The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  “Nine different times since his release Jessup has left the apartment where he stays in Venice and in the middle of the night driven up to Mulholland on top of the mountains. From there he has visited one or two of the canyon parks up there per night. Franklin Canyon is his favorite. He’s been there six times. But he also has hit Stone Canyon, Runyon Canyon and the overlook at Fryman Canyon a few times each.”

  “What’s he doing at these places?” McPherson asked.

  “Well, first of all, these are public parks that are closed at dusk,” Bosch replied. “So he’s sneaking in. We’re talking two, three o’clock in the morning. He goes in and he just sort of sits. He communes. He lit candles a couple times. Always the same spots in each of the parks. Usually on a trail or by a tree. We don’t have photos because it’s too dark and we can’t risk getting in close. I’ve gone out with the SIS a couple times this week and watched. It looks like he just sort of meditates.”

  Bosch circled the four parks on the map. Each was off Mulholland and close to the others.

  “Have you talked to your profiler about all this?” Haller asked.

  “Yeah, I did, and she was thinking what I was thinking. That he’s visiting graves. Communing with the dead… his victims.”

  “Oh, man…,” Haller said.

  “Yeah,” Bosch said.

  There was a long pause as Haller and McPherson considered the implications of Bosch’s investigation.

  “Harry, has anybody done any digging in any of these spots?” McPherson asked.

  “No, not yet. We didn’t want to go too crazy with the shovels, because he keeps coming back. He’d know something was up and we don’t want that yet.”

  “Right. What about—”

  “Cadaver dogs. Yeah, we brought them out there undercover yesterday. We—”

  “How do you make a dog go undercover?” Haller asked.

  Bosch started to laugh and it eased some of the tension in the room.

  “What I mean is, there were two dogs and they weren’t brought out in official vehicles and handled by people in uniforms. We tried to make it look like somebody walking their dog, but even that was a problem because the park doesn’t allow dogs on these trails. Anyway, we did the best we could and got in and got out. I checked with SIS to make sure Jessup wasn’t anywhere near Mulholland when we went in. He was surfing.”

  “And?” McPherson asked impatiently.

  “These dogs are the type that just lie down on the ground when they pick up the scent of human decay. Supposedly they can pick it up through the ground after even a hundred years. Anyway, at three of the four places Jessup’s gone in these parks, the dogs didn’t react. But at one spot one of the two dogs did.”

  Bosch watched McPherson swivel in her seat and look at Haller. He looked back at her and there was some sort of silent communication there.

  “It should also be noted that this particular dog has a history of being wrong—that is, giving a false positive—about a third of the time,” Bosch said. “The other dog didn’t react to the same spot.”

  “Great,” Haller said. “So what does that tell us?”

  “Well, that’s why I invited you over,” Bosch said. “We’ve reached the point where maybe we should start digging. At least in that one spot. But if we do, we run the risk that Jessup will find out and he’ll know we’ve been following him. And if we dig and we find human remains, do we have enough here to charge Jessup?”

  McPherson leaned forward while Haller leaned back, clearly deferring to his second chair.

  “Well, I see no legal embargo on digging,” she finally said. “It’s public property and there is nothing that would stop you legally. No need for a search warrant. But do you want to dig right now based on this one dog with what seems like a high false-positive rate, or do we wait until after the trial?”

  “Or maybe even during the trial,” Haller said.

  “The second question is the more difficult,” McPherson said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say there are remains buried in one or even all of those spots. Yes, Jessup’s activities seem to form an awareness of what is below the earth in the places he visits in the middle of the night. But does that prove he’s responsible? Hardly. We could charge him, yes, but he could mount a number of defenses based on what we know right now. You agree, Michael?”

  Haller leaned forward and nodded.

  “Suppose you dig and you find the remains of one of these girls. Even if you can confirm the ID—and that’s going to be a big if—you still don’t have any evidence connecting her death to Jessup. All you have is his guilty knowledge of the burial spot. That is very significant but is it enough to go into court with? I don’t know. I think I’d rather be defense counsel than prosecutor on that one. I think Maggie’s right, there are any number of defenses that he could employ to explain his knowledge of the burial sites. He could invent a straw man—somebody else who did the killings and told him about them or forced him to take part in the burials. Jessup’s spent twenty-four years in prison. How many other convicts has he been exposed to? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many of them were murderers? He could lay this whole thing on one of them, say that he heard in prison about these burial spots and he decided to come and pray for the souls of the victims. He could make up anything.”

  He shook his head again.

  “The bottom line is, there are a lot of ways to go with a defense like this. Without any sort of physical evidence connecting him or a witness, I think you would have a problem.”

  “Maybe there is physical evidence in the graves that connects him,” Bosch offered.

  “Maybe, but what if there isn’t?” Haller shot right back. “You never know, you could also pull a confession out of Jessup. But I doubt that, too.”

  McPherson took it from there.

  “Michael mentioned the big if, the remains. Can they be IDed? Will we be able to establish how long they were in the ground? Remember, Jessup has an ironclad alibi for the last twenty-four years. If you pull up a set of bones and we can’t say for sure that they’ve been down there since at least ’eighty-six, then Jessup would walk.”

