The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  “Yes, Your Honor. Doctor, of the twenty thousand autopsies you have performed, how many of them were on victims of sexually motivated violence?”

  Eisenbach looked across the floor to me, but there was nothing I could do for him. Bosch had taken Maggie’s place at the prosecution table. He leaned over to me and whispered.

  “What’s he doing? Trying to make our case?”

  I held up my hand so I would not be distracted from the back-and-forth between Royce and Eisenbach.

  “No, he’s making their case,” I whispered back.

  Eisenbach still hadn’t answered.

  “Doctor,” the judge said, “please answer the question.”

  “I don’t have a count but many of them were sexually motivated crimes.”

  “Was this one?”

  “Based on the autopsy findings I could not make that conclusion. But whenever you have a young child, particularly a female, and there is a stranger abduction, then you are almost always—”

  “Move to strike the answer as nonresponsive,” Royce said, cutting the witness off. “The witness is assuming facts not in evidence.”

  The judge considered the objection. I stood up, ready to respond but said nothing.

  “Doctor, please answer only the question you are asked,” the judge said.

  “I thought I was,” Eisenbach said.

  “Then let me be more specific,” Royce said. “You found no indications of sexual assault or abuse on the body of Melissa Landy, is that correct, Doctor?”

  “That is correct.”

  “What about on the victim’s clothing?”

  “The body is my jurisdiction. The clothing is analyzed by forensics.”

  “Of course.”

  Royce hesitated and looked down at his notes. I could tell he was trying to decide how far to take something. It was a case of “so far, so good—do I risk going further?”

  Finally, he decided.

  “Now, Doctor, a moment ago when I objected to your answer, you called this a stranger abduction. What evidence from the autopsy supported that claim?”

  Eisenbach thought for a long moment and even looked down at the autopsy report in front of him.

  “Doctor?”

  “Uh, there is nothing I recall from the autopsy alone that supports this.”

  “Actually, the autopsy supports a conclusion quite the opposite, doesn’t it?”

  Eisenbach looked genuinely confused.

  “I am not sure what you mean.”

  “Can I draw your attention to page eight of the autopsy protocol? The preliminary examination of the body.”

  Royce waited a moment until Eisenbach turned to the page. I did as well but didn’t need to. I knew where Royce was going and couldn’t stop him. I just needed to be ready to object at the right moment.

  “Doctor, the report states that scrapings of the victim’s fingernails were negative for blood and tissue. Do you see that on page eight?”

  “Yes, I scraped her nails but they were clean.”

  “This indicates she did not scratch her attacker, her killer. Correct?”

  “That would be the indication, yes.”

  “And this would also indicate that she knew her attack—”

  “Objection!”

  I was on my feet but not quick enough. Royce had gotten the suggestion out and to the jury.

  “Assumes facts not in evidence,” I said. “Your Honor, defense counsel is clearly attempting to plant seeds with the jury that do not exist.”

  “Sustained. Mr. Royce, a warning.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. The defense has no further questions for this prosecution witness.”

  Twenty-eight

  Monday, April 5, 4:45 P.M.

  Bosch knocked on the door of room 804 and looked directly at the peephole. The door was quickly opened by McPherson, who was checking her watch as she stood back to let him enter.

  “Why aren’t you in court with Mickey?” she asked.

  Bosch entered. The room was a suite with a decent view of Grand Avenue and the back of the Biltmore. There was a couch and two chairs, one of them occupied by Sarah Ann Gleason. Bosch nodded his hello.

  “Because he doesn’t need me there. I’m needed here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Royce tipped his hand on the defense’s case. I need to talk to Sarah about it.”

  He started toward the couch but McPherson put her hand on his arm and stopped him.

  “Wait a minute. Before you talk to Sarah you talk to me. What’s going on?”

  Bosch nodded. She was right. He looked around but there was no place for private conversation in the suite.

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  McPherson went to the coffee table and grabbed a key card.

  “We’ll be right back, Sarah. Do you need anything?”

  “No, I’m fine. I’ll be here.”

  She held up a sketchpad. It would keep her company.

  Bosch and McPherson left the room and took the elevator down to the lobby. There was a bar crowded with pre–happy hour drinkers but they found a private spot in a sitting area by the front door.

  “Okay, how did Royce tip his hand?” McPherson asked.

  “When he was cross-examining Eisenbach, he riffed off of Mickey’s question about the killer using only his right hand to choke her.”

  “Right, while he was driving. He panicked when he heard the call on the police radio and killed her.”

  “Right, that’s the prosecution theory. Well, Royce is already setting up a defense theory. On cross he asked whether it was possible that the killer was choking her with one hand while masturbating with the other.”

  She was silent as she computed this.

  “This is the old prosecution theory,” she said. “From the first trial. That it was murder in the commission of a sex act. Mickey and I sort of figured that once Royce got all the discovery material and learned that the DNA came from the stepfather, the defense would play it this way. They’re setting up the stepfather as the straw man. They’ll say he killed her and the DNA proves it.”

  McPherson folded her arms as she worked it out further.

