The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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ISBN 978-0-316-22591-5
E3-20171004-NF-DA
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Cappers 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Part Two: The South Side of Nowhere 22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
Part Three: The Intervention 36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Michael Connelly
Discover More Michael Connelly
For Heather Rizzo
Thanks for the title and everything else.
Part One
Cappers
1
Bosch was in cell 3 of the old San Fernando jail, looking through files from one of the Esme Tavares boxes, when a heads-up text came in from Bella Lourdes over in the detective bureau.
LAPD and DA heading your way. Trevino told them where you are.
Bosch was where he was at the start of most weeks: sitting at his makeshift desk, a wooden door he had borrowed from the Public Works yard and placed across two stacks of file boxes. After sending Lourdes a thank-you text, he opened the memo app on his phone and turned on the recorder. He put the phone screen-down on the desk and partially covered it with a file from the Tavares box. It was a just-in-case move. He had no idea why people from the District Attorney’s Office and his old police department were coming to see him first thing on a Monday morning. He had not received a call alerting him to the visit, though to be fair, cellular connection within the steel bars of the cell was virtually nonexistent. Still, he knew that the surprise visit was often a tactical move. Bosch’s relationship with the LAPD since his forced retirement three years earlier had been strained at best and his attorney had urged him to protect himself by documenting all interactions with the department.
While he waited for them, he went back to the file at hand. He was looking through statements taken in the weeks after Tavares had disappeared. He had read them before but he believed that the case files often contained the secret to cracking a cold case. It was all there if you could find it. A logic discrepancy, a hidden clue, a contradictory statement, an investigator’s handwritten note in the margin of a report—all of these things had helped Bosch clear cases in a career four decades long and counting.
There were three file boxes on the Tavares case. Officially it was a missing-persons case but it had gathered three feet of stacked files over fifteen years because it was classified as such only because a body had never been found.
When Bosch came to the San Fernando Police Department to volunteer his skills looking at cold case files, he had asked Chief Anthony Valdez where to start. The chief, who had been with the department twenty-five years, told him to start with Esmerelda Tavares. It was the case that had haunted Valdez as an investigator, but as police chief he could not give adequate time to it.
In two years working in San Fernando part-time, Bosch had reopened several cases and closed nearly a dozen—multiple rapes and murders among them. But he came back to Esme Tavares whenever he had an hour here and there to look through the file boxes. She was beginning to haunt him too. A young mother who vanished, leaving a sleeping baby in a crib. It might be classified as a missing-persons case but Bosch didn’t have to read through even the first box to know what the chief and every investigator before him knew. Foul play was most likely involved. Esme Tavares was more than missing. She was dead.
Bosch heard the metal door to the jail wing open and then footsteps on the concrete floor that ran in front of the three group cells. He looked up through the iron bars and was surprised by who he saw.
“Hello, Harry.”
It was his former partner, Lucia Soto, along with two men in suits whom Bosch didn’t recognize. The fact that Soto had apparently not let him know they were coming put Bosch on alert. It was a forty-minute drive from both the LAPD’s headquarters and the D.A.’s Office downtown to San Fernando. That left plenty of time to type out a text and say, “Harry, we are heading your way.” But that hadn’t happened, so he assumed that the two men whom he didn’t know had put the clamps on Soto.
“Lucia, long time,” Bosch said. “How are you, partner?”
It looked like none of the three were interested in entering Bosch’s cell, even if it had been repurposed. He stood up, deftly grabbing his phone from beneath the files on the desk and transferring it to his shirt pocket, placing the screen against his chest. He walked to the bars and stuck his hand through. Though he had talked to Soto intermittently by phone and text over the past couple of years he had not seen her. Her appearance had changed. She had lost weight and she looked drawn and tired, her dark eyes worried. Rather than shaking his hand, she squeezed it. Her grip was tight and he took that as a message: Be careful here.
It was easy for Bosch to figure out who was who between the two men. Both were in their early forties and dressed in suits that most likely came off the rack at Men’s Wearhouse. But the man on the left’s pinstripes were showing wear from the inside out. Bosch knew that meant he was wearing a shoulder rig beneath the jacket, and the hard edge of his weapon’s slide was wearing through the fabric. Bosch guessed that the silk lining had already been chewed up. In six months the suit would be toast.
