Resurrection Walk

1

Bosch had the letter propped on the steering wheel. He noted that the printing was legible and the margins were clean. It was in English but not perfect English. There were misspellings and some words were misused. Homonyms, he thought. I din’t do this and want to higher you to clear me.

It was the last line of that paragraph that held his attention: The attorny said I had to plea guilty or I would get life for killing a law enforcement officer.

Bosch turned the page over to see if there was anything written on the back. There was a number stamped at the top, which meant someone in the intel unit at Chino had at least scanned the letter before it was approved and sent out.

Bosch carefully cleared his throat. It was raw from the latest treatment and he didn’t want to make things worse. He read the letter again. I didn’t like him but he was the father of my child. I would not kill him. Thats a lie.

He hesitated, unsure whether to put the letter in the possibles stack or the rejects stack. Before he could decide, the passenger door opened and Haller climbed in, grabbing the stack of unread letters off the seat and tossing them up on the dashboard.

“You didn’t get my text?” he asked.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear it,” Bosch said.

He put the letter on the dashboard and immediately started the Lincoln.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Airport courthouse,” Haller said. “And I’m late. I was hoping you would pick me up out front.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to the judge if I’m late for this hearing.”

Bosch dropped the transmission into drive and pulled away from the curb. He drove up to Broadway and turned into the entrance to the northbound 101. The rotary was lined with tents and cardboard shanties. The recent mayoral election had hinged on which candidate would do a better job with the city’s teeming homeless problem. So far, Bosch hadn’t noticed any changes.

Bosch immediately transitioned to the southbound 110, which would eventually get him to the Century Freeway and a straight shot to the airport.

“Any good ones?” Haller asked.

Bosch handed him the letter from Lucinda Sanz. Haller started reading it, then checked out the name of the inmate.

“A woman,” he said. “Interesting. What’s her story?”

“She killed her ex,” Bosch said. “Sounds like he was a cop. She pleaded nolo to manslaughter because they were holding life without over her head.”

“Man’s laughter...”

Haller continued to read and then tossed the letter on top of the stack of letters he had thrown onto the dashboard.

“That’s the best you got?” he asked.

“So far,” Bosch said. “Still have more to go.”

“Says she didn’t do it but doesn’t say who did. What can we do with that?”

“She doesn’t know. That’s why she wants your help.”

Bosch drove in silence while Haller checked his phone and then called his case manager, Lorna, to go over his calendar. When he was finished, Bosch asked how long they would be at the next stop.

“Depends on my client and his mitigation witness,” Haller said. “He wants to ignore my advice and tell the judge why he’s not really all that guilty. I’d rather have his son beg for mercy for him, but I’m not sure he’ll show, whether he’ll talk, or how that will go.”

“What’s the case?” Bosch asked.

“Fraud. Guy’s looking at eight to twelve. You want to come in and watch?”

“No, I’m thinking that while we’re over there, I might drop by and see Ballard — if she’s around. It’s not far from the courthouse. Text when you’re finished in court and I’ll swing back.”

“If you even hear the text.”

“Then call me. I’ll hear that.”

Ten minutes later he pulled to a stop in front of the courthouse on La Cienega.

“Later, gator,” Haller said as he got out. “Turn your phone up.”

After he shut the door, Bosch adjusted his phone as instructed. He had not been completely open with Haller about his hearing loss. The cancer treatments at UCLA had affected his hearing. So far, he had no issue with voices and conversation, but some electronic noises were at the limits of his range. He had been experimenting with various ringtones and text alerts but was still searching for the right setting. In the meantime, rather than listening for incoming messages or calls, he relied more on the accompanying vibration. But he had put his phone in the car’s cup holder earlier and therefore missed both the sound and vibration that came when Haller wanted to be picked up outside the downtown courthouse.

As he pulled away, Bosch called Renée Ballard’s cell. She picked up quickly.

“Harry?”

“Hey.”

“You all right?”

“Of course. You at Ahmanson?”

“I am. What’s up?”

“I’m in the neighborhood. Okay if I swing by in a few minutes?”

“I’ll be here.”

“On my way.”

2

The Ahmanson Center was on Manchester ten minutes away. It was the Los Angeles Police Department’s main recruitment and training facility. But it also housed the department’s cold-case archive — six thousand unsolved murders going back to 1960. The Open-Unsolved Unit was located in an eight-person pod at the end of all the rows of shelving holding the murder books. Bosch had been there before and considered it sacred ground. Every row, every binder, was haunted by justice on hold.

At the reception desk Bosch was given a visitor’s tag to clip to his pocket and sent back to see Ballard. He declined an escort and said he knew the way. Once he went through the archive door, he walked along the row of shelves, noting the case years on index cards taped on the endcaps.

Ballard was at her desk at the back of the pod in the open area beyond the shelves. Only one of the other cubicles was occupied. In it sat Colleen Hatteras, the unit’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy expert and closet psychic. Colleen looked happy to see Bosch when she noticed his approach. The feeling wasn’t mutual. Bosch had served a short stint on the all-volunteer cold-case team the year before, and he had clashed with Hatteras over her supposed hyper-empathic abilities.

“Harry Bosch!” she exclaimed. “What a nice surprise.”

“Colleen,” Bosch said. “I didn’t think you could be surprised.”

Hatteras kept her smile as she registered Bosch’s crack.

“Still the same old Harry,” she said.

Ballard turned in her swivel chair and broke into the conversation before it could go from cordial to contentious.

“Harry,” she said. “What brings you by?”

Bosch approached Ballard and turned slightly to lean on the cubicle’s separation wall. This put his back to Hatteras. He lowered his voice so he could speak as privately to Ballard as possible.

“I just dropped Haller off at the airport courthouse,” he said. “Thought I might just come by to see how things are going over here.”

“Things are going well,” Ballard said. “We’ve closed nine cases so far this year. A lot of them through IGG and Colleen’s good work.”

“Great. Did you put some people in jail or were they cleared others?”

What occurred often in cold-case investigations was a DNA hit leading to a suspect who was long dead or already incarcerated for other crimes with a life sentence. This, of course, solved the case, but it was carried on the books as “cleared other” because no prosecution resulted.

“No, we’ve put some bodies in lockup,” Ballard said. “About half, I’d say. The main thing is the families, though. Just letting them know that it’s cleared whether the suspect’s alive or dead.”

“Right,” Bosch said. “Yeah.”

But telling members of a victim’s family that the case had been solved but the identified suspect was dead had always bothered Bosch when he’d worked cold cases. To Bosch, it was admitting that the killer had gotten away with it. And there was no justice in that.

“So that’s it?” Ballard asked. “You’re just dropping by to say hi and bust Colleen’s chops?”

“No, that wasn’t what...” Bosch mumbled. “I wanted to ask you something.”

“Then ask.”

“I’ve got a couple names. People in prison. I wanted to get case numbers, maybe pull cases.”

“Well, if they’re in lockup, then you’re not talking about cold cases.”

“Right. I know.”

“Then, what... you want me to — Harry, are you kidding?”

“Uh, no, what do you mean?”

Ballard turned and sat up straight so she could glance over her privacy wall at Hatteras. Hatteras had her eyes on her computer screen, which meant she was probably trying to hear their conversation.

Ballard stood up and started walking toward the main aisle that ran in front of the archives.

“Let’s go up and get a coffee,” she said.

She didn’t wait for Bosch to answer. She kept going and he followed. When he glanced back at Hatteras, she was watching them go.

As soon as they got to the break room, Ballard turned and confronted him.

“Harry, are you kidding me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re working for a defense attorney. You want me to run names for a defense attorney?”

Bosch paused. He hadn’t seen it that way until this moment.

“No, I didn’t think that—”

“Yeah, you didn’t think. I can’t run names for you if you’re working for the Lincoln Lawyer. They could fire my ass without even a board of rights. And don’t think there aren’t people over at the PAB gunning for me. There are.”

“I know, I know. Sorry, I didn’t think it through. Forget I was even here. I’ll leave you alone.”

He turned toward the door, but Ballard stopped him.

