Two Kinds of Truth

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch waited patiently while Haller asked the old man questions about days gone by, getting him ready for the interview. Finally, Siegel balled up the sandwich wrap and was done. He tossed it toward a trash can in the corner and came well short. Haller picked up the debris and put it back in his briefcase.

  “You ready, Uncle Dave?” he asked.

  “Been ready,” Siegel said.

  Haller pulled the napkin out of the collar of Siegel’s shirt and adjusted the camera once more before holding his finger on the record button.

  “All right, here we go,” he said. “Look at me, not at the camera.”

  “Don’t worry, they had video cameras back when I was practicing,” Siegel said. “I’m not that much of a relic.”

  “I just thought maybe you were out of practice.”

  “Never.”

  “Okay, then we’ll start. Three, two, one, recording.”

  Haller introduced Siegel and stated the date, time, and location of the interview. Though the camera was solely focused on Siegel, he identified himself and Bosch as well. Then he began.

  “Mr. Siegel, how long did you practice law in Los Angeles County?”

  “Almost fifty years.”

  “You specialized in criminal defense?”

  “Specialized? That was the entire practice, yes.”

  “Did there come a time when you represented a man named Preston Borders?”

  “Preston Borders engaged my services in his defense of a murder charge in late nineteen eighty-seven. The trial ensued the following year.”

  Haller proceeded to walk him through the case, first the preliminary hearing to determine if the charge was valid, then on to the jury trial. Haller was careful to avoid any questions regarding the internal discussions of the case, as they were privileged attorney-client communications. Once the case was summarized to the point of a guilty verdict and the subsequent sentence of death, Haller moved on to contemporary times.

  “Mr. Siegel, are you aware of a new legal effort being undertaken on your former client’s behalf to vacate his conviction after almost thirty years?”

  “I am aware of it. You made me aware of it.”

  “And are you aware that in the legal filings, Mr. Borders makes the claim that you suborned his perjury during the trial by telling him to testify about things that you both knew were untrue?”

  “I’m aware of it, yes. He threw me under the bus, to use today’s terminology.”

  Siegel’s voice had drawn tight with contained anger.

  “Specifically, Borders makes the claim that you furnished him with the sworn testimony regarding his purchase of a sea-horse pendant on the Santa Monica pier. Did you provide that testimony to Mr. Borders?”

  “I certainly did not. If he lied, he did so on his own and at his own counsel. As a matter of fact, I did not want him to testify during the trial, but he insisted. I felt I had no choice, so I let him and he talked himself onto death row. The jury did not believe a word he said. I talked to several of the jurors after the verdict and they confirmed that.”

  “Did you ever consider putting forth a defense that included the allegation that the lead detective on the case had planted the sea-horse pendant in your client’s home in order to frame him?”

  “No, I didn’t. We had both of the detectives on the case checked out and challenging their integrity was not an option. We didn’t try it.”

  “Have you allowed me to interview you today freely and without outside pressure?”

  “I volunteered. I’m an old man but you don’t trash me and the integrity of a forty-nine-year career in law without a word from me about it. Fuck them.”

  Haller leaned away from the camera, not expecting the off-color language. He tried not to put laughter on the sound track.

  “One final question,” he managed to say. “Do you understand that giving this interview today could result in an investigation and sanctions against you from the California bar?”

  “They can come and get me if they want. I’ve never been afraid of a fight. They were stupid enough to believe and print the obit I sent them. Let them come at me.”

  Haller reached over and turned off the recorder.

  “That was good, Uncle David,” he said. “I think it’s going to help.”

  “Thank you,” Bosch said. “I know it will help.”

  “Like I said, fuck them,” Siegel said. “They want a fight, they got it.”

  Haller started packing up the camera.

  Siegel turned his head slightly and looked at Bosch.

  “I remember you at that trial,” he said. “I knew you spoke the truth and Borders was done for. You know, in forty-nine years, he was the only one of mine to end up on the row. And I never felt bad about it. He was where he was supposed to be.”

  “Well,” Bosch said, “with any luck he’ll stay there.”

  Twenty minutes later Bosch and Haller stood by their cars in the parking lot.

  “So what do you think?” Bosch asked.

  “I think they picked the wrong lawyer to mess with,” Haller said. “I loved that ‘fuck them’ line.”

  “Yeah. But they thought he was dead.”

  “They’re going to be shitting bricks next Wednesday, that’s for sure. Just need to keep this all under wraps if we can.”

  “Why shouldn’t we be able to?”

  “It’s about standing. I’ll file for you as an intervening party. The D.A. will probably object, saying they represent you as the lead on the case. If I lose that battle, then I may have to file on Legal Siegel’s behalf to get in the door. That’s all we want, a foot in the door to make our case.”

  “You think the judge will allow the interview in?”

  “He’ll look at some of it, at least. I started out with the basic stuff on purpose. To lull Cronyn and Kennedy into thinking it’s fluff. Then—boom—I ask the question about perjury. It crosses the line into privilege, so we’ll see. I’m hoping the judge will be a little bit pregnant by then and say he wants to watch the whole thing. I checked him out. We got lucky there. Judge Houghton’s been on the bench twenty years and was practicing law for twenty before that. That means he was around when Legal was active. I’m hoping he’ll cut the old guy a break and hear him out.”

