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“I think he knew all along,” Shear said. “He played us, and those rockets are as good as gone.”

Bosch went to the back table and took the ninth murder book to his borrowed desk. No one had said a thing to him, but he was smart enough to know that the investigation would now move into desperation mode. Recovery of the missiles might now depend on putting pressure on Nikolai Novak, and Bosch had to try to find the pressure point to use.

He finally found it in book eleven.

This book was dedicated to the investigative moves made in the late 1990s, after Eddie Nash had beaten murder charges twice but before his name came up in a federal fraud investigation. Detectives working the case knew that Nash was untouchable because of double jeopardy rules. He could never be tried again for the murders in state court, and prosecuting him under federal racketeering laws was beyond their jurisdiction. So they renewed efforts to identify the men Nash had sent to the house on Wonderland Avenue.

The list of possible suspects was long. Nash had associations with so many organized-crime groups and their violent members that it was hard to know where to start. Most of the first-tier suspects had already been investigated, so this time the investigators dropped down to the second and third tiers of possible killers. And this was where the name Nicky Novak surfaced.

In the early days of the investigation, when the case was front-page news on a daily basis, the police received dozens and dozens of anonymous tips, some supposedly naming the killers, some just providing information, some designed to focus police attention on entirely innocent people. All of these needed to be checked out, and Bosch knew from experience that this was where valuable information could fall through the cracks. Most tips were handled by a second-string team of investigators — those with the least amount of experience or office-bound burnouts who mailed in their work. Good information was often not recognized, not understood, or ignored because it would take too much work to develop further. But lead investigators relied on this first filter to separate the wheat from the chaff, and sometimes the wheat didn’t get through to them; sometimes it was left behind and never acted on.

An anonymous tipster had called the case hotline two days after the Wonderland murders, said that one of the killers was Nicky Novak, and promptly hung up. This was well before caller ID and automatic tracing systems. Los Angeles did not even engage a 911 emergency call system until three years later, one of the last major cities in the country to do so.

All of this ensured that the anonymous call remained anonymous, and to this day it was unknown who first pointed a finger at Nicky Novak. It also ensured that the tip would get little notice. It was logged on the tip sheets but never proffered to the lead team as a hot shot — the designation for a tip that needed immediate attention.

At the time, Nicky Novak was flying well below the radar. Though he was the adoptive son of mobster Mikhail Novak, his name carried no weight. But almost two decades later, when investigators took a fresh look at everything about the case, Nicky Novak’s name meant something. He had taken the reins of the Spolu after his father’s death and was known to run the organization with the same kind of violent tendencies as Eddie Nash.

Most career criminals maintain a front that allows them at least some cover from law enforcement attention and provides a means for washing and legitimizing the profits of crime. When investigators of the Wonderland massacre finally took notice of Nicky Novak, they were able to gather a wealth of intel from within the department. The LAPD’s OCID — Organized Crime Intelligence Division — had been collecting information on the Spolu and its members going all the way back to Mikhail Novak’s time as its leader. They revealed to the homicide investigators that Nicky Novak had been operating a business called Stovak Plumbing Supplies for nearly three decades. This information fit with the fact that the cause of death of each victim of the Wonderland massacre was blunt-force trauma, meaning they had been beaten to death with a heavy object — such as a metal pipe.

This elevated Nicky Novak to a person of interest. Added to that, the OCID files credited Novak with the 1989 beating death of a Chicago mobster who had made the mistake of coming to L.A. with four pounds of ecstasy to sell without permission from the local purveyors of the drug. According to an OCID informant, the man was struck so hard that the brass pipe Novak used had bent, an aspect of the killing that became lore in criminal circles in Los Angeles. Novak had reportedly bragged about it, calling the pipe he used his eighty, a pipe with a thick, heavy wall for durability.

The investigators could also connect Novak to Nash via his father. Throughout the seventies, the OCID on various occasions placed Nash’s home off Laurel Canyon Boulevard under surveillance. More than once, a license plate from a car parked by the house was traced back to Mikhail Novak. Nash and Novak clearly had business together and it was assumed that relationship included the son of the Czech mobster. When Nash was putting together a team of killers to avenge the humiliating robbery perpetrated by the Laurel Canyon Gang, it was not a stretch to consider that he would reach out to the Novaks for manpower.