“No, you’re here, we’re here. Let’s have that cup of coffee.”

“Uh, well, okay. You sure?”

“Just sit down. I’ll get it.”

There was one table in the break room. It was pushed up against the wall, with chairs on the three open sides. Bosch sat down and watched as Ballard filled to-go cups with coffee and brought them over. Like Ballard, Bosch took his coffee black, and she knew this.

“So,” she said after sitting down. “How are you, Harry?”

“Uh, good,” Bosch said. “No complaints.”

“I was over at Hollywood Division about a week ago and ran into your daughter.”

“Yeah, Maddie told me, said you had a guy in a holding cell.”

“A case from ’89. A rape-murder. We got the DNA hit but couldn’t find him. Put out a warrant and he got picked up over there on a traffic violation. He didn’t know we were even looking for him. Anyway, Maddie said you got into some kind of test program at UCLA?”

“Yeah, a clinical trial. Supposedly running a seventy percent extension rate for what I’ve got.”

“‘Extension’?”

“Extension of life. Remission if you’re lucky.”

“Oh. Well, that’s great. Is it getting results with you?”

“Too early to tell. And they don’t tell you if you’re getting the real shot or the placebo. So who knows.”

“That kinda sucks.”

“Yeah. But... I’ve had a few side effects, so I think I’m getting the real stuff.”

“Like what?”

“My throat is pretty rough and I’m getting tinnitus and hearing loss, which is kind of driving me crazy.”

“Well, are they doing something about it?”

“Trying to. But that’s what being in the test group is about. They monitor this stuff, try to deal with side effects.”

“Right. When Maddie told me, I was kind of surprised. Last time we talked, you said you were just going to let nature take its course.”

“I sort of changed my mind.”

“Maddie?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Anyway...”

Bosch leaned forward and picked up his cup. The coffee was still too hot to drink, especially with his ravaged throat, but he wanted to stop talking about his medical situation. Ballard was one of the few people he had told about it, so he felt she deserved an update, but his practice had been not to dwell on the situation and the various possibilities for his future.

“So tell me about Haller,” Ballard said. “How’s that going?”

“Uh, it’s going,” Bosch said. “Staying pretty busy with the stuff coming in.”

“And now you’re driving him?”

“Not always, but it gives us time to talk through the requests. They keep coming, you know?”

The year before, when Bosch worked as a volunteer with Ballard in the Open-Unsolved Unit, they broke open a case that identified a serial killer who had operated unknown in the city for several years. During the investigation, they’d also determined that the killer was responsible for a murder for which an innocent man named Jorge Ochoa had been imprisoned. When politics in the district attorney’s office prevented immediate action to free Ochoa, Ballard tipped Haller to the case. Haller went to work and in a highly publicized habeas hearing was granted a court order freeing Ochoa and declaring him innocent. The media attention garnered by the case resulted in a flood of letters and collect phone calls to Haller from inmates in prisons across California, Arizona, and Nevada. All of them professed their innocence and pleaded for his help. Haller set up what amounted to an in-house innocence project and installed Bosch to do the initial review of the claims. Haller wanted a gatekeeper with an experienced detective’s eye.

“These two names you wanted me to run — you think they’re innocent?” Ballard asked.

“It’s too early for that,” Bosch said. “All I have are their letters from prison. But since I started this, I’ve rejected everything except these two. Something about them tells me I should at least take a further look.”

“So based on a hunch, you’re going to run with them.”

“More than a hunch, I think. Their letters seem... desperate in a certain way. Hard to explain. I don’t mean like desperate to get out of prison but desperate... to be believed, if that makes sense. I just need to take a look at the cases. Maybe then I find their bullshit.”

Ballard pulled her phone out of her back pocket.

“What are the names?” she asked.

“No, I don’t want you to do anything,” Bosch said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Just give me the names. I’m not going to do anything right now with Colleen in the pod. I’m just going to send myself an email with the names. It’ll remind me to get back to you if I get something.”

“Colleen. She’s still sticking her nose into everything?”

“Not so much, but I don’t want her to know anything about this.”

“You sure? Maybe she can just get a feeling or a vibe and tell me whether they’re guilty or not. Save both of us a lot of time.”

“Harry, give it a rest, would you?”

“Sorry. Had to.”

“She does good work on the IGG stuff. That’s all I care about. It makes it worth putting up with her ‘vibes’ in the long run.”

“I’m sure.”

“I have to get back to the pod. Are you going to give me the names?”

“Lucinda Sanz. She’s in Chino. And Edward Dale Coldwell. He’s at Corcoran.”

“Caldwell?”

“No, Cold — Coldwell.”

She was typing with her thumbs on her phone. “DOBs?”

“They didn’t think to add those in their letters. I have inmate numbers if that helps.”

“Not really.”

She slid her phone back into her pocket.

“Okay, if I get anything, I’ll call you.”

“Thanks.”

“But let’s not make it a habit, okay?”

“It won’t be.”

Ballard took her coffee and headed toward the door. Bosch stopped her with a question.

“So who’s gunning for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Downstairs you said there are people gunning for you.”

“Oh, just the usual shit. People hoping I’ll fail. Your everyday woman-in-charge stuff.”

“Well, fuck them.”

“Yeah, fuck them. I’ll see you, Harry.”

“See you.”

3

Bosch was already back on La Cienega by the courthouse when Haller texted that he was finished with the sentencing hearing. Bosch texted that he’d be out front. He pulled the Navigator up to the glass exit doors just as Haller was coming through. Bosch hit the button to unlock the doors, and Haller opened the back and jumped into the seat. He closed the door but Bosch didn’t move the SUV, just stared at him in the rearview.

Haller settled in and then realized they weren’t moving.

“Okay, Harry, we can—”

He realized his mistake, opened the door, and got out. The front door opened and he climbed into the passenger seat.

“Sorry,” he said. “Force of habit.”

They had a deal. On the occasions that Bosch drove the Lincoln, he insisted that Haller ride in the front seat so that they could converse side by side. Bosch had been adamant: he would not play chauffeur to a defense lawyer, even if that attorney happened to be his half brother who had hired him so that he could get private health insurance and be in the clinical trial at UCLA.

Satisfied he had made a proper stand, Bosch pulled away from the curb and said, “Where to?”

“West Hollywood,” Haller said. “Lorna’s apartment.”

Bosch moved into the left lane so he could make a U-turn and head north. He had already driven Haller to many meetings with Lorna, either at her place or at Hugo’s up the street if food was involved. Since the so-called Lincoln Lawyer worked out of his car instead of an office, Lorna managed things from her condo on Kings Road. It was the center of the practice.

“How’d things go back there?” Bosch asked.

“Uh, let’s just say that my client received the full measure of the law,” Haller said.

“Sorry to hear it.”

“The judge was an asshole. I don’t think he even read the PSR.”

It had been Bosch’s experience when he was a sworn officer that presentencing reports weren’t usually favorable to the offender, so he wasn’t sure why Haller thought a careful reading of the PSR by the judge in this case could have resulted in a lesser sentence. Before he could ask about it, Haller reached forward to the center screen on the dashboard, pulled up the favorites list from his contacts, and placed a call to Jennifer Aronson, the associate in the firm of Michael Haller and Associates. The Bluetooth system brought the call up on the vehicle’s speakers and Bosch heard both sides of it.

“Mickey?”

“Where you at, Jen?”

“My house. Just got back from the city attorney’s office.”

“How’d that go?”

“Just round one, really. Bit of a game of chicken. Nobody wants to say a number first.”

Bosch knew that Haller had trusted Aronson with the Jorge Ochoa negotiation. Haller and Associates had filed a lawsuit against the city and the LAPD for his wrongful conviction and incarceration. Though the city and police department were protected by state-mandated limits to financial settlements in such matters, there were aspects of the poor and possibly corrupt handling of the case that allowed Ochoa to seek other financial penalties. The city hoped to head that off with a negotiated settlement.

“Hold the line,” Haller said. “They’ll pay.”

“Hope so,” Aronson said. “How’d it go at the airport?”

