Resurrection Walk

18

I found silver where I had last seen him, behind his desk in his tiny office in the legal commune on Ord Street. I noticed that he had replaced the business card I had taken from the slot on the wall. The door was open like it had been before, but this time I walked in without knocking. Silver didn’t look up from what he was writing on a legal pad. The room smelled of Chinese takeout.

“How can I help you?” he said.

I didn’t answer. I put the stapled document down in front of him. He glanced up and did a double take when he saw who stood in front of his desk.

“Da Lincoln Lawyer,” he said. “What’s up, partner?”

“You ever go to court, Frank?” I asked.

“I always thought a good lawyer tries to avoid court. Bad shit happens in court, right?”

“Not always.”

He picked up the document and leaned back in his chair to read it.

“So what do we have here?” he asked.

“That’s a copy of my habeas petition,” I said. “I’ll file it tomorrow. I thought you should have it in case the media gets wind of it. Lately they seem to be following my cases and my moves pretty closely.”

“That’s because you’re a winner. And winners get the ink.”

“It’s mostly digital now. But I get the point.”

Silver started to read.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he said.

I noticed an open takeout container filled with what looked like fried rice. It was giving the claustrophobic room a sharp odor of fried pork.

As soon as Silver read the case styling — Sanz v. the State of California — he leaned forward and looked up at me.

“You’re going federal with this?” he asked. “I thought you said—”

“I know what I said,” I interrupted. “That was before we took a deep dive into the case and found out a few things.”

“I’ve never worked in federal.”

“I try to avoid it, but there are reasons this time.”

“Such as?”

“Just keep reading. You’ll see.”

Silver nodded and went back to the document. The top sheet was boilerplate, listing the reasons why the U.S. district court should hear the motion. The second page was more case-specific and outlined how my efforts to secure cooperation from the FBI for a habeas motion in state court had been thwarted by a blanket denial of requests from the district’s U.S. Attorney’s Office. Silver nodded as he read as though agreeing to the facts outlined on page two. When he saw the notation about the attached exhibit he flipped to the back of the document and read the short, terse letter from the Central District of California U.S. Attorney’s Office denying my request to speak to FBI agent Tom MacIsaac and warning that any effort to serve him with a state court subpoena would be blocked.

“Perrrrfect,” Silver said, drawing the word out.

He went back to the second page and then moved on to page three. This was what I was waiting for. Page three was the meat of the document. It contained the reasons why the petition should be granted and a habeas hearing scheduled. I watched closely as Silver continued reading and nodding, acting like he was checking off boxes and approving as he went.

But a few seconds later he stopped nodding.

“What the fuck, Haller?” he said. “This says ‘ineffective assistance of counsel’ and you said you weren’t going that way.”

“I told you, things have changed,” I said.

“How the fuck have they changed? You think you’re going to file this and then leak it to the press? That’s a big nonstarter, buddy boy. That isn’t happening.”

I was still standing. I didn’t want to sit down for this. I didn’t want to be in this room and in front of this guy any longer than I had to. I put my hands down on his desk after shoving some of the clutter out of the way. I leaned down but was still above Silver’s level.

“Things changed when I found out about you,” I said.

“Me?” Silver exclaimed. “What are you talking about? Found out what?”

“That you sold Lucinda Sanz down the river. That you took a dive.”

“Bullshit.”

“No bullshit. You could’ve beaten this case easy. But you folded, and that woman’s been sitting in Chino for five years.”

“Are you nuts? None of that is true. I got her a great fucking deal. But even if it was a bad deal, I didn’t take it. She did. It was her call.”

“You talked her into it.”

“I didn’t have to. She knew they had her. And she knew it was a good deal. I just had to lay it out for her and she did the rest. You ask her, she’ll say the same.”

“I did ask her. She did say it was her call, but she didn’t know at the time that a few months earlier, you’d represented a client named Angel Acosta.”

Silver failed to keep the surprise out of his eyes.

“That’s right,” I said. “Angel Acosta, the guy your new client’s ex-husband shot during a firefight at a hamburger stand.”

