“They still do,” Ballard said. “They like having cops as customers.”
She gave him some time to savor his first bite of rotisserie chicken slathered in barbecue sauce. It was the kind of food that made you bring a napkin to your mouth after every bite.
“So, tell me about this nexus you found,” she said.
“All I have is the public records that you can get online,” Bosch said. “Corporate records filed with the state. You’re going to have to go deeper with your access to confirm.”
“Okay, and what am I confirming?”
“I think it’s like the factoring that happened in the Albert Lee case. Ownership of the body shop, including the property it sits on, was transferred from Javier Raffa three years ago to a corporation owned by Raffa and a partner.”
“Who’s the partner?”
“A dentist named Dennis Hoyle. Office in Sherman Oaks.”
“Another dentist. Dennis the dentist. The dentist in the Albert Lee case was down in the Marina, right?”
“Yeah, John William James.”
“Any connection between Hoyle and James?”
“That’s the nexus.”
Ballard could tell Bosch was proud of whatever it was he had found, and of doing so without even leaving his house. She hoped she would still have that mojo if she was around and working cases at his age.
“Tell me,” she said.
“All right, you start with Hoyle and James being dentists,” Bosch said. “Completely different practices. James, he’s down in the Marina with that crowd: celebrities, singles, actors, whatever. Your guy, Hoyle, he’s up in the Valley, different clientele, probably more of a family practice. So it looks like never the twain shall meet, right?”
“I guess. Maybe they knew each other from professional associations. You know, Teeth Pullers of Los Angeles, or something like that.”
“Close. These guys — dentists — when they put in a crown or an implant or what have you, most of them don’t make that stuff in-house. They make a mold of the patient’s tooth and send it out to a dental lab that makes crowns and dentures.”
“They sent to the same lab.”
“They owned the same lab. They were partners — until somebody whacked James. It’s all in state corporate records. If somebody wants to spend the time chasing it through a maze of holding companies, it’s right there.”
“And you spent the time.”
“What else am I going to do?”
“Chase your guy Finbar McShane?”
“Finbar’s a white whale. You said so yourself. But this? This is real.”
Bosch wiped his hands thoroughly on a clot of napkins and then reached over for a sheaf of documents at the side of the table. Ballard could see the state seal of California on the top sheet.
“So you’ve been printing,” she said. “That must have taken all morning.”
“Funny,” Bosch said. “These are the incorporation filings behind a joint business venture called Crown Labs Incorporated. It’s located in Burbank up by the airport. Four other corporations own it, and these I traced to four dentists: James, Hoyle, and two guys named Jason Abbott and Carlos Esquivel.”
“How can James still own it if he’s been dead for seven years?”
“His company is called JWJ Ventures. Corporate records show the vice president of that company upon its founding was Jennifer James, who — I’m going to take a wild guess — was his wife. Seven months after he gets murdered, the records are amended and Jennifer James is now president. So he’s dead but she has his piece of the lab.”
“Okay, so James — when he was alive — knew Hoyle and was in business with him.”
“And each had an association with a business where the principal owner/operator is murdered.”
“With the same gun.”
Bosch nodded.
“With the same gun,” he repeated. “Very risky. The shells connect the case more solidly than the corporate records. There’s got to be a reason.”
“Well, twenty-twos are hard to match,” Ballard said. “They mushroom, shatter. It was about the shells. And in the Raffa kill, we got a break. The shell went under a car and wasn’t readily retrievable.”
“Same with Albert Lee — the shell wasn’t quickly retrievable. You get into coincidences now, and I don’t buy coincidences like that.”
“So, maybe we have other kills where there were no shells left behind and we just got lucky with these two.”