“He got the full Monty. The judge probably never even looked at the childhood-trauma stuff. I tried to bring it up but he shut it down. And it didn’t help that my guy pleaded for mercy by telling the judge he hadn’t really meant to defraud all those people. So off he goes. He’ll probably do seven years if he doesn’t act out.”

“Anybody there for him except you?”

“Only me.”

“What about the guy’s kid? I thought you had him queued up.”

“Didn’t show. Anyway, moving on, I’m going to sit down with Lorna in about thirty to look at the calendar. You want to sit in?”

“I can’t. I just came home to grab something to eat. I promised my sister I’d go up to Sylmar to see Anthony today.”

“Right. Well, good luck with that. Let me know if I can help.”

“Thanks. Are you with Harry Bosch?”

“Sittin’ right next to him.”

Haller looked at Bosch and nodded as if he were making up for jumping in the back seat earlier.

“Are we on speaker?” Aronson said. “Can I talk to him?”

“Sure can,” Haller said. “Go.”

He pointed to Bosch.

“You’re on,” he said.

“Harry, I know you’ve drawn a line about not doing defense work per se,” Aronson said.

Bosch nodded his head but then realized she couldn’t see this.

“Right,” he said.

“Well, I could really use you to just look at a case,” Aronson said. “No investigatory work. Just look at what I’ve got so far from the DA.”

Bosch knew that the main juvenile detention center for the north county was in Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley.

“It’s a juvie case?” he asked.

“Yes, my sister’s son,” Aronson said. “Anthony Marcus. He’s sixteen but they’re going to move to try him as an adult. There’s a hearing next week and I’m desperate, Harry. I need to help him.”

“What’s the charge?”

“They say he shot a cop but there’s just nothing in this boy’s character that says he would do something like this.”

“Where? What agency?”

“LAPD. It’s a West Valley case. It happened in Woodland Hills.”

“Is he alive or dead? The cop.”

“He’s alive. He only got shot in the leg or something. But Anthony wouldn’t have done this and he told me he didn’t. He said there had to be another shooter because it wasn’t him.”

Bosch reached up to the dashboard screen and punched the mute button. He looked over at Haller.

“Are you kidding?” Bosch said. “You want me to work for a kid who shot an LAPD cop? I’m already looking at this case from Chino where the woman shot a LEO. You know what this could do to me out there?”

“Hello?” Aronson said. “Did I lose you?”

“I’m not asking you to work the case,” Haller said. “She is, and all she wants is for you to look at the file she has. That’s it. Just read the reports and tell her what you think. Then you’re done with it. You won’t be attached to it and nobody will ever know.”

“But I’ll know,” Bosch said.

“Hello?” Aronson repeated.

Bosch shook his head and unmuted the call.

“Sorry,” he said. “Lost you for a few seconds there. What kind of documents do you have?”

“Well, there’s an investigator’s chronology,” Aronson said. “And there’s an incident report and the medical report on the officer. There’s an evidence report but there’s really nothing on it. I was going to call the assigned prosecutor today and see when the next discovery drop will be. But bottom line is I just think there’s something wrong here. I’ve known this kid all his life and he is not violent. He’s gentle. He’s—”

“Are there any witness reports?” Bosch asked.

“Uh, no, no witnesses,” Aronson said. “It’s basically his word against what the police say.”

Bosch was silent. It sounded like a case he wouldn’t want to be anywhere near. Haller broke into the silence.

“Tell you what, Jennifer,” he said. “Email what you’ve got to Lorna and tell her to print it. Harry will have eyes on it in thirty minutes. We are headed to her place now.”

Haller looked at Bosch.

“Unless you’re saying no,” he said.

Bosch slowly shook his head. This was not what he had signed up for. He didn’t want the last act of his professional life to be helping criminals. The haystack work, as Haller called it, was one thing. Finding innocence among the many convicted felt to Bosch like a check on a system he knew firsthand was imperfect. But assisting in the defense of someone accused was something else in his mind.

“I’ll take a look,” he said grudgingly. “But if there’s any follow-up work needed, you have to go to Cisco for that.”

Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski was Haller and Associates’ longtime investigator — and Lorna Taylor’s husband.

“Thank you, Harry,” Aronson said. “Please call me as soon as you’ve had a chance to look it over.”

“Sure,” Bosch said. “Why does your sister want you to go up there to see the kid?”

“Because she says he’s not doing well,” Aronson said. “He’s getting bullied by other kids there. I figure if I can sit with him for an hour, that’s an hour he doesn’t have to be afraid.”

“Okay, well, I’ll look at the stuff from the file as soon as I get it,” Bosch said.

“Thank you, Harry,” Aronson said again. “I really, really appreciate it.”

“Anything else on your end, Jennifer?” Haller asked.

“No, just what I said,” she said.

“When’s the next meet with the city attorney’s office?” Haller asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Aronson said.

“Good,” Haller said. “Keep the pressure on. Let’s talk after that.”

Haller disconnected and they drove in silence for a bit. Bosch was not happy and wasn’t trying to hide it.

“Harry, just look at the file and tell her you got nothing,” Haller said. “She’s too emotionally invested in the case. She’s got to learn to—”

“I know she’s invested,” Bosch said. “I don’t blame her. But what is happening now is exactly what I told you I didn’t want to happen. One more time and I’m out. You understand?”

“I understand,” Haller said.

They made good time to West Hollywood, which was a relief to Bosch since there was a steely silence in the car after the phone call with Aronson. Bosch turned off Santa Monica Boulevard onto Kings Road and cruised two blocks south. Haller had texted Lorna about their imminent arrival and she was standing at a red curb waiting, file in hand. The windows on the Navigator were smoked. When Bosch pulled to a stop, Lorna stepped off the curb, walked around the back of the SUV, and got in the passenger seat behind Bosch.

“Oh,” she said to Haller. “I thought you’d be in your usual spot.”

“Not when Harry’s driving,” Haller said. “Did you print out the stuff from Jennifer?”

“Got it right here.”

“Pass that up to Harry so he can take a look while I jump in the back with you.”

Bosch was handed a file. He opened it and tried to tune out the conversation from the back as Haller started going over his court calendar and other case-related matters with Lorna. Bosch’s starting point was the incident report.

The kid’s name was Anthony Marcus. He was about to spend his seventeenth birthday in the juvenile detention center in Sylmar. He was accused of shooting a patrol cop named Kyle Dexter with the officer’s own gun. According to the report, Dexter and his partner Yvonne Garrity had responded to a burglary-in-progress call at a home on Califa Street in Woodland Hills. Upon arrival they searched the exterior of the house and found a sliding door on a rear pool deck open. They called for backup, but before other officers arrived,

Dexter saw a figure in dark clothing run from the house, climb over a wall behind the pool, and drop down to Valley Circle Boulevard, which ran parallel to Califa. He told Garrity to get the patrol car while he chased the fleeing figure. Dexter climbed the wall and pursued. The chase lasted several blocks and ended when Dexter followed the suspect around a corner at Valerie Avenue. The suspect had stopped, apparently thinking he had lost his pursuer, and Dexter turned the corner and came upon him. He drew his weapon and ordered the suspect to kneel and lace his fingers behind his head. The suspect complied and Dexter radioed his location to his partner and backup officers. When he moved in to handcuff the suspect, a struggle ensued and Dexter was shot. The suspect then ran off but was quickly apprehended by the other officers who were now responding to Dexter’s officer-down call.

The suspect was arrested and identified as Anthony Marcus. He denied burglarizing the house or running from the police. He claimed he had snuck out of his nearby home and was walking to his girlfriend’s house for a secret rendezvous when he was suddenly confronted by Dexter. He also denied shooting Dexter but admitted that he ran from the scene after the shot was fired and Dexter went down because he didn’t know what was happening and who was shooting at them.

