The Crossing

  “Look, all I’m saying is look at the case, see for yourself. Go talk to him and you’ll be convinced.”

  “I’m not going to talk to anybody.”

  Bosch wiped his mouth with his napkin and put it down on the table next to his plate.

  “You want to talk about something else here, Mick? Or should I just take this to go?”

  Haller didn’t respond. He looked down at his own uneaten food. Bosch could see the fear in his eyes. Fear of failure, fear of having to live with something bad.

  Haller put his fork down.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “You work the case and if you find evidence against my guy, you take it to the D.A. Anything you find, no matter how it cuts, we share with the D.A. Wide-open discovery—anything that doesn’t fall directly under attorney-client privilege.”

  “Yeah, what will your client say about that?”

  “He’ll sign off on it because he’s innocent.”

  “Right.”

  “Look, just think about it. Then let me know.”

  Bosch pushed his plate away. He’d taken only one bite but lunch was over. He started wiping his hands on the cloth napkin.

  “I don’t have to think about it,” he said. “And I can let you know right now. I can’t help you.”

  Bosch stood up and dropped the napkin on his food. He reached into his pocket, peeled off enough cash to pay for both sides of the check, and put the money down under the saltshaker. All this time Haller just stared out into the waiting room.

  “That’s it,” Bosch said. “I’m going to go.”

  4

  Bosch successfully put off thinking about Haller’s offer for most of the weekend. On Saturday he and his daughter drove down to Orange County so she could visit her future school and get a feel for the surrounding town. They ate a late lunch at a restaurant on the edge of campus that served everything on waffles and later took in an Angels game in nearby Anaheim.

  He reserved Sunday for working on his motorcycle restoration. The task he had waiting for him would be one of the most vital parts of the project. In the morning he dismantled the Harley’s carburetor, cleaned all the parts, and laid them out on a spread of old newspapers on the dining room table to dry. He had previously bought a rebuild kit at Glendale Harley and had all new gaskets and O-rings for the job. The Clymer rebuild manual warned that if he mis-seated a gasket, left the pilot jet dirty, or mishandled any of a dozen things during the reassembly, then the whole restoration would be for naught.

  After lunch on the back deck, he returned to the table, jazz on the stereo and Phillips head screwdriver in hand. He carefully studied the pages in the Clymer manual one more time before starting the assembly by reversing the steps he had followed while taking the carburetor apart. The John Handy Quintet was on the stereo and the song was “Naima,” Handy’s 1967 ode to John Coltrane. Bosch thought it was up there with the best live saxophone performances ever captured.

  With Bosch following the manual step-by-step, the carburetor quickly began to take shape. When he reached for the pilot jet, he noticed that it had been lying on top of a newspaper photo of the state’s former governor, cigar clenched in his teeth, a broad smile on his face as he threw his arm around another man, whom Bosch identified as a former state assemblyman from East L.A.

  Bosch realized that the edition of the Times that he had spread out was an old one that he had wanted to keep. It had contained a classic report on politics. A few years earlier, in his last hours in office, the governor had used his authority under executive clemency to reduce the sentence of a man convicted in the killing of another. He happened to be the son of his pal the assemblyman. The son had been involved with others in a fight and fatal stabbing, had made a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty, but then was unhappy when the judge handed him a sentence of fifteen to thirty years in state prison. On his way out the door at the end of his term of office, the governor knocked it down to seven years.

  If the governor thought nobody would notice his last official act in office, then he was wrong. The shit hit the fan with charges of cronyism, favoritism, politics of the worst kind. The Times cranked up an extensive two-part report on the whole sordid chapter. It sickened Bosch to read it but not so that he recycled the paper. He kept it to read again and again to be reminded of the politics of the justice system. Before running for office the governor had been a movie star specializing in playing larger-than-life heroes—men willing to sacrifice everything to do the right thing. He was now back in Hollywood, trying to be a movie star once again. But Bosch was resolved that he would never watch another one of his films—even on free TV.

  Thoughts of injustice prompted by the newspaper article made Bosch wander from the carburetor project. He got up from the table and wiped his hands on the shop cloth he kept with his tools. He then threw it down, remembering that he used to spread murder books out on this table, not motorcycle parts. He opened the sliding glass door in the living room and walked out onto the deck to look at the city. His house was cantilevered on the west side of the Cahuenga Pass, offering him a view across the 101 freeway to Hollywood Heights and Universal City.

  The 101 freeway was choked with traffic moving both ways through the pass. Even on a Sunday afternoon. Since his retirement Bosch had reveled in not being a part of it anymore. The traffic, the workday, the tension, and the responsibility of it all.

  But he also thought of it as a false sense of revelry. He knew that, no matter how stressful it was being down there in that slow-moving river of steel and light, he belonged there. That in some way he was needed down there.

  Mickey Haller had appealed to him at Friday’s lunch on the grounds that his client was an innocent man. That of course would have to be proved. But Haller had missed the other half of that equation. If his client was truly innocent, then there was a killer out there whom no one was even looking for. A killer devious enough to set up an innocent man. Despite his protestations at the restaurant, that fact bothered Bosch and was not far from his thoughts throughout the whole weekend. It was something he had trouble leaving alone.

