“Far as I know. He was already heading there when he was assigned to me. You’d have to call Terminal Island and have them check their files. Or talk to Scales.”

Bosch filled Wish in on the conversation while they were on the road. Otherwise, it was a long ride and there were long periods of silence. Bosch spent much of the time wondering about the night before. Her visit. Why had she come? After they crossed into Ventura County his mind came back to the case, and he asked her some of the questions he had come up with the night before while reviewing the files.

“Why didn’t they hit the main vault? At WestLand there were two vaults. Safe-deposit and then the bank’s main vault, for the cash and the tellers’ boxes. The crime scene reports said the design of both vaults was the same. The safe-deposit vault was bigger but the armoring in the floor was the same. So it would seem that Meadows and his partners could just as easily have tunneled to the main vault, gotten in and taken whatever was there and gotten out. No need to risk spending a whole weekend inside. No need to pry open safe-deposit boxes either.”

“Maybe they didn’t know they were the same. Maybe they assumed the main vault would be tougher.”

“But we are assuming they had some knowledge of the safe-deposit vault’s structure before they started on this. Why didn’t they have the same knowledge of the other vault?”

“They couldn’t recon the main vault. It’s not open to the public. But we think one of them rented a box in the safe-deposit vault and went in to check it out. Used a phony name, of course. But, see, they could check out one vault and not the other. Maybe that’s why.”

Bosch nodded and said, “How much was in the main vault?”

“Don’t know offhand. It should have been in the reports I gave you. If not, it’s in the other files back at the bureau.”

“More, though. Right? There was more cash in the main vault than what, the two or three million in property they got from the boxes.”

“I think that is probably right.”

“See what I’m saying? If they had hit the main vault the stuff would have been laying around in stacks and bags. Right there for the taking. It would have been easier. There probably would have been more money for less trouble.”

“But, Harry, we know that from hindsight. Who knows what they knew going in? Maybe they thought there was more in the boxes. They gambled and lost.”

“Or maybe they won.”

She looked over at him.

“Maybe there was something there in the boxes that we don’t even know about. That nobody reported missing. Something that made the safe-deposit vault the better target. Made it worth more than the main vault.”

“If you’re thinking drugs, the answer is no. We thought of that. We had the DEA bring around one of their dogs and he went through the broken boxes. Nothing. No trace of drugs. He then sniffed around the boxes the thieves hadn’t gotten to and he got one hit. On one of the small ones.”

She laughed for a moment and said, “So then we drilled this box the dog went nuts over and found five grams of coke in a bag. This poor guy who kept his coke stash at the bank got busted just because somebody happened to tunnel into the same vault.”

Wish laughed again, but it seemed to be a little forced to Bosch. The story wasn’t that funny. “Anyway,” she said, “the case against the guy was kicked by an assistant U.S. attorney because he said it was a bad search. We violated the guy when we drilled his box without a warrant.”

Bosch exited the freeway into the town of Ventura and headed north. “I still like the drug angle, despite the dog,” he said after a quarter hour of silence. “They aren’t infallible, those dogs. If the stuff was packed in there right and the thieves got it, there may not have been a trace. A couple of those boxes with coke in them and the caper starts being worth their while.”

“Your next question will be about the customer lists, right?” she said.

“Right.”

“Well, we did a lot of work on that. We checked everybody, right down to tracing purchases of things they said were in the boxes. We didn’t find who did the job, but we probably saved the bank’s insurance companies a couple million in paying for things that were reported stolen but never really existed.”

He pulled into a gas station so he could take out a map book from under the seat and figure out the way to Charlie Company. She continued to defend the FBI investigation.

“The DEA looked at every name on the boxholder list and drew a blank. We ran the names through NCIC. We got a few hits but nothing serious, mostly old stuff.” She gave another one of those short fake laughs. “One of the holders of one of the bigger boxes had a kiddy porn conviction from the seventies. Served a deuce at Soledad. Anyway, after the bank job he was contacted and he reported nothing was taken, said he had recently emptied his box. But they say these pedophiles can never part with their stuff, their photos and films, even letters written about kids. And there was no record at the bank of him going into the box in the two months before the burglary. So we figured that the box was for his collection. But, anyway, that had nothing to do with the job. Nothing we turned up did.”

Bosch found the way on the map and pulled out of the service station. Charlie Company was in grove country. He thought about her story about the pedophile. Something about it bothered him. He rolled it around in his head but couldn’t get to it. He let it drift and went on to another question.

“Why was nothing ever recovered? All that jewelry and bonds and stocks, and nothing ever turns up except for a single bracelet. Not even any of the other worthless things that were taken.”

“They are sitting on it until they think they are clear,” Wish said. “That’s why Meadows was smoked. He went out of line and pawned the bracelet before he should have, maybe before everyone agreed they were clear. They found out he’d sold it. He wouldn’t say where, so they buzzed him until he told them. Then they killed him.”

“And by coincidence, I get the call.”

“It happens.”

“There is something in that story that doesn’t work,” Bosch said. “We start out with Meadows getting juiced, tortured, right? He tells them what they want, they put the hot load in his arm and they go get the bracelet from the pawnshop, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But, see, it doesn’t work. I’ve got the pawn slip. It was hidden. So he didn’t give it to them, and they had to go break in the shop and take the bracelet, covering the scam by also taking a lot of other junk. So if he didn’t give them the pawn slip, how’d they know where the bracelet was?”

“He told them, I guess,” Wish said.

“I don’t think so. I don’t see him giving up one and not the other. He had nothing to gain from holding back the slip. If they got the name of the shop out of him, they would’ve gotten the slip.”

“So, you’re saying he died before he told them anything. And they already knew where the bracelet was pawned.”

“Right. They worked him to get the ticket, but he wouldn’t give it up, wouldn’t break. They killed him. Then they dump the body and roll his place. But they still don’t find the pawn stub. So they hit the pawnshop like third-rate burglars. The question is, if Meadows didn’t tell them where he had sold the bracelet and they didn’t find the stub, how did they know where it was?”

“Harry, this is speculation on top of speculation.”

“That’s what cops do.”

“Well, I don’t know. Could have been a lot of things. They could have had a tail on Meadows ’cause they didn’t trust him and could have seen him go into the pawnshop. Could’ve been a lot of things.”

“Could’ve been they had somebody, say a cop, who saw the bracelet on the monthly pawn sheets and told them. The sheets go to every police department in the county.”

“I think that kind of speculation is reckless.”