He hoped the implication of the last line was clear to his visitors.
“So they have no jail?” Soto asked. “They have to run bodies down to Van Nuys?”
“No, we’ve got a jail,” Bosch said. “It’s part of the station. State-of-the-art, single-man cells. I’ve even stayed over a few times. Beats the bunk room at the PAB, with everybody snoring.”
She threw him a look as if to say he had changed if he was willing to sleep in a jail cell. He winked at her.
“I can sleep anywhere,” he said.
When the traffic cleared, they crossed over to the police station and entered through the side door. The detective bureau was through the first door on the right. Bosch opened it with a key card and held the door as the others stepped in.
The bureau was no bigger than a single-car garage. At center were three workstations tightly positioned in a single module. These belonged to the unit’s three full-time detectives, Danny Sisto, a recently promoted detective named Oscar Luzon, and Bella Lourdes, just a month back from a lengthy injury leave. The walls of the unit were lined with file cabinets, radio chargers, and a coffee-and-printing station below bulletin boards covered in Wanted posters, work schedules, and departmental bulletins. Up high on one wall was a poster depicting the iconic Disney ducks Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which were the proud nicknames of the three detectives who worked in the module below. Captain Trevino’s office was to the right and the war room was on the left. A third room was subleased to the Medical Examiner’s Office and used by two coroner’s investigators who covered the entire San Fernando Valley.
Bosch saw Lourdes peeking over a partition from her desk. He gave her a nod of thanks for the heads-up. It was also a sign that so far things were okay. He then led the visitors into the war room. It was a soundproof room with walls lined with white boards and flat-screen monitors. At center was a boardroom-style table with eight leather chairs around it. The room was designed to be the command post for major crime investigations, task force operations, and coordinating responses to public emergencies such as earthquakes and riots. The reality was that such incidents were rare and the room was used primarily as a lunchroom, the broad table and comfortable chairs perfect for group lunches. The room carried the distinct odor of Mexican food. The owner of Magaly’s Tamales up on Maclay Avenue routinely dropped off free food for the troops and it was usually devoured in the war room.
“Have a seat,” Bosch said.
Tapscott and Soto sat on one side of the table, while Kennedy went around and sat across from them. Bosch took a chair at one end of the table so he would have angles on all three visitors.
“So, what’s going on?” he said.
“Well, let’s introduce ourselves,” Kennedy began. “You, of course, know Detective Soto from your work together in the Open-Unsolved Unit. And now you’ve met Detective Tapscott. They have been working with me on a review of a homicide case you handled almost thirty years ago.”
“Preston Borders,” Bosch said. “How is Preston? Still on death row at Q last time I checked.”
“He’s still there.”
“So why are you looking at the case?”
Kennedy had pulled his chair close and had his arms folded and his elbows on the table. He drum-rolled the fingers of his left hand as if deciding how to answer Bosch’s question, even though it was clear that everything about this surprise visit was rehearsed.
“I am assigned to the Conviction Integrity Unit,” Kennedy said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I have used Detectives Tapscott and Soto on some of the cases I’ve handled because of their skill in working cold cases.”
Bosch knew that the CIU was new and had been put into place after he had left the LAPD. Its formation was the fulfillment of a campaign promise made during a heated election in which the policing of the police was a hot-ticket debate issue. The newly elected D.A.—Tak Kobayashi—had promised to create a unit that would respond to the seeming groundswell of cases where new forensic technologies had led to hundreds of exonerations of people imprisoned across the country. Not only was new science leading the way, but old science once thought to be unassailable as evidence was being debunked and swinging open prison doors for the innocent.
As soon as Kennedy mentioned his assignment, Bosch put everything together and knew what was going on. Borders, the man thought to have killed three women but convicted of only one murder, was making a final grab at freedom after thirty years on death row.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Bosch said. “Borders? Really? You are seriously looking at that case?”
He looked from Kennedy to his old partner Soto.
He felt totally betrayed.
“Lucia?” he said
“Harry,” she said. “You need to listen.”
2
Bosch felt like the walls of the war room were closing in on him. In his mind and in reality, he had put Borders away for good. He didn’t count on the sadistic sex murderer ever getting the needle, but death row was its own particular hell, one that was still harsher than any sentence that put a man in general population. The isolation of it was what Borders deserved. He went up to San Quentin as a twenty-six-year-old man. That meant fifty-plus years of solitary confinement. Less if he got lucky. More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California.
“It’s not as simple as you think,” Kennedy said.
“Really?” Bosch said. “Tell me why.”
“The obligation of the Conviction Integrity Unit is to consider all legitimate petitions that come to it. Our review process is the first stage, and that happens in-house before they go to the LAPD or other law enforcement. When a case meets a certain threshold of concern, we go to the next step and call in law enforcement to carry out a due diligence investigation.”
“And of course everyone is sworn to secrecy at that point.”
Bosch looked at Soto as he said it. She looked away.
“Absolutely,” Kennedy said.
“I don’t know what evidence Borders or his lawyer brought to you, but it’s bullshit,” Bosch said. “He murdered Danielle Skyler and everything else is a scam.”
