Bosch eventually struck pay dirt in the rear parking lot of a discount shoe store in Alhambra, east of Los Angeles. The store was where a man named Martin Perez, a reformed SanFer, worked as an inventory manager far away from the turf he once trod. Perez was forty-one years old and had shed his gang affiliation twelve years earlier. Though he had been carried in gang unit intel files as a hard-core member of the SanFers since he was sixteen, he had escaped the life with several arrests on his record but no convictions. He had never been to prison and had spent only a few days here and there in county jail.
The files Bosch reviewed contained color photos of the tattoos that adorned most parts of Perez’s body during his active years. Included in these was an RIP UNCLE MURDA ink job on his neck. This put him high on the list of men Bosch wanted to talk to.
Bosch staked out the shoe store’s parking lot and spotted Perez stepping out back to smoke a cigarette while on a three p.m. break. Through a pair of binoculars Bosch confirmed that Perez still carried the tattoo on his neck. He noted the time of the break and then drove away.
The next day he came back shortly before break time. He was dressed in blue jeans and a denim work shirt with permanent stains on it and carried a soft pack of Marlboro reds in the breast pocket. When he saw Perez behind the shop, he casually joined him, holding a cigarette up and asking if he could borrow a light. Perez flicked a lighter and Bosch leaned in to ignite his smoke.
Leaning back away, Bosch mentioned the tattoo he had just seen up close and asked how Uncle Murda died. Perez responded by saying that Uncle Murda was a good man who had been set up by his own people.
“How come?” Bosch asked.
“Because he got greedy,” Perez said.
Bosch pushed no further. He finished his cigarette — the first he had smoked in years — and thanked Perez for the light, then walked away.
That night, Bosch knocked on the door of Perez’s apartment. He was accompanied by Bella Lourdes. This time he identified himself, as did Lourdes, and told Perez he had a problem. He pulled his phone and played a snippet of the conversation they had shared while smoking behind the shoe store. Bosch explained that Perez had knowledge about a gang murder but had deliberately withheld it from authorities. This was obstruction of justice — a crime — not to mention conspiracy to commit murder, which would be the charges he would face unless he agreed to cooperate.
Perez took the option of cooperating, but he did not want to go to the San Fernando Police Department lest he be spotted in the old neighborhood by someone he used to run with. Bosch made a call to an old friend who worked in the Sheriff’s Department homicide unit in Whittier and arranged to borrow an interview room for a couple hours.
The threat of charges against Perez was largely a bluff by Bosch, but it worked. Perez was deathly afraid of the L.A. County jail and the California prison system. He said both were well stocked with members of the eMe — the Mexican Mafia — which had a strong alliance with the VSF and was known for its brutal crimes against those who snitched or were perceived to be vulnerable to law enforcement pressure to flip. Perez believed that he would be marked for death whether he snitched or not. He chose to put everything on the table in hopes of convincing Bosch and Lourdes that he was not the killer but knew who was.
The story Perez told was as old as the crime of murder itself. Vega had risen to a place of power in the gang, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He was taking more than his share in proceeds from the SanFers’ criminal enterprises and was also known to force sexual relations on young women associated with members on the lower tiers of the gang. Many of those young vatos despised him. One named Tranquillo Cortez plotted against him. According to Perez, he was the nephew of Vega’s wife and was incensed by Vega’s greed and very public infidelities.
Perez was in Cortez’s clique within the gang and was privy to part of the planning but insisted he was not present when Cortez killed Vega. The case had long been considered the perfect hit within the SFPD, because no evidence other than a bullet had been left behind. So this was where Bosch and Lourdes pressed Perez, asking many questions about the gun, its ownership, and its present whereabouts.
Perez said the gun was Cortez’s own gun but had no information on how Cortez came to own it. As far as what happened to the weapon after the murder, he had no idea because he soon separated himself from the gang and left the Valley. But Perez did provide a piece of information that gave Bosch his focus. He said that Cortez had equipped the gun with a homemade silencer. This fit with the original investigation.
Bosch zeroed in, asking how Cortez had made the silencer. Perez said that at the time, Cortez worked in an uncle’s muffler shop in nearby Pacoima, and he had machined it out of the same piping and internal sound-suppressing materials used in motorcycle mufflers. He did this after hours and without his uncle’s knowledge. Perez also acknowledged that he and two other fellow gang members were with Cortez in the shop when he tested his creation by attaching it to his gun and firing a couple of shots into the back wall of the muffler shop.
After the interview with Perez, the priority for the investigators became confirming as much of his story as possible. Lourdes was able to nail down the link between Cortez and Vega’s wife. She was his father’s sister. She also determined that Cortez’s standing within the VSF had risen over the past fourteen years and he was now a shot caller like the man he was suspected of assassinating. Meanwhile, Bosch confirmed that Pacoima Tire & Muffler, located on San Fernando Road in Los Angeles, was previously owned by Helio Cortez, the suspect’s uncle, and that the new owner’s name was not in any gang intel files of the San Fernando and Los Angeles police departments. Other details were substantiated and it all added up to enough probable cause for Bosch to go see a judge for a search warrant.
He had that now and it was time to move the case forward.
Lourdes and Luzon were the first to enter the war room. Soon they were followed by Trevino and then Sergeant Irwin Rosenberg, a dayside watch commander. In accordance with department protocol, all search warrants were served with a uniformed presence, and Rosenberg, a veteran street cop with high people skills, would coordinate that side of things. Everyone took seats around the oval table.
“What, no doughnuts?” Rosenberg asked.
The table was usually where the spread of food donated by citizens ended up. Almost every morning there were doughnuts or breakfast burritos. Rosenberg’s disappointment was shared by all.
“All right, let’s get this going,” Trevino said. “What’ve we got, Harry? You should bring Irwin up to speed.”
“This is the Cristobal Vega case,” Bosch said. “The murder of Uncle Murda fourteen years ago. We have a search warrant allowing us to enter Pacoima Tire & Muffler on San Fernando Road and search for bullets fired into the rear wall of the main garage fourteen years ago. This place is on LAPD turf, so we will coordinate with them. We want to do it as unobtrusively as possible so word doesn’t get back to our suspect or anybody else with the SanFers. We want to keep this quiet until it’s time to hopefully make an arrest.”
“It’s going to be impossible with the SanFers,” Rosenberg said. “They have eyes all over the place.”
Bosch nodded.
“We know that,” he said. “Bella’s been working on a cover story. We just need to buy a couple days. If we find slugs, then I have it greased down at the lab. They’ll ASAP the comparison to the bullet that killed Vega. If there’s a match, we’ll be good to go at our suspect.”