A Darkness More Than Night

by Michael Connelly

  “No. I sensed at that point that I might be able to bait him into saying more. I said to him, ‘You did it, didn’t you?’ He continued to smile and then he slowly nodded. And he said, ‘And I’ll get away with it.’ He said, ‘I’m a — ’”

  “Bullshit! You’re a fucking liar!”

  It was Storey. He had stood up and was pointing at Bosch. Fowkkes had his hand on him and was trying to pull him back into his place. A deputy sheriff, who had been positioned at a desk to the rear of the defense table was up and moving toward Storey from behind.

  “The defendant will sit DOWN!” the judge boomed from the bench at the same moment he brought the gavel down.

  “He’s fucking lying!”

  “Deputy, sit him down!”

  The deputy moved in, put both hands on Storey’s shoulders from behind and roughly pulled him back down into his seat. The judge pointed another deputy toward the jury.

  “Remove the jury.”

  While the jurors were quickly hustled into the deliberation room, Storey continued to struggle with the deputy and Fowkkes. As soon as the jurors were gone he seemed to relax his efforts and then calmed. Bosch looked over at the reporters, trying to see if any of them had noted how Storey’s demonstration ended as soon as the jurors were out of sight.

  “Mr. Storey!” the judge yelled from a standing position. “That behavior and language is not acceptable in this courtroom. Mr. Fowkkes, if you can’t control your client, my people will. One more outburst and I will have him gagged and chained to that chair. Am I clear on this?”

  “Absolutely, Your Honor. I apolo —”

  “That is a zero tolerance rule. Any outburst from here on out and he’ll be shackled. I don’t care who he is or who his friends are.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. We understand.”

  “I am taking five minutes and then we’ll start again.” The judge abruptly left the bench, his feet resounding loudly as he quickly took the three steps down. He disappeared through a door to the rear hallway that led to his chambers.

  Bosch looked over at Langwiser and her eyes betrayed her delight at what had just happened. To Bosch it was a trade-off. On one hand the jurors saw the defendant acting angry and out of control — possibly exhibiting the same rage that had led to murder. But on the other hand, he was registering his objection to what was happening to him in the courtroom. And that could register an empathic response from the jurors. Storey had to reach only one of them in order to walk.

  Before the trial Langwiser had predicted that they would draw Storey into an outburst. Bosch had thought she was wrong. He thought Storey was too cool and calculating. Unless, of course, the outburst was a calculated move. Storey was a man who directed dramatic scenes and characters for a living. Bosch knew he should have seen that a time might come when he would be unwittingly used as a supporting actor in one of those scenes.

  25

  The judge returned to the bench two minutes after leaving and Bosch wondered if he had retreated to his chambers to put a holster on under the robes. As soon as he sat down Houghton looked at the defense table. Storey was sitting with his face somberly pointed down at the sketch pad in front of him.

  “Are we ready?” the judge asked.

  All parties murmured they were ready. The judge called for the jury and they were brought in, most of them looking directly at Storey as they entered.

  “Okay, folks, we’re going to try this again,” Judge Houghton said. “The exclamations you heard a few minutes ago from the defendant are to be ignored. They are not evidence, they are not anything. If Mr. Storey wants to personally deny the charges or anything else said about him in testimony, he’ll get that chance.”

  Bosch watched Langwiser’s eyes dance. The judge’s comments were his way of slapping back at the defense. He was setting up the expectation that Storey would testify during the defense phase. If he didn’t, then it could be a letdown for the jurors.

  The judge turned it back over to Langwiser, who continued her questioning of Bosch.

  “Before we were interrupted, you were testifying about your conversation with the defendant at the door to his house.”

  “Yes.”

  “You quoted the defendant as saying, ‘And I’ll get away with it,’ is that correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you took this comment to be referring to the death of Jody Krementz, correct?”

  “That’s what we were talking about, yes.”

  “Did he say anything else after that?”

  “Yes.”

  Bosch paused, wondering if Storey would make another outburst. He didn’t.

  “He said, ‘I am a god in this town, Detective Bosch. You don’t fuck with the gods.’”

  Nearly ten seconds of silence went by before Langwiser was prompted by the judge to move on.

  “What did you do after the defendant made this statement to you?”

  “Well, I was kind of taken aback. I was surprised that he would say this to me.”

  “You were not recording the conversation, is that correct?”

