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number.”
    Bosch was secretly pleased that he wasn’t going to get bigfooted by the OCID, but he was also surprised at the brush-off. The quickness with which Carbone had dismissed the case seemed unusual.
    “Any other details you want to give me, Bosch?”
    “We’re just starting. But let me ask you, you ever hear of a hitter takes the vic’s shoes with him? Also, he unties the body afterward.”
    “Takes his shoes…unties him. Uh, not offhand, no. Nobody specific. But like I said, I’ll ask around in the morning and I’ll put it on our box. Anything else cute about this one?”
    Bosch didn’t like what was happening. Carbone seemed too interested while saying he wasn’t. He said Tony Aliso wasn’t connected, yet he still wanted the details. Was he just trying to be helpful or was there something more to it?
    “That’s about all we got at the moment,” Bosch said, deciding not to give up anything else for free. “Like I said, we’re just getting going here.”
    “Okay, then, give me the morning and I’ll do some more checking. I’ll call if I come up with anything, okay?”
    “Right.”
    “Check you later. But you know what I think you have there, Bosch? You’ve got a guy, he was probably making sandwiches with somebody’s wife. Lotta times things look like pro hits that aren’t, you know what I mean?”
    “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll talk to you later.”
     
    Bosch walked to the rear of the Rolls. Up close he could see the pattern swirls he had noticed in the laser light before appeared to be swipe marks made with a cloth. It looked like the whole car had been wiped down.
    But when Donovan moved the wand over the bumper, the laser picked up a partial shoe print on the chrome.
    “Did anybody —”
    “No,” Bosch said. “Nobody put their foot there.”
    “Okay, then. Hold the wand on the print.”
    Bosch did so while Donovan bent over and took several photos, bracketing the exposure settings to make sure he had at least one clear shot. It was the forward half of the foot. There was a circle pattern at the ball of the foot with lines extending from it like the rays of a sun. There was a cross-cut pattern through the arch and then the print was cut off by the edge of the bumper.
    “Tennis shoe,” Donovan said. “Maybe a work shoe.”
    After he photographed it, he moved the wand around the trunk again, but there was nothing but wipe marks.
    “Okay,” Donovan said. “Open it.”
    Using a penlight to guide his way, Bosch made it to the driver’s door and bent in to pull the trunk release. Shortly afterward, the smell of death flooded the shed.
    It looked to Bosch as though the body had not shifted during the transport. But the victim took on a ghoulish look under the harsh examination of the laser, his face almost skeletal, like the monsters painted in Day-Glo in fun-house hallways. The blood seemed blacker and the bone chips in the jagged wound were luminescent in bright counterpoint.
    On his clothes, small strands of hair and tiny threads glowed. Bosch moved in with a pair of tweezers and a plastic vial like the kind made to hold a stack of silver half dollars. He carefully picked these pieces of potential evidence off the clothing and collected them in the vial. It was painstaking work and there was nothing much there. He knew this kind of material could be found on anybody at anytime. It was common.
    When he was done he said to Donovan, “The tail of the jacket. I flipped it up to check for a wallet.”
    “Okay, pull it back down.”
    Bosch did so, and there on Aliso’s hip was another footprint. It matched the footprint on the bumper but was more complete. On the heel was another circle pattern with off-shooting lines. In the lower arch was what looked like a brand name but it was unreadable.
    Regardless of whether they could identify the shoe, Bosch knew it was a good find. It meant that a careful killer had made a mistake. At least one. If nothing else, it gave rise to the