Kennedy didn’t respond but from his look Bosch could tell he was surprised he still remembered the victim’s name.
“Yeah, thirty years later I remember her name,” Bosch said. “I also remember Donna Timmons and Vicki Novotney, the two victims we couldn’t make cases on. Were they part of this due diligence you conducted?”
“Harry,” Soto said, trying to calm him.
“Borders didn’t bring any new evidence,” Kennedy said. “It was already there.”
That hit Bosch like a punch. He knew Kennedy was talking about the physical evidence from the case. The implication was that there was evidence from the crime scene or that had been collected elsewhere by Bosch that cleared Borders of the crime. The greater implication was incompetence or, worse, malfeasance—that he had missed the evidence or intentionally withheld it.
“What are we talking about here?” he asked.
“DNA,” Kennedy said. “It wasn’t part of the original case in ’eighty-eight. The case was prosecuted before DNA was allowed into use in criminal cases in California. It wasn’t introduced and accepted by a court up in Ventura for another year. In L.A. County it was a year after that.”
Kennedy nodded to Soto.
“We went to property and pulled the box,” she said. “You know the routine. We took clothing collected from the victim to the lab and they put it through the serology protocol.”
“They did a protocol twenty-nine years ago,” Bosch said. “But back then, they looked for ABO markers instead of DNA. And they found nothing. You’re going to tell me that—”
“They found semen,” Kennedy said. “It was a minute amount, but this time they found it. The process has obviously gotten more sophisticated in thirty years. And it didn’t come from Borders.”
Bosch shook his head.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” h
e said. “Whose was it?”
“A rapist named Lucas John Olmer,” Soto said.
Bosch had never heard of Olmer. His mind went to work, looking for the scam, the fix, but not considering that he had been wrong when he closed the cuffs around Borders’s wrists.
“Olmer’s in San Quentin, right?” he said. “This whole thing is a—”
“No, he’s not,” Tapscott said. “He’s dead.”
“Give us a little credit, Harry,” Soto added. “It’s not like we went looking for it to be this way. Olmer was never in San Quentin. He died in Corcoran four years ago and he never knew Borders.”
“Big surprise there,” Tapscott said. “Those prisons are only three hundred miles apart.”
His misplaced sarcasm gave Bosch the urge to backhand him across the mouth. Soto knew her old partner’s triggers and reached over to put a hand on Bosch’s arm.
“Harry, this is not your fault,” she said. “This is on the lab. The reports are all there. You are right—they found nothing. They missed it back then.”
Bosch looked at her and pulled his arm back.
“You really believe that?” he said. “Because I don’t. This is Borders. He’s behind this—somehow. I know it.”
“How, Harry? We’ve looked for the fix in this.”
“Who’s been in the box since then?”
“The last person to pull the box was you. Eleven years ago, when you were working with Allingwood on Borders’s final appeal. Show him the video.”
She nodded to Tapscott, who pulled his phone and opened up a video. He turned the screen to Bosch.
“This is at Piper Tech,” he said.
Piper Tech was where the LAPD’s records and evidence property archives were located, along with the fingerprint unit. The aero squadron had the roof. Bosch knew that the integrity protocol in the archival unit was high. Sworn officers had to provide departmental ID and fingerprints to pull a case. The boxes were opened in an examination area under twenty-four-hour video surveillance. But this was Tapscott’s own video, recorded on his phone.
“This was not our first go-round with CIU, so we have our own protocol,” Tapscott said. “This is us opening the box. We video the whole thing. Doesn’t matter that they have their own cameras down there. And as you can see, no seal is broken, no tampering.”
The video showed Soto displaying the box to the camera, turning it over so that all sides and seams could be seen as intact, as well as the red tape that sealed it and was wrapped twice around it for good measure—a habit Bosch had employed for decades when archiving evidence. Soto manipulated the box in a bored manner and Bosch read that as her thinking they were wasting their time on this one. At least up until that point, Bosch still had her in his court.
Soto then used a box cutter attached by a wire to an examination table to slice through the evidence tape and open the box. As she started removing items from the box, including the victim’s clothing and an envelope containing her fingernail clippings, she called each piece of property out so it would be duly recorded.
Before the video was over, Tapscott pulled the phone back and killed the playback. He then put the phone away.
“On and on like that,” he said. “Nobody fucked with the box. What was in it had been there from day one.”
Bosch was silent for a long moment as he considered for the first time that his thirty-year belief that he had put a sadistic killer away for good was bogus.
“Where’d they find it?” he finally asked.
“Find what?” Kennedy asked.
“The DNA,” Bosch said.
“One microdot on the victim’s underwear,” Kennedy said.
“Easy to have missed back in ’eighty-eight,” Soto said. “They were probably just using black lights then.”
Bosch nodded.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
Soto looked at Kennedy. The question was his to answer.
“There’s a hearing scheduled in department one-sixteen next Wednesday,” the prosecutor said. “We’ll be asking Judge Houghton to vacate the sentence and release Borders from death row.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bosch said.