“It’s not a conflict of interest,” Silver said. “It’s a coincidence. Definitely not ineffect—”

“Acosta told you that was no ambush. It was some kind of meeting between the gang and a corrupt cop. I don’t know the details yet, but you do. Whatever it was, it went bad fast and the shooting started. Sanz was no hero and you knew it. That was the ace up your sleeve with Acosta. Your leverage. That’s how you got him the sweet deal. You threatened to put it all out there, put the sheriff’s department on trial.”

“You really don’t know what you’re talking about, Haller.”

“I think I do. You then saw the opportunity to double dip with Lucinda. Get the case from the public defender, then use the same intel from Acosta to get a deal. But the reality was you had an innocent client. And you had everything you needed to go to trial and win. But, no, you’re Second-Place Silver. You took a dive.”

Silver shoved the food container to the side of his desk but he pushed too hard and it fell off and showered the floor and wall with fried rice.

“Goddamn it!” he said.

He started to bend down to clean it up but then sat back up straight and looked at me.

“It was a judgment call,” he said. “We make them every single day and no judge will grant you a habeas on a judgment call. You file this and you’ll be laughed out of federal court.”

The document I had prepared that morning was simply a prop. Silver was right about one thing: Going for a habeas in federal court with just ineffective assistance of counsel was a nonstarter. It would go nowhere and I wasn’t planning to file it. It was just a tool to help me get to Silver and get him talking.

“I might be laughed out of court,” I said. “Or the public might learn that you took a dive on an innocent client’s case.”

“As I said, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Silver said.

“Then here’s your chance to school me, Frank. Tell me what I don’t know.”

“I was fucking threatened, you dumbass. I had no choice.”

There. I had broken through. Now I pulled out the chair in front of his desk and sat down.

“Threatened by who?” I said.

“I can’t get into it,” he said. “The threat is still out there and it’s real. You need to be careful or it will be your ass in a sling next.”

“Wrong answer. You need to get into it right now or I’ll file that in the morning and put a press release out to every newsroom in the city.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

I pointed to the document on the desk in front of him.

“It’s already done. You want to stop it, tell me what went down with Sanz. Who threatened you and why?”

“Jesus Christ.”

Silver shook his head like a man who sees no way out of a trap.

“There’s only one choice here, Frank,” I said. “You’re working with me or you’re working against me. And I will burn the ground you walk on to get my client out of that prison.”

“All right, all right,” Silver said. “I’ll tell you what happened, okay? But you need to treat it as intel. You can’t reveal who you got it from.”

“I can’t make that promise. Not until I know what you know.”

“Fuck...”

He was stalling. I pushed my chair back.

“Okay, I’m out of here. Good luck tomorrow.”

“No, no, no, wait. Okay, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you. You were right, Angel told me everything. Sanz was a collector for this sheriff’s gang who call themselves the Cucos. Acosta and his gang were paying for protection, and Sanz was the bagman. That day was supposed to be a regular cash pickup but then Sanz upped the ante. The Cucos wanted more. There was an argument and it turned into a shoot-out. After Angel told me that, a friend of Sanz’s called me and said that if I went into court with what I knew, it would be the last case I ever tried.”

“A friend? Who are we talking about?”

“I don’t know. One of the Cucos.”

“That doesn’t help me. I need a name.”

“I don’t have a name. I didn’t want a name.”

“I’ll protect you.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You can’t protect me from them. They’re cops!”

“How did you know they were cops?”

“I just did. It was obvious, wasn’t it? With what Acosta had told me.”

“I still need a name, Frank, or we’re done here. Who called you?”

“He didn’t say his name and I didn’t ask for it.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He told me to tell Acosta that if he kept his mouth shut, he’d get a deal from the DA. I said fine. I knew getting him a deal would be a big victory. And so did Acosta. I didn’t have to sell it. He was happy to take it.”

“Who was the prosecutor who offered the deal?”