  “That is correct. It was just a conversation at the door after I knocked.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “I went to the car and immediately wrote out these notes of the conversation so I would have it verbatim from when it was freshest in my mind. I told my partners what had just transpired and we decided to call the district attorney’s office for advice as to whether this admission to me would give us probable cause to arrest Mr. Storey. Um, what happened was that none of us could get a signal on our cell phones because we were up there in the hills. We left the house and drove to the fire station on Mulholland just east of Laurel Canyon Boulevard

  . We asked to use a phone there and I made the call to the DA.”

  “And who did you speak with?”

  “You. I recounted the case, what had transpired during the search and what Mr. Storey said at the door. It was decided to continue the investigation at that point and not make the arrest.”

  “Did you agree with that decision?”

  “Not at the time. I wanted to arrest him.”

  “Did Mr. Storey’s admission change the investigation?”

  “It pretty much closed the focus. The man had admitted the crime to me. We began looking only at him.”

  “Did you ever consider that perhaps the admission was an empty boast, that at the same time you were in essence baiting the defendant, he was baiting you?”

  “Yes, I considered it. But ultimately I believed he made the statements because they were true and because he believed he was in an invincible position at that point.”

  There was a sharp ripping sound as Storey tore the top page off his sketch pad. He crumpled the paper and bounced it across the table. It hit a computer screen and bounced off the table to the floor.

  “Thank you, Detective,” Langwiser said. “Now, you said the decision was to continue the investigation. Can you tell the jury what that entailed?”

  Bosch described how he and his partners had interviewed dozens of witnesses who had seen the defendant and the victim at the film premiere or at the reception that followed in a circus tent erected in a nearby parking lot. They also interviewed dozens more people who knew Storey or had worked with him. Bosch acknowledged that none of these interviews had produced information important to the investigation.

  “You mentioned earlier that during the search of the defendant’s home you became curious about a missing book, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Fowkkes objected.

  “There has been no evidence whatsoever about a missing book. There was a space on the shelf. It does not mean there was ever a book in that place.”

  Langwiser promised she would tie it all up promptly and the judge overruled.

  “Did there come a time when you determined what book had been in that space on the shelf in the defendant’s home?”

  “Yes, in the course of our gathering of background
information on Mr. Storey, my partner, Kizmin Rider, who was aware of his work and professional reputation, remembered that she had read a story about him in a magazine called Architectural Digest. She was able to do an Internet search and determine that the issue she remembered was from February of last year. She then ordered a copy of the magazine from the publisher. What she had remembered was that there were photos in the article of Mr. Storey in his house. She remembered his bookshelves because she is an avid reader and was curious about what books this movie director would have on his shelves.”

  Langwiser made a motion to introduce the magazine as her next exhibit. It was received by the judge and Langwiser gave it to Bosch on the witness stand.

  “Is that the magazine your partner received?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you turn to the story on the defendant and describe the photograph on the opening page of the story?”

  Bosch flipped to a marker in the magazine.

  “It is a photograph of David Storey sitting on the couch in the living room of his house. To his left are the bookshelves.”

  “Can you read the titles of the books on the spines ofthe books?”

  “Some of them. They are not all clear.”

  “When you received this magazine from the publisher, what did you do with it?”

  “We saw that not all of the books were clear. We contacted the publisher again and attempted to borrow the negative of this photo. We dealt with the editor in chief, who would not allow the negatives out of the office. He cited media law and free-press restraints.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “The editor said he would even fight a court order. An attorney from the city attorney’s office was called in and began negotiating with the magazine’s lawyer. The result was that I flew to New York City and was allowed access to the negative in the photo lab in the Architectural Digest offices.”

  “For the record, what date were you there?”

  “I took a redeye on October twenty-ninth. I was at the magazine’s office the following morning. It was a Monday, October thirtieth.”

  “And what did you do there?”

  “I had the magazine’s photo lab manager make blowups of the shot containing the bookshelves.”

  Langwiser introduced two large blowup photographs on hard backing as her next exhibits. After they were approved over unsustained objection she put them on easels set in front of the jury. One showed the bookcase in full while the other was a blowup of one shelf. The image was grainy but the titles on the spines of the books could be read.

  “Detective, did you compare these photos with those taken during the search of the defendant’s house?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  Langwiser asked permission to set up a third and fourth easel and to put blowup photos taken during the search of the full bookcase and the shelf with the space for a missing book. The judge approved. She then asked Bosch to step down from the witness stand and use a pointer to explain what he found during his comparison study. It was obvious to anyone looking at the photos what he found but Langwiser was painstakingly going through the motions so that no juror could be confused.