Bosch read the report twice and pulled up Google Maps on his phone. He looked at a map and then street photos of the chase route and compared them to the details contained in the report. This gave him a better understanding of the direction, terrain, and distance of the chase. He then moved on to the medical report filed by the Force Investigation Division. FID handled all officer-involved shootings, even those where an officer was the victim. The medical report stated that Dexter was wounded twice by the same bullet, which grazed the outside of his right calf at a downward angle and then passed through his shoe and foot. He was treated in the ER at the Warner Medical Center and discharged.

Bosch heard Haller in the back seat telling Lorna to turn down a prospective client charged with distributing Chinese fentanyl, even though the client was willing to pay a $100,000 retainer for the Lincoln Lawyer’s services.

“Fentanyl’s on my no-fly list,” Haller said. “Tell him no.”

“I know,” Lorna said. “I just thought you’d want to know what he was offering on the retainer.”

“Worse than blood money. Next.”

Lorna told him about another case: The potential client was charged with fraud for selling a guitar he claimed had been signed by John Lennon; the buyer found out after the deal went down that the guitar had been manufactured after Lennon died, so clearly he could not have signed it. The defendant was a dealer of online rock and roll memorabilia and the DA was reviewing other past sales of guitars allegedly signed by now-dead rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. The case could get more serious.

Haller told Lorna he’d take that case but would need a $25,000 retainer up front.

“Think that will be a problem?” Haller asked.

“I’ll find out and let you know,” Lorna said.

Bosch went back to reading the reports for the Marcus case. There was an investigative chronology with brief entries covering the steps the FID investigators had taken. One of the last entries noted that investigators met with a fingerprint technician at the house on Califa Street. Bosch knew from experience that this meant they were trying to tie Marcus to the break-in that had spawned the whole event. If they could put him in the house, it would block a possible defense claim that Marcus was not the burglar whom Dexter and Garrity saw fleeing. The chrono did not say what, if anything, the fingerprint tech had found.

Among the reports was an inventory of property taken from Marcus after his arrest and a description of his clothes. He had been wearing blue jeans, black Nikes, and what was described as a USC hoodie. In his pockets were a house key, a condom packet, and a roll of breath mints. There was also a lab report for a gunshot-residue test conducted on the suspect, which was positive for GSR on his hands and the right arm of his hoodie.

The last document in the package was a transcript of the radio calls Dexter and Garrity had made during the event. The first was Garrity’s initial call for backup, followed by her call saying there was a fleeing suspect and giving a description of someone in dark pants and a dark hoodie. Bosch paid close attention to the calls for help that came from Dexter moments later and noted that the transcript showed that only eight seconds elapsed between Dexter calling in his location and stating that he had the suspect in custody and his officer-down call:

01:43:23 — Officer Dexter: Suspect code four Valerie west of Valley Circle.

01:43:31 — Officer Dexter: Officer down, officer down...

01:43:36 — Officer Dexter: He shot me. He shot me...

01:43:42 — Officer Dexter: Suspect is GOA, going west on Valerie. Maroon USC hoodie.

After Bosch reviewed everything in the file, he had some definite thoughts about what had gone down in the shooting. He checked the rearview mirror. Haller and Lorna were now talking about clients who had not yet paid for legal services rendered. It was too close a space to carry on two separate conversations.

“I’m going to step out and call Jennifer,” Bosch said.

“Thank you, Harry,” Haller said.

4

Bosch put the file containing the Marcus case reports on the hood of the Navigator and called Aronson. She answered right away.

“Harry, I’m waiting to see Anthony at the detention center. They’re going to take me back anytime now.”

“Okay, you can call me later. I looked at the records you sent on his case.”

“Thank you so much. Did you see anything?”

“Listen, I don’t want my name mixed up in this. Are we clear on that? Whatever you do with what I tell you, it doesn’t include me. Okay?”

“Of course. I already agreed to that. It goes no further than this call.”

Bosch was silent for a long moment as he decided whether to trust her.

“Are you still there?” Aronson said.

“Yes, I’m here,” Bosch said. “So, you said you were going to call the prosecutor to see if there was any update on discovery. Did you do that?”

“Uh, no, not yet.”

“Well, the chrono says they brought a print tech to the house your client supposedly broke into.”

“Which he says he didn’t do.”

“Right. But the chrono doesn’t say what the tech found. They were obviously looking for a print from your client in the house because that would tie him to the burglary and catch him in a direct lie in his initial statement. So you’ve got to get a report on what the print guy found, if anything.”

“Okay, I’ll get on that. What else?”

“I looked at the Google Maps of the area where this went down, and the house at the corner of Valley Circle and Valerie Avenue has a hedge that runs the lot lines.”

“Okay. What does that mean?”

“Well, Dexter chased the burglary suspect up Valley Circle and then he followed when the guy turned left onto Valerie. Because of the hedge, he would have lost sight of the suspect.”

“Which supports Anthony’s claim that he’s not the burglar Dexter was chasing.”

“Possibly, yeah.”

“That’s good, but the burglary is the least of our problems. It’s the shooting they want to burn him for. What else did you see?”

“The property report. Anthony had a condom in his pocket along with breath mints and a house key.”

“Which of course supports his story, not theirs.”

“But what he didn’t have is important. No burglary tools, no gloves. There are no gloves in the evidence report. This is why they sent the fingerprint tech into the house. If he wasn’t wearing gloves then they should have found his prints in there. And if they didn’t, then...”

“Good, Harry. That’s the first thing I’ll ask about when I get to the DA.”

“The radio transcript you have here is also important. When the chase starts, Dexter’s partner Garrity calls out a description. She says the suspect is a white male in dark clothes. Then after Dexter gets shot, he gets on the radio and says the suspect is GOA and wearing a USC hoodie.”

“‘GOA’?”

“Cop code for ‘gone on arrival.’ It means he ran. But the important thing is the hoodie. USC hoodies are usually maroon with gold letters. How come Garrity didn’t get the USC part when they first saw the guy?”

“Maybe his back was to them and they couldn’t see.”

“Possibly, but it’s a discrepancy. Another is if there are no prints putting him in the house.”

“Right. That’s a good start, Harry. I think I can work with that. Anything else?”

Bosch hesitated. He believed there were more significant inconsistencies in the police reports and possibly even something more wrong with what had gone down that night on Valerie Avenue. But somehow he felt guilty about giving this information to a defense attorney. And then Aronson asked the question he was most reticent about answering.

“So then who shot Dexter?” she said. “You think the real burglar came up from behind or something? Anthony said he didn’t see anybody else.”

“No, I don’t think that’s what happened,” Bosch said. “I think the real burglar probably cut between a couple of the houses and hid out in a backyard until it was clear.”

“Then what happened? The reports say there’s gunshot residue on Anthony’s hands.”

“The GSR can be explained. I think there is a possibility that Dexter shot himself and blamed Anthony so he wouldn’t lose his job.”

“Harry, you’re a fucking genius.”

“I’m not telling you this as some kind of defense strategy. Based on these reports, I think it could have happened.”

“Okay,” Aronson said. Her tone was deadly serious. “Walk me through it.”

“Look, again, I’m not saying this is what happened, okay?” Bosch said. “I don’t know what happened. But it wouldn’t be the first time that some dumbass cop shot himself and tried to blame somebody else for it. If you admit you shot yourself by accident, you’re pretty much done in the department. It’s time to find a new job.”

“I understand. Just walk me through what could have happened and I’ll take it from there.”

“Well, we know from Anthony that Dexter had his weapon out and drew down on him. It was an adrenaline-fueled chase and then arrest. Before approaching him, he made Anthony get on his knees and lace his fingers behind his head. The procedure would then be to grab and hold the suspect’s wrists with one hand and holster your weapon with the other. Then you cuff the suspect. According to the transcript of the radio calls, Dexter said the suspect was code four, which means in custody. And then eight seconds later he makes the officer-down call.”

“Oh my God, Dexter shot himself!”

Aronson was almost gleeful in her response as she saw an open route to successfully defending her sister’s kid.

“I don’t know what happened,” Bosch said. “And neither do you. But a couple things. The first is that Anthony did not have Dexter’s handcuffs on his wrists when he was caught later. So whatever happened, it happened before Dexter was able to handcuff him. Then you have the trajectory of the bullet that was fired.”

