Two Kinds of Truth
Page 32
On Wednesday night, Bosch had called the number on the letter he had received, and the woman who identified herself as Angela said she would meet him at nine the next morning at her home in Woodland Hills.
The woman who answered the door of the condo on Topanga Canyon Boulevard was blond and in her midthirties. Bosch had spent a lot of time over the previous two years looking at photographs of the dark-haired, dark-eyed Esme Tavares of fifteen years before. He had one shot of her, her lips pursed in a pout, posted in the cell so that he would always be reminded of the case. He had chosen the pout photo out of all the rest because he knew the set of a person’s closed mouth changed little over time. The woman who called herself Angela wasn’t smiling when she answered the door, and he knew right away that she was Esme.
And she recognized that he knew.
“You have to stop looking for me,” she said.
They sat in her living room and she told him her story. Once she got going, he could have filled in the details ahead of her, but he let her tell it just the same. Young woman caught in a bad marriage to an older, dominating man; physically abused regularly and tied to a baby she never wanted to have—that her husband wanted only as a means of controlling her. She made the hard choice to leave everything behind, including the child, and disappear.
She had help, and when Bosch probed deeper with his questions, it became clear that help came from a lover she had had on the side at the time and had now lived with for fifteen years. They had first moved away and lived in Salt Lake City together. They came back ten years later because both missed the city where they had grown up.
Her story had more holes in it than a San Pedro fishing net but Bosch thought the omissions and incongruities were designed to cast her in the best light in a place of deep shadows. She seemed to show no guilt about the daughter she had left in a crib or about the efforts of the community to find her. She professed to be unaware of all of that because she was then living in Salt Lake City.
She also claimed that her disappearance was not an effort in any way to cast suspicion on the husband she left behind. She said she had no alternative but to run.
“If I had tried to just leave him, he would have killed me,” she said. “Admit it, you thought he had killed me.”
“That might be true,” Bosch said. “But that was at least in part dictated by the circumstances of you disappearing with the baby left in the crib.”
In the end, Angela Martinez née Esmerelda Tavares was singularly unapologetic for what she had done. Not to Bosch, the police, or the community. And most of all not to her baby daughter, whom her husband gave up for adoption a year after his wife was gone.
“Do you even know where she is?” Bosch asked, the dispassionate detective pose not working at the moment.
“Wherever it is, I’m sure she’s in a better place than if I had stayed in that house of horrors,” Martinez said. “She might not have survived it. I know I wouldn’t have.”
“But how did you know he would give her up once you were gone? She could still be in that house of horrors as far as you knew back then.”
“No, I knew he would give her up. He only wanted her so I would be tied to him. I proved him very wrong.”
Bosch thought about the intervening years and all the efforts to find her. He thought about Detective Valdez, now the chief of police, haunted by the case for so long. Bosch knew that on one level it was a good outcome. The mystery was solved and Esme was alive. But Bosch didn’t feel good about it.
“Why now?” Bosch said. “Why’d you reach out now?”
“Albert and I want to get married,” she said. “It’s time. My husband never divorced me—that’s how controlling he was. He never had me declared dead. But I hired a lawyer and he’ll handle it now. The first step was to solve the mystery that everybody’s been so worked up about for so long.”
She smiled as though she was proud of her actions, energized by knowing she had kept the secret for so long.
“Aren’t you still afraid of him, your husband?” Bosch asked.
“Not anymore,” she said. “I was just a girl then. He doesn’t scare me now.”
Her smile had now turned into the pout from the photo Bosch had hung in the cell where he worked.
He stood up.
“I think I have what I need to close this out,” he said.
“That’s all you need to know?” she asked.
She seemed surprised.
“For now,” Bosch said. “I’ll get back to you if there’s anything else.”
“Well, you know where to find me,” she said. “Finally.”
Bosch headed to the station after that. He was morose. He was coming in with another case closed but there was nothing to feel good about. A lot of people had spent time, money, and emotions on Esme Tavares. As had always been suspected, Esme Tavares was dead. But Angela Martinez was alive.
After parking at SFPD, he made a swing through the detective bureau on his way to the main interior hallway of the station. The pods were empty and Bosch heard voices from the war room. He suspected the detectives were taking a joint lunch break.
The chief of police’s office was located at the center of the station and across a hallway from the watch lieutenant’s office. Bosch stuck his head in the door and asked Valdez’s secretary if the boss had a free five minutes. He knew that once he got in the room with the man, the conversation would likely last a lot longer. The secretary called back to the room behind her desk and got an approval. Bosch stepped in.
