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probably been removed after he was forced into the trunk of the Rolls.
    “Okay, that’s it,” Donovan said.
    The lights came back on and Matthews went to work with the corpse, rotating joints, opening the shirt to look at the lividity level of the blood, opening the eyes and swiveling the head. Donovan paced around, waiting for the coroner’s tech to finish so he could continue the laser show. He walked over to Bosch.
    “Harry, you want the swag on this?”
    “Swag?”
    “Scientific wild ass guess.”
    “Yeah,” Bosch said, amused. “Give me the swag.”
    “Well, I think somebody gets the drop on this guy. Ties him up, dumps him in the trunk and drives him to that fire road. He’s still alive, okay? Then our doer gets out, opens the trunk, puts his foot on the bumper ready to do the job but can’t get all the way in there to put the muzzle against the bone, you know? That was important to him. To do the job right. So he sticks his big foot on this poor guy’s hip, leans further in and bam, bam, out go the headlights. What do you think?”
    Bosch nodded.
    “I think you are on to something.”
    He had already been thinking along the same lines but was past those deductions to the problem.
    “Then how does he get back?” he asked.
    “Back to where?”
    “If this guy was in the trunk the whole time, then the doer drove the Rolls. If he drove there in the Rolls, then how’s he get back to wherever he intercepted Tony?”
    “The other one,” Donovan said. “We’ve got two different prints on the jacket. Somebody could’ve followed behind the Rolls. The woman. The one who put her hand on the vic’s shoulder.”
    Bosch nodded. He had already been puzzling with this but didn’t like something about the scenario Donovan had woven. He wasn’t sure what it was.
    “Okay, Bosch,” Matthews interrupted. “You want to hear this tonight or you want to wait for the report?”
    “T’night,” Bosch said.
    “Okay then, listen up. Lividity was fixed and unchanged. The body was never moved once the heart stopped pumping.” He referred to a clipboard. “Let’s see, what else. We’ve got ninety percent rigor mortis resolution, cornea clouding and we’ve got skin slippage. I think you take all of that and it’s forty-eight hours, maybe a couple hours less. Let us know if you come up with any markers and we might do better.”
    “Will do,” Bosch said.
    By markers he knew Matthews meant that if he traced the victim’s last day and found out what he had eaten last and when, the ME could get a better fix on time of death by studying the digestion of food in the stomach.
    “He’s all yours,” Bosch said to Matthews. “Any idea on the post?”
    “You caught the tail end of a holiday weekend. That’s bad luck for you. Last I heard, we’ve run on twenty-seven homicides in the county so far. We probably won’t cut this one until Wednesday, if you’re lucky. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”
    But the delay didn’t really bother Bosch this time. In cases like this, the autopsy usually held few surprises. It was pretty clear how the victim died. The mystery was why and by whom.
    Matthews and his assistants wheeled the corpse out, leaving Bosch and Donovan alone with the Rolls. Donovan stared at the car silently, contemplating it the way a matador looks at the bull he is going to fight.
    “We’re going to get her secrets, Harry.”
    Bosch’s phone buzzed then and he fumbled getting it out of his jacket and open. It was Edgar.
    “We got the ID, Harry. It is Aliso.”
    “You got this off the prints?”
    “Yeah. Mossler’s got a fax at home. I sent him everything and he eyeballed it.”
    Mossler was one of the SID’s latent-print men.
    “This is with the DL thumbprint?”
    “Right. Also, I pulled a full set of Tony’s prints from an old pop for soliciting. Mossler had those to look at, too. It’s Aliso.”
    “Okay, good work. What else you