“Same one who handled all the heavy cases out there. Andrea Fontaine. But she’s downtown now.”

I considered everything just said and then moved on.

“Okay,” I said. “Lucinda Sanz. You went to the PD and took the case.”

“Because I was told to,” Silver said.

“By who? The same one who called you on Acosta?”

“No, this time it was a woman. She knew about the whole Acosta deal and she said there would be an offer from Fontaine. She told me to make Lucinda take the deal and plead her out. And that if I used what I knew about Roberto Sanz and the shoot-out from before, I was a dead man, plain and simple.”

I thought about this. Lucinda had said a woman had conducted the GSR test on her, a woman who said she worked with Roberto Sanz.

“The second caller, do you know who it was?” I asked.

“No, man, I told you,” Silver said. “No names were mentioned. They weren’t that stupid.”

“Did Lucinda know about any of this?”

Silver lowered his eyes.

“I never told her,” he said. “I just told her to take the deal. That it was the only way.”

I thought I could see shame and regret in Silver’s eyes. Maybe he had believed at the time that Lucinda was guilty as charged and that the callers were putting a cap on what could blow up into another scandal for the sheriff’s department. But either way, Silver knew deep inside that he’d never be more than a hack lawyer from the Ord Street commune.

“You did all this based on phone calls from nameless people who claimed they were cops,” I said. “But how did you know the threats were legit?”

“Because they knew things,” Silver said. “Things that had never gotten out, that had to have come from the inside.”

“Like what?”

“Like they knew what Acosta could spill if I put him on the stand. That Roberto Sanz was no fucking hero that day at the shoot-out.”

I changed direction with Silver, using Bosch’s tactic of keeping a witness off balance with unexpected questions.

“Tell me about Agent MacIsaac,” I said.

“Who?” Silver asked.

Through a few phone calls Bosch had been able to learn MacIsaac’s full name and posting in the Bureau’s L.A. field office. That part of the document was fact and I was hopeful it would draw a response from Silver.

“FBI Special Agent Tom MacIsaac,” I said. “He’s the guy the U.S. attorney won’t allow me to talk to or subpoena. Did he ever show up around here to talk to you?”

“No, I never heard of him till now. What’s his—”

“He had a lengthy meeting with Roberto Sanz on the day he was killed. If you were any kind of an attorney, you would have found that out and not talked your client into a plea deal.”

Silver shook his head.

“Look, man, I keep telling you, I was threatened,” he said. “I had no choice.”

“So you turned around and gave your client no choice,” I said. “You talked her into the plea. You talked her into prison.”

“You weren’t there, man. You have no idea what kind of pressure was on me and what evidence they had on her. She was going down either way.”

“Sure, Frank. Whatever lets you sleep at night.”

I had an almost overwhelming desire to get away from Frank Silver and his office, which stank of failure and pork fried rice. But I stayed to hear him finish his confession.

“All right,” I said. “Go back to Angel Acosta and tell me everything you know. I need every detail you can remember. You do that and this motion never gets filed.”

I pointed to the prop doc on his desk.

“How do I know you won’t fuck me over in the end?” Silver asked.

“Well, buddy boy,” I said, “I guess you don’t.”

19

The Lincoln was at the curb, Bosch behind the wheel, when I came out. I had completely broken the habit of jumping in the back and I got in the front seat without a second thought.

“Did it work?” Bosch asked.

“Yes and no,” I said. “He pretty much confirmed what we had already put together. But he said he didn’t know anything about MacIsaac or the FBI.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I do. For now.”

“Well, what did he know?”

“He said that on both the Acosta and Sanz cases he was threatened by deputies. First he had to get Acosta to take a deal, then later the same thing all over again with Lucinda. He didn’t have names. It was all on his phone. One call from a male, the second from a female. Each time, he was told that the DA would come across with an offer and his client had to take it or there would be consequences. For him.”

“Just that? Anonymous phone calls?”

“Each time the caller had inside information. Knew details about the shoot-out with Sanz. He believed the threat.”

