The Crossing

  Da’Quan Foster agreed.

  Bosch looked up and realized he had worked through the lunch rush in the restaurant. His check was sitting on the edge of the table and he had not noticed it. Feeling sheepish about not turning the table over during lunch, he put thirty dollars down on the table for the ten-dollar check, then gathered the reports back together and headed out. He cursed his luck when he found a parking ticket under the Cherokee’s windshield wiper. He had paid for two hours on the meter but had been in the restaurant for two and a half. He took the ticket from beneath the rubber blade and shoved it into his pocket. He never had to worry about parking tickets when he was driving a city car, when he carried a badge. It was another reminder of how his life had changed in the last six months. He used to feel like an outsider with an insider’s job. From now on he would be a full-time outsider.

  For some reason Bosch didn’t want to go home to finish reading the chrono and the rest of the discovery reports. He felt as though reviewing the case at the dining room table where he had worked on so many cases as an LAPD homicide detective would be some kind of betrayal. He took Third Street out of downtown and out to West Hollywood. Before reading further into the chrono log, he wanted to drive by the house where Lexi Parks had been murdered. He thought it would be good to get out of the paper and to see some of the physical touchstones of the case.

  The home was located on Orlando south of Melrose in a neighborhood of modest bungalows. Bosch pulled to the opposite curb and studied the house. It was almost entirely hidden by a tall privacy hedge with an arched entry cut through it. He could see the front door beyond the passage. There was a FOR SALE sign posted in front of the hedge. Bosch wondered how difficult it would be to sell a house where a brutal murder had recently occurred. He decided that living in the house where your wife had been the victim of that murder would be even more difficult.

  His phone buzzed and he answered while still staring at the house.

  “Bosch,” he said.

  “It’s me,” Haller said. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going.”

  “You still reading the discovery material?”

  “About halfway through.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I’m still reading.”

  “I just thought maybe you might have—”

  “Look, don’t push me on this, Mick. I’m doing what I have to do. If I want to take it further when I’m finished, I’ll tell you. If I don’t, I’ll drop all of this stuff back with you.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Good. I’ll catch you later.”

  Bosch disconnected. He continued to look at the house. He noticed that there was a BEWARE OF DOG sign posted in a planter beside the front door. He had not read anything in the discovery so far that mentioned Parks and her husband having a dog. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he thought about that. He felt strongly that if the couple owned a dog it would have been noted up front in the reports. House pets always leave trace evidence in a home. It was something that had to be accounted for in an investigation.

  Bosch’s conclusion was that there was no dog and that the sign was posted as a deterrent. The next best thing to having a dog was pretending you had a dog. The question was did the killer know there was no dog? And if so, how?

  Finally, he drove away and went up Orlando to Santa Monica Boulevard. He turned east toward home but pulled over again when he spotted a Starbucks at Fairfax. This time he bought four hours of time on the meter and went in with the discovery file.

  With a cup of steaming black coffee in hand, he settled into a chair in the corner with a small round table next to it. There was no room to open the file and spread the stack, so he just pulled out the chrono to continue reading where he had left off. Before doing so he took a pen out of his shirt pocket and wrote a quick note on the outside of the file folder.

  Dog?

  He needed to confirm his conclusion about the dog. Jotting the one-word question down was an almost involuntary response to what he had seen while sitting outside the murder house. But as soon as he wrote it, he realized that something as small as writing a single word on the file was a big step toward buying into the case. He had to ask himself the question. Did he miss the work so much that he could actually cross the aisle and work for an accused murderer? Because that was what it would be. Haller was the attorney of record but the client was sitting in a cell accused of raping a woman and beating her to death. If he accepted the job offer, Bosch would be working for him.

  He felt the burn of humiliation on the back of his neck. He thought of all the guys before him who retired and the next thing you know they were working for defense lawyers or even the Public Defender’s Office. He had dropped relationships with those guys as though they were criminals themselves. The moment he heard someone had crossed, Bosch considered him persona non grata.

  And now…

  He took a sip of scalding coffee and tried to put the discomfort aside. He then took up the investigation where he had left off.

  After picking up Foster at his studio, the Sheriff’s investigators drove him to the Lynwood station, where they borrowed a room in the detective bureau. The interview was short and its entire transcript was placed into the chronological record. Foster was asked only a few questions before realizing the depth of the trouble he was in and asking for Mickey Haller by name.

  Cornell and Schmidt never told him that they had connected his DNA to a murder scene. They attempted to pad their case by flushing out an admission from Foster. But the effort failed. Cornell began the session by reading Foster his constitutional rights—always a quick way to put a willing interview subject on high alert.

  Cornell: Okay, Mr. Foster, are you willing to talk to us a little bit, maybe answer some questions and clear up some details?

  Foster: I guess so, but what’s it about? What do you people think I did?

  Cornell: Well, it’s about Lexi Parks. You know her, right?

  Foster: That name, it rings a bell for some reason but I don’t know. Maybe I sold her a painting or she’s one of the mothers of the kids I got come in the studio.

