me to have it there. I get a cut, you know? It makes me good money because people need the cash when they come in here.”
“Right. Can you get records?”
“What records?”
“Of the withdrawals. Like if I wanted to know who she was.”
“Mmm, I don’t know. You might have to have the legal paper for that. Not my company, you see.”
“A search warrant. Okay.”
“I mean, if it was up to me, I give you, you know? I always help police. But this guy might not be the same.”