“Yes, sir,” Jericho said.
“Can you look up inmates anywhere in the DOC system or just San Quentin?”
“This is the system-wide database.”
“Good. Can you look up another inmate for me? His name is—”
“Lieutenant Menendez didn’t ask me to check multiple inmates.”
“That’s okay, I can hold while you ask him.”
There was a pause while Jericho decided whether he really wanted to ask his lieutenant if it was okay to look up another name.
“What is the name?” he finally asked.
“Lucas John Olmer. He’s probably listed as deceased.”
Jericho asked Bosch to spell the full name and he heard typing.
“Yes, deceased,” Jericho said. “D-O-D November ninth, twenty fifteen.”
“Okay,” Bosch said. “Is there still an approved-visitor list on the file?”
“Uh, hold one.”
Bosch waited.
“Yes,” Jericho finally said. “He had five visitors approved.”
“Give them to me,” Bosch said.
He wrote the names Jericho recited in his notebook.
Carolyn Olmer
Peyton Fornier
Wilma Lombard
Lance Cronyn
Victoria Remple
Bosch stared at the list. One was obviously a family member, and the other women were probably prison groupies, women attracted to a man of danger as long as the danger is incarcerated. Only Cronyn’s name was important. The lawyer currently representing Preston Borders had previously represented the now dead inmate who supposedly committed the murder that Borders was held on death row for.
“How did you know?” Jericho asked.
“Know what?” Bosch said.
“That the lawyer was on both visitor lists.”
“I didn’t until now.”
But it was an obvious thing to check, and Bosch knew Soto and Tapscott had to have made the connection as well. And yet it had not hindered the conclusion that Borders was innocent in the killing of Danielle Skyler.
Bosch knew he needed to get to the file and review the second half—the recent investigation. He thanked Jericho for his time and asked him to pass on his appreciation to Lieutenant Menendez. He then put both his phone and notebook away.
“Harry, what’s going on?” Lourdes asked.
“It’s a personal matter,” Bosch said. “It’s not related to our case.”
“It is if it’s keeping you up at night and then you’re falling asleep in my car.”
“I’m an old man. Old men take naps.”
“I’m not kidding. You need to be on your game for this.”
“Don’t worry. It won’t happen again. I’m on my game.”
They drove in silence the rest of the way to the SFPD station. They entered the detective bureau through the side door and immediately went to the war room, where Sisto, Luzon, and Trevino were waiting.
“Whatcha got?” Lourdes asked.
“Take a look,” Sisto said.
He was holding the remote for one of the screens. There was a frozen image from the camera over the prescription counter at La Farmacia Familia. Sisto hit the play button. Bosch first noted the time-and-date stamp. The video was recorded thirteen days before the murders.
Everyone stood in front of the screen in a semicircle to watch. On the screen José Esquivel Sr. was standing behind the counter, his fingers on the computer keyboard. A customer stood on the other side of the counter, a young woman holding a baby. There was a white prescription bag on the counter.
While the customer transaction was taking place, a man entered the store through the front door. He was wearing a black golf shirt and sunglasses and had a goatee. Bosch immediately recognized him as the man he and Lourdes had seen driving the van from the clinic to Whiteman Airport that morning. The capper. He went along two of the aisles and idly perused the shelves as if he were looking for something.
But it was clear he was waiting.
Esquivel finished his computer work and handed what appeared to be an insurance card back to the woman holding the baby. He then handed her the prescription bag and nodded as the interaction was completed. The woman turned and left the store and then the man in the black shirt stepped up to the counter.
There was no sign of José Jr. in the store. The playback was without sound, but it was clear from the body language and hand gestures that the man in black was angry and began to confront Esquivel. The pharmacist took a step back from the counter to put some space between himself and the angry visitor. The visitor first held a finger up like he was saying one more thing or one last time. He then pointed it at Esquivel’s chest and leaned across the counter to drive home the point.
That was when Esquivel apparently made a mistake. He gestured with his own hands in defense and started to say something. It appeared that he was engaging in the argument, verbally pushing back. Suddenly the visitor’s arm shot out and he grabbed Esquivel by the lapel of his lab coat. He jerked the pharmacist forward and half over the counter. He then got right in his face, their noses inches apart. Esquivel went up on his toes, his thighs braced against the edge of the counter. He instinctively raised his hands to show contrition and that he was not resisting. The visitor held him in the awkward position and continued to talk, his head jerking in a paroxysm of anger.
And then came the moment Sisto wanted everybody to see. The visitor raised his left hand and formed a gun, forefinger pointing and thumb up. He put the finger against Esquivel’s temple and pantomimed shooting him in the head, his hand even jerking back to show the recoil. He then pushed the pharmacist back over the counter and released his hold. Without another word he turned and walked through the pharmacy and out the front door. José was left disheveled and trying to pull himself together.
Sisto raised the remote to stop the playback.
“Wait,” Bosch said. “Let’s watch him.”
On the screen the pharmacist paced for a moment behind the counter. He rubbed his face with both hands and then looked up as if asking the heavens for guidance. His face was clear on the overhead camera angle, and José Esquivel Sr. seemed like a man carrying a tremendous burden. He then put his hands on the edge of the counter and leaned down.
