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Nash had been set up by one of his own drug clients. World-famous pornography star John Holmes, badly addicted to heroin and cocaine, was a customer of both Nash and Launius. His need for money to feed his addiction led him to suggest to Launius that Nash would be an easy target. He agreed to leave a door unlocked for the robbers when he went to Nash’s house to score heroin. Launius and two others entered Nash’s house through the unlocked door, disarmed Nash’s live-in bodyguard, and carried out the robbery while a fourth man waited outside in a getaway car.

But it wasn’t long after the robbery that Nash figured out that Holmes had somehow been involved. He sent his bodyguard and other henchmen to find him. The actor, known for adult films in which he played a detective, was snatched off the street and brought to Nash’s home, where he was beaten until he admitted his part in the robbery. He was then told that the only way he could live and make up for his betrayal was to lead a group of killers assembled by Nash to the hideout on Wonderland.

And he did.

Bosch knew most of the story. It was Hollywood lore. It had been the subject of books, podcasts, and documentaries. There had even been a movie called Wonderland featuring Val Kilmer as John Holmes, portraying him in a sympathetic light. But as Bosch worked his way through the murder books accumulated during the decades-long investigation, he came to realize how the tentacles of the case snaked through the entire culture of the time.

Eddie Nash was a self-made man. He immigrated from Palestine in the early 1950s with seven dollars in his pocket. Like so many before and since, he came to Hollywood to be in the movies. It didn’t quite work out; his lone appearance on film was a bit part in a TV series called The Cisco Kid. To make money, he operated a hot dog cart on Hollywood Boulevard. Before long, he made enough to buy into a club. One club became two, and so on.

By the 1970s he operated a string of clubs that catered to every kind of customer. He had strip clubs, rock-and-roll clubs, gay clubs, underage clubs… the common denominator was that each club was a sales point for drugs. His drugs. Though investigated often and even charged on occasion, Nash employed a phalanx of lawyers and spent little time behind bars. His empire continued to expand. As cocaine grew in popularity and became the drug of choice, Nash adapted his business and built a direct connection with a major Colombian supplier. When crack hit the streets in New York, Nash’s organization quickly introduced it to L.A., and a devastating epidemic swept through the poorer neighborhoods of the city. Nash had the low end and high end of the business covered. It was said that it was his drugs that killed John Belushi, but Nash was too many steps up the chain of dealers to be blamed. Nash was an equal-opportunity businessman. He made alliances with all manner of organized-crime groups, from Black street gangs to Armenian mobsters to the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, and even the so-called Kosher Nostra. The only color Eddie Nash saw was green.

Nash ruled his empire with an iron fist. He was cruel. He turned female addicts into sex slaves, male addicts into crack cooks. When dealers were caught skimming, they died. When four men were foolish enough to come to his home to rob and humiliate him, there were going to be consequences. There had to be, or Eddie Nash would lose the power and fear he wielded in controlling the drug trade in one of the biggest cities in the world.

According to the early summaries Bosch reviewed, the investigators tried to figure out how Nash had planned the Wonderland massacre. Holmes flipped and revealed who had taken part in the home invasion and where they were hiding, so Nash would have expected there to be at least four armed men in the narrow, multilevel structure. With the houses on Wonderland standing only feet apart, there could be no gunfire if the killers were to get away successfully. The house was in a canyon with only one escape route. This operation had to go smoothly and quietly. To control the house without guns with that many armed targets on that many levels, Nash likely assembled an assault team of at least four men and possibly as many as six armed with weapons of silent death. Nash could not have anticipated that the house would be populated by more women than men that night. He must have sent a small army.

Identifying the members of that army became the focus of the investigation. Nash’s bodyguard, who was roughed up during the robbery at Nash’s house, was a primary suspect. It was believed that John Holmes had been part of the team, whether voluntarily or not. This was confirmed when his palm print was found on the brass railing at the head of the bed where Ron Launius had been beaten to death.

Nash was never suspected of actually taking part in the bloody massacre himself. It was beneath him to be involved on that level. But as the so-called mastermind of the massacre, Nash was arrested and tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury; one woman was the lone holdout against a guilty verdict. It was later confirmed that Nash had gotten to her and paid her fifty thousand dollars to vote for acquittal.

Nash was retried and acquitted when the judge made rulings adverse to the prosecution and the state lost a key witness; he disappeared the night before he was to testify that he overheard Nash ordering the hit on the Wonderland house.

Twenty years after the murders, Nash was caught up in a federal investigation of a major fraud and charged with racketeering. The Wonderland murders were listed among the predicate crimes needed to show that he operated an ongoing criminal enterprise. Nash cut a deal by taking responsibility for ordering the massacre and did three years in prison.

But who the actual killers were was never established, despite many years of effort to identify and bring them to justice. Holmes was tried and acquitted when he claimed he was forced against his will to take part in the crime. Fearing the wrath of Nash, he refused to say who was with him in the Wonderland house that night, a secret he took to the grave when he died of AIDS. Nash’s bodyguard was acquitted in the same trials that included Nash. No other suspects were ever publicly named, though investigations continued.

Bosch had gotten through eight of the murder books when Cavanaugh told him to go home for the day.

“I still have four books to go,” Bosch said.

“Pick it up tomorrow,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re closing up shop and I’m going to make sure you don’t take anything home with you, since it’s now clear it won’t be safe.”

“Give it a rest, Cavanaugh. I’m trying to help you here and you’re just pissed off because I put your man’s face into a car grille. Don’t you see that I unintentionally helped solidify his status? Novak will never be suspicious of him because he took one for the team.”

“Let me say to you again, Bosch: I am not talking about our source of intel within the organization. You, in fact, would be the last person on the planet I would confide in. Now get the hell out of here and see if you can go one night without fucking up my case.”

“Sure. Whatever you say.”

Bosch stood up from his borrowed desk and took his jacket off the back of the chair.

“I want you to finish with the books by tomorrow,” Cavanaugh said.

Bosch nodded.

“That was my plan,” he said.

“The sooner the better,” Cavanaugh added. “You might have Cutler snowed, but not me.”

“Then it must burn you up inside that he calls the shots.”

“Fuck you, Bosch. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

Bosch left the Roybal and hung around waiting for Shear to come out. Earlier, when Shear left the task force room, Bosch overheard him tell Cavanaugh that he was going to drop by the ATF offices in the building to check in with his boss.

Bosch waited fifteen minutes and was beginning to think he had missed him when he saw Shear emerge through the building’s glass doors.

Bosch approached.

“You going to Union Station?” he asked. “Mind if I tag along?”