Valdez was in uniform as usual and seated behind his desk. He held up the A section of the Times.
“Just reading about you, Harry,” he said. “They exonerated you pretty good here. Congratulations.”
Bosch sat down across the desk from him.
“Thanks,” he said.
Bosch had read the story that morning before heading off to his appointment and was satisfied with it. However, he knew that more people read the Sunday edition of the Times than the Thursday paper. There was always going to be a gulf between those who had read that he was a crooked cop and those who read the never-mind-he’s-straight story.
It didn’t bother him too much. The one person he wanted most to read the latest story had already seen it online and had texted him, saying again that she was very proud of him and happy with the outcome of the Borders case.
“So,” he said. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, so I’ll just tell you. I just met Esme Tavares. She’s alive and well and living in Woodland Hills.”
Valdez almost came out of his seat. He leaned violently forward across the desk, his face showing his surprise.
“What?”
Bosch ran down the story, beginning with him opening the letter the night before.
“Mother of God,” Valdez said. “I’ve had her as dead for fifteen years. Let me tell you, many was the night I wanted to go to that house and drag that asshole husband of hers behind the back of my car until he told me where she was buried.”
“I know. Me too.”
“I mean, Christ, I fell in love with her. You know how you do with victims sometimes?”
“Yeah, I had a little bit of that too. Until today.”
“So did she tell you why?”
Bosch recounted the conversation he’d had that morning with Angela Martinez. As he told it, Valdez’s face grew increasingly dark with anger. He shook his head several times and wrote some notes down on a scratch pad on his desk.
When Bosch was finished, the chief checked his notes before speaking.
“Did you advise her?” he asked.
Bosch knew he was asking if Bosch had informed Martinez of her constitutional rights to an attorney and to avoid self-incrimination.
“No,” Bosch said. “I didn’t think I had to. She called me to her place and we sat in her living room. I identified myself and she obviously knew who I was. But it doesn’t matter, Chief. I know what you’re thinking, and those things never work out.”
“Look, I hate to come off as defending her, but she committed a moral crime, not a crime that the D.A. will find prosecutable. She was escaping from what she considered a dangerous situation. She was long gone before the overtime and everything else started flowing. She can claim she didn’t know or that it was too dangerous to call in and say she was okay. She’s got a lot of defenses. The D.A. won’t touch it.”
The chief didn’t respond. He leaned back in his chair and stared at a toy police helicopter hanging on a string from the ceiling. He liked to say it was the tiny department’s air squadron.
“Shit,” he finally said. “I wish there was something we could do about it.”
“We just have to live with it,” Bosch said. “She was in a bad situation back then. She made the wrong choice, but people are flawed. They’re selfish. All this time we thought she was dead, she was pure and innocent to us. Now we find out she was the kind that would leave a baby in a crib to save herself.”
Bosch thought about Jose Esquivel Jr. dying with his cheek on the linoleum in the back hallway of his father’s business. He wondered if anybody was pure and innocent.
Valdez got up from his desk and went to the bulletin board over the low row of filing cabinets against the right wall. He flipped back some deployment sheets, then weeded through a stack of Wanted flyers until he found the MISSING leaflet with the photo of Esme Tavares on it circa 2002. He tore it off the board and crumpled it between his hands, crushing the ball as small as he could. He then fired a shot at a trash can at the end of the file cabinets.
He missed.
“What’s this world about, Harry?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “This week I closed out a double murder and a fifteen-year-old missing-persons case. And I don’t feel good about any of it.”
Valdez dropped back into his seat.
“You gotta feel good about the farmacia caper,” he said. “You took two pieces of shit off the board.”
Bosch nodded. But the truth was, it felt to him like he was walking in circles. True justice was the brass ring just out of reach.
Bosch stood up.
“You going to call up Carlos and tell him he’s off the hook?” he asked.
Carlos Tavares was Esmerelda’s husband, fifteen years a suspect.
“Fuck him,” Valdez said. “He’s still an asshole. He can read about it in the paper.”
Bosch went to the door and then looked back at his boss.
“I’ll have the report on this finished today,” he said.
“Good,” Valdez said. “Then we go drinking.”
“That sounds right.”
44
Bosch wanted to avoid the detective bureau. He didn’t want to talk anymore. Bella Lourdes and the others would find out soon enough about Esme Tavares being alive and well, and it would be the talk of the department and then the whole town. But Bosch had talked about it enough for the time being.