  Bosch put the pointer on the photo showing the open space in the shelved books. He then brought it over and put the tip on a book that was in the same spot.

  “When we searched the house on October seventeenth there was no book here between The Fifth Horizon and Print the Legend. Here in this photo, taken ten months before, there is a book between The Fifth Horizon and Print the Legend.”

  “And what is the title of that book?”

  “Victims of the Night.”

  “Okay, and did you look at photos you had from the search of the full bookcase in order to see if this book, Victims of the Night, had been shelved elsewhere?”

  Bosch pointed to the October 17 blowup of the entire bookcase.

  “We did. It’s not there.”

  “Did you find this book anywhere in the house?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “Thank you, Detective. You can return to the witness stand now.”

  Langwiser introduced a copy of Victims of the Night as an exhibit and handed it to Bosch.

  “Can you tell the jury what that is, Detective?”

  “It is a copy of Victims of the Night.”

  “Is that the book that was on the defendant’s shelf when his photograph was taken for Architectural Digest in January of last year?”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a copy of the same book. I bought it.”

  “Where?”

  “A place called Mystery Bookstore in Westwood.”

  “Why did you buy it there?”

  “I called around. It was the only place I could find that had it in stock.”

  “Why was it so hard to find?”

  “The man at Mystery Bookstore told me it was a small printing by a small publisher.”

  “Did you read this book?”

  “Parts of it. It is mostly photographs of unusual crime scenes and accident scenes, that sort of thing.”

  “Is there anything in there that struck you as unusual or perhaps relating to the killing of Jody Krementz?”

  “Yes, there is a photograph of a death scene on page seventy-three that immediately drew my attention.”

  “Describe it, please.”

  Bosch opened the book to a marker. He spoke as he looked at the full-page photograph on the right side of the book.

  “It shows a woman in a bed. She’s dead. A scarf is tied around her neck and looped over one of the bars of the headboard. She is nude from the waist down. Her left hand is between her legs and two of her fingers have penetrated the vagina.”

  “Can you read the caption beneath the photo, please?”

  “It says, ‘Autoerotic Death: This woman was found in her bed in New Orleans, a victim of autoerotic asphyxia. It is estimated that around the world more than five hundred people die from this accidental misadventure each year.’”

  Langwiser asked and received permission to place two more blowup photos on the easels as exhibits. She placed them right over two of the bookshelf photos. Side by side the photos were of Jody Krementz’s body in her bed and of the page from Victims of the Night.

  “Detective, did you make a comparison between the photo of the victim in this case, Jody Krementz, and the photo from the book?”

  “Yes, I did. I found them to be very similar.”

  “Did it appear to you that the body of Ms. Krementz could have been staged, using the photo from the book as a model or baseline?”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “Did you ever have occasion to ask the defendant what happened to his copy of the book Victims of the Night?”

  “No, since the day of the search of his home, Mr. Storey and his attorneys have refused repeated requests for an interview.”

  Langwiser nodded and looked at the judge.

  “Your Honor, may I take these exhibits down and offer them to the court clerk?”

  “Please do,” the judge responded.

  Langwiser made a show of taking the photos of the two dead women down first by folding them in toward each other like two sides of a mirror closing. It was a little thing but Bosch saw the jurors watching.

  “Okay, Detective Bosch,” Langwiser said when the easels were cleared. “Did you make any inquiries or do any further investigation into autoerotic deaths?”

  “Yes. I knew that if this case ever moved to a trial that the classification of the death as a homicide staged to look like this sort of accident might be challenged. I was also curious about what that caption in the book said. Frankly, I was surprised by the figure of five hundred deaths a year. I did some checking with the FBI and found that the figure was actually accurate, if not low.”

  “And did that cause you to do any further research?”

  “Yes, on a more local level.”

  With Langwiser prompting, Bosch testified that he checked through records at the medical exa
miner’s office for deaths due to autoerotic asphyxia. His search went back five years.

  “And what did you find?”

  “In those five years, sixteen deaths in Los Angeles County classified as accidental death by misadventure had been attributed specifically to autoerotic asphyxia.”

  “And how many of these cases involved female victims?”

  “Only one case involved a female.”