  He took his phone out of his pocket and hit a number on the favorites list. The call was answered after five rings by the urgent voice of Virginia Skinner.

  “Harry, I’m on deadline, what is it?”

  “It’s Sunday night, what are you—”

  “I got called in.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Sandy Milton was involved in a hit-and-run last night in the Woodland Hills.”

  Milton was a conservative city councilman. Skinner was a politics reporter for the Times. Bosch understood why she’d be called in on a Sunday. But what he didn’t understand is why she had not called him to tell him, maybe pick his brain about who she should call in the LAPD to try to get details. It underlined for him what had been going on in their relationship for the past month or so. Or rather not going on.

  “I have to go, Harry.”

  “Right. Sorry. I’ll call you after.”

  “No, I’ll call you.”

  “Okay. Are we still having dinner tonight?”

  “Yes, fine, but I need to go.”

  She disconnected. Bosch went back inside the house to grab a beer out of the refrigerator and to check its stores. He determined that he had nothing he could tempt Virginia with to come up the mountain. Besides, Bosch’s daughter would be coming home from her Police Explorer’s shift at about eight and it could get awkward with Virginia in the house. She and Maddie were still in the early stages of getting to know each other’s boundaries.

  Bosch decided that when Skinner called back, he would offer to meet her somewhere for dinner downtown.

  He had just opened a bottle and switched the CD to a Ron Carter import recorded at the Blue Note Tokyo when his phone buzzed.

  “Hey, that was fast.”

  “I just turned in the story. It’s just a sidebar on the political implications for Milton. Richie Bed-wetter will call
me in ten or fifteen minutes to go over the edit. Is that enough time to talk?”

  Richie Bed-wetter was her editor, Richard Ledbetter. She called him that because he was inexperienced and young—more than twenty years her junior—but insisted on trying to tell her how to handle her beat and write her stories and a once-a-week column on local politics, which he wanted to call a blog. Things would be coming to a head between them soon, and Bosch was worried that Virginia was the vulnerable one, since her experience translated into a higher paycheck and therefore a more appealing target to management.

  “Where do you want to go? Somewhere downtown?”

  “Or near your place. Your call. But not Indian.”

  “Of course, no Indian. Let me think on it and I’ll have a plan when you’re close. Call me before you reach Echo Park. In case.”

  “Okay. But listen, can you do me a favor and pull up some stories on a case?”

  “What case?”

  “There’s a guy that got arrested for murder. LAPD case, I think. His name is Da’Quan Foster. I want to see—”

  “Yeah, Da’Quan Foster. The guy who killed Lexi Parks.”

  “Right.”

  “Harry, that’s a big case.”

  “How big?”

  “You don’t need me to pull stories. Just go on the paper’s website and punch in her name. There are a lot of stories about her because of who she was and because he didn’t get arrested until like a month after it happened. And it’s not an LAPD case. It’s Sheriff’s. Happened in West Hollywood. Look, I gotta go. Just got the signal from Richie.”

  “Okay, I’ll—”

  She was gone. Bosch put the phone in his pocket and went back to the dining room table. Holding the corners of the newspaper, he pulled the carburetor project to the side. He then took his laptop down off a shelf and turned it on. While he waited for it to boot, he looked at the carburetor sitting on the newspaper. He realized he had been wrong to think that restoring the old motorcycle could take the place of anything.

  On the stereo Ron Carter was accompanied by two guitars and playing a Milt Jackson song called “Bags’ Groove.” It got Bosch thinking about his own groove and what he was missing.

  When the computer was ready he pulled up the Times website and searched the name Lexi Parks. There were 333 stories in which Lexi Parks was mentioned, going back six years, long before her murder. Bosch narrowed it to the current year and found twenty-six stories listed by date and headline. The first was dated February 10, 2015: Well-Liked WeHo Asst. Manager Found Murdered in Bed.

  Bosch scanned the entries until he came to a headline dated March 19, 2015: Gang “Shot Caller” Arrested in Parks Murder.

  Bosch went back and clicked on the first story, figuring he could at least read the initial story on the murder and the first on the arrest before heading to his car for the drive downtown.

  The initial report on the murder of Lexi Parks was more about the victim than the crime because the Sheriff’s Department was revealing few details about the actual murder. In fact, all the details contained in the report could be summarized in one sentence: Parks had been beaten to death in her bed and was found by her husband when he returned home from working the midnight shift as a Sheriff’s deputy in Malibu.

  Bosch cursed out loud when he read the part about the victim’s husband being a deputy. That would make Bosch’s possible involvement in the case for the defense an even greater offense to those in law enforcement. Haller had conveniently left that detail out when he urged Bosch to look into the case.

  Still, he continued to read, and learned that Lexi Parks was one of four assistant city managers for West Hollywood. Among her responsibilities were the departments of Public Safety, Consumer Protection, and Media Relations. It was her position as the chief spokesperson for the city and the front-line media interface that accounted for the “well-liked” description in the headline. She was thirty-eight years old at the time of her death and had worked for the city for twelve years, starting as a code inspector and rising steadily through promotions.