“Down through his foot,” Aronson said.

“After wounding the outside of his right calf. Definite downward trajectory. What you need to find out is if Dexter is right-handed and holstered his weapon on his right side. It could mean he unintentionally fired the gun while attempting to holster it. Remember, it was a high-tension, adrenalized moment. It’s happened before.”

“And he’s willing to send a sixteen-year-old boy to prison to cover his own fuckup.”

“Maybe. There was nothing in what you got that said how long he’s been with the LAPD. I’m guessing not long. Accidental discharge is usually a rookie mistake. This could also explain the GSR on Anthony. He was in a kneeling position, hands behind his head, Dexter right behind him. Depending on how tall Dexter is, this position puts Anthony’s hands and right arm close to a right-handed discharge of the weapon.”

“Oh my God... I’ll be getting all that information before the end of the day.”

“Well, keep in mind that if you’re looking at it this way, FID probably is too. That fingerprint report is important.”

“Harry, I can’t thank you enough for this.”

“You can thank me by keeping me out of it.”

“You don’t have to worry. You are completely out. But I have to go. They just signaled me that they’ve put Anthony in the attorney-client room.”

“Okay, good luck.”

Aronson disconnected. Bosch took the file off the hood and got back into the driver’s seat of the Navigator. Haller and Lorna were apparently finished with the casework and engaged in small talk about Haller’s daughter, Hayley, who was studying for the bar exam after having finished law school at USC.

“You’ll have to change the firm’s name to Haller, Haller, and Associates,” Lorna said.

“I don’t think she wants to pursue criminal law,” Haller said. “She wants to go into environmental law and help save the planet.”

“Good intentions, but boring as hell.”

“She’ll find her way.”

“All right, boys, I’m out of here. Mickey, I’ll let you know about the guitar fraud. Hopefully he can pay the retainer.”

“Hopefully.”

Bosch heard Lorna pull up the door handle to get out.

“Hold it,” he said.

He checked the side-view mirror to make sure she wasn’t about to swing the door out into traffic.

“Okay, you’re clear,” he said.

“Thanks, Harry,” Lorna said.

She got out and closed the door.

“Would it have killed you to get out and open the door for her?” Haller asked.

“Probably not,” Bosch said. “My bad. Where to now?”

“That’s it,” Haller said. “I’m done for the day and you can take me home.”

Bosch checked the dash clock. It wasn’t yet two, and this would be an early work stop. He didn’t put the car in gear. He waited and soon Haller realized why.

“Oh, right,” he said.

He got out and then got back in, this time in the front seat, moving the Anthony Marcus file to the dashboard.

“You come up with anything on this case?” he asked. “Looked like you did most of the talking on that call.”

“I think so,” Bosch said. “Gave her a pathway, you could say.”

“Well, good. I hope it didn’t darken your soul, having to do that.”

“A bit. But I’ll deal with it. Just remember, that was a one-off, Mick, and it was easy. But I’m going back to the haystack now.”

“Which is exactly where I need you. Find me the needle.”

Bosch checked the side-view, pulled away from the curb, and headed toward Haller’s home. After a few minutes of silence, Bosch spoke.

“On that Ochoa negotiation with the city attorney, what do you stand to make from that?”

“Well, we have a sliding rate for all such cases. We get a standard twenty-five percent of the first million, goes up to thirty-three on a prorated scale. Most lawyers have a flat rate of a third or higher all the way through. Me, my cut gets bigger only if the check gets bigger.”

“Not bad when it’s a slam dunk like that one looks to be.”

“It’s never as easy as it looks.”

“But with the haystack, you’re not doing it for that second-level payout, right?”

“It’s strictly pro bono on all the work we do up front. Now, if we get somebody out, I’m happy to represent them in a suit for damages and compensation at my usual rate. But that’s pie-in-the-sky money. In most cases compensation is limited by state caps. So could there be money down the line, yes. But this is not a moneymaking operation. Why do you think I was going over cases with Lorna? I need to put gas in the tank. I need paying cases so you can work the haystack.”

“I just wanted to be sure, that’s all.”

“Well, you can be. The deal I made with Ochoa was made before all the letters started coming in, and it was Hayley who suggested I create my own little innocence project. The only difference is the real Innocence Project takes donations to the cause. I don’t.”

“Got it.”

They dropped back into silence until Bosch started up the hill on Fareholm. He passed Haller’s house and turned around at the top, then came back down and parked at the curb by the stairs to Haller’s front door.

They both got out.

“Thank you, Harry,” Haller said.

“What are you going to do?” Bosch asked.

“Well, I haven’t had a half day off like this in months. I don’t want to waste it. I might go over to Wilshire and hit the range.”

“You play golf?”

“Taking lessons.”

“And you’re a member at Wilshire?”

“Joined a few months ago.”

“Good for you.”

“What’s that mean, that tone?”

“Nothing. Just means good for you that you’re in a club. You deserve it.”

“I got a friend in the public defender’s office who’s a member. He sponsored me.”

“Nice.”

“What are you going to do this afternoon?”

“I don’t know. Probably take a nap.”

“You should.”

Bosch handed him the keys to the Lincoln and started walking down the street to where he had parked his Cherokee. Haller called after him.

“How’s the new car?” he said.

“Like it,” Bosch said. “Still miss the old one.”

“That’s so Bosch.”

Bosch wasn’t sure what that meant. He had found and bought a 1994 Jeep Cherokee to replace the one he had lost in a crash during the investigation he’d been on with Ballard the year before. The “new” old car had fewer miles on it and a better suspension. It had come with new tires and a recent paint job. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles that the Navigator had, but it was good enough to get him home.

5

After waking from a lengthy afternoon nap, Bosch checked his phone and saw he’d slept through a series of texts; he read the messages from his daughter, Ballard, Aronson, and a bartender at the Catalina Bar and Grill. He got up, washed his face, and went out to the dining room, where the table had long ago become a desk. He stopped at the shelves by the turntable, flipped through his record collection, and pulled out an old one that had been one of his mother’s favorites. Released in 1960 — a year before her death — the album had been kept in pristine condition. Bosch’s care over the years had been motivated by respect for the recording artist as well as for his mother.

He carefully dropped the needle on the second track of Introducing Wayne Shorter. Stepping out from Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers to record his first effort as a leader, Shorter soon after was playing the tenor saxophone alongside Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Theo at the Catalina had left Bosch the message that Shorter had just passed on.

Bosch stood there in front of his speakers and listened to the moves made by Shorter on track two. His breath, his finger work, it was all there. It had been more than six decades since Bosch had first heard these notes, but the news of Shorter’s death had triggered the memory of this song that still meant so much to him. The track ended and Bosch carefully lifted the arm, drew it back, and started “Harry’s Last Stand” once more. He then moved to the table to go back to work.

Maddie’s message was short, her daily check on him. He would respond with a call to her later. Ballard had texted to say she’d sent him an email. He logged in and saw she’d forwarded links to two Los Angeles Times stories from five years earlier. Bosch started to read them in chronological order.

Bosch read the story again. Quartz Hill was a suburb of a suburb called Palmdale, located in the vast northeastern expanse of the county. Once a small desert town, it had, like the nearby equally small town of Lancaster, experienced tremendous population growth since the turn of the century when housing prices in Los Angeles exploded, sending thousands of people into the far-flung areas of the county to find affordable homes. Palmdale and Lancaster grew into a single mini — desert metropolis with all the problems that came with urban life. That included gangs and drugs. The sheriff’s department had its hands full out there.

Quartz Hill was nestled next to Palmdale and Lancaster. Bosch had been out there on cases in the past and he remembered tumbleweeds and sand-swept streets. He expected all of that might be different now.

Bosch admired what Ballard had done. Rather than sending him a case extracted from a law enforcement computer and risk losing her job, she had looked up the case and found links to newspaper stories that were available to anyone. In fact, he was annoyed with himself for not thinking to run Lucinda Sanz’s name through an L.A. Times search before going to Ballard.

