A week after interviewing Amanda Margot, the detectives positioned themselves on a surveillance of Borders’s apartment in Sherman Oaks and waited for him to exit for the day. They wanted to approach him away from the apartment in case he revealed something in the interview that would serve as probable cause to search his home. They didn’t want to knock on the door and give him the chance to hide or destroy incriminating evidence.
They were also working a hunch. With the help of Danielle Skyler’s mother and friends, they had inventoried her apartment and found only one piece of personal property missing. It was a blue sea-horse pendant that had been attached to a necklace made of braided twine. Her mother had given it to her on the day she left home for California. Danielle had gone to a high school that had the sea horse as a mascot, and the pendant was a reminder of the Hollywood Danielle had come from and that her mother didn’t want her to forget. Her mother had attached it to a necklace she had made herself. The piece of jewelry, though not outwardly valuable, was said to be the young woman’s most prized possession.
Despite three different searches of Skyler’s apartment, Bosch and Sheehan did not find the sea horse or necklace. They were certain Skyler had not lost it, as it was prominently shown in a new set of head shots taken a few weeks before her death. The detectives believed that the killer had taken the necklace and pendant as a souvenir after the murder. If they were found in a suspect’s possession, any blood residue on the twine could be type-matched to Danielle and would be a valuable piece of evidence.
Late in the morning of the surveillance, Borders emerged from his apartment on Vesper and walked a block south to Ventura Boulevard. Bosch and Sheehan gave him a lead and then followed on foot. Borders first entered the Tower Records store at the corner of Cedros and Ventura and browsed in the video section for more than a half hour. The detectives observing him debated whether they should approach and ask for an interview but decided to hang back and intercept him only if he started back to his apartment.
After leaving the record store, Borders walked back across Ventura and went into a restaurant called Le Café, where he had lunch by himself at the bar while chatting familiarly to the bartender. Bosch had been in Le Café several times because above the restaurant and bar was a jazz club called the Room Upstairs that was open late and featured world-class performers. He had seen Houston Person and Ron Carter perform there just a few months before.
When lunch was finished, Borders left a twenty on the counter and left. Bosch and Sheehan quickly approached the three-sided bar and Bosch drew the bartender over to one side with a question about what bourbons he had available, while Sheehan went to the other side and placed the empty beer glass Borders had drunk from into a paper bag. He headed out and waited for Bosch on the sidewalk. Borders was nowhere to be seen at first when Bosch joined him but they checked a drugstore two businesses down and found him inside shopping with a plastic basket.
Borders bought a box of condoms and other toiletry items at the drugstore before heading back to his apartment. As he was unlocking the security gate, Bosch and Sheehan approached him from different sides. They had a plan for talking him into agreeing to a voluntary interview. His reported behavior with Skyler suggested a narcissistic personality, two hallmark traits of which were an inflated sense of self-importance and feelings of superiority. The detectives played to those traits by identifying themselves to Borders and saying they needed his help solving the murder of Danielle Skyler. Sheehan said they were grasping at straws and hoped, since Borders had dated her, he could give insight into her personality and lifestyle. Borders agreed to the interview without hesitation. Bosch and Sheehan read that as Borders believing that if he went with the detectives that he would learn more from them than they would from him. It was similar to the psychology that often led a murderer to volunteer to join the search for the missing person they had actually killed and buried. They had to get close to the investigation to learn what was going on, while hiding in plain sight also brought them psychological fulfillment.
They drove Borders over to the nearby Van Nuys station, where they had previously reserved an interview room with the detective commander. The room was wired for sound, and the interview was taped.
Bosch dropped off his reading of the chrono log and changed the CD as Chemistry came to an end. This time he put in Frank Morgan’s Mood Indigo and soon he was hearing “Lullaby,” one of his favorite recordings. He then looked back through the stack of old reports for the transcript of the interview conducted thirty years earlier with Borders. It was the thickest report in the stack, weighing in at forty-six pages. He quickly leafed through it to find the moment when Borders was caught in the lie that ultimately led to his arrest and conviction. It was two-thirds through the thirty-minute conversation and during a segment where Bosch was asking the questions. It was also after Borders had signed a consent form acknowledging his Miranda rights and agreeing to talk to the detectives.
HB: So you and Danielle didn’t have sex? You just dropped her at her place and took off?
PB: That’s right.
HB: Well, were you a gentleman? Did you walk her to her door?
PB: No, it was like she jumped out and was gone before I could even be a gentleman.
HB: You mean like she was mad at you?
PB: Sort of. She didn’t like what I’d had to say.
HB: Which was what?
PB: That there wasn’t any chemistry. You know, nice try but it wasn’t right. I thought she understood and thought the same thing but then she jumped out of the car and was gone without so much as a good-bye. It was rude but I guess she was disappointed. She liked me better than I liked her. Nobody likes getting rejected.
HB: And you said you had not picked her up at her place earlier?
