“That’s just the highlights—stuff I kept in a backup file. The real file used to fill a whole drawer.”

“Used to?”

Lindell looked around as if realizing for the first time he was sitting outside a building that housed more agents and spooks than anywhere west of Chicago. He looked down at the file lying there between us for the world to see.

“I don’t like sitting out here. Where’s your car? Let’s take a ride.”

We walked out into the parking lot without talking. But seeing Lindell acting the way he was unnerved me and made me think again about Kiz Rider’s warning about some sort of higher authority being involved in the case. Once we got inside the Benz, I put the file on the backseat and keyed the engine. I asked him where he wanted to go.

“I don’t care, just drive.”

I went west on Wilshire, thinking I’d cut over to San Vicente and cruise through Brentwood. It would be a nice drive on a street lined with trees and joggers, even if the conversation wasn’t nice.

“Were you being square on the tape?” Lindell asked. “That’s your real story about not working on this for anybody?”

“Yeah, that’s the square story.”

“Well, you better watch your ass, podjo. There are larger forces at work here. People that don’t —”

“Fuck around. Yeah, I know. I’ve been told that but nobody wants to tell me who this higher authority is and why this connects to Gessler or means anything to the movie money heist four years after it went down.”

“Well, I can’t tell you because I don’t know. All I know is that after you called today I made a few calls myself and the next thing I know the walls came down on me. Hard, man, they came down hard.”

“This came out of Washington?”

“No, right here.”

“Who, Roy? There’s no use in us driving around and talking if you’re not talking. What do we have here? Organized Crime? I read the report on Gessler’s RICO case. It looked like the only thing you had going on it.”

Lindell laughed as though I had suggested something absurd.

“Organized crime. Shit, I wish this was just an OC deal.”

I pulled to the side of San Vicente. We were a couple blocks from where Marilyn Monroe had OD’d, one of the city’s lasting scandals and mysteries.

“Then what, Roy? I’m tired of talking to myself.”

Lindell nodded and then looked over at me.

“Homeland security, baby.”

“What do you mean? Somebody thinks there’s a terrorist connection to this?”

“I don’t know what they think. I wasn’t made privy. All I know is that I was told to shut you down, tape it and send it down to the ninth floor.”

“The ninth floor . . .”

I said it just to be saying something. I was trying to think. My mind scanned quickly through the images of the case, Angella Benton on the tile, the gunman waving weapons and firing, the impact of one of my shots catching one of them in the body and knocking him—at least I think it was a him—backward into the van. Nothing seemed to fit with what Lindell was telling me.