  Haller got up and went to the whiteboard, grabbing a marker off the ledge. In a clear spot he drew two circles side by side.

  “Here’s what we’ve got so far. One is our case and one is this whole new thing you’ve come up with. They’re separate. We have the case with the trial about to go and then we have your new investigation. When they’re separate like this we’re fine. Your investigation has no bearing on our trial, so we can keep the two circles separate. Understand?”

  “Sure,” Bosch said.

  Haller grabbed the eraser off the ledge and wiped the two circles off the board. He then drew two new circles, but this time they overlapped.

  “Now if you go out there and start digging and you find bones? This is what happens. Our two circles become connected. And that’s when your thing becomes our thing and we have to reveal this to the defense and the whole wide world.”

  McPherson nodded in agreement.

  “So then, what do we do?” Bosch asked. “Drop it?”

  “No, we don’t drop it,” Haller said. “We just be careful and we keep them separate. You know what is universally held as the best trial strategy? Keep it simple, stupid. So let’s not complicate things. Let’s keep our circles separate and go to trial and get this guy for killing Melissa Landy. And when we’re done that, we go up to Mulholland with shovels.”

  “Done with.”

  “What?”

  “When we’re done with that.”

  “Whatever, Professor.”

  Bosch’s eyes moved from Haller’s connected circles on the board to the row of faces. All his instincts told him that at least some of those girls did not get any older than they were in the photos. They were in the ground and had been buried there by Jason Jessup. He hated the idea of them spending another day in the dirt but knew that they would have to wait a little longer.

&
nbsp; “Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep working it on the side. For now. But there’s also one other thing from the profiler that you should know.”

  “The other shoe drops,” McPherson said. “What?”

  Haller had returned to his seat. Bosch pulled out a chair and sat down himself.

  “She said a killer like Jessup doesn’t reform in prison. The dark matter inside doesn’t go away. It stays. It waits. It’s like a cancer. And it reacts to outside pressures.”

  “He’ll kill again,” McPherson said.

  Bosch slowly nodded.

  “He can visit the graves of his past victims for only so long before he’ll feel the need for… fresh inspiration. And if he feels under pressure, the chances are good he’ll move in that direction even sooner.”

  “Then we’d better be ready,” Haller said. “I’m the guy who let him out. If you have any doubts about him being covered, then I want to hear them.”

  “No doubts,” Bosch said. “If Jessup makes a move, we’ll be on him.”

  “When are you planning on going out with the SIS again?” McPherson asked.

  “Whenever I can. But I’ve got my daughter, so it’s whenever she’s on a sleepover or I can get somebody to come in.”

  “I want to go once.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see the real Jessup. Not the one in the papers and on TV.”

  “Well…”

  “What?”

  “Well, there are no women on the team and they’re constantly moving with this guy. There won’t be any bathroom breaks. They piss in bottles.”

  “Don’t worry, Harry, I think I can handle it.”

  “Then I’ll set it up.”

  Twenty-one

  Friday, March 19, 10:50 A.M.

  I checked my watch when I heard Maggie say hello to Lorna in the reception room. She entered the office and dropped her case on her desk. It was one of those slim and stylish Italian leather laptop totes that she never would have bought for herself. Too expensive and too red. I wanted to know who gave it to her like I wanted to know a lot of things she would never tell me.

  But the origin of her red briefcase was the least of my worries. In thirteen days we would start picking jurors in the Jessup case and Clive Royce had finally landed his best pretrial punch. It was an inch thick and sat in front of me on my desk.

  “Where have you been?” I said with a clear note of annoyance in my voice. “I called your cell and got no answer.”

  She came over to my desk, dragging the extra chair with her.

  “More like, where were you?”

  I glanced at my calendar blotter and saw nothing in the day’s square.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My phone was turned off because I was at Hayley’s honors assembly. They don’t like cell phones ringing when they are calling the kids up to get their pins.”

  “Ah, shit!”

  She had told me and copied me on the e-mail. I printed it out and put it on the refrigerator. But not on my desk blotter or into my phone’s calendar. I blew it.

  “You should’ve been there, Haller. You would’ve been proud.”

  “I know, I know. I messed up.”

  “It’s all right. You’ll get other chances. To mess up or stand up.”

  That hurt. It would’ve been better if she had chewed my ass out like she used to. But the passive-aggressive approach always got deeper under the skin. And she probably knew that.

  “I’ll be at the next one,” I said. “That’s a promise.”

  She didn’t sarcastically say Sure, Haller, or I’ve heard that one before. And somehow that made it worse. Instead, she just got down to business.

  “What is that?”

  She nodded at the document in front of me.

  “This is Clive Royce’s last best stand. It’s a motion to exclude the testimony of Sarah Ann Gleason.”

  “And of course he drops it off on a Friday afternoon three weeks before trial.”

  “More like seventeen days.”

  “My mistake. What’s he say?”

  I turned the document around and slid it across the desk to her. It was held together with a large black clip.