  “I’ve had a number of cases before Houghton over the years. He likes to get the full story on things. I think he’ll want to hear what Legal has to say. What about Borders? Will he testify at this thing?”

  “I doubt it. That would be a mistake. But he’ll be there and I want to see his face when we put Legal Siegel on the video screen.”

  Bosch nodded. He thought about facing Borders again himself after so many years. He realized that he wasn’t even sure what the man looked like. In his mind and memory Borders was a shadowy figure with piercing eyes. He had taken on the dimensions of a monster from imagination.

  “You need to step things up now,” Haller said.

  “How so?” Bosch asked.

  “What we’ve got is good, but it’s not good enough. We’ve got you, we’ve got Legal Siegel, and we’ve got the DNA in question being in Cronyn’s possible possession. But we need more. We need the whole frame. That’s what this is. They’re framing you for hanging this on an innocent man.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Then work harder, my brother.”

  Haller opened his car door, ready to go.

  “I’ll have Cisco give you a call,” he said.

  “Appreciate it,” Bosch said. “And, uh, you might not hear from me for a few days. I’ve got something I’ve gotta do on my San Fernando case. I probably won’t be available.”

  “What case, man? This should be your only case. Priority one.”

  “I know, but this other thing can’t wait. I’ve got it covered. I’ll figure out the frame and then we’re home free.”

  “Famous last words, ‘home free.’ Don’t stay away too long.”

  Haller dropped into his car and closed the door.
Bosch watched him back out and leave.

  18

  Bosch had made a deal with Bella Lourdes on the San Fernando case. He would go off to take care of some personal business and prep for his undercover assignment while she and the remaining members of the detective team continued to pursue all avenues of the investigation and prepare for Friday’s operation. That left Bosch a solid day and a half to pursue the Borders frame, as Haller had termed it, as well as take a meeting set by Hovan with a DEA undercover training team.

  Bosch had realized after talking with Haller that he might have had his focus on Borders wrong from the start. Because he knew Borders was guilty of the crime he was on death row for, Bosch had put him at the origin of the frame. He was the evildoer, the monster, and so this was all his cunning orchestration, his one last manipulation of the system and attempt to escape from prison through legal means.

  But now he understood that this was wrong. The starting point was Lance Cronyn. The attorney was at the center of every stage of this case. While he had cast himself as a lawyer with a conscience just bringing a miscarriage of justice to the attention of the powers that be, it was clear now that he was the one pulling the strings of the D.A.’s Office, the LAPD, and most likely Borders himself.

  Still sitting in his car outside Legal Siegel’s nursing home, Bosch rested his wrist on the steering wheel and drummed his fingers on the dashboard as he thought about next moves. He had to be careful. If Cronyn picked up on any investigation directed by Bosch toward him, then he would go running to the judge and the D.A. and claim intimidation. Bosch wasn’t sure yet what the first step was, but he had always employed a battering-ram philosophy when he found himself stuck on the logic of a case. He would step back and then move quickly forward, hoping the momentum of what he did know would carry him through the block.

  He went back to the beginning of how Cronyn could have engineered the frame and then carried it out. He decided it had to have started with the death of Lucas John Olmer. From there Bosch started free-associating, using the knowns of the case as the waypoints between the unknowns.

  He figured it began when Cronyn got the word that his client Olmer had died in prison. What did he do? Clear space in the files, send everything collected over the years on Olmer to archives? Did he take one last look for old time’s sake? For whatever reason, Cronyn reviewed the files and was reminded of the strategy not taken: semen identified as Olmer’s taken in evidence on the rape cases. The judge had ordered the police lab to share the genetic material with the private lab of Cronyn’s choosing. It was sent there and either tested or not and that is the last record of the material’s whereabouts.

  Bosch kept rolling with it, putting pieces together. Upon his client’s death, Cronyn could have reached out to the lab and requested that the material be returned. The suspect was dead, the case was closed, and the attorney was tying up all loose ends. Cronyn ended up with the material and then needed to figure out a way to use it.

  What was his goal? To make money? Bosch believed so. It was always about money. In the case at hand, Borders stood to make millions in a city payout for wrongful conviction. The attorney who brokered that deal would get as much as a third of it.

  Going back to his evolving case theory, Bosch knew that Cronyn was Olmer’s longtime attorney and therefore would have more knowledge of the rapist and his activities than anyone else. Cronyn goes back in time in Los Angeles, looking through newspaper archives for a case that will fit the bill. A case before the advent of DNA evidence. A case in which he could use DNA as an out.

  He comes across Preston Borders. Convicted of murder in a largely circumstantial case, with the exception of the sea-horse pendant being the only hard evidence against him. Cronyn knows that dropping the DNA of a serial rapist into the case would be like setting off a bomb. Eliminate the sea-horse pendant and the DNA is like a golden key that unlocks the door to death row.