Everything about his face and body language said What am I going to do?
Finally straightening up, he opened a drawer in the counter. He took out a pack of cigarettes and a throwaway lighter. He pushed through the half door to the back hallway and out of sight, presumably going to the back alley to smoke and calm his nerves.
“Okay,” Sisto said. “Then there’s this.”
He fast-forwarded the video playback for twenty seconds and then returned to normal play. Bosch checked the time counter as Sisto narrated.
“This is two hours later on the same day,” the young detective said. “Watch when the son comes in.”
On the screen José Sr. was standing behind the pharmacy counter, looking at the computer’s screen. His son entered the business through the front door and walked behind the pharmacy counter. As he pulled his pharmacist’s coat from a hook, José Sr. looked up from the screen and waited for his son to turn around.
An argument ensued between the father and son, with the father making pleading gestures—hands clasped together as if in prayer—and the son looking away, even shaking his head. It ended with the son removing the coat he had just put on—and days later would be murdered in—and throwing it into the air as he stormed out of the store. Once again the father was left leaning against the counter, supporting himself by both hands and shaking his head in dismay.
“He saw it coming,” Luzon said.
They all took seats at the big table to talk about what they had seen and what it meant. Lourdes looked at Harry and they exchanged nods, a silent communication that they were on the same page.
“We think we know who the guy in the black shirt and shades is,” she began.
“Who?” Trevino asked.
>
“He’s what they call a capper. He works for a clinic operating as a pill mill. We saw him today driving people around. People who take illegitimate prescriptions to pharmacies like the Esquivel family’s. We think the father was neck-deep in the whole thing and the son was probably trying to get them out of it.”
Trevino made a low whistling sound and told Lourdes to fill in the story. With Bosch pitching in here and there, she proceeded to bring the team up-to-date on their activities during the day, including the Whiteman angle and the visit with Edgar downtown at the Reagan Building. Trevino, Sisto, and Luzon asked few questions and seemed duly impressed by the progress Lourdes and Bosch had made on the case.
Halfway through the session, Chief Valdez entered the war room, pulled out a chair, and sat down at the end of the table. Trevino asked if he wanted Bosch and Lourdes to start at the top and Valdez demurred, saying he was just trying to catch some of the update.
When Lourdes concluded her report, Bosch asked Sisto if he could put a freeze-frame of the capper on the screen next to a freeze-frame of the killers in the pharmacy. It took Sisto a few minutes to accomplish this and then everyone stood in front of the screens to compare the man who had threatened José Esquivel Sr. to the men who had killed him and his son. The conclusion based on body size was unanimous: neither of the killers was the man who had threatened José Sr. Additionally, Lourdes noted, the capper had used his left hand to pantomime shooting José Sr., while the two shooters had held their weapons in their right hands.
“So,” Trevino said. “Next moves?”
Bosch held back, letting Lourdes take the lead, but she hesitated.
“Search warrant,” Bosch said.
“For what?” Trevino asked.
Bosch pointed to the man in black on the video screen.
“My read is that he threatened to kill Esquivel and then those two guys were brought in to actually do the job,” he said, pointing to the second screen. “What we’re hearing is that this organization is operating south of here and uses planes to move people around. We get a search warrant to look at video at Whiteman going back maybe twenty-four hours from our shooting. We see if they flew the shooters in.”
The police chief nodded and that made Trevino follow suit.
“I’ll write the warrant,” Lourdes said. “We can take it over there tonight before O’Connor leaves.”
“Okay,” Bosch said. “Meantime, I’ll try to make contact with Edgar’s guy at the DEA. Maybe they already have a line on our shooters.”
“Can we trust the DEA with this?” Valdez asked.
“The medical board guy happens to be my old partner,” Bosch said. “He vouched for the guy, so I think we’re good.”
“Good,” the chief said. “Then let’s do it.”
After the meeting ended, Bosch walked out to the parking lot before heading over to his desk in the old jail. He grabbed the copy of the Skyler case file out of his car and carried it with him across the street. It was time to go back to work on it.
13
As expected, Bosch’s call to DEA agent Charlie Hovan was not accepted. It had been Bosch’s experience over many years that DEA agents were a different breed of federal law officers. Because of the nature of their work, they were often treated with suspicion by others in law enforcement—as had been exhibited earlier by Chief Valdez. It was odd and unwarranted; all law officers deal with criminals. But there was a stigma attached to drug agents, as though the scourge of the particular crime they fought could rub off on them. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It was a phenomenon most likely rooted in the need for infiltration and undercover work in so many drug investigations. That stigma left agents paranoid, isolated, not interested in talking on the phone with strangers, even if they were law enforcement and it could be argued that they were all part of the same team protecting society.
Bosch suspected that he would not hear back from Hovan unless there was a pressing need on the agent’s part. Harry tried to give him that with one sentence left on the agent’s voice mail.
“This is Detective Bosch with the San Fernando Police Department and I’m looking for some intel on a guy who calls himself Santos and flies a plane in and out of an airstrip up here, where we just had a double murder in a pharmacy that was filling opioid scrips for him.”