  “He’s been working on this one since the start because he knows the case comes down to her. She’s our primary witness and without her none of the other evidence matters. Even the hair in the truck is circumstantial. If he takes out Sarah he takes out our case.”

  “I get that. But how’s he trying to get rid of her?”

  She started flipping through the pages.

  “It was delivered at nine and is eighty-six pages long so I haven’t had the time to completely digest it. But it’s a two-pronged effort. He’s attacking her original identification from when she was a kid. Says the setup was prejudicial. And he—”

  “That was already argued, accepted by the trial court and it held up on appeal. He’s wasting the court’s time.”

  “He’s got a new angle this time. Remember, Kloster’s got Alzheimer’s and is no good as a witness. He can’t tell us about the investigation and he can’t defend himself. So this time out Royce alleges that Kloster told Sarah which man to identify. He pointed Jessup out for her.”

  “And what is his backup? Supposedly only Sarah and Kloster were in the room.”

  “I don’t know. There’s no backup but my guess is he’s riffing on the radio call Kloster made telling them to make Jessup take off his hat.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The lineup was put together to see if Sarah could identify Derek Wilbern, the other driver. Any argument that he then told her to put the finger on Jessup is ridiculous. That ID came quite unexpectedly but naturally and convincingly. This is nothing to get worked up about. Even without Kloster we’ll tear this one up.”

  I knew she was right but the first attack wasn’t really what I was most worried about.

  “That’s just his opening salvo,” I said. “That’s nothing compared with part two. He also seeks to exclude her entire testimony based on unreliable memory. He’s got her whole drug history laid out in the motion, seemingly down to every chip of meth she ever smoked. He’s got arrest records, jail records, witnesses who detail her consumption of drugs, multiple-partner sex and what they term her belief in out-of-body experiences—I guess she forgot to mention that part up in Port Townsend. And to top it all off, he’s got experts on memory loss and false memory creation as a by-product of meth addiction. So in all, you know what he’s got? He’s got us fucked coming and going.”

  Maggie didn’t respond as she was scanning the summary pages at the end of Royce’s motion.

  “He’s got investigators here and up in San Francisco,” I added. “It’s thorough and exhaustive, Mags. And you know what? It doesn’t even look like he’s gone up to Port Townsend to interview her yet. He says he doesn’t have to because it doesn’t matter what she says now. It can’t be relied upon.”

  “He’ll have his experts and we’ll have ours on rebuttal,” she said calmly. “We expected this part and I’ve already been lining ours up. At worst, we can turn this into a wash. You know that.”

  “The experts are only a small part of it.”

  “We’ll be fine,” she insisted. “And look at these witnesses. Her ex-husbands and boyfriends. I see Royce conveniently didn’t bother to include their own arrest records here. They’re all tweakers themselves. We’ll make them look like pimps and pedophiles with grudges against her because she left them in the dust when she got straight. She married the first one when she was eighteen and he was twenty-nine. She told us. I’d love to get him in the chair in front of the judge. I really think you are overreacting to this, Haller. We can argue this. We can make him put some of these so-called witnesses in front of the judge and we can knock every one of them out of the box. You’re right about one thing, though. This is Royce’s last best stand. It’s just not going to be good enough.”

  I shook my head. She was seeing only what was on paper and what c
ould be blocked or parried with our own swords. Not what was not written.

  “Look, this is about Sarah. He knows the judge is not going to want to chop our main witness. He knows we’ll get by this. But he’s putting the judge on notice that this is what he is going to put Sarah through if she takes the stand. Her whole life, every sordid detail, every pipe and dick she ever smoked, she’s going to have to sit up there and take it. Then he’ll trot out some PhD who’ll put pictures of a melted brain on the screen and say this is what meth does. Do we want that for her? Is she strong enough to take it? Maybe we have to go to Royce, offer a deal for time served and some kind of payout from the city. Something everybody can live with.”

  Maggie flopped the motion onto the desk.

  “Are you kidding me? You’re running scared because of this?”

  “I’m not running scared. I’m being realistic. I didn’t go up to Washington. I have no feel for this woman. I don’t know if she can stand up to this or not. Besides, we can always take a second bite of the apple with those cases Bosch has been working.”

  Maggie leaned back in her chair.

  “There’s no guarantee that anything will come out of those other cases. We have to put everything we have into this one, Haller. I could go back up there and hold Sarah’s hand a little bit. Tell her more about what to expect. Get her ready. She already understood it wasn’t going to be pretty.”

  “To put it mildly.”

  “I think she’s strong enough. I think in some weird way she might need it. You know, get it all out there, expiate her sins. It’s about redemption with her, Michael. You know about that.”

  We held each other’s eyes for a long moment.

  “Anyway, I think she’ll be more than strong and the jury will see it,” she said. “She’s a survivor and everybody likes a survivor.”

  I nodded.

  “You have a way of convincing people, Mags. It’s a gift. We both know you should be lead on this, not me.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “All right, go up there and get her prepped for this. Next week, maybe. By then we should have a witness schedule and you can tell her when we’ll be bringing her down.”