  Bosch liked it. It worked so far. But Cronyn would not have taken a step further with it without first enlisting Borders as a willing component in the plan. Of course this would not have been a difficult sell. Borders was on death row, out of appeals, and running out of time, given the recent statewide vote in favor of a measure to speed up the culmination of death penalty cases. Cronyn shows up and offers a potential get-out-of-jail card with a seven- or maybe eight-figure chaser: Walk out of prison and death row and have the City of Los Angeles pay you for your troubles. What was Borders going to say, “I pass”?

  Bosch realized he had a way to partially confirm his theory. He reached over the seat to where he had placed the Borders case files. He brought the rubber-banded top half of the stack forward and quickly went to the letter Cronyn had sent to the Conviction Integrity Unit. It was the official starting point of the frame. All Bosch was interested in was the date on it. It had been sent by Cronyn in August of the previous year. He realized that he’d had a small piece of evidence of the frame all along. Officer Jericho had said that Cronyn had visited Borders the first Thursday of every month since January of the previous year.

  Cronyn had gone up to San Quentin and had several meetings with Borders before sending the letter to the D.A.’s Office. If that didn’t show the making of a conspiracy and the plan to frame, then he didn’t know what did.

  Buzzed by having made a connection that could be documented at the hearing the following week, Bosch had the battering ram moving with high velocity. The block was still the application of the plan. He had Cronyn and Borders tied together. He had Olmer’s DNA in Cronyn’s possession. He just needed step three. The execution of the plan.

  Bosch decided to break the possibilities into two pieces, with the separator between them being the video that Tapscott took of Lucia Soto opening the evidence box, presumably after many years of its sitting undisturbed on a shelf in LAPD property control.

  If the planted evidence was already in place when Soto opened the box, then the fix came before—most likely in the window between Cronyn journeying to San Quentin to meet Borders in January, and August, when he sent the letter to the D.A.’s Office, having presumably reached some form of agreement with Borders on the plan. That was a lot of time and Bosch knew that realistically he would need Soto’s help in identifying who might have had access to the box.

  In a space the size of a football field, the archives were strictly monitored and access was documented on multiple levels. A fleet of bonded civilian employees comprised the staff and worked under the on-site supervision of a police captain. Access to evidence was restricted to law enforcement officers, who needed to provide proper identification and a thumbprint for all requests, and there were also cameras that kept the evidence viewing areas under surveillance 24/7.

  If the genetic evidence was planted after Tapscott and Soto retrieved the box from property control, then there were a number of places along the chain of custody where that could have happened. The detectives would have hand delivered the contents of the evidence box to the lab at Cal State L.A. for examination and analysis in the serology unit. This brought into play several lab technicians who could have had access to the clothing being examined. But it was a lot of could haves. Bosch knew that these cases were randomly assigned to technicians and that there were several integrity checks built into the protocols and personnel of the DNA unit to guard against corruption, cross-contamination, and evidence tampering, intended or not. In the early days of DNA use in criminal proceedings, the science and protocols were challenged from every angle and with such frequency that over time a firewall of integrity had made the lab nearly impervious. Bosch knew this side of the equation was a long shot.

  The more Bosch considered the two possibilities, the more he believed that it was unlikely that the frame had occurred in the lab. The random assignment of a technician to each case alone seemed to undercut the possibility. Even in the unlikely event that Cronyn had a corrupt technician in hand, there seemed to be no way for him to be sure that his tech would even get the case, let alone ha
ve access to plant DNA on Danielle Skyler’s pajamas.

  Bosch kept coming back to the evidence box and the possibility of it being tampered with before Soto cut through his seals and opened it under Tapscott’s camera. He pulled out the burner phone he had the video on and once again watched the opening of the box. The evidence seals were intact as Soto cut through them and opened the flaps of the box. Bosch saw nothing wrong and again it confounded him.

  He thought about texting Soto and asking if she had access to the archive’s overhead cameras and whether she had asked to view them. But he knew such a question would likely make her suspicious of Bosch’s activities. It would also make her angry. After all, Tapscott had filmed Soto opening the box because the two detectives wanted video confirmation that the box’s seals were unbroken. They had filmed the process themselves as a means of avoiding having to request the footage from the overhead cameras. It was unlikely they would be interested in doing it for Bosch now. They were satisfied that there had been no tampering and that Olmer’s DNA had been in the box on the pajamas since day one.

  Bosch watched the video again, this time muting Tapscott’s commentary so he could concentrate on the images as Soto used a box cutter to slice through the seals. Halfway through, his real phone buzzed in his pocket and he paused the playback and dropped the burner into a cup holder in the center console. He pulled his phone and saw a number he didn’t recognize but he took the call anyway.

  “Hello.”

  “Harry Bosch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cisco. Mickey said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Yes, how are you doing?”

  “Doin’ good. What’s up?”

  “I’d like to meet and talk to you about something. It’s confidential. I’d rather do it in person.”

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “Uh, sitting in a parking lot near Fairfax High.”

  “I’m not too far. The upstairs at Greenblatt’s will be pretty quiet this time of day. Meet there?”

  “Yeah, I can head there.”

  “You don’t want to give even a hint about what this is?”