“I just thought it was the place to start,” he said. “To try to get momentum going again. While I was there, the investigator I worked with from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department showed up. There’s been nothing happening on it from their end either.”

“Can you tell us about Finbar McShane?” Ballard asked. “The more the group knows, the more we might be in a position to have ideas.”

“Stephen Gallagher was born in Ireland,” Bosch said. “Dublin. He met an American woman visiting from L.A.—Jennifer Clarke—and they came back here and eventually married and he started his business. So then at some point he hired another Irish guy, named Finbar McShane. He was from Belfast in Northern Ireland and it was never established if they knew each other previously. McShane wasn’t a partner but he was running the business with Stephen. After the Gallaghers disappear, McShane keeps the business going and piece by piece he starts selling off the equipment. To make this short, a year later the bodies that were never supposed to be found are discovered. And guess what? McShane is gone and the warehouses and the equipment yard are empty. It was a classic bust-out operation.”

“What’s that mean?” Hatteras asked. “A ‘bust-out’?”

“It’s like a scheme,” Bosch said. “A con in which you hollow out a business by ordering products and selling them and basically selling everything until there’s nothing left and it collapses, leaving all your suppliers unpaid and on the hook for the losses.”

“You ever watch The Sopranos?” Rawls asked. “Great show. They did it all the time.”

“So McShane is your suspect,” Masser said, attempting to get back to Bosch’s story. “Any estimate on how much selling all the equipment brought in?”

“We were able to track the sales,” Bosch said. “It was just over eight hundred thousand.”

“Four lives for eight hundred K,” Rawls said.

“If he did it,” Hatteras said.

“Tell them about the letter,” Ballard said.

“We got a letter addressed to the LAPD, supposedly from him,” Bosch said. “He claimed he was innocent and that he left because he didn’t want to be falsely accused.”

“Postmark?” Hatteras asked.

“It was local,” Bosch said. “We put flags on his passport. If he left the country and got back to Belfast or anywhere else, then he did it without his passport.”

“I think he’s still here,” Hatteras said. “I can feel it.”

Bosch looked at her, then turned his eyes to Ballard.

“Talk about the evidence,” Ballard said. “How were they killed?”

“They were executed,” Bosch said. “With a nail gun from one of Gallagher’s warehouses. It was in the grave with them. And there was evidence that the grave had been dug with an excavator.”

“What the heck is an excavator?” Masser asked.