“Bob Tapscott,” he said. “Lucky Lucy’s partner now.”
Tapscott was black and Bosch w
ondered if he was related to Horace Tapscott, the late South L.A. musician who had been vital in preserving the community’s jazz identity.
“And I’m Alex Kennedy, deputy district attorney,” said the second man. “We’d like to talk to you if you have a few minutes.”
“Uh, sure,” Bosch said. “Step into my office.”
He gestured toward the confines of the former cell now fitted with steel shelves containing case files. There was a long communal bench left over from the cell’s previous existence as a drunk tank. Bosch had files from different cases lined up to review on the bench. He started stacking them to make room for his visitors to sit, even though he was pretty sure they wouldn’t.
“Actually, we talked to your Captain Trevino, and he says we can use the war room over in the detective bureau,” Tapscott said. “It will be more comfortable. Do you mind?”
“I don’t mind if the captain doesn’t mind,” Bosch said. “What’s this about anyway?”
“Preston Borders,” Soto said.
Bosch was walking toward the open door of the cell. The name put a slight pause in his step.
“Let’s wait until we’re in the war room,” Kennedy said quickly. “Then we can talk.”
Soto gave Bosch a look that seemed to impart the message that she was under the D.A.’s thumb on this case. He grabbed his keys and the padlock off the desk, stepped out of the cell, and then slid the metal door closed with a heavy clang. The key to the cell had disappeared long ago and Bosch wrapped a bicycle chain around the bars and secured the door with the padlock.
They left the old jail and walked through the Public Works equipment yard out to First Street. While waiting for traffic to pass, Bosch casually pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked for messages. He had received nothing from Soto or anyone else prior to the arrival of the party from downtown. He kept the recording going and put the phone back in his pocket.
Soto spoke, but not about the case that had brought her up to San Fernando.
“Is that really your office, Harry?” she asked. “I mean, they put you in a jail cell?”
“Yep,” Bosch said. “That was the drunk tank and sometimes I think I can still smell the puke when I open it up in the morning. Supposedly five or six guys hung themselves in there over the years. Supposed to be haunted. But it’s where they keep the cold case files, so it’s where I do my work. They store old evidence boxes in the other two cells, so easy access all around. And usually nobody to bother me.”
He hoped the implication of the last line was clear to his visitors.
“So they have no jail?” Soto asked. “They have to run bodies down to Van Nuys?”
Bosch pointed across the street to the police station they were heading toward.
“Only the women go down to Van Nuys,” Bosch said. “We have a jail here for the men. In the station. State-of-the-art single cells. I’ve even stayed over a few times. Beats the bunk room at the PAB, with everybody snoring.”
She threw him a look as if to say he had changed if he was willing to sleep in a jail cell. He winked at her.
“I can work anywhere,” he said. “I can sleep anywhere.”
When the traffic cleared, they crossed over to the police station and entered through the main lobby. The detective bureau had a direct entrance on the right. Bosch opened it with a key card and held the door as the others stepped in.
The bureau was no bigger than a single-car garage. At its center were three workstations tightly positioned in a single module. These belonged to the unit’s three full-time detectives, Danny Sisto, a recently promoted detective named Oscar Luzon, and Bella Lourdes, just two months back from a lengthy injured-on-duty leave. The walls of the unit were lined with file cabinets, radio chargers, a coffee setup, and a printing station below bulletin boards covered in work schedules and departmental announcements. There were also numerous Wanted and Missing posters, including a variety showing photos of Esme Tavares that had been issued over a period of fifteen years.
Up high on one wall was a poster depicting the iconic Disney ducks Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which were the proud nicknames of the three detectives who worked in the module below. Captain Trevino’s office was to the right and the war room was on the left. A third room was subleased to the Medical Examiner’s Office and used by two coroner’s investigators, who covered the entire San Fernando Valley and points north.
All three of the detectives were at their respective workstations. They had recently cracked a major car-theft ring operating out of the city, and an attorney for one of the suspects had derisively referred to them as Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They took the group nickname as a badge of honor.
Bosch saw Lourdes peeking over a partition from her desk. He gave her a nod of thanks for the heads-up. It was also a sign that so far things were okay.
