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“What?” Cavanaugh cried. “Are you — ”

“All right, take it easy,” Cutler interjected. “Everybody, calm down. Why do you think this doesn’t hurt us? Novak now knows there’s an investigation.”

“Yeah, and he’s probably relieved as hell that that’s all it is,” Bosch said, “some old guy with a bug up his ass about a sixty-year-old murder is snooping around. I have the report right here. It doesn’t mention the FBI. It doesn’t mention the US attorney’s office. There’s nothing about missiles and rockets. Novak’s probably thinking this is not as bad as it could have been and that he properly scared the old man off. This may actually be a good thing, because if he was suspicious about being investigated, he now thinks it’s not about shipping arms to terrorists.”

In his peripheral vision Bosch saw Cavanaugh shake his head in disgust.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Bosch said. “You’ve got an inside man. He told you about this before I could. What did he say about how Novak took it? I’m betting he had a big laugh when he found out what I was up to.”

“We’re not going to talk about our intel or how we get it,” Cavanaugh said.

“How’s his face?” Bosch said. “No permanent marks, I hope.”

Cavanaugh pivoted in his seat to look directly at Bosch.

“What the fuck did you just say?” he said.

“Yeah, I figured it’s the guy with the topknot,” Bosch said calmly. “It had to be one of the men in the garage, so I’m going with Topknot. And I do hope he’s all right. At the time I put his face into the grille, I had no idea he was working for you.”

“You think you know it all, don’t you, Bosch,” Cavanaugh responded. “But you — ”

“Okay, let’s put our dicks away and figure out where we go from here,” Cutler said.

“Bosch has to go,” Cavanaugh said. “That’s it.”

“You sure you want me running around out there with everything I know?” Bosch asked.

“You don’t know shit,” Cavanaugh said. “That’s what I was trying to say.”

“I know you’re watching a shipping container in a railyard in Prague,” Bosch said. “Hoping to get a bunch of missiles back.”

Cavanaugh threw his hands up in disgust.

“Fucking Shear,” he said. “That dumb son of a bitch.”

“Actually, he’s probably the smartest one here,” Bosch said. “He realizes that the more everybody on the team knows, the better that team can cover all the bases. That’s something the FBI has never figured out.”

Cavanaugh looked at Cutler.

“I want him out,” he said. “He will bring this whole thing down.”

Cutler leaned back, considering the request.

“Look, you want leverage on Nicky Novak,” Bosch said. “I can get you that. If it’s not the MacLaren case, then it will be Wonderland. Give me a couple days with the books and I’ll find what you need. It’s what I’m good at. If I don’t come through, you can cut me loose, no hard feelings. But this is what I do.”

Cutler continued to mull the decision over for a long moment. Then he looked at Cavanaugh.

“Give him the books,” he said.

26

RON LAUNIUS WAS a bad guy, and few mourned his passing when he was found among the dead in the house on Wonderland Avenue. At the time of his murder, he himself was a murder suspect in the killing of a sports promoter who was found shot to death in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce. The killing was thought to be a contract hit by mobsters who believed the promoter was skimming off the money he was laundering for them in Las Vegas.

Launius was also a drug dealer, an armed robber, and the leader of a rough association of criminals known as the Laurel Canyon Gang. The gang’s hideout was the rented house on Wonderland, and the group had a dangerous specialty: They robbed those who they knew would not report the crime to police — their fellow drug dealers. On any given night, there might be as many as four or five members of the gang with their wives and girlfriends in the house. But on the night of July 1, 1981, there happened to be only Launius, his second in command, and three women who were not involved in their crimes beyond using their stolen drugs. Other core members of the gang had found other places to crash.

The original detectives on the case quickly learned that both Launius and his deputy had taken part two nights earlier in the violent robbery of a major drug trafficker named Adel Gharib Nasrallah, known locally as Eddie Nash, at his home five minutes away from the Wonderland hideout. Money, drugs, and guns were taken in the home-invasion robbery, along with something perhaps more valuable: Eddie Nash’s dignity. The robbers humiliated Nash, at one point making him get down on his knees and suck on the barrel of a pistol, then forcing him to open a floor safe hidden in his bedroom closet.

The investigators learned these details from one of the robbers who was not at the Wonderland house during the massacre. But the man’s girlfriend was there and she was among the victims. Overcome by guilt and grief, he fully cooperated with the investigation, laying out his own crimes in the process, which included the robbery at Eddie Nash’s house.