The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(66)

A team of officers directed by Lt. Greg Stout, of the Special Operations Unit, made simultaneous raids on the apartments early Thursday, and both men were arrested without incident. Stout said at the press conference that a gun believed to have been the murder weapon was found hidden in Cardozo’s apartment.

“We have no doubt that these are the right guys,” Stout said.

Muniz and Companioni appeared at the press conference but did not address the media. When contacted by phone later, Companioni said, “This guy, Cardozo, is a piece of [expletive] and that’s all I have to say.”

The suspects are scheduled to be arraigned tomorrow at the Hillsborough County Courthouse.

Bosch read through the story a second time and came away as convinced as the Tampa police apparently were. Reading between the lines, he guessed that Fields had flipped and was hoping to avoid a murder charge by laying the killings squarely on his partner, Cardozo. It seemed obvious that someone was talking or they would not have had the details about the fender bender and the abduction at the traffic light.

Other stories followed in the weeks after the arrest story, but Bosch didn’t need to read them. What he knew already scratched Maura Frederick off his list.

But Clayton Manley was still on it, and Orlando Reyes had not said anything about him when he rejected talking to Bosch earlier.

Bosch grabbed his phone and hit Redial. This time he decided on a different tack with Reyes.

The unsuspecting detective answered promptly. “Robbery-Homicide Division, Detective Reyes. How can I help you?”

“You can start by telling me why you dropped Clayton Manley.”

“Bosch? Bosch, I told you, I’m not talking to you.”

“I checked out Tampa and you were right: Maura Frederick is in the clear. But that was just a deflection, Reyes. You need to tell me why you dropped off Manley or you’re going to have to tell it to a judge.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Are you crazy?”

“There’s something missing about Clayton Manley from the murder book, something not in discovery, and if I put that idea in Haller’s ear he’s going to run with it and he’s going to drag you and your dumbshit partner into court to talk about it with the judge.”

“You’re the dumbshit, Bosch. There’s nothing. We got the DNA hit on that nutjob and that was it. Game over. We didn’t need to do anything else on Manley.”

“It’s in the chronology, Reyes. Actually, it’s what’s not in the chrono. The interview with Manley came a week before the DNA hit, but there’s nothing on Manley in the chrono that week after you talked to him. You aren’t going to convince me—or Haller or the judge—that you did nothing on Manley that week. He was a solid suspect. At least a person of interest. So what happened? What did you leave out of discovery? What happened the week before the DNA came back?”

Reyes said nothing—and that was when Bosch knew he had struck a nerve. His bluff was on the nose. Gustafson and Reyes had taken the Manley angle another step but had left it out of the discovery version of the murder book they handed over to the defense.

“Talk to me, Reyes,” Bosch said. “I can contain it. You don’t and you get Haller up your ass. If he smells any money in this he’ll sue you, the department, the city—it’ll blow up and you get blown up with it. You want that? You’re new to RHD. You think they’ll keep you around if you get tainted with this?”

He waited and Reyes finally broke.

“Okay, listen, Bosch,” he began. “Detective to detective, I’ll give you something and you do whatever the fuck you want with it. But it won’t add up to anything because your nutjob was the guy. He fucking did it.”

“Just give it to me,” Bosch said.

“You have to protect me. No Haller, no fucking lawyers.”

“No Haller, no lawyers.”

“Okay, the only thing we left out of discovery was that we started out with Manley by running down every lawyer in that firm.”

“Michaelson and Mitchell.”

“Right, every lawyer. We wanted to see who we were dealing with, what other clients they were representing. It’s a big powerful law firm and we had to step carefully. We put all the lawyer names in the county courts computer and got all their cases in the last ten years. It was a lot. But we got one hit of interest.”

“Which was?”

“About five years ago Michaelson and Mitchell represented Dominick Butino. Got him off on a weapons beef—witness changed his story. And that was it. Then the DNA came in on Herstadt and we dropped it. It didn’t mean anything anyway.”

Bosch knew the name. Dominick “Batman” Butino was a reputed organized-crime figure from Las Vegas who had business interests in Los Angeles. Bosch now knew exactly what Gustafson and Reyes had done. They had DNA directly linking Herstadt to the Montgomery killing. They weren’t going to put something in discovery—a certified mobster—that would allow the defense to create any sort of jury distraction.

They didn’t want Haller building a potential third-party-culpability case by pointing to a lawyer who had threatened and sued Montgomery, and whose firm represented a notorious organized-crime figure. Butino’s nickname did not come from the superhero but from his alleged use of a baseball bat to collect money owed to him.