“Tell me,” she said.
“All right, you start with Hoyle and James being dentists,” Bosch said. “Completely different practices. James, he’s down in the Marina with that crowd: celebrities, singles, actors, whatever. Your guy, Hoyle, he’s up in the Valley, different clientele, probably more of a family practice. So it looks like never the twain shall meet, right?”
“I guess. Maybe they knew each other from professional associations. You know, Teeth Pullers of Los Angeles, or something like that.”
“Close. These guys — dentists — when they put in a crown or an implant or what have you, most of them don’t make that stuff in-house. They make a mold of the patient’s tooth and send it out to a dental lab that makes crowns and dentures.”
“They sent to the same lab.”
“They owned the same lab. They were partners — until somebody whacked James. It’s all in state corporate records. If somebody wants to spend the time chasing it through a maze of holding companies, it’s right there.”
“And you spent the time.”
“What else am I going to do?”
“Chase your guy Finbar McShane?”
“Finbar’s a white whale. You said so yourself. But this? This is real.”
Bosch wiped his hands thoroughly on a clot of napkins and then reached over for a sheaf of documents at the side of the table. Ballard could see the state seal of California on the top sheet.
“So you’ve been printing,” she said. “That must have taken all morning.”
“Funny,” Bosch said. “These are the incorporation filings behind a joint business venture called Crown Labs Incorporated. It’s located in Burbank up by the airport. Four other corporations own it, and these I traced to four dentists: James, Hoyle, and two guys named Jason Abbott and Carlos Esquivel.”
“How can James still own it if he’s been dead for seven years?”
“His company is called JWJ Ventures. Corporate records show the vice president of that company upon its founding was Jennifer James, who — I’m going to take a wild guess — was his wife. Seven months after he gets murdered, the records are amended and Jennifer James is now president. So he’s dead but she has his piece of the lab.”
“Okay, so James — when he was alive — knew Hoyle and was in business with him.”
“And each had an association with a business where the principal owner/operator is murdered.”
“With the same gun.”
Bosch nodded.
“With the same gun,” he repeated. “Very risky. The shells connect the case more solidly than the corporate records. There’s got to be a reason.”
“Well, twenty-twos are hard to match,” Ballard said. “They mushroom, shatter. It was about the shells. And in the Raffa kill, we got a break. The shell went under a car and wasn’t readily retrievable.”
“Same with Albert Lee — the shell wasn’t quickly retrievable. You get into coincidences now, and I don’t buy coincidences like that.”
“So, maybe we have other kills where there were no shells left behind and we just got lucky with these two.”
They both were silent for a moment as they considered this. Ballard thought, but didn’t say, that there had to be another reason the killer kept the gun. It belied the planning and precision of the hits. She knew it was something that would need to be answered in the course of the investigation.
“So … ,” Ballard said, moving on. “Let’s suppose that Hoyle’s connection to Javier Raffa came out of a factoring deal. These dentists had to have somebody who set these things up. Somebody who knew about these men — Albert Lee and Javier Raffa — needing money.”
“Exactly. The factor man.”
“And that’s who we’ve got to find.”
“You have to go back to the Raffa family and find out when he hit a financial crunch and who he went to about it.”
“Well, I know one thing. He had to buy his way out of the gang. Our intel is that he paid Las Palmas twenty-five grand in cash to walk away.”
“Where’s a guy like that get that kind of cash — without robbing a bank?”
“He could have refinanced the business or the property.”
“What, and tell the bank he needed the money to buy his way out of a street gang? Good luck with that.”
Ballard didn’t respond as she thought it through.
“What about the other two dentists?” she finally said. “Abbott and Esquivel.”
Bosch tapped his stack of printouts.
“I got ’em here,” he said. “One of them’s got a practice in Glendale, the other’s in Westwood.”
“That’s weird,” Ballard said. “I just remembered Raffa’s son said the other night that his father’s partner was a white guy from Malibu.”
“Maybe Hoyle lives out there and commutes in to Sherman Oaks. Malibu puts him closer to James in the Marina. You’ll have to run all of them through DMV to get home addresses.”
“I will. When did Crown Labs first incorporate?”
“In ’04.”
“So these guys, they’ve been around.”
“Oh, yeah. James was thirty-nine when he got his ticket punched seven years ago.”
Ballard finished off the cup of coleslaw that came with her chicken. She then wiped her mouth with a napkin for the final time and closed the to-go carton.
“There is not much I can do to formally run all the connections down with the state till Monday,” she said. “And that’s only if I’m still on the case.”
“There is that,” Bosch said.
“Whether I’m on it then or not, what I feel like doing today is skeeing a few of these places. The lab, Hoyle’s house, maybe his office. See how high on the hog he’s living. I’ll run the other two through DMV and put them on the map. But right now there’s no real connection to them. That’s why I’m going to go skeeing. I want to see what I’m up against. Then I’ll go talk to Raffa’s family.”
Skeeing was pure LAPD jargon — a less formal word for surveilling. It meant doing a drive-by of a person of interest, taking a measure of him. Its origin was debated: One camp thought it derived from the word schematic, meaning getting the physical parameters of a suspect’s place of business or residence. Others said it was short for scheming— taking the first step in a plan to hit a house of criminal activity. Either way, Ballard did not have to translate for Bosch.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
“You sure?” Ballard asked.
“I’m sure,” Bosch said. “I’ll grab a mask.”
17
The skee patrol started at the dental lab near the airport. On San Fernando Road in an industrial zone that backed up to the 5 freeway, it was a large single-level building with a gated parking lot on the side. A small sign identifying the business was on the door along with a logo: a cartoon tooth with eyes and a bright smile.
“It’s bigger than I thought it would be,” Ballard said.
“The four entities own it but it most likely does work for dentists all over the city,” Bosch said.
“You’d think a place like this would make them enough money that they didn’t need to be involved in factoring and murder schemes.”
“Some people can never have enough money. And then again, maybe we’re completely wrong and they are completely legit.”
“It’s not looking that way.”
“You want to try to go in?”
“They’re closed. No cars in the lot. Besides, we don’t want to give them early warning that we’re sniffing around.”
“Good point. But drive down to the end, see what we can see.”
Ballard drove along the fence line until they could see a third side of the building. There was an emergency exit here by a trash dumpster.
“Okay,” Ballard said. “What’s next?”
Bosch had brought his printouts and had mapped out the order in which they should conduct the skee. Their next stop was nearby Glendale. They drove by a shopping plaza on Brand Boulevard, where Carlos Esquivel had a family dentistry practice. It was on the second level of the plaza and reachable by an outdoor escalator, which had been turned off for the holiday weekend.
“Looks like a nice practice he’s got here,” Ballard said.