“One caller male, the other female. Lucinda says it was a woman who did the GSR.”

“What I was thinking. For now we call her Lady X. But we need to identify everybody who was in Sanz’s unit at the time, especially any women. Between you and Cisco, run them down, full bios, and we’ll start building a witness list.”

“Got it. Where to now?”

“Hall of Justice. Time to rattle a cage over there.”

Bosch checked the mirrors and then pulled the Lincoln away from the curb on Ord Street.

“Whose cage?” Bosch asked.

“The deputy DA who handled both the Acosta and Sanz cases is Andrea Fontaine. Back then she was assigned to the Antelope Valley courthouse. Now she’s downtown in Major Crimes. I was thinking we’d pay her a visit and see what she has to say about those cases and the deals she made on them. Looks to me like she might’ve made a deal for herself.”

“You’re talking major conspiracy here. The sheriff’s department and the DA’s office.”

“Hey, man, conspiracy theories are a defense lawyer’s bread and butter.”

“Great. What about the truth?”

“You don’t find that too often in the courtrooms I’ve been in.”

Bosch had no comeback for that. It took us five minutes to get to the Hall of Justice and another ten to find a parking spot. Before we got out, Bosch finally spoke.

“What you said about building a witness list. What do you expect to get from Sanz’s teammates?”

“I expect them to get on the stand and lie their asses off about this. They do and we take out the biggest piece of evidence against Lucinda.”

“The GSR.”

“Now you’re thinking like a defense attorney.”

“Never.”

“Look, do you believe that Lucinda killed her ex and is where she should be right now?”

Bosch thought a moment before answering.

“Come on,” I said. “You’re not under oath.”

“I don’t think she did it,” he finally said.

“Well, neither do I. So what we gotta do is knock down the evidence against her like dominoes. And if we can’t do that, then we have to own it and explain it. They come up with photos of her shooting at targets, then we own it and say yes, that’s her, but she was doing that because she couldn’t shoot for shit and certainly not well enough to put two bullets in her ex-husband’s back less than six inches apart. Like that. You get it?”

“I get it.”

“Good. Now, let’s go see what this prosecutor has to say.”

“You’re going to ask about this? The GSR?”

“Yeah, without giving anything away.”

Bosch nodded and we opened our doors and got out.

The Hall of Justice was across from the Criminal Courts Building. It had at one time housed the sheriff’s department, and its top three floors were the county jail. But then the sheriff’s department moved most of its operations out to the STARS Center in Whittier and a county jail was built. The building was repurposed and the jail floors were turned into offices for prosecutors who worked cases in the courtrooms across the street.

Andrea Fontaine was not welcoming of our unscheduled visit. She met us in a waiting area after being notified by the receptionist of our request for an audience. We introduced ourselves and she walked us back to her office, explaining that she had only a few minutes before she needed to leave for a hearing in a courtroom across the street.

“That’s okay,” I said. “We only need a few minutes.”

She led us into an office that was smaller than Frank Silver’s and clearly had once been a cell: three walls of concrete block and a fourth behind her desk that was a latticework of iron bars and glass with no opening bigger than six inches square.

The office was neat and not as cramped as Silver’s. There was room for two chairs in front of her desk and we all sat down.

“I don’t think we have a case together, do we?” Fontaine asked.

“Uh, not yet,” I said.

“That sounds mysterious. What’s this about?”

“Two cases you handled during your Antelope Valley days.”

“I was moved down here four years ago. Which cases?”

“Angel Acosta and Lucinda Sanz. I’m sure they’re on your greatest-hits list.”

Fontaine tried to keep a poker face but I could see the flare of fear enter her eyes.

“I remember Sanz, of course,” she said. “She killed a deputy I actually knew. It’s rare you get a case where you know the victim. And Acosta... help me with that one. It rings a bell but I can’t place it.”

“The ambush at the Flip’s burger stand the year before Sanz was killed,” I said. “The shoot-out?”

“Oh, yes, of course. Thank you. Why are you asking about those cases? They were both closed with dispositions. Guilty people pleading guilty.”