  Cornell: No, sir, Lexi Parks didn’t buy a painting. She is the woman up in West Hollywood. You remember you visited her at her house?

  Foster: West Hollywood? No, I ain’t been to West Hollywood.

  Cornell: What about Vince Harrick, do you know him?

  Foster: No, I don’t know no Vince Harrick. Who’s he?

  Cornell: That’s Lexi’s husband. Deputy Harrick. Did you know him when he worked in this station?

  Foster: What? I don’t know him. I’ve never been here before you took me.

  Schmidt: Can you tell us where you were the night of February eighth going into the morning of February ninth of this year? That was a Sunday night. Where were you that night, Mr. Foster?

  Foster: How the fuck would I know? That’s like two months ago. Tell you what, every night I’m either at home with my family, puttin’ my boys to sleep, or at the studio, doin’ my work. I stay over a lot at night to get things done. I’m not teachin’ anybody anything and I get to work on my own stuff, you understand? I mean, like I got people who want my pictures and they’ll pay. So I do the work. So you can take your pick between me bein’ at home or me bein’ at the studio because that’s it. There’s no other place. And I know my rights here and you people are up to no good on me. I think I want my lawyer now. I’m thinking I want Mickey Haller to represent me in this matter—whatever the fuck it is.

  Cornell: Then let’s get it on the record right here, Mr. Foster. Tell us why you chose Lexi Parks.

  Foster: Chose her for what? I don’t know her and I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  Cornell: You killed her, didn’t you? You beat her and you killed her and then you raped her.

  Foster: You people are crazy. You’re really fucking crazy. Get me my goddamned lawyer. Now.

  Cornell: Yeah, you bet, asshole. One lawy
er coming right up.

  Schmidt: You sure you don’t want to clear this up right here? Now’s the time. You bring a lawyer into this and it goes out of our hands.

  Foster: I want my motherfucking lawyer.

  Schmidt: You got it. But he’s not going to be able to explain how we found your DNA in Lexi Parks. Only you can—

  Foster: DNA? What DNA? Lord, what is happening here? What is—I can’t believe you motherfuckers. I ain’t killed nobody. I want my lawyer and I’m not saying another word to you people.

  Cornell: In that case, stand up, sir. You are under arrest for the murder of Lexi Parks.

  End of Interview

  Bosch read the entry twice and then made a note to remind Haller to get a video version of the interview. The interview room was most likely outfitted with a camera. If he stayed with the case, he would want to see Foster’s body language and hear the tone of each voice. It would tell him more than the words on the printout. Still, knowing that, his take on the transcript of the brief interview was that Foster had not seen the questions about Lexi Parks coming. There appeared to be real surprise and then panic in his words. He knew that didn’t really mean anything. Sex murders were usually the work of psychopaths and with that psychology was an innate ability to lie, to act, to feign surprise and horror when it was needed. Psychopaths were great liars.

  Bosch noted one of the lines in the transcript. Cornell had accused Foster of beating and killing Lexi Parks and then raping her. Harry had not reviewed the autopsy yet but the question from Cornell was the first hint that the rape had occurred postmortem. If that was what the evidence revealed, then it rolled a whole new set of psychological factors into the case.

  Bosch continued to read. The rest of the chrono outlined the efforts of Cornell and Schmidt to find a connection between Da’Quan Foster and Lexi Parks, either through her husband and his work, which would put the motivation in the arena of revenge, or through a random intersection of predator and prey, which would better fit the profile and type of assault. But neither effort was fruitful. As Foster said during his brief interview, he had never been to the Sheriff’s Lynwood station, where Vincent Harrick had last worked five years ago. The investigators could find no evidence to the contrary and the reality was that there would be no logical reason for a Rollin’ 40s Crip out of Leimert Park to be conducting gang business all the way east in Lynwood. That was Bloods territory and it didn’t add up.

  Cornell’s focus was on the Lynwood/Harrick angle and backgrounding Foster, while Schmidt worked the sexual predator angle. Schmidt’s task was the more difficult to investigate and prove because it relied upon the happenstance of Lexi Parks somehow, somewhere crossing the radar of a sexual sadist on the hunt. Bosch, like Cornell and Schmidt, had already read and seen enough to know the murder was not a crime of opportunity. There was more than enough evidence that the victim was stalked and the crime planned. The BEWARE OF DOG sign was the starting point of this supposition. According to the discovery, there was no dog in the house, and the killer seemed to know it. That suggested that the house on Orlando had been cased. Other factors such as the alarm system not being engaged and the husband working a midnight shift also added to the theory.

  Schmidt carefully documented the victim’s activities in the six weeks prior to her death, trying to find the place where Foster and Parks crossed paths. She looked at hundreds of hours of video taken from cameras along Lexi’s path but she never found Foster in one digital frame. Bosch knew that this was the juncture where cases could go wrong. They had a suspect in custody and a DNA match. Some would already call that a slam-dunk case. But the investigators were being thorough. They were looking for more and in doing so they were sliding into the tunnel. The tunnel was the place where vision narrows and the investigator sees only the bird in hand. Bosch had to wonder if Schmidt had been looking for any other faces on those videos besides Foster’s.