He walked out the front door of the station and then crossed the street. He went through the Public Works yard and into the jail. After unlocking his cell, he slid the heavy steel door open and it banged hard against its frame. Like the police chief, Bosch went to the photo of Esme Tavares to yank it down. But then he stopped. He decided to leave it in place so he would always see it and it would remind him about how wrong he had been about the case.
It was the child in the crib that had misled him. He knew this. It seemed against all laws of nature, and so it had led him and many others before him down the wrong path.
He stood there looking at the photo and considered the irony of the week. Elizabeth Clayton couldn’t recover from the loss of a child and wandered the earth as a zombie, not caring what was done to her or what depravity she had willingly sunk to. Esme Tavares left a child in a crib and apparently never looked back.
The reality of the world was dark and horrifying. Bosch sat down behind his makeshift desk to do the paperwork that would document the grim reality of it. But he found that he couldn’t even begin.
He contemplated this for a long moment and then stood back up. There was a bench that ran down the center of the cell perpendicular to his desk. He used it mostly to spread out photos and files so that he could review stubborn cases from a fresh angle, often looking at the crime scene photos placed side by side down the length of the scarred wooden bench. He had been told that the bench had been nicknamed “the diving board” back in the day because it had been the jumping-off point to oblivion for a handful of inmates over time. They would step up on the bench, wrap one leg from their jail pants through the bars guarding the overhead air vent, then wrap the other around their neck.
They’d jump off the end of the bench into the dark pool of emptiness, and their misery would be over.
Bosch stepped up onto the bench now. He reached above his head to grasp one of the overhead bars for support.
He dug into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Checking the screen, he held the phone up, turning on the bench, moving his arm until he saw one service bar finally appear in the corner. With his thumb, he went to his contact list and scrolled until almost the end and hit the number he was looking for.
Lucia Soto answered right away.
“Harry, what’s up?”
“Did you pull that case I told you about?”
“Daisy Clayton? Yes, first thing this morning.”
“And?”
“You were right, gathering dust. Nobody’s worked it in three, four, years except for the annual due diligence reports, which are word-for-word copies of the year before. You know how it goes: ‘No viable leads at this time’ because they didn’t really look for viable leads.”
“And?”
“And I think they were wrong. I saw some stuff. There are workable angles. It was pretty much written off as a serial. Somebody who moved through Hollywood, did his thing, and moved on. But I’m not so sure about that. I looked at the photos. There was a familiarity with her and the place she was left. He knew the area. I’m going to—”
“Lucia.”
“What, Harry?”
“Cut me in.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. I want in. Let’s go get him.”
Acknowledgments
Many people contributed their time, experience, and expertise to the author in the research and writing of this novel. On the research side of things they include Rick Jackson, Tim Marcia, Mitzi Roberts, David Lambkin, Dennis Wojciechowski, Irwin Rosenberg, Anthony Vairo, Lynn Smith, Adam Frisch, Henrik Bastin, and Daniel Daly. On the writing side, there was Asya Muchnick, Bill Massey, Harriet Bourton, Emad Aktar, Pamela Marshall, Terrill Lee Lankford, Jane Davis, Heather Rizzo, John Houghton, and Linda Connelly. Many of those named here had their feet firmly planted in both sides of the equation.
To those listed and those left off inadvertently or by choice to remain anonymous, the author is deeply grateful.
About the Author
Michael Connelly is the author of thirty previous novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers The Late Show, The Wrong Side of Goodbye, and The Crossing. His books, which include the Harry Bosch series and Lincoln Lawyer series, have sold more than sixty million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels and is the executive producer of Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. He spends his time in California and Florida.
Books by Michael Connelly
Featuring Renée Ballard
The Late Show
Featuring Harry Bosch
The Black Echo
The Black Ice
The Concrete Blonde
Trunk Music
Angels Flight
A Darkness More Than Night
City of Bones
Lost Light
The Narrows
The Closers
Echo Park
The Overlook
Nine Dragons
The Drop
The Black Box
The Burning Room
Featuring Mickey Haller
The Lincoln Lawyer
The Fifth Witness
Featuring Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller
The Brass Verdict
The Reversal
The Gods of Guilt
The Crossing
Featuring Jack McEvoy
The Poet
The Scarecrow
Other Novels
Blood Work
Void Moon
Chasing the Dime
Anthologies
Mystery Writers of America Presents The Blue Religion: New Stories about Cops, Criminals, and the Chase (editor)