Bosch left his phone number before disconnecting. He still believed that he might need to call Jerry Edgar in a day or two and ask him to vouch for him with Agent Hovan in order to prompt a simple conversation.
Bosch knew that it would probably take Lourdes a couple hours to write up a warrant for the Whiteman video archives and then get a telephonic approval from a Superior Court judge. It would take longer if she could not find a judge—the courthouses were closing now and most jurists would soon be in their cars, commuting home. Bosch’s plan was to use whatever time he had to dig further into the Skyler investigation. Despite the double murder being the priority of the moment, Bosch could not stop thinking about the Skyler case and the threat it posed to his public reputation and private self-worth. In his career, he had chased down hundreds of killers and put them in prison. If he was wrong about one, then it would put the lie to everything else.
It would cast him adrift.
He first had to push the file boxes from the Esmerelda Tavares case to the side. When he lifted one box to put it on top of another, a photo dropped onto his makeshift desk. It had slipped through a separation in the bottom seam of the box and fallen out. Bosch picked it up and studied it. He realized he had not seen it before. The photo was of the baby daughter who had been left in the crib when her mother went missing. Bosch knew she would be fifteen or sixteen now. He’d have to get her exact birthday and check the math on that.
A year after her mother’s disappearance, her father decided he could not raise her. He turned her over to the county’s foster care program and she was raised by a family that adopted her and eventually moved from Los Angeles up to Morro Bay. The photo reminded him that he had long planned to go up there to find her and talk to her about her mother. He wondered if she had any distant memories of her natural mother and father. But it was a long shot and he had never made the trip. He put the photo on top of the contents of the box so it would serve as a reminder next time he checked into the case.
Bosch split the Skyler files in half and put the stack of copies from the original investigation to the side. He then started reviewing the chronological record that Soto and Tapscott had begun keeping once assigned to reinvestigate the case.
It quickly became clear that the new look at the Skyler case began with a letter sent seven months earlier to the Conviction Integrity Unit from the man who was the nexus between both sexual predators involved. Attorney Lance Cronyn. Bosch put the chrono aside and looked through the stack until he found the document. It was on Cronyn’s letterhead, showing his office address on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys. The letter was directed to Kennedy’s boss and the head of the CIU, Assistant District Attorney Abel Kornbloom.
Mr. Kornbloom,
I write to you today in hopes that you will follow your sworn duty and right a terrible wrong and miscarriage of justice that has plagued our city and our state for three decades. It is a wrong that in some ways I helped propagate and extend. I now need your help fixing this.
I currently represent Preston Borders, who has resided on death row in San Quentin State Prison since 1988. I took on his representation only recently and quite frankly solicited him as a client. Attorney-client privilege in another case has prevented me from coming forward until this point. You see, until his death in 2015, I represented Lucas John Olmer, who was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and abduction in 2006 and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. He served that sentence until his death from cancer at California State Prison, Corcoran.
On July 12, 2013, I had occasion to meet with Mr. Olmer at Corcoran to discuss potential grounds for a final appeal of his conviction. During the course of this
privileged conversation, Mr. Olmer revealed to me that he was responsible for the murder of a young woman in 1987 and that another man had been falsely convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. He did not name the victim but said that the crime had occurred in her home in Toluca Lake.
As you will understand, this was a privileged conversation between attorney and client. I could not reveal this information because to do so would be to put my own client at risk of a conviction leading to the death penalty.
Attorney-client privilege survives after death. However, there are exceptions to the rule of privilege —if revealing protected communication will help right a continuing wrong or prevent serious injury or death to an innocent person. And that is exactly what I am trying to do now. Charles Gaston, an investigator in my employ, took the facts as revealed to me by Olmer and investigated the matter. He determined that a young woman named Danielle Skyler was sexually assaulted and murdered in her home in Toluca Lake on October 22, 1987, and that Preston Borders was later convicted of the crime and sentenced to death after a trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.
I subsequently went to San Quentin to interview Borders and he retained me as his attorney. In that capacity I sincerely request that the murder of Danielle Skyler be reviewed by the Conviction Integrity Unit and that the District Attorney’s Office right this wrong. Preston Borders is factually innocent and has spent more than half his life in prison under the threat of state-sanctioned death. This miscarriage of justice must be remedied.
This request is the first of many options available to Mr. Borders. I intend to explore all avenues of amelioration, but I am starting with you. I look forward to your expedited reply.
Sincerely yours,
Lance Cronyn, Esq.
Bosch read the letter a second time and then quickly scanned a letter of receipt from Kornbloom to Cronyn that told him his request would be given the utmost priority and urged him not to take any other action until the CIU had the opportunity to review and investigate the matter. It was clear that Kornbloom didn’t want this case spilling into the media or referred to the Innocence Project, a privately funded legal group that had a national record of overturning wrongful convictions. It would be a political blunder if the work of an outside entity instead of the district attorney’s much ballyhooed unit led to a revelation of innocence.
Two Kinds of Truth Page 10