He clicked on the second link, and another story on the Sanz case downloaded. It had been published nine months after the first story.

Bosch reread this story too. It carried many more details of the crime. The new details in the second story bothered him. The murder weapon was never found despite what must have been intensive and repeated searches. That suggested that it had somehow been taken far away from the scene. Since Sanz was a deputy, Bosch suspected that there would have been a full-court press on the investigation and that the first search would have been followed by at least two more with different teams and different sets of eyes. He was satisfied that the gun was not there, and that suggested preplanning and premeditation.

But shooting Sanz in the back as he walked across the front yard to his car suggested a spur-of-the-moment act of anger. It contradicted any idea that the murder was planned. That and the missing murder weapon were most likely the reasons the prosecution floated a deal to Silver for a reduced charge.

Bosch knew of Frank Silver and had once faced him on a case. He wasn’t one of the elite lawyers in town. He was no Lincoln Lawyer. He was a solid B-level defense attorney who had likely known he couldn’t win the case if it went to trial. Despite what he had told the newspaper, he probably welcomed the offer of a disposition, and that would have entered into his selling it to his client.

Bosch picked up his phone and sent a text to Ballard thanking her without mentioning what he was thanking her for. He then pushed his luck by cryptically asking if she had found anything on the other thing — meaning the other name he had given her.

While he waited for a response, he ran Edward Dale Coldwell through the Times search engine but drew a blank. He tried it without the middle name and drew another blank.

He checked his phone. Nothing from Ballard.

Bosch didn’t like waiting for information. It made him restless, agitated. All his years as an investigator had taught him that momentum was key and losing it could permanently stall a case. This applied even to cold cases, where the momentum was most often carried inside the investigator’s own head. Bosch felt as though he had little momentum now, but the contradiction he had seen in the newspaper stories about the Sanz case coupled with the letter from Lucinda had lit a fire in him. He wanted to keep moving on it if there was no progress yet on Coldwell.

He picked up his phone but hesitated before calling Ballard. He didn’t want to lose her as a friend and source, and he knew he would if he kept pestering her with calls asking her to break the rules.

He put the phone down but checked the time on its screen. He silently cursed himself for taking the nap that had sucked up the afternoon. Even if he could make it downtown to the courthouse, there would be little time for him to review what might still be in Lucinda Sanz’s case file in the basement archives. That trip would need to wait till the morning.

He picked up the phone again and called his daughter, knowing that hearing her voice and learning what was happening in her world would pull him away from Lucinda Sanz and the frustration of the momentum block. But the call went to voice mail. Disappointed, Bosch left a perfunctory update, telling her that he was doing fine and was busy with a couple of investigations for Mickey Haller.

After disconnecting, he remembered the text from Jennifer Aronson. She had asked him to call her. He did and could tell she was driving as she took the call.

“Harry, I talked to the prosecutor and she admitted that Anthony’s prints were not found in the house on Califa.”

“Did she say if there were any other prints not belonging to the occupants?”

“I asked but she said I have to wait for the next discovery drop. It was hard enough to get her to admit Anthony’s prints weren’t there.”

“So then when’s the next discovery drop?”

“She said she’s waiting until the judge decides whether Anthony will be tried as an adult.”

“Okay, what else? Did you tell her about your theory that Dexter shot himself?”

“I did. I thought maybe it would scare her away from trying him as an adult. If they move this to superior court, it will be open court and this will all come out publicly. Juvenile court is closed to the public and press.”

“And what did she say?”

“She sort of laughed it off and said ‘Good try.’ She thought I was bluffing.”

“Who’s the prosecutor?”

“Shay Larkin. She’s younger than me.”

“Well, she’ll find out it’s no bluff. How’s Anthony?”

“He’s scared shitless. I need to get him out but there’s nothing I can do — legally, at least.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I want to hold a press conference. Put this stuff out there about Dexter and put pressure on them to look at him and know that this is no bluff.”

“Won’t that give them a heads-up on your case?”

“Yes, but if it gets Anthony out... I also think it would be better if Mickey does it. The media follows him around like dogs. He would draw attention to this.”

“That’s an idea.”

“And someone like you, with your experience, standing with him would certainly lend credibility to it.”

Bosch closed his eyes and told himself that he should have known better.

“Jennifer, that’s not going to happen,” he said. “We had a deal. I look at the file but then I’m out.”

“I know, I know,” Aronson said. “But it’s my sister’s kid, Harry. I can’t stand seeing him in there when I know he’s innocent.”

“If he’s innocent, you’ll get him out.”

“Eventually, Harry. But what happens in between? He could get hurt in there. Or worse.”

“Then hold your press conference and see what that does. Get Mickey up there, but don’t ask me. I have relationships and a reputation in this town that I’m not about to destroy because of what amounted to less than an hour’s work on this case. You have to find some other way.”

There was silence and when Aronson finally responded, her tone was as cold as winter rain.

“I understand,” she said. “Goodbye.”

She disconnected but Bosch held his phone to his ear for a long time, wondering why he felt like a coward.

He thought about Anthony Marcus up there alone in Sylmar juvie. When Bosch was a kid he had been held in juvenile detention a few times as a runaway from foster homes. He was so slightly built as a teenager that a few years later he was put on an army tunnel crew in Vietnam. His size was an advantage while moving through the dark and narrow tunnels used by the Vietcong. But it had made him an easy target in juvenile detention. Things were done to him, taken from him, and he didn’t like to dwell on the memories. But thinking about Anthony Marcus in Sylmar brought them back now. Despite the position he had taken with Haller and Aronson, Bosch was struck by what Aronson had said about Anthony being bullied. He knew firsthand that it was a dog-eat-dog world inside the children’s jail. He secretly hoped Aronson would be able to rescue her nephew with the help he had just given her.

6

Bosch was back on the Lucinda Sanz case by 9 a.m. the next day, standing at the service window at the archives division of the Los Angeles Superior Court in downtown. The archives were in the basement of the Civic Center, located three floors below the vast green lawns and pink chairs of Grand Park. Few people knew that beneath the park was a windowless concrete bunker where case files and court exhibits from decades of criminal prosecutions were available for public viewing.

But Bosch knew and he was the first person at the counter when the clerk slid back the plexiglass window and opened for business. He had already filled out the request form for all materials in the archives related to California v. Lucinda Sanz, having pulled the case number off the county court system’s public database the night before.

The clerk studied the request form, told Bosch to take a seat, and disappeared into the vast archives.

Bosch wasn’t expecting much because the case had never gone to trial. That meant that there would be no exhibits — photos and documents — that would have been shown to a jury. But what he was hoping for was the presentencing report submitted by the Department of Probation and Parole. It would have been required by the judge before he accepted the plea from Lucinda Sanz and passed sentence. The PSRs Bosch had seen before were usually stocked with case reports and other documents filed in support of the sentencing recommendation. Those reports were what he wanted, and he hoped there would be enough to give him a baseline knowledge of the case.

While he waited, Bosch took out his phone so he could call the cancer center at UCLA to push back his appointment to the afternoon. But being three levels underground and surrounded by reinforced-concrete walls, he had no cell service. He thought about going up topside to make the call but he didn’t want to miss the return of the clerk.

Ten minutes later the clerk emerged from the archives carrying a single manila folder no thicker than a slice of bread. He read Bosch’s reaction.

“All I could find,” he said. “But it was a nolo case. No trial, no exhibits, no transcripts. Lucky there was even a file.”

Bosch took the file and walked it over to a side room where there were individual desk pods for viewing documents and exhibits. He opened the file and found a handwritten list on an index card on the inside cover noting only six documents, ordered by date filed with the court. The top sheet was the most recent. It was the order from Judge Castle sentencing Lucinda Sanz to prison. Behind this were three letters that had been sent to the judge asking for leniency for the defendant. They had come from her mother, her brother, and a man who stated in his opening paragraph that he had been Lucinda’s employer at an onion farm in Lancaster where she had worked for many years in the packing-and-shipping warehouse.

