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“Never happen. If I get anything going on this, I’ll take it to him. Unless you tell me otherwise.”
“Okay, as long as we’re clear. Give me the name.”
“Nikolai — spelled with a k and an ai, not a y.”
Bosch could hear her typing on a keyboard.
“Last name?” she asked impatiently.
“Novak,” Bosch said, and spelled it. “I don’t have a DOB but he would have been born in ’50 or ’51.”
“Probably don’t need it with that first — wait, I think I know this guy.”
“How?”
“The name, I mean. Is this Nicky Novak we’re talking about?”
“I don’t know. Who’s Nicky Novak?”
“The Spolu guy.”
“I guess I missed the memo. What’s Spolu?”
“It’s what they call the Czech cartel. The Spolu. It means, like, ‘us’ or ‘all of us together’ or something. Like how Cosa Nostra means ‘our thing’ in Italian.”
“How do you know all this, Renée?”
“Because I had to pull an old case a few months ago for a couple feds and Novak’s name was in it.”
“What case?”
“The Wonderland massacre. You remember that one up in Laurel Canyon in, I think, 1981? There were, like, twelve murder books total. Big investigation. A quadruple murder. I told the feds that we weren’t a lending library but they were welcome to come out to Ahmanson and take a look at what we had. The next thing I knew, word came down from the tenth floor that I was supposed to turn the books over to them. And I’ll tell you what, they filled a damn shopping cart.”
The tenth floor of the Police Administration Building was where the offices of the chief of police were located. It was also where secretive decisions were made along political lines.
“Do you remember the names of the agents?” Bosch asked.
“Nah, not really. But I can look it up in the call log,” Ballard said.
“And you looked through all the books before turning them over?”
“No, that would’ve taken a month. But I had them stacked on my desk and ready to go, so I looked at book twelve, you know, to see where things left off. That’s where I saw Novak’s name. He was suspected of being one of the hitters. You know the case, Harry? It was before my time.”
“Yeah, I actually was up there that day. I had just moved from the auto-theft table to the J-Car on PM watch in Hollywood. Because it was the last day before the holiday, there was nobody in the squad but me doing paperwork. Russ Kuster called and sent me up to Wonderland to babysit the scene until RHD showed up and took over. He told me not to go in the house, but I did.”
“Of course you did. Were you part of the investigation after that?”
“No, it was just a babysitting job. How was Nicky Novak connected to Wonderland?”
“As I remember, an informant mentioned his name, but they had more leads than they could handle. When a second informant gave the name, they started looking at him but couldn’t make a case. And there was also an intel report on the Spolu and the guy who ran it at the time — Nicky’s father. He was tight with the guy who ordered the hit on the house on Wonderland. Something like that. This was a while back and I’ve had a few other cases since then.”
“Right.”
“So that’s gotta be mind-blowing for a guy who doesn’t believe in coincidences.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you were up there that day. Now, forty-five years later, you’re trying to find Nicky Novak.”