Bosch led the visitors into the war room. It was a soundproof room with walls lined with whiteboards and flat-screen monitors. At center was a boardroom-style table with eight leather chairs around it. The room was designed to be the command post for major crime investigations, task force operations, and coordinating responses to public emergencies such as earthquakes and riots. The reality was that such incidents were rare and the room was used primarily as a lunchroom, the broad table and comfortable chairs perfect for group lunches. The room carried the distinct odor of Mexican food. The owner of Magaly’s Tamales up on Maclay Avenue routinely dropped off free food for the troops and it was usually devoured in the war room.
“Have a seat,” Bosch said.
Tapscott and Soto sat on one side of the table, while Kennedy went around and sat across from them. Bosch took a chair at one end of the table so he would have angles on all three visitors.
“So, what’s going on?” he said.
“Well, let’s properly introduce ourselves,” Kennedy began. “You, of course, know Detective Soto from your work together in the Open-Unsolved Unit. And now you’ve met Detective Tapscott. They have been working with me on a review of a homicide case you handled almost thirty years ago.”
“Preston Borders,” Bosch said. “How is Preston? Still on death row at the Q last time I checked.”
“He’s still there.”
“So why are you looking at the case?”
Kennedy had pulled his chair close and had his arms folded and his elbows on the table. He drumrolled the fingers of his left hand as if deciding how to answer Bosch’s question, even though it was clear that everything about this surprise visit was rehearsed.
“I am assigned to the Conviction Integrity Unit,” Kennedy said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I have used Detectives Tapscott and Soto on some of the cases I’ve handled because of their skill in working cold cases.”
Bosch knew that the CIU was new and had been put into place after he left the LAPD. Its formation was the fulfillment of a promise made during a heated election campaign in which the policing of the police was a hot-ticket debate issue. The newly elected D.A.—Tak Kobayashi—had promised to create a unit that would respond to the seeming groundswell of cases where new forensic technologies had led to hundreds of exonerations of people imprisoned across the country. Not only was new science leading the way, but old science once thought to be unassailable as evidence was being debunked and swinging open prison doors for the innocent.
As soon as Kennedy mentioned his assignment, Bosch put everything together and knew what was going on. Borders, the man thought to have killed three women but convicted of only one murder, was making a final grab at freedom after nearly thirty years on death row.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?” Bosch said. “Borders? Really? You are seriously looking at that case?”
He looked from Kennedy to his old partner Soto.
He felt totally betrayed.
“Lucia?” he said
“Harry,” she said. “You need to listen.”
2
Bosch felt like the walls of the war room were closing in on him. In his mind and i
n reality, he had put Borders away for good. He didn’t count on the sadistic sex murderer ever getting the needle, but death row was still its own particular hell, one that was harsher than any sentence that put a man in general population. The isolation of it was what Borders deserved. He went up to San Quentin as a twenty-six-year-old man. To Bosch that meant fifty-plus years of solitary confinement. Less only if he got lucky. More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California.
“It’s not as simple as you think,” Kennedy said.
“Really?” Bosch said. “Tell me why.”
“The obligation of the Conviction Integrity Unit is to consider all legitimate petitions that come to it. Our review process is the first stage, and that happens in-house before the cases go to the LAPD or other law enforcement. When a case meets a certain threshold of concern, we go to the next step and call in law enforcement to carry out a due diligence investigation.”
“And of course everyone is sworn to secrecy at that point.”
Bosch looked at Soto as he said it. She looked away.
“Absolutely,” Kennedy said.
“I don’t know what evidence Borders or his lawyer brought to you, but it’s bullshit,” Bosch said. “He murdered Danielle Skyler and everything else is a scam.”
Kennedy didn’t respond, but from his look Bosch could tell he was surprised he still remembered the victim’s name.
“Yeah, thirty years later I remember her name,” Bosch said. “I also remember Donna Timmons and Vicki Novotney, the two victims your office claimed we didn’t have enough evidence to file on. Were they part of this due diligence you conducted?”
“Harry,” Soto said, trying to calm him.
“Borders didn’t bring any new evidence,” Kennedy said. “It was already there.”
That hit Bosch like a punch. He knew Kennedy was talking about the physical evidence from the case. The implication was that there was evidence from the crime scene or elsewhere that cleared Borders of the crime. The greater implication was incompetence or, worse, malfeasance—that Bosch had missed the evidence or intentionally withheld it.