Bosch quickly skimmed these before moving to the next document, which was the agreement signed by Lucinda Sanz pleading nolo contendere to a charge of voluntary manslaughter. The document, also signed by Andrea Fontaine, the deputy district attorney who had handled the case, additionally set out the term range from medium to high, with an enhancement for use of a firearm. It all added up to Sanz going before the judge and receiving a sentence that could be anywhere between seven and thirteen years. It seemed to Bosch to be a good deal for someone who had supposedly killed a law enforcement officer.

The last document was the presentencing report. Bosch fanned it open and saw that it was lengthy and at least half the pages were police and autopsy reports. This was what he had hoped for. Summaries of the investigation that would allow him to understand how the case had been worked.

The report was authored by a state probation officer named Robert Kohut. It was written in narrative form and was essentially a deep dive into Lucinda Sanz’s life with specific sections regarding her childhood, family structure, adolescent legal troubles, education, employment history, residency history, adult law enforcement interactions, and any documented psychological treatment.

Kohut’s report was largely favorable. He described Sanz as a single mother who worked sixty-hour weeks at Desert Pearl Farms in Lancaster in order to provide for herself and her young son. She had no criminal record prior to the homicide charge, though there were two incidents listed in which deputies were called to the house in Quartz Hill to quell domestic disputes. In one case, Lucinda was arrested, but the district attorney did not file a charge against her and the case was dropped. In the second incident, neither Lucinda nor her husband was arrested. Both incidents were pre-divorce and Bosch assumed that Roberto Sanz and his wife had been cut a break because he was a deputy.

The report also said there was no record of mental-health or drug issues, and Lucinda was deemed by Kohut to be a good candidate for rehabilitation and eventual probation. However, Kohut’s recommendation was to sentence Sanz on the high end of the manslaughter term range because of the circumstances of the crime. Those centered on the fact that Roberto Sanz was shot twice in the back, once when he was apparently already on the ground.

Bosch planned to request a copy of the PSR, so he moved on to the official records that had been included in the support material. This was where Bosch lived as an investigator. He had a facility for digesting reports and being able to view the case from all angles. He could see the logic jumps as well as the discrepancies and conflicts between reports. He understood that this was where he would come to a decision about Lucinda Sanz’s claim of innocence.

He first reviewed the initial crime report on the killing. The summary stated that Lucinda Sanz told responding officers that she had argued with her ex-husband because he had been two hours late returning their son home from a weekend visit, a violation of their custody agreement. The argument continued until Roberto Sanz turned and walked out of the house in an apparent effort to leave the dispute behind. Lucinda Sanz said she slammed and locked the front door after he left but then heard what sounded like gunshots from the front exterior of the house. Unsure whether her ex-husband had fired at the house, she hid with her son in the boy’s bedroom and did not reopen the door. From her son’s room she called 911 on her cell phone and reported the gunfire. Arriving officers found Roberto Sanz lying facedown in the front yard. Paramedics were called but he was declared dead at the scene.

The medical examiner’s report on the autopsy of Roberto Sanz was part of the support package. Bosch flipped to it now so he could look at the diagram of exactly where the wounds were located.

The single-page diagram contained two side-by-side generic line drawings of a male human body, front and back. There were markings, measurements, and annotations hand-printed by the deputy medical examiner who had conducted the autopsy. Bosch’s eyes were immediately drawn to the two Xs on the upper back of the rear profile. A note indicated that the distance between the wounds was 5.7 inches.

There were also notations on the diagram about the angle of entry of the wounds, and from these it was determined that the two shots had distinctly different trajectories. One shot, presumed to be the first, was from a relatively flat angle, indicating the victim was likely standing when struck by the bullet from behind. The second shot entered the body at an acute angle, indicating that the victim was already down when fired on a second time. The trajectory was upward through the body from back to front, breaking the right collarbone before lodging in the upper pectoral muscle.

To Bosch the second shot was key because it undercut arguments of accidental discharge, self-defense, and heat of passion. The shooter took aim a second time at a victim who had been knocked down by the first shot. It was a coup de grâce.

Bosch took out his phone and photographed the diagram. He planned to get copies made of the entire file but he wasn’t sure how long that would take and he wanted to have the diagram with him when he talked to Haller about the case.

After putting the phone down on the table, he flipped through the other pages of the autopsy report. He noted that two 9-millimeter slugs were recovered from the body. Also included in the report were black-and-white copies of the photos of the body taken before the autopsy. The body was naked and lying on a stainless-steel autopsy table. The photos showed both front and rear views of the body as well as close-ups of the entry wounds.

Bosch was quickly flipping through these when something caught his eye, and he held on the page. There was a tattoo running below the beltline of the left hip. It was in script and Bosch could easily read it.

Bosch picked up his phone again and took another photo, this time enlarging the field to clearly show the tattoo without revealing the rest of the body. He knew what the tattoo meant. Not just in terms of literal translation, but in a larger and more telling sense:

7

Topside in Grand Park, Bosch sat in one of the pink chairs scattered randomly on the lawn in front of the Criminal Courts Building and overshadowed by “Old Faithful,” the familiar tower of City Hall. He texted Haller. He knew his docket and remembered that he had an arraignment on the schedule.

After sending the message, he switched to the phone’s internet browser and typed in L.A. County sheriff’s gangs. Before any results appeared, a call came in from Haller.

“Yes, I’m in the CCB,” he said. “And you should be at UCLA, correct?”

“I should be but I’m not,” Bosch said. “I gotta call them, push it till later.”

“Don’t fuck around with that program. Took me a lot of wheeling and dealing to get you in there.”

“And I appreciate that. But something came up. Your arraignment on the guitar fraud happen yet?”

“Just did. But this driving-myself thing is a pain in the ass. Gotta go all the way over to the garage where jurors park to get the Lincoln.”

“I’m in the park outside. In the pink chairs. It’ll be on your way. I need to talk to you about the Sanz case.”

“Okay, then. I’m heading out now. No telling how long the elevator is going to take, though.”

“I’ll be here.”

Bosch disconnected and went back to the phone’s browser. He eventually pulled up an L.A. Times story from seven years earlier that reported on the FBI’s wide-ranging investigation into corruption in the sheriff’s department. The department had an entrenched culture of deputies joining cliques that were formed in jail units as well as in certain substations and patrol areas.

Bosch scrolled down and found a list of known cliques with names like the Executioners, the Regulators, the Jump Out Boys, the Banditos, and the Bogeymen. The story noted that the far-reaching FBI investigation had started small, with an inquiry into alleged improprieties within the county’s massive jail system, which was operated by the sheriff’s department. The Bureau found that deputies assigned to the jail division had created cliques within each detention facility. Members engaged in illegal activities that ranged from betting on fights between inmates to passing messages to inmates from outside gang leaders to facilitating and looking the other way when gang beatdowns and even assassinations occurred.

The Bureau further found that when deputies rotated out of jail assignments to substations serving the public, they formed new cliques, leading to a variety of corrupt behaviors there as well.

When either the Bureau or the sheriff’s department referred to these groups publicly, they called them cliques. But to Bosch, they were no different from street gangs. These were gangsters with badges. And he now believed Roberto Sanz had been one of them.

“You check that chair for bird shit?”

Bosch looked up from his phone. Haller was approaching, carrying one of the pink chairs.

“I did,” Bosch said.

Haller put his chair down beside Bosch’s so they could sit next to each other with a view of City Hall across the park. He put his slim briefcase down on the grass between his feet.

“I had an interesting call with Jen Aronson last night,” he said.

Bosch nodded. He’d thought this might come up. “She told you about wanting to do a press conference on her nephew’s case?” he asked.

“She did,” Haller said. “And she also said you want no part of it.”

“I don’t.”

“Harry, you planted the seed but want no part of the tree that grows from it.”

“I don’t know what that means. Can we talk about Lucinda Sanz? That’s what I’m working on.”

“We can, but I want to make sure you get to UCLA.”

“I’m going this afternoon.”

“Good. What’ve you got?”