“Well, we’re not so sure about that. The guilty part.”

“On which one?”

“Lucinda Sanz.”

“You’re going to challenge that conviction? She got a great deal. You want to risk getting a redo? If we go to trial she could end up with a life sentence. With what she’s got now, she’ll be out in, what, four or five more years? Maybe even sooner.”

“Four and a half, actually. But she says she didn’t do it. And she wants out now.”

“And you believe her?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Fontaine turned her eyes to Bosch.

“What about you, Bosch?” she asked. “You worked homicide.”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe,” Bosch said. “The evidence isn’t there for conviction.”

“Then why did she plead guilty?” Fontaine asked.

“Because she had no choice,” I said. “And actually, she pled nolo. There’s a difference.”

Fontaine just stared at us for a few moments.

“Gentlemen, we’re done here,” she finally said. “I have nothing more to say about those cases. They’re closed. Justice was done. And I’m going to be late for court.”

She started stacking files on her desk and getting ready to go.

“I’d rather talk now than have to subpoena you,” I said.

“Well, good luck with that,” Fontaine said.

“The most damning piece of evidence you had on her was the GSR. I’ll tell you right now, we can blow that up.”

“You’re a defense lawyer. You can find a so-called expert to say whatever you want. But over here we deal in facts, and the fact is she shot her ex-husband and is where she deserves to be.”

She stood up and dumped her gathered files into a leather bag with initials in gold near the handle. Bosch started to stand up. But I didn’t.

“I’d hate to see you dragged through the shit that’s about to come out,” I said. “When this gets to court.”

“Is that a threat?” Fontaine asked.

“It’s more like a choice. Work with us to find the truth. Or work against us and hide it.”

“That’ll be the day, when I find a defense attorney really interested in the truth. Now, you need to go or I’m going to call security to escort you out.”

I took my time standing up, holding her angry stare as I did.

“Just remember,” I said. “We gave you the choice.”

“Just go,” she said loudly. “Now!”

Bosch and I didn’t speak until we were on the elevator going down.

“I’d say you succeeded in rattling her cage,” Bosch said.

“Hers and a few others down the line, I’m sure,” I said.

“Are we ready for that? What happened to ‘no footprints’?”

“Changing course. Besides, somebody out there already knows what we’re doing.”

“How do you know that?”

“Easy. Somebody broke into your house because they wanted us to know.”

Bosch nodded and we were silent while the old elevator made its way down.

When we stepped out into the lobby, Bosch brought up what I had been mulling over myself.

“So,” he said. “Fontaine. Think she’s bent or is she a victim?”

“Good question,” I said. “They threatened the defense attorney into doing what they wanted. Maybe they did it with the prosecutor too. Or maybe she’s just as corrupt as the Cucos.”

“Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. She was pressured into protecting the sheriff’s department from scandal. It is, after all, the sister agency to the DA’s office.”

“I think you’re being too kind, Harry. You gotta remember, two years after this shit went down, she gets a transfer from Antelope fucking Valley to Major Crimes downtown. That feels like a payoff to me.”

“True, I guess.”

“We can’t guess. We have to have it down solid before we get into court.”

“You’ll subpoena her as a witness?”

“Not with what we know now. Too many things that aren’t clear. It would be too dangerous to bring her in. No telling what she’d say on the stand.”

We pushed through the heavy doors onto Temple Street and headed back to the Lincoln.

20

I wanted to get home so I could start writing the real petition that I would file on behalf of Lucinda Sanz. No more props, no more games. It was time to put together the narrative that would make the case for my client’s actual innocence. As I had told Lucinda, the world was turned upside down. She was now considered guilty until proven innocent. The initial document I would write in the next few days needed to make clear, without giving away the store, what I would present and what I would prove. It needed to do more than shake cages in the sheriff’s department. It had to be compelling enough to make a U.S. district court judge sit up in his or her comfortable chambers and say, “I want to hear more.” I had at least two solid things going for me at this point that were not hearsay or otherwise dismissible. One was the revelation that Roberto Sanz was in a sheriff’s clique, which brought a clear implication of organized corruption. The other was the meeting between Sanz and an FBI agent just an hour before his murder. That was new evidence that pointed to a wide range of suspects other than Lucinda Sanz. I believed that these could get me through the habeas door. But I knew I would need more — much more — once I got through.