PB: Yeah, she took a cab and we met at the restaurant, because she was coming from the Westside and for me to go all the way over the hill to get her would be a slog, man. I liked the girl, or at least I thought I did, but not that much, you know what I mean?
HB: Yeah, I get it.
PB: I mean, I’m not running a taxi service. Some of these girls think you are their chauffeur or [unintelligible]. Not me.
HB: Okay, so what you’re saying is that you didn’t pick her up and then you just dropped her at the curb and took off.
PB: That’s it. Not even a good-night kiss.
HB: And you were never in her apartment?
PB: Nope.
HB: Not even to her door?
PB: Never.
HB: What about after that night? You knew where she lived now. Did you ever come back?
PB: No, man, I’m telling you. I wasn’t interested.
HB: Well, then, we have a problem that we need to work out here.
PB: What problem?
HB: Why do you think we approached you today, Preston?
PB: I don’t know. You said you needed my help. I thought maybe one of her friends told you Skyler and I had dated.
HB: Actually, it was because we found your fingerprints on the front door of her apartment. The problem is, you just told me you’d never been to the door.
PB: I don’t understand. How’d you get my fingerprints?
HB: You know, that’s sort of funny. I tell you that your fingerprints were found at a murder scene and you ask how I got your fingerprints. I think most guys would’ve said something else, especially if they had previously said they were never, ever at that scene. Is there something you want to tell us, Preston?
PB: Yeah, I want to say this is all bullshit.
HB: You’re sticking with the story that you were never there?
PB: That’s right, everything else is bullshit. You don’t have any prints.
HB: What if I told you that she told two different friends about you trying to break down her door after she rejected your sexual advances on the night of the date?
PB: Oh, man, I see it now. I get it. Those bitches are lining up against me. Let me tell you, she didn’t
reject me. Nobody rejects me. I rejected her.
HB: Answer my question, did you go to her door on the night of your date with Danielle? Yes or no?
PB: No, I did not, and there are no fucking fingerprints, and I’m done talking to you. Get me a lawyer if you want to ask any more questions.
HB: Fine, who do you want?
PB: I don’t know. I don’t know any lawyers.
HB: Then I’ll get you the yellow pages.
Bosch had lied about the fingerprints. Multiple prints had been found on the door and in the apartment, but they had found no prints for Borders on file. Prints subsequently taken from the collected beer glass would not match any from Skyler’s apartment. But Bosch was on steady legal ground. Courts across the country had long approved the use of deception and trickery by police in an interview setting with a suspect, holding that an innocent person would see through the deception and not falsely confess to the crime.
The interview with Borders was the only time he ever spoke to anyone in law enforcement. Based on the contradiction between what Margot and Henderson had reported about Skyler’s account of the ill-fated date and Borders’s denying that he had returned to the apartment, he was arrested in the interview room on suspicion of murder and booked two floors up, in the Van Nuys jail. The case at that point was beyond weak and Bosch and Sheehan knew it. Catching Borders in the lie about not coming to the victim’s door supported their belief that he was the killer, but it was based on hearsay. It relied on the memories of two friends of the victim, and Danielle’s story had been told while all three women were drinking. The bottom line was that it would be their word against the suspect’s. Defense attorneys thrived and reasonable doubt lived in the gray areas in between.
The detectives knew that they needed to find corroborating evidence or kick Borders loose at the end of the forty-eight-hour arrest hold. Using the witness statements from Margot and Henderson connecting victim and suspect, they got a friendly judge to issue a search warrant based upon probable cause. It gave them twenty-four hours to search Preston Borders’s car and home.
They got lucky. Three hours into the search of the Vesper apartment, Bosch noticed that a set of wooden shelves had been put together without two screws that held the bottom shelf in place on the unit’s base. Bosch figured that if someone was going to cut corners on assembling a set of shelves, they would do it at the top, not the base.
Once he removed the books and other items from the shelf, he was able to easily lift up the laminated board, revealing a hiding space within the base of the shelving unit. He found the sea-horse pendant there wrapped in a tissue. The braided twine necklace was gone. He found several other pieces of women’s jewelry as well and a collection of pornographic magazines specializing in sadomasochism and bondage.
With the discovery of the sea-horse pendant, the case against Borders went from weak to strong. Skyler’s mother was still in town, having made arrangements for her daughter’s body to be returned to Florida for burial. Bosch and Sheehan met her at her hotel and she identified the pendant as the one she had given her daughter.
The detectives were overjoyed and felt they had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. That night after filing the case with the District Attorney’s Office, they would go out and click martini glasses at the Short Stop in Echo Park.
Thirty years later, Bosch remembered the thrill of finding the key evidence. He savored the moment across time as he stacked the loose pages of the interview transcript. He remained unshaken in his confidence in the case he and Sheehan had built, and in his belief that Borders had murdered Danielle Skyler.