It took Bosch a moment to switch tracks and get back to thinking about Lucinda Sanz. When Haller brought Bosch on to review and cull the requests that came in from the prisons, one of the rules of the road he’d set was that Bosch was not to reach out to any sender of a request without his approval. These were long shots and Haller wasn’t in the business of offering false hope to incarcerated individuals. He didn’t want Bosch making that move until he had been apprised of Bosch’s thinking and agreed on next steps.

“It’s the court file,” Bosch said. “It’s pretty thin but there’s enough there to make me want to go out to Chino and talk to Lucinda Sanz.”

“The one who killed her husband, the deputy?” Haller said.

“Her ex-husband.”

“Well, tell me what you got. But she pleaded nolo, right? That makes it a steep mountain to climb. You know what El Capitan is?”

“At Yosemite? Yeah.”

“Reversing a nolo is like climbing El Cap.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t have the Lincoln Lawyer on her side back then. She had some second-stringer works out of that lawyer commune in Chinatown.”

While still with the LAPD, Bosch had been to the office of Frank Silver, the attorney who had represented Lucinda Sanz. It was in a brick building on Ord Street that was nicknamed “the commune” because several solo-practice attorneys worked there out of cubbyhole offices in a cut-rate space that allowed them to share the overhead expenses of reception, internet, copying, coffee, and paralegal and other support services. And it was walking distance to the CCB.

“I’d rather work out of my car,” Haller said. “Who was the lawyer? Maybe I know him.”

“Frank Silver,” Bosch said. “I had a case with him once. When I was with Hollywood Homicide. He was a water-seeks-its-own-level kind of guy. Not too impressive, you ask me.”

“Silver — don’t know him. They give you the silver medal for second place. And in trial, second place is a guilty verdict.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“At least over there they’re close to Little Jewel and Howlin’ Ray’s.”

After COVID, those were two of the best restaurants left, not only in Chinatown but in all of downtown.

“True, but I miss Chinese Friends,” Bosch said.

“It’s closed?” Haller asked. “You mean permanently?”

There was surprise and disappointment in Haller’s tone. There weren’t many quick and reliable lunch places near the CCB, especially since the pandemic.

“Last year,” Bosch said. “After fifty years.”

He realized that he had probably been going to Chinese Friends all fifty of those years. Until he went one day in August and there was a sign on the locked glass door that said ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO AN END — like a message from a fortune cookie. He had never spoken to the man who ran the restaurant and was always posted at the cash register. Bosch had always just nodded to him when he paid, assuming there was a language barrier.

“Anyway,” Haller said. “What did you find in the basement?”

Bosch pushed himself back on track with the case.

“Okay, a few things bother me on this one,” he said, “to the point that I want to take it further. First off, Silver. I think he talked Sanz into accepting a plea. He probably knew they would get the full-court press if he took it to trial. The victim was a deputy, after all. So he pushed for a deal and then he pushed her into taking it.”

“I get that,” Haller said. “What else?”

“The PSR was in the basement file. It contained the autopsy report and some crime reports and there’s some stuff that just doesn’t add up for me.”

“Like what?”

“Well, first of all, the weapon. Never found. This was painted as a crime of passion, like an argument that went too far, but they never found the gun. And then they let her plea nolo without turning it in.”

“Maybe she didn’t have it. She got rid of it and it was destroyed or otherwise irretrievable.”

“Maybe. But I read the plea agreement everybody signed, and it was not mentioned as lost or acknowledged at all. She was not required to reveal what she’d done with it.”

“Okay, noted. What else?”

“The choreography of it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Lucinda Sanz was not the registered owner of a firearm. So the gun had to be hot. That would indicate she bought this gun illegally, and the only reason to do that was—”

“Premeditation — she got it to kill him.”

“Yeah. Like she had a plan. But the way it goes down doesn’t jibe with that. He goes storming out of the house, she grabs the gun and, in a fit of anger, shoots him when he’s outside the house and walking to his car. Right on the front lawn. Then she shoots him again when he’s down.”

Haller leaned back in his pink plastic chair and gazed at the top of City Hall.

“Vultures,” he said. “There are always vultures up there.”

Bosch looked up and could see birds flying around the top of the spire.

“How can you tell they’re vultures?” he asked. “They’re so far up.”

“Because they’re circling,” Haller said. “Vultures always circle.”

“I’ve got one more thing, if you’re interested. On the case.”

“Go ahead.”

“The autopsy. Roberto Sanz was hit twice in the back. Now look at this.”

Bosch pulled out his phone and opened the photo of the body diagram from the autopsy. He handed the phone to Haller.

“What am I looking at?” Haller said.

“That’s the diagram that shows the impacts,” Bosch said. “Two shots in the upper back, perfectly placed. Small grouping, only five point seven inches apart.”

“Okay. And?”

“And that was some good shooting. Moving target, dark out, but she hits him in the back, then when he’s down, she pops him again. Two entry wounds, less than six inches apart.”

“And she didn’t even own a gun.”

“Right, no gun.”

“Did he teach her to shoot? When they were together?”

“Yeah, the PSR says there were photos in evidence of them at a range when they were still married. The photos weren’t in the file. Silver may have them.”

Bosch could tell Haller was intrigued. He continued to stare at the image on the phone. He had his trial face on and was most likely running through what he could do in court with what Bosch was telling him.

“Kind of looks more like a hit than a crime of passion,” Haller said, mostly to himself.

“Yeah, and one last thing,” Bosch said. “When this went down, all the news stories talked about how Roberto Sanz was a hero, got the medal of valor after a gang shooting and all of that. Now slide to the next photo.”

Haller swiped his finger across the screen. Bosch leaned over and saw a photo of his daughter, Maddie, with a black eye.

“Wrong way,” Bosch said.

“What the hell is this?” Haller exclaimed.

“She’s working undercover. The other night she took down a purse snatcher on Melrose and because she’s a woman, the guy thought he could throw a punch and get away. He was wrong.”

“That’s kind of cool. Except for the black eye.”

“Yeah. I told her to send me a selfie before she covered it with makeup. I wanted to see how bad it was. Swipe the other way.”

Haller did so and the image of Roberto Sanz’s tattoo came up on the screen. He hesitantly read the words out loud.

“‘Que Viene... el Cuco.’ What’s this?”

“You know what it means?”

“Not really.”

“You’re half Mexican.”

“I grew up in Beverly Hills.”

“It says se habla español on your billboards and bus benches all over town.”

“Hablo español, but it doesn’t mean I’m fluent in tattoo or every colloquial phrase out there. Are you going to tell me what or who El Cuco is?”

“It’s Mexican folklore. El Cuco is the bogeyman — the monster that lives under the bed or hides in the closet. He comes out to grab children who are bad. There’s a whole song about it. The bogeyman’s coming, he’s going to eat you, and so on. I remember the older kids singing it when I was in juvie hall. I guess you probably didn’t hear it in Beverly Hills.”

“With good reason. So adults sing that to their kids?”

“I guess it keeps them in line.”

“No doubt. So he had this tattoo? Sanz?”

“On his hip below the beltline, where most people wouldn’t see it unless they were in the locker room at the substation. Sanz was in a clique. A sheriff’s gang.”

Haller went silent again as he thought about this, his lawyer face firmly back in place. Bosch imagined that he had gone off to a courtroom in his mind and was seeing himself holding up the photo in front of a jury. Roberto Sanz’s obvious affiliation with the Cucos — the Bogeymen — changed things about the case.

Bosch finally interrupted his reverie.

“So, what do you think?”

“It raises a lot of possibilities, that’s what I think. We need to go out to Chino.”

“We?”

“Yeah. Tomorrow. I want to talk to her. I’ll clear the schedule. Today, you get your bony ass over to UCLA.”

“Okay. What about Silver?”

“I’ll deal with him. We’ll need his files.”

Bosch nodded. They were finished. For now. Both men stood up. Haller leaned in close to Bosch.

“You know, this could get...” Haller said.

His voice trailed off.

“I know,” Bosch said.

“We need to be careful,” Haller said. “No footprints till we’re ready.”

Haller bent down to grab his briefcase. Bosch looked up at the top of City Hall.

The vultures were still circling.