Things go wrong when Alexandra Parks breaks the crystal on her watch and sends it for repair to the shop in Las Vegas. When she learns there may be a problem with the watch’s ownership, Parks, head of the consumer protection unit and married to a law officer, quietly tries to look into the watch’s history. She calls Nelson Grant & Sons to make inquiries. Maybe she tells them her husband is a Sheriff’s deputy, maybe they knew that from when he bought the watch in the first place. Whatever was said, her call worries the Nguyen brothers to the point that they contact Ellis and Long and say, “We might have a problem here.”
Ellis and Long decide on an extreme response: take out Parks before she investigates further and pulls the thread on their extortion operation. Bosch had to assume that Schubert wasn’t the only victim in the scheme and that there was a bigger money-making machine afoot, using the women to entice men into performing before the hidden cameras.
Ellis and Long concoct a scheme to murder Parks and make it look like a sexually motivated crime. They use James Allen, a snitch they controlled and may have used in similar extortion schemes, to procure a condom containing semen that could be planted at the crime scene to send investigators in the wrong direction toward the wrong man.
That theory left James Allen and the question of why he was in turn murdered. To tie up loose ends? Or had he threatened the vice cops in some way? The murder of Lexi Parks had splashed big in the media. Allen could have caught the story, then put two and two together after his customer Da’Quan Foster was arrested based on DNA evidence. If he made a move against Ellis and Long, asked for money or threatened them in any way, it could have cost him his life. He was murdered, and his body was staged in a way that might send investigators off in the wrong direction. Ellis and Long would have been aware of the earlier murder, the body left in the alley off El Centro. They may have even been responsible for it.
The misdirection, Bosch thought. There was a pattern in it. A repeating pattern. First Alexandra Parks, then James Allen.
43
Ellis joined Long in the Charger.
“’Bout time,” Long said.
“Quit whining,” Ellis said. “I was taking care of business with the girls. What’s the status here?”
“Schubert came out and Bosch confronted him. Then they went inside. That was thirty-five minutes ago.”
Ellis nodded and thought about things. Schubert had been inside with Bosch long enough that it should be assumed that he was spilling his guts. That signaled the endgame to Ellis. It was time to close down the operation. Time to close down all operations.
He didn’t know about Long but he had certainly planned for this day. He pulled out his phone and opened the weather app. He had several cities tabbed just in case his phone ever fell into the wrong hands. But only one mattered. It was seventy-six degrees in Placencia, Belize. What could be more perfect?
He put his phone away.
“This is it,” he said.
“What is it?” Long asked.
“This. Right here. This is the end of the line. We have a choice to make.”
“What choice?”
“You take this car, I go back to my car, and we split. We grab our stashes and we split. For good.”
“No, no, we can’t just—”
“It’s over. Over.”
“What’s the other choice?”
Long’s voice was off. It had gone up a notch or two as panic began to take hold of his vocal cords.
“We go in,” Ellis said. “And we finish it. Leave no one to tell the story.”
“That’s it?” Long asked. “That’s your big plan?”
“It’s not a plan. It just might buy us more time. We go in, take care of business, and it might be tomorrow morning before anyone finds them. By then, you’re in Mexico and I’m halfway to wherever.”
Long drummed the fingers of both hands on his thighs.
“There’s gotta be another way, another plan,” he said.
“There’s nothing,” Ellis said. “I told you. Dominoes. It’s come to this. Make the call.”
“What about the girls? We could take—”
“Forget the girls. I’ll take care of them as soon as I leave here.”
Long looked sharply at him.
“What the fuck, man?” he said.
“I told you,” Ellis said. “Dominoes.”
Now Long was rubbing his jaw with one hand while gripping the wheel with the other.
“Make the call,” Ellis repeated.
44
Bosch studied the timeline and saw how it all worked, how the dominoes all fell in a way pointing directly to Ellis and Long.
“When was the last time you saw Ellis and Long?” he asked.
Schubert had dropped into a quiet reverie while Bosch looked at the timeline. Now he straightened up at the question.
“Seen them? I haven’t seen them in months. But they’ve called me a lot. They called me two days ago to ask if anybody had been snooping around. I guess they were talking about you.”
Bosch nodded.
“Do you have their number?” he asked.
“No, they always call me,” Schubert said. “The number is always blocked.”
“What about Deborah? You have a number for her?”
“In the files.”
“I need to get that. And her address.”
“I think it’s illegal for me to share information from a medical file.”
“Yes, but we’re well beyond that now, right?”
“Right, I guess. What happens now?”
“Uh... I have some work to do getting independent confirmation of some of this. And I’m going to pay a visit to Deborah and her roommate. I’m going to need a list of all the jewelry you gave Long and Ellis in addition to the watches.”
“I have a list. My wife made it.”
“Good. Where did you physically hand over all of the stuff to them?”
Schubert looked down when he answered.
“They came to my house and looked through what we had,” he said. “My wife was in Europe. I stood there while they went through her things. They took what they wanted and left the rest. They knew what was valuable and what wasn’t. What they could and couldn’t sell.”
“They take anything besides jewelry?”
“One of them — Ellis — knew his wine. He went through our storage rack and took my two bottles of ’eighty-two Lafite.”
“Maybe he just took the old stuff because it looked valuable.”
“No, he took the ’eighty-two Lafite and left the nineteen eighty. The ’eighty-two is worth fifty times what the ’eighty is worth and will taste fifty times as good. He knew that.”
Bosch nodded. He realized the wine might be more important to the case than the jewelry. If Ellis had kept it for himself, there might still be a bottle somewhere in his possession, and it could link him to the case and be a verifiable point should Schubert’s story be challenged in court or elsewhere.
“You said it was their idea to make it look like a burglary?”
“When I told them I couldn’t pay them cash without my wife knowing, they said we could make it look like a burglary, only I wouldn’t report it. I would only tell my wife I had reported it when she came back from her trip. They even mocked up a burglary report that I could show her. It had phony names, phony everything.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Yes. At the house.”
“We’re going to need that. Did you make an insurance claim on everything that was taken?”
If Schubert had also engaged in insurance fraud, it could undercut his strength as a witness.