  Bosch made another note on the outside of the file, a reminder to tell Haller he should make a discovery request to be allowed access to all of the videos Schmidt had studied.

  The chrono had an oblique reference to a witness interviewed by Cornell and identified only as AW—which Bosch recognized as shorthand for alibi witness. It was not uncommon to use coded abbreviations in reports to safeguard witnesses who were not officially given confidential informant status. Bosch also knew that AW could be a witness fortifying or knocking down a suspect’s alibi. In this case the chrono said that Cornell met with the AW seven days after Foster’s arrest and that the meeting lasted an hour.

  Bosch skimmed through the remaining pages of the chrono and nothing else caught his eye. There were routine entries on preparations for the case to move toward trial. Cornell and Schmidt found nothing that directly tied Foster to the victim but they had his DNA, and apart from the O. J. Simpson case twenty years before, DNA was as good as it got when it came to closing out a case. Cornell, Schmidt, and the prosecutor assigned to the case were locked and loaded. They sailed through a four-hour preliminary hearing in April and were now ready for trial.

  The prosecutor was a woman—always a good edge to have when it was a sex crime. Her name was Ellen Tasker and Bosch had worked with her on some big cases early in her career. She was good and lived up to her name when it came to making sure cases were ready for trial. She was a lifer in the D.A.’s Office, a prosecutor who kept her head below the level of office politics and just did her job. And she did it well. Bosch could not recall Tasker ever losing a case.

  Before moving on, he called Haller.

  “You said that your client had an alibi but you just couldn’t prove it.”

  “That’s right. He was in the studio painting. He did that a lot—worked all night. But he worked alone. How am I going to prove that?”

  “Did he have a cell phone?”

  “No, no cell so no pinging record. Just the landline in the studio. Why?”

  “There is a reference in the Chronological Log to one of the detectives meeting with an alibi witness. You know anything about that?”

  “No, and if they found somebody who supports DQ’s alibi, they have to bring them forward.”

  “DQ?”

  “Da’Quan. He signs his paintings DQ. By the way, you know that’s how I’m getting paid, right? In paintings. I figure we get an acquittal and the value will go way up.”

  Bosch didn’t care how Haller was getting paid.

  “Listen to me. I’m not saying this witness supports his alibi. It’s probably the opposite. It was referenced in the chrono and I just wanted to know if you were aware.”

  “No, I didn’t see that.”

  “It was coded and brief—which makes me think it might be significant. I’ll look through the witness reports and see if I can find anything.”

  “If you don’t find it, then that’s trouble for them. Violation of discovery.”

  “Whatever. I’ll call you later.”

  Clicking off, Bosch realized he needed to be more guarded with Haller and not just throw things out to him that he might tee up and take into court, dragging Bosch along with him.

  Bosch looked through the printouts until he found the stack of witness statements. He started paging through them, checking the summaries for who they were and what they said. The great majority were witnesses from the Lexi Parks side of the investigation: friends, co-workers, professional acquaintances who were interviewed as the investigation took shape. There were also statements from her husband and several Sheriff’s deputies who knew Parks through him. The second half of the stack contained interviews from people who knew Da’Quan Foster. Many of these were LAPD officers who knew of him from his active gang days. There were also statements from former parole officers, neighbors, fellow shopkeepers, and the suspect’s wife, Marta.

  Bosch found what he was looking for on a twofer—a report page that had statements from two witnesses summarized on it. It was an old discovery trick. Turn over reams of paper as a way of hiding the one thing you
don’t want the defense attorney to notice. The prosecution had not violated the rules of discovery but had made finding the important piece of information a needle in the haystack.

  The top half of the witness report contained the summary of an interview with a neighbor of Da’Quan Foster’s who said he did not see Foster’s car parked in front of his house on the night of the murder. It was a relatively harmless comment because Foster was not claiming that he was at home. He was claiming he spent the night painting in his studio.

  But just a line below the neighbor’s statement was the start of another statement from someone identified only as M. White. This statement said M. White stopped by Foster’s studio on the night of the murder to see Foster but the painter was not there. That was all that was included in the report but it was enough for Bosch to know that Cornell and Schmidt had found someone who could counter Foster’s claim that he had spent the entire night in the studio painting.

  The subterfuge employed by the detectives to hide the identity and value of the witness known as M. White didn’t really bother Bosch. He assumed that “M. White” was not the witness’s name but rather his gender and race. He knew all Haller would have to do is file a motion citing insufficient discovery and the sheriffs would have to cough up the real identity. It was all part of the game and he had pulled the haystack move himself on occasion as a cop. What troubled him was the fact that now there was an alibi issue added to the DNA match that put Foster at the crime scene.

  It was enough to make him want to drop the review of the case right there and then.

  Harry thought about it for a little bit while he finished his coffee and gave his eyes a rest. He took off his reading glasses and looked out through the window at the busy intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica. He knew he still had the autopsy and the crime scene photos to go through to complete his review of the murder file. He had saved the photos for last because they would be the most difficult to look at—and were not something he would risk doing in a public place like a coffee shop.