  Parks had met her husband, Deputy Vincent Harrick, while both were on the job. West Hollywood contracted with the Sheriff’s Department to provide law enforcement services and Harrick was assigned to the station on San Vicente Boulevard. Once Parks and Harrick got engaged, Harrick asked for a transfer out of the West Hollywood station to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest with both of them working for the city. He worked at first in the south county out of the Lynwood station and then transferred out to Malibu.

  Bosch decided to read the next story in the digital queue in hopes of getting more detail about the case. The headline promised he would: Investigators: Lexi Parks Murder a Sex Crime. The story, published one day after the first, reported that Sheriff’s homicide investigators were looking at the murder as a home invasion in which Parks was attacked in her bed as she slept, sexually assaulted, and then brutally beaten with a blunt object. The story did not say what the object was or whether it was recovered. It made no mention of any evidence that had been collected at the scene. After these scant few details of the investigation were revealed, the story transitioned into a report on the reaction to the crime among those who knew Parks and her husband, as well as the horror the crime had invoked in the community. It was reported that Vincent Harrick had taken a leave of absence to deal with the grief arising from his wife’s murder.

  After reading the second story, Bosch looked back at the list of stories and scanned the headlines. The next dozen or so didn’t sound promising. The case remained in the news on a daily and then weekly basis but the headlines carried a lot of negatives. No Suspects in Parks Murder, Investigators Drawing Blanks on Parks, WeHo Offers 100K Reward in Parks Case. Bosch knew that going out with a reward was in effect announcing that you had nothing and were grasping at straws.

  And then they got lucky. The fifteenth story in the queue, published thirty-eight days after the murder, announced the arrest of forty-one-year-old Da’Quan Foster for the murder of Lexi Parks. Bosch opened the story and learned that the connection to Foster seemingly came out of the blue, a match made on DNA evidence collected at the scene of the crime. Foster was arrested with the help of a team of LAPD officers at the Leimert Park artists’ studio where he had just finished teaching a painting class as part of an after-school program for children.

  That last piece of information gave Bosch pause. It didn’t fit with his idea of what a gang shot caller was all about. He wondered if Foster was booking community-service hours as part of a criminal sentence. He kept reading. The story said that DNA collected at the Parks crime scene had been entered into the state’s data bank and was matched to a sample taken from Foster following his arrest in 2004 on suspicion of rape. No charge was ever filed against him in that case but his DNA remained on file in the state Department of Justice data bank.

  Bosch wanted to read more of the stories in the coverage but was running out of time if he wanted to meet Virginia Skinner. He saw one headline that came a few days after Foster’s arrest: Parks Suspect Had Turned Life Around. He opened the story and quickly scanned it. It was a community-generated story that held that Da’Quan Foster was a reformed Rollin’ 40s Crips member who had straightened his life out and was giving back to his community. He was a self-taught painter who had work hanging in a Washington, DC, museum. He ran a studio on Degnan Boulevard where he offered after-school and weekend programs for area children. He was married and had two young children of his own. To balance the story, the Times reported that he had a criminal record that included several drug arrests in the ’90s and a four-year stint in prison. But he paroled out in 2001 and other than his arrest on the rape case, for which no charge was ever filed, he had not run afoul of the law in more than a decade.

  The story included statements from many locals who expressed either disbelief at the charges or outright suspicion that Foster had somehow been set up. No one quoted in the article believed he had killed Lexi Parks or been an
ywhere near West Hollywood on the night in question.

  From what he had read, it was unclear to Bosch whether Foster even knew the victim in the case or why he had targeted her.

  Harry closed the laptop. He would read all of the stories later, but he didn’t want to leave Virginia Skinner waiting for him—wherever it was she would choose to meet. They needed to talk. The relationship had been strained as of late, largely because she was busy with her work and Bosch had not been busy with anything other than restoring a motorcycle that was as old as he was.

  He got up from the table and went back to his bedroom to put on a fresh shirt and nicer shoes. Ten minutes later he was driving down the hill to the freeway. Once he joined the steel river and cleared the pass he pulled out his phone and hooked up the earpiece so he’d be legal. When he carried a badge, he used to not care about such minor things, but now he dutifully buckled his seat belt and put in his earpiece. He could be ticketed for talking on a cell while driving.

  From the background sound, he guessed he had caught Haller in the backseat of the Lincoln. They were both on the road, going somewhere.

  “I’ve got questions about Foster,” Bosch said.

  “Shoot,” Haller said.

  “What was the DNA—blood, saliva, semen?”

  “Semen. A deposit on the victim.”

  “On or in?”

  “Both. In the vagina. On the skin, upper thigh on the right. Some on the sheets, too.”

  Bosch drove in silence for a few moments. The freeway was elevated as it cut through Hollywood. He was passing by the Capitol Records Building. It was built to look like a stack of records but that was a different time. Not many people listened to records anymore.

  “What else?” Haller asked. “I’m glad you’re thinking about the case.”

  “How long have you known this guy?” Bosch asked.