  “It’s good but there are two things wrong with it. Sarah and the hair evidence. So we’re missing something. Royce has got to have something or someone who discredits Sarah’s ID.”

  “That’s why I’m here. I brought Royce’s witness list. These people have been playing hide-and-seek with me and I haven’t run them all down. Sarah’s got to look at this list and tell me which one I need to focus on.”

  “How the hell will she know?”

  “She’s got to. These are her people. Boyfriends, husbands, fellow tweakers. All of them have records. They’re the people she hung out with before she got straight. Every address is a last-known and worthless. Royce has got to be hiding them.”

  McPherson nodded.

  “That’s why they call him Clever Clive. Okay, let’s talk to her. Let me try first, okay?”

  She stood up.

  “Wait a minute,” Bosch said.

  She looked at him.

  “What is it?”

  “What if the defense theory is the right one?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He didn’t answer and she didn’t wait long. She headed back toward the elevator. He got up and followed.

  They went back to the room. Bosch noticed that Gleason had sketched a tulip on her pad while they had been gone. He sat down on the couch across from her, and McPherson took the chair right next to her.

  “Sarah,” McPherson said. “We need to talk. We think that somebody you used to know during those lost years we were talking about is going to try to help the defense. We need to figure out who it is and what they are going to say.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sarah said. “But I was thirteen years old when this happened to us. What does it matter who my friends were after?”

  “It matters because they can testify about things y
ou might have done. Or said.”

  “What things?”

  McPherson shook her head.

  “That’s what is so frustrating. We don’t really know. We only know that today in court the defense made it clear that they are going to try to put the blame for your sister’s death on your stepfather.”

  Sarah raised her hands as if warding off a blow.

  “That’s crazy. I was there. I saw that man take her!”

  “We know that, Sarah. But it’s a matter of what is conveyed to the jury and what and who the jurors believe. Now, Detective Bosch has a list of the defense’s witnesses. I want you to take a look at it and tell us what the names mean to you.”

  Bosch pulled the list from his briefcase. He handed it to McPherson, who handed it to Sarah.

  “Sorry, all those notes are things I added,” Bosch said, “when I was trying to track them down. Just look at the names.”

  Bosch watched her lips move slightly as she started to read. Then they stopped moving and she just stared at the paper. He saw tears in her eyes.

  “Sarah?” McPherson prompted.

  “These people,” Gleason said in a whisper. “I thought I’d never see them again.”

  “You may never see them again,” McPherson said. “Just because they’re on that list, it doesn’t mean they’ll be called. They pull names out of the records and load up the list to confuse us, Sarah. It’s called haystacking. They hide the real witnesses, and our investigator—Detective Bosch—wastes his time checking out the wrong people. But there’s got to be at least one name on there that counts. Who is it, Sarah? Help us.”

  She stared at the list without responding.

  “Someone who will be able to say you two were close. Who you spent time with and told secrets to.”

  “I thought a husband couldn’t testify against a wife.”

  “One spouse can’t be forced to testify against the other. But what are you talking about, Sarah?”

  “This one.”

  She pointed to a name on the list. Bosch leaned over to read it. Edward Roman. Bosch had traced him to a lockdown rehab center in North Hollywood where Sarah had spent nine months after her last incarceration. The only thing Bosch had guessed was that they’d had contact in group therapy. The last known address provided by Royce was a motel in Van Nuys but Roman was long gone from there. Bosch had gotten no further with it and had dismissed the name as part of Royce’s haystack.

  “Roman,” he said. “You were with him in rehab, right?”

  “Yes,” Gleason said. “Then we got married.”

  “When?” McPherson said. “We have no record of that marriage.”

  “After we got out. He knew a minister. We got married on the beach. But it didn’t last very long.”

  “Did you get divorced?” McPherson asked.

  “No… I never really cared. Then when I got straight I just didn’t want to go back there. It was one of those things you block out. Like it didn’t happen.”

  McPherson looked at Bosch.

  “It might not have been a legal marriage,” he said. “There’s nothing in the county records.”

  “Doesn’t matter if it was a legal marriage or not,” she said. “He is obviously a volunteer witness, so he can testify against her. What matters is what his testimony is going to be. What’s he going to say, Sarah?”

  Sarah slowly shook her head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what did you tell him about your sister and your stepfather?”

  “I don’t know. Those years… I can hardly remember anything from back then.”

  There was a silence and then McPherson asked Sarah to look at the rest of the names on the list. She did and shook her head.

  “I don’t know who some of these people are. Some people in the life, I just knew them by street names.”

  “But Edward Roman you know?”

  “Yes. We were together.”

  “How long?”

  Gleason shook her head in embarrassment.

  “Not long. Inside rehab we thought we were made for each other. Once we were out, it didn’t work. It lasted maybe three months. I got arrested again and when I got out of jail, he was gone.”

  “Is it possible that it wasn’t a legitimate marriage?”

  Gleason thought for a moment and halfheartedly shrugged.

  “Anything is possible, I guess.”