In the run-up to the trial, Bosch and Sheehan attempted to link the other pieces of jewelry found in the hiding place to other cases. They pulled all unsolved murders and disappearances of young women during the four years Borders had lived in Los Angeles. They believed he was good for at least two other sex slayings. Both victims were women who had tangential connections to the entertainment industry and who moved in the same Ventura Boulevard bar circuit as Borders. They found photos of the women wearing jewelry that they believed matched pieces from the hiding place in his apartment, but expert analysis could not confirm the connections and the D.A.’s Office decided to try Borders only for the Skyler murder. Bosch and Sheehan objected to the decision but the prosecutor always got final call.
At trial Borders and his lawyer had to scramble to explain the sea-horse pendant. But the effort seemed desperate. Defense attorney David Siegel, known in courthouse circles as Legal Siegel because of his shrewd understanding and use of the law, attempted to challenge the authentication of the piece of jewelry as Skyler’s.
The prosecution had presented the victim’s mother, who identified the piece and tearfully told the story behind it, as well as the photos of Skyler taken just a few weeks before the murder in which the pendant could be seen hanging around her neck. Siegel presented a representative of the jewelry piece’s manufacturer, who testified that several thousand sea-horse pendants in the exact color and style were made and distributed across the country, including hundreds in Los Angeles–area retail stores.
Borders testified in his own defense and claimed he had bought the pendant found in his apartment at a store on the Santa Monica pier. He explained that he had remembered seeing a similar pendant on Skyler during their date and liking it. He bought his own to give at some point as a gift and that was why he had hidden the piece as well as other women’s jewelry in the shelving unit. He kept the jewelry as potential gifts for women he dated and he didn’t want the cache stolen should there be a break-in at his apartment.
Siegel backed his client’s testimony with the introduction of burglary statistics for the Van Nuys Division, but the strained explanation for possession of the sea-horse pendant did not impress the jury, particularly when juxtaposed with a playback of the audiotape from the interview with Borders. The jury deliberated for six hours before delivering a guilty verdict. After a separate hearing, the same jurors took only two hours deliberating on the horrors to which Skyler was subjected to recommend the death penalty. The judge followed through and imposed the ultimate sanction on Borders.
Bosch completed his review of the initial investigation at four a.m. The music had stopped without his noticing. He was tired and he knew he had an all-hands meeting at seven thirty in the war room at SFPD to discuss where the farmacia murder investigation stood. He decided to grab a couple hours’ sleep and get to the new investigation conducted by Soto and Tapscott as soon as the next break came up in the current case.
He headed down the hallway to his bedroom, remembering the moment when he had found the sea horse and knew in the deep folds of his heart that Borders was the murderer and that he was going to pay for his crime.
7
Bosch was on the road at seven, gulping home-brewed coffee as he drove down the ramp at Barham Boulevard onto the northbound 101 freeway. It was a cool, crisp morning and the mountains that ringed the Valley and usually trapped smog under the crosscurrents were clear across the northern horizon. After transitioning onto the 170, the second of three freeways that would take him to San Fernando, he pulled his phone and called the number he had for the Investigative Services Unit at San Quentin State Prison.
The call was answered by a human voice and Bosch asked for an investigator named Gabe Menendez. The prison had its own squad of investigators who handled inmate-on-inmate crimes and also gathered intel on the activities of the criminals housed within the prison. Bosch had worked with Menendez in years past and knew him as a straight shooter.
After a short delay, a new voice came on the line.
“This is Lieutenant Menendez. How can I help you?”
He had gotten a promotion since the last time Bosch had spoken to him.
“This is Harry Bosch down in L.A. Sounds like you’ve been moving up in the world.”
Bosch was careful not to say he was calling from the LAPD. He was skirting the reality of his situation because h
e believed he would get better cooperation if Menendez believed he was dealing with the LAPD than with the tiny SFPD.
“That’s been a while, Detective Bosch,” Menendez said. “What can I do for you?”
“One of your guys on death row,” Bosch said. “Name’s Preston Borders. I put him there.”
“I know him. Been here longer than me.”
“Yeah, well, then you may have heard. He’s trying to change that.”
“I may have heard something about it, yeah. We just got travel orders for him. He’s heading your way next week. I thought a guy like him being here so long, his appeals would have run out.”
“They did, but this is a new angle he’s playing. What I need to know is his visitor history and who is on his list.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem. How far back you want to go?”
Bosch thought about when Lucas John Olmer had died.
“How about going back two years?” he asked.
“Not a problem,” Menendez said. “I’ll put someone on it and get back to you. Anything else?”
“Yeah, I was wondering, does Borders have phone and computer access on death row?”
“Not directly, no. No phone and no computer but he has access to regular mail. There are a number of websites out there that facilitate communication between death row inmates and pen pals, things like that. He connects to them through mail.”
Bosch thought about that for a moment before continuing.
“Is that monitored?” he asked. “The mail, I mean.”
“Yes, it all goes through readers,” Menendez said. “Somebody in this unit. It’s on a rotation. Nobody can stand doing it for too long.”
“Any record of it kept?”
“Only if follow-up action is required. If there’s nothing suspicious about the letter, it’s passed on.”
Two Kinds of Truth Page 5