“That’s good.”
An awkward silence followed. Both their daughters—the same age and each the other’s only cousin—had gone to Chapman University, but because of different majors and interests, they had not formed the tight bond their fathers had hoped for and expected. They had shared a dorm room in the first year but gone separate ways the second. Hayley had stayed in the dorms and Maddie had rented the house with girls from the Psychology Department.
After making at least a dozen copies of the will, Haller moved on to the letter Vance wrote to Bosch and started making an equal number of copies.
“Why so many?” Bosch asked.
“’Cause you never know,” Haller said.
That was a non-answer, Bosch thought.
“So what do we do from here?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Haller said.
“What?”
“Nothing. For now. Nothing public, nothing in the courts. We just lie low and wait.”
“Why?”
“You keep working the case. Confirm that Vance has an heir. Once we have that, we see who makes a move, see what the corporation does. When they make their move we make ours. But we make our move from a position of knowing what they’re up to.”
“We don’t even know who ‘they’ are.”
“Sure we do. It’s all of them. It’s the corporation, the board of directors, the security people, it’s all of them.”
“Well, ‘they’ may be watching us right now.”
“We have to assume they are. But they don’t know what we have here. Otherwise this package wouldn’t have sat in your mailbox for four days.”
Bosch nodded. It was a good point. Haller gestured to the documents on the table, meaning the two originals.
“We have to safeguard these,” he said. “At all costs.”
“I have a safe deposit box,” Bosch said. “Studio City.”
“You can bet they already know that. They probably know everything about you. So we make copies and you put copies in your bank box. If they’re watching you they’ll think that’s where the will is.”
“And where will it really be?”
“You’ll figure something out. But don’t tell me.”
“Why not?”
“In case I get hit with an order from a judge to produce the will. If I don’t have it and don’t know where it is, I can’t produce it.”
“Smart.”
“We need to get to Ida Forsythe too. If you’re right about her being the one who smuggled this stuff to the post office, then we need to lock her story down in a statement. It will be part of the chain of authenticity. We’ll need verification of every step we take. When I finally go into court with this, I don’t want my ass hanging out in the wind.”
“I can get her address. If she has a driver’s license.”
Still wearing gloves, Haller picked up the gold pen.
“And this,” he said. “You’re sure it’s the one he had last week?”
“Pretty sure. I saw it in photos, too, on a wall in the mansion. A photo of him signing a book to Larry King.”
“Cool. Maybe we’ll bring Larry into court to verify—that’ll get a headline or two. We’ll also need Ida to confirm it as well. Remember, verification on all levels. His pen, his signature in the pen’s ink. We’ll match it. I have a lab that will do that—when the time is right.”
Finished with the copying, Haller started collating the documents, creating a dozen sets of both.
“You have paper clips?” he asked.
“No,” Bosch said.
“I have some in the car. You take half of these and I’ll take half. Put a set under the mattress, in the safe deposit box. Doesn’t hurt to have them in many places. I’ll do the same.”
“Where do you go from here?”
“I go to court and act like I don’t know shit about any of this while you find and confirm that heir.”
“When I get to her, do I tell her or confirm on the sly?”
“That’s gotta be your call when you reach that point. But whatever you decide, remember that secrecy is our edge—for now.”
“Got it.”
Haller went to the front door and whistled to get his driver’s attention. He signaled him to come in to get the printer/copier. He then stepped out onto the front stoop and looked both ways up the street before coming back in.
The driver entered, unplugged the machine, and wrapped the cord around it so he could carry it back out without tripping on it. Haller walked over to the sliding glass doors in the living room to look out at the view of the Cahuenga Pass.
“Your view is quieter,” he said. “Lots of trees.”
Haller lived on the other side of the hill with an unfettered view across the Sunset Strip and the vast expanse of the city. Bosch stepped over and slid the door open a few feet so Haller could hear the never-ending hiss of the freeway at the bottom of the pass.
“Not so quiet,” Bosch said.
“Sounds like the ocean,” Haller said.
“A lot of people up here tell themselves that. Sounds like a freeway to me.”
“You know, you’ve seen a lot with all the murders you worked for all those years. All the human depravity. The cruelty.”
Haller kept his eyes focused out into the pass. There was a red-tailed hawk floating on spread wings above the ridgeline on the other side of the freeway.
“But you haven’t seen anything like this,” he continued. “There are billions of dollars on the line here. And people will do anything—I mean anything—to maintain control of it. Be ready for that.”
“You too,” Bosch said.
25
Twenty minutes later Bosch left the house. When he got to the rented Cherokee he used the GPS detector for the first time, walking completely around the SUV, holding the device down low with its antenna pointed toward the undercarriage and wheel wells. He got no response. He popped the front hood and went through a similar process as instructed in the manual. Again, nothing. He then switched the device to its jamming frequency as a precaution and got behind the wheel.
He took Wrightwood down to Ventura in Studio City and then jogged west to his bank, which was located in a shopping plaza off of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. He had not been to the safe deposit box in at least two years. It contained primarily his own documents—birth and marriage and divorce certificates and military service documentation. He kept his two Purple Hearts in a box in there along with a commendation he had received from the chief of police for pulling a pregnant woman out of a fiery wreck when he was a boot. He put one copy of the Vance documents in the box and then returned it to the handler from the bank.
Bosch checked his surroundings when he got back to the rental car and initially saw no sign of surveillance. But when he pulled out of the bank’s parking lot onto Laurel Canyon he saw in his rearview a car with dark tinted windows pull out of the same lot but at a different exit point and fall in behind him a hundred yards back.
Bosch knew it was a busy shopping plaza so he didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that he was being followed. But he decided to avoid the freeway and stay on Laurel Canyon so he could keep a better eye on the traffic behind him. Continuing north, he checked the mirror every block or so. By its distinctive grille work, he identified the dark green car trailing him as a BMW sedan.
After two miles he was still on Laurel Canyon, and the BMW was still in traffic behind him. Even though Bosch had slowed at times and sped up at others and the Beemer had occasionally changed lanes on the four-lane boulevard, it had never changed the distance between them.