“He has a lawyer and he’ll be filing a claim against the city,” Kennedy continued. “We’ve been in contact with the City Attorney’s Office. We’re probably talking about a settlement well into seven figures.”
Bosch looked down at the table. He couldn’t hold anyone’s eyes.
“And I have to warn you,” Kennedy said. “If a settlement is not reached and he files a claim in federal court, he can go after you personally.”
Bosch nodded. He knew that already. A civil rights claim filed by Borders would leave Bosch personally responsible for damages if the city chose not to cover him. Since two years ago Bosch had sued the city to reinstate his full pension, it was unlikely that he would find a single soul in the City Attorney’s Office interested in indemnifying him against damages collected by Borders. The one thought that pushed through this reality to him was of his daughter. He could have nothing but an insurance policy to leave her.
“I’m sorry,” Soto said. “If there were any other …”
She didn’t finish and he slowly brought his eyes up to hers.
“Nine days,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“The hearing’s in nine days. I have until then to figure out how he did it.”
“Harry, we’ve been working this for five weeks. There’s nothing. This was before Olmer was on anybody’s radar. All we know is he wasn’t in jail at the time and he was in L.A.—we found work records. But the DNA is the DNA. On her clothing, DNA from a man later convicted of multiple abduction-rapes. Similar to Skyler without the death. I mean, no D.A. in the world would touch this or go any other way with it.”
Kennedy cleared his throat.
“We came here today out of respect for you, Detective, and all the cases you’ve cleared over time. We don’t want to get into an adversarial position on this.”
“And you don’t think those cases are affected by this?” Bosch said. “You open the door to this guy and you might as well open it for every one of the people I sent away. If you put it on the lab—same thing. It taints everything.”
Bosch leaned back and stared at his old partner. He had at one time been her mentor. She had to know what this was doing to him.
“It is what it is,” Kennedy said. “We have an obligation. ‘Better that one hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned.’”
“Spare me your bastardized Ben Franklin bullshit,” Bosch said. “I put Borders in the vicinity of all three of those women’s disappearances and your office passed on two of them, some snot-nosed prosecutor saying there was not enough. This doesn’t fucking make sense. I want the nine days and I want access to everything you have and everything you’ve done.”
He looked at Soto as he said it but Kennedy responded.
“Not going to happen, Detective,” he said. “As I said, we’re here as a courtesy. But you’re not on this case anymore.”
Before Bosch could counter, there was a sharp knock on the door and it was cracked open. Bella Lourdes stood there. She waved him out.
“Harry,” she said. “We need to talk right now.”
There was an urgency in her voice that Bosch could not ignore. He looked back at the others seated at the table and started to get up.
“Hold on a second,” he said. “We’re not done.”
He stood up and went to the door. Lourdes signaled him all the way out with her fingers. She closed the door behind him. He noticed that the squad room was empty—no one in the module, the captain’s door open and his desk chair empty.
“Harry, we’ve got two down in a robbery at a farmacia on the mall.”
“Two what? Officers?”
“No, people there. Behind the counter. Two one-eighty-sevens. The chief wants all hands on this. Are you okay? You want to ride with me?”
The California Penal Code designation for murder was 187. Bosch looked back at the closed door of the war room and thought about what had been said in there. What was he going to do about it? How was he going to handle it?
“Harry, come on, I gotta go. You in or out?”
Bosch looked at her.
“Okay, let’s go.”
They moved quickly toward the door to the lobby and the side entrance of the station. He pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and turned off the recording app.
“What about them?” Lourdes said.
“Fuck them,” Bosch said. “They’ll figure it out.”
3
San Fernando was a municipality barely two and a half square miles and surrounded on all sides by the city of Los Angeles. To Harry Bosch it was the proverbial needle in the haystack, the tiny place he had found when his time with the LAPD ended with him still believing he had more to give and a mission unfulfilled. Racked by budgetary shortfalls in the years that followed the 2008 recession, and having laid off a quarter of its forty officers, the Police Department actively pursued the creation of a voluntary corps of retired law officers to work in every section of the department, from patrol to communications to detectives.
When Chief Valdez reached out to Bosch and said he had an old jail cell full of cold cases and no one to work them, it was like a lifeline had been thrown to a drowning man. Bosch was alone and certainly adrift, having unceremoniously left the department he had served for almost forty years at the same time that his daughter left home for college. Most of all, the offer came at a time he felt unfinished. After all the years he had put in, he never expected to walk out the door one day at the LAPD and not be allowed back in.
At a period in their lives when most men took up golf or bought a boat, Bosch felt resolutely incomplete. He was a closer. He needed to work cases, and setting up shop as a private eye or a defense investigator wasn’t going to suit him. He took the offer from the chief and soon was proving he was a closer at the SFPD. And he quickly went from part-time hours working cold cases to mentoring the entire detective bureau. Huey, Dewey, and Louie were dedicated investigators but together they had a total of less than ten years’ experience as detectives. Captain Trevino was only part-time in the unit himself, responsible for supervising both the communications unit and the jail. It fell to Bosch to teach Lourdes, Sisto, and Luzon the mission.
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