  “Okay, Sarah, I’m going to step out with Detective Bosch again for a few minutes. I want you to think about Edward Roman. Anything you can remember will be helpful. I’ll be right back.”

  McPherson took the witness list from her and handed it back to Bosch. They left the room but just took a few paces down the hallway before stopping and talking in whispers.

  “I guess you’d better find him,” she said.

  “It won’t matter,” Bosch said. “If he’s Royce’s star witness he won’t talk to me.”

  “Then find out everything you can about him. So when the time comes we can destroy him.”

  “Got it.”

  Bosch turned and headed down the hall toward the elevators. McPherson called after him. He stopped and looked back.

  “Did you mean it?” McPherson asked.

  “Mean what?”

  “What you said down in the lobby. What you asked. You think twenty-four years ago she made it all up?”

  Bosch looked at her for a long moment, then shrugged.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what about the hair in the truck? Doesn’t that tie her story in?”

  Bosch held a hand up empty.

  “It’s circumstantial. And I wasn’t there when they found it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means sometimes things happen when the victim is a child. And that I wasn’t there when they found it.”

  “Boy, maybe you should be working for the defense.”

  Bosch dropped his hand to his side.

  “I’m sure they’ve thought of all of this already.”

  He turned back toward the elevators and headed down the hallway.

  Twenty-nine

  Tuesday, April 6, 9:00 A.M.

  Sometimes the wheels of justice roll smoothly. The second day of trial started exactly as scheduled. The full jury was in the box, the judge was on the bench and Jason Jessup and his attorney were seated at the defense table. I stood and called my first witness of what I hoped would be a productive day for the prosecution. Harry Bosch even had Izzy Gordon in the courtroom ready to go. By five minutes after the hour, she was sworn in and seated. She was a small woman with black-framed glasses that magnified her eyes. My records said she was fifty years old but she looked older.

  “Ms. Gordon, can you tell the jury what you do for a living?”

  “Yes. I am a forensic technician and crime scene supervisor for the Los Angeles Police Department. I have been so employed in the forensics unit since nineteen eighty-six.”

  “Were you so employed on February sixteenth of that year?”

  “Yes, I was. It was my first day of work.”

  “And what was your assignment on that day?”

  “My job was to learn. I was assigned to a crime scene supervisor and I was to get on-the-job training.”

  Izzy Gordon was a major find for the prosecution. Two technicians and a supervisor had worked the three separate crime scenes relating to the Melissa Landy case—the home on Windsor, the trash bin behind the El Rey and the tow truck driven by Jessup. Gordon had been assigned to be at the supervisor’s side and therefore had been in attendance at all three crime scenes. The supervisor was long since dead and the other techs were retired and unable to offer testimony about all three locations. Finding Gordon allowed me to streamline the introduction of crime scene evidence.

  “Who was that supervisor?”

  “That was Art Donovan.”

  “And you got a call out with him that day?”

  “Yes, we did. An abduction that turned i
nto a homicide. We ended up going from scene to scene to scene that day. Three related locations.”

  “Okay, let’s take those scenes one at a time.”

  Over the next ninety minutes I walked Gordon through her Sunday tour of crime scenes on February 16, 1986. Using her as the conduit, I could deliver crime scene photographs, videos and evidence reports. Royce continued his tack of objecting at will in an effort to prevent the unimpeded flow of information to the jury. But he was scoreless and getting under the judge’s skin. I could tell, and so I did not complain. I wanted that annoyance to fester. It might come in handy later.

  Gordon’s testimony was fairly pedestrian as she first discussed the unsuccessful efforts to find shoe prints and other trace evidence on the front lawn of the Landy’s house. It turned more dramatic when she recalled being urgently called to a new crime scene—the trash bin behind the El Rey.

  “We were called when they found the body. It was handled in whispers because the family was there in the house and we did not want to upset them until it was confirmed that there was a body and that it was the little girl.”

  “You and Donovan went to the El Rey Theatre?”

  “Yes, along with Detective Kloster. We met the assistant medical examiner there. We now had a homicide, so more technicians were called in, too.”

  The El Rey portion of Gordon’s testimony was largely an opportunity for me to show more video footage and photographs of the victim on the overhead screens. If nothing else, I wanted every juror in the box to be incensed by what they saw. I wanted to light the fire of one of the basic instincts. Vengeance.

  I counted on Royce to object and he did, but by then he had exhausted his welcome with the judge, and his argument that the images were graphic and cumulatively excessive fell on deaf ears. They were allowed.

  Finally, Izzy Gordon brought us to the last crime scene—the tow truck—and she described how she had spotted three long hairs caught in the crack that split the bench seat and pointed them out to Donovan for collection.

  “What happened to those hairs?” I asked.

  “They were individually bagged and tagged and then taken to the Scientific Investigation Division for comparison and analysis.”

  Gordon’s testimony was smooth and efficient. When I turned her over to the defense, Royce did the best he could. He did not bother to assail the collection of evidence but merely attempted once again to gain a foothold for the defense theory. In doing so he skipped the first two crime scenes and zeroed in on the tow truck.