I told Bosch to take me home. He had his own assignment: Identify the other members of Roberto Sanz’s unit, especially any female deputies. He needed to put a name to Lady X.

Bosch pulled to the curb on Fareholm by the stairs to my front door.

“So, I’m around if you need me,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I have the crew names put together.”

“You know where to find me,” I said. “I cleared my schedule to write—”

I stopped mid-sentence when I looked up the stairs to the front door.

“What is it?” Bosch asked.

“My front door’s open,” I said. “Those bastards...”

We both got out and proceeded cautiously up the steps to the deck.

“I don’t have a weapon,” Bosch announced.

“Good,” I said. “I don’t want another shooting in here.”

More than fifteen years earlier, I had exchanged fire in my home with a woman intent on killing me. It was the one and only gunfight I’d ever been in. I had won it and I wasn’t interested in risking a perfect record.

“Besides, I doubt there’s anyone inside,” I added. “Like at your place, they’re just sending a message: ‘We know about you, we’re watching you.’”

“Whoever ‘they’ are,” Bosch said.

I entered first and found the front room empty and undisturbed. It was a small house with a big view, on the other side of the hills from Bosch’s place. Living room, dining room, and kitchen were in the front, and two bedrooms and an office were in the back. The backyard was barely big enough for a deck and the hot tub I never used.

As we moved through, I saw no signs of a break-in. We saw nothing out of place until we moved down the hallway and reached the office.

The intruders had left the room in shambles: drawers pulled out of the desk and overturned on the floor, couch upholstery slashed with a blade, lawbooks knocked off shelves. The coup de grâce came from a bottle of maple syrup I’d brought back from a trip to Montreal with my daughter the year before. I had left it on a shelf as a reminder of the fun we’d had. Now it was shattered on the floor, its contents having been poured onto the keyboard of the laptop lying open next to the shards of glass.

“With you, they only made you think there was a break-in, right?” I asked.

“That or made me think I was losing my mind,” Bosch said.

“Well, I would rather have had that than this.”

“Yeah. Will you call it in?”

“Did you?”

“I made a report. You told me to. But nothing’s going to come of it.”

“I get the feeling that’s what they want me to do.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. It’s their plan, not mine. But I don’t have time to deal with a police investigation that won’t lead to anything. They want to distract me.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“I don’t know. The Cucos? The FBI? It could be anybody at this point. We’ve obviously poked the hornet’s nest.”

I scanned the entire room, surveying the damage.

“I need to figure out what they took,” I said. “And go to the Apple Store.”

With a foot, I shoved the laptop a few feet across the floor. It left a trail of maple syrup.

“This one is done,” I said. “But I’ve got everything on the cloud. I’ll be back in business as soon as I pick up a new one.”

“What makes you think they took something?” Bosch asked.

I spread my hands to take in the whole ransacked room.

“They were covering something up by trashing the place,” I said. “Something they found.”

Bosch didn’t respond.

“You don’t think so?” I asked.

“Not sure,” he said. “Could’ve been a lot of things. First of all, we don’t know this has anything to do with the Sanz case. I’m sure you’ve made your fair share of enemies over the years. It could be unrelated to Sanz.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Bosch. We’ve both had break-ins just days apart. What’s the connection? Sanz. This is them. Believe me. And it’s not going to stop us. Fuck them. This will just make it taste all the better when we take them down and Lucinda does the resurrection walk.”

“Resurrection walk?”

“When she is raised from the dead.”

“Okay.”

He looked a little baffled by the term.

“You gotta make sure you’re there for that, Harry,” I said. “That will be something.”

“You get her out, I’ll be there,” he said.