Bosch thought the intel about the 1989 murder was significant. It was eight years after Wonderland but involved the same kind of murder weapon. The fact that Novak had a nickname for the pipe indicated that he might have kept the murder weapon from Wonderland and used it again. And this suggested that he still might have it.

Reading about Novak bragging about killing people with a pipe from his plumbing-supply business brought back memories for Bosch of the people he had found mutilated and dead in the house on Wonderland — especially the women, struck so violently that their faces no longer looked human. He had known evil in its many forms for more than half a century, since the day at MacLaren when he was told that his mother was gone, that she had been taken by a faceless killer who left her in a dumpster like so much trash. At various times, recognizing evil had frightened him, shocked him, or motivated him. It was that last effect that he had learned to use to do what he needed to do. He knew it was working its way through his blood now. It was he who would be the avenger. He knew it in his bones.

Elevated to full suspect, Nikolai Novak was brought in for questioning in early 2000. He came without an attorney, saying he had nothing to hide. The transcript from the twenty-five-minute conversation in a Robbery-Homicide Division interview room was in the murder book. Bosch read it through twice, both times noting Novak’s arrogance and his confidence that he was beyond the reach of the law. He offered an alibi for the murders, telling the investigators that he was with a woman who was not his wife that night in a hotel in Marina del Rey. When the investigators scoffed at his having an alibi readily available almost twenty years after the murders, Novak said he knew where he was that night because he had always thought he would eventually be accused.

Investigators confirmed through records provided by the Marina Inn that Novak had rented a room on the night of the killings, and the woman he said he was with, Natalia Dvorak, now married and the mother of two children, confirmed that they had spent the night in the room. At the time of the murders, she was employed at Stovak Plumbing Supplies, and she was the daughter of a man suspected of being a member of the Spolu.

Despite the questionable associations between Novak and Dvorak, confirming the alibi cut the legs out from under the case. Though alibis can be challenged because they largely rely upon human confirmation, the LA County District Attorney’s Office was not interested in going to trial against Novak and his team of lawyers when it was obvious they would be prepared to present an alibi defense, especially when there was only circumstantial evidence at best connecting Novak to the murders. Novak’s association with the Spolu and LAPD’s suspicions about past crimes would not be allowed in court without hard evidence. The last file in the murder-book section on Novak contained a rejection slip from the DA’s office.

Bosch closed the murder book and thought about things for a long moment. He considered the possibility that Novak had not discarded the murder weapon he had used at Wonderland but kept it and used it again years later. He knew there weren’t a lot of options. But if he began with the belief that Novak was on the team of killers that Eddie Nash assembled and sent into the night to kill, then his alibi was most likely put together before they even went through the door.

And Bosch knew that anything put together by humans could also be taken apart.

28

NATALIA DVORAK’S MARRIED name, Sjovald, was Swedish, which told Bosch she had married outside the confines of her father’s Spolu network. Her address when she was interviewed in 2000 was in the northern LA suburb of Valencia. Twenty-five years later, it remained the same, according to DMV records that Renée Ballard had checked for Bosch. The house where Sjovald raised two children was on a cul-de-sac within screaming distance of the features most associated with Valencia: the roller coasters of Magic Mountain.

Bosch was on the street in his car at seven a.m. the day after he completed his review of the Wonderland murder books. He sipped coffee and waited to see what activity might take place at the Sjovald residence. He had taken evasive maneuvers on his way to make sure he was not followed.

Natalia Dvorak Sjovald was now sixty-four years old. She and her husband, Henrik, were empty nesters. Bosch had no idea how old Henrik was or whether he was retired or still working. But he was going to give him a chance to leave the house before he pulled in and knocked on the door.

At 8:47 Bosch’s cell phone buzzed with a call from Agent Cavanaugh.

“You’re late, Bosch,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Magic Mountain,” Bosch said. “Taking the morning off.”

“Why is it that I don’t believe you, Bosch? Why is it that you were at the Marina Inn last night checking out room nine-oh-two?”

“You know about that, huh? I missed the tail.”

“You miss a lot. Like the fact that you were explicitly told to confine your investigation to the four walls of this room. Was that not clear to you?”

“No, it was clear. It’s just that… well, let me tell you a story.”