The Crossing

6

Bosch met Haller at 11 a.m. Monday in a downtown parking lot beneath the outstretched hands of Anthony Quinn painted on the side of a building on Third. Bosch pulled his old Cherokee up close to the rear passenger door of the Lincoln and the window came down. Because of a bad angle and the tinting on the Lincoln’s windows Bosch could not see who was driving.

From the backseat Haller handed a thick, rubber-banded file out the window to him. Bosch had somehow thought it would be contained in a blue binder the way murder books were in the detective bureau. Seeing the file full of photocopies was a glaring reminder that what he was about to do wasn’t remotely close to working a case for the police department. He was going far out on his own here.

“What will you do now?” Haller asked.

“What do you think?” Bosch replied. “I’ll go off somewhere and read through all of this.”

“I know that, but what are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for the things that are missing. Look, I don’t want to get your hopes up. I read all the newspaper coverage this morning. I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. The guy’s a criminal. You know him because he’s a criminal. So right now all I’m promising to do — the one thing — is look through all of this and render an opinion. That’s it.”

Bosch held the unwieldy file up so Haller could see it again.

“If I don’t find something missing or something that flares on my radar, then I’m giving it all back and that’ll be it. Comprende, hermano?”

“Comprende. You know, it must be hard to be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Not believing in rehabilitation and redemption, that people can change. With you it’s ‘once a con always a con.’”

Bosch ignored the accusation.

“So the Times says your client’s got no alibi. What are you going to do about that?”

“He has an alibi. He was in his studio painting. We just can’t prove it — yet. But we will. They say he’s got no alibi but they’ve got no motive. He didn’t know this woman, had never even seen her or been in that neighborhood, let alone her house. It’s crazy to think he would do this. They tried to connect him somehow to the husband when he worked down in Lynwood — some kind of a gang revenge scheme, but it’s not there. Da’Quan was a Crip and the husband worked Bloods. There is no motive because he didn’t do it.”

“They don’t need motive. With a sex crime the sex is motive enough. What are you going to do about the DNA?”

“I’m going to challenge it.”

“I’m not talking about O.J. bullshit. Is there evidence of mishandling of the sample or test failure?”

“Not yet.”

“‘Not yet’ — what’s that mean?”

“I petitioned the judge to allow for independent testing. The D.A. objected, saying there wasn’t enough material recovered, but that was bullshit and the judge agreed. I have an independent lab analyzing now.”

“When will you hear something?”

“The court fight took two months. I just got the material to them and am hoping to hear something any day. At least they’re faster than the Sheriff’s lab.”

Bosch was unimpressed. He assumed the analysis would conclude what the Sheriff’s analysis concluded — that the DNA belonged to Da’Quan Foster. The next step would be to go after the handlers of the evidence. It was the kind of tactic defense attorneys took all the time. If the evidence is against you, then taint the evidence any way you can.

“So aside from that, what’s your theory?” he asked. “How’d your client’s DNA end up in the victim?”

Haller shook his head.

“I don’t think it was. Even if my lab says it’s his DNA, I still won’t believe he did it. He was set up.”

Now Bosch shook his head.

“Jesus,” he said. “You’ve been around the block more times than most of the lawyers I know. How can you think this?”

Haller looked at Bosch and held his eyes.

“Maybe because I have been around the block a few times,” he said. “You been at it as long as me, you get to know who’s lying to you. I got nothing else, Harry, but I have my gut and it tells me something’s wrong here. There’s a setup, there’s a fix, there’s something somewhere, and this guy didn’t do this. Why don’t you go talk to him and see what your gut tells you?”

“Not yet,” Bosch said. “Let me read the book. I want to know everything there is to know about the investigation before I talk to him. If I talk to him.”

Haller nodded and they parted ways, Bosch promising to keep in touch. Each man drove off to a different parking lot exit. While waiting for traffic on Third to open up for him, Bosch looked up at Anthony Quinn, his arms stretched out as if to show he had nothing.

“You and me both,” Bosch said.

He pulled out on Third and then took a right on Broadway, driving through the civic center and into Chinatown. He found street parking and went into Chinese Friends for an early lunch. The place was empty. Carrying the file Haller had passed to him, Bosch took a table in the corner where his back would be to the wall and no one would be able to look over his shoulder at what he was reading. He didn’t want anyone losing their appetite.

Bosch ordered without looking at the menu. He then took the rubber bands off the file and opened it on the table. For more than two decades he had put together discovery packages for attorneys defending the men and women he had arrested for murder. He knew every trick there was when it came to planting obfuscation and misdirection in a murder book. He could write a how-to manual on the art of turning the discovery process into a nightmare for a defense attorney. It had been his routine practice back in the day to redact words in reports without rhyme or reason, to intermittently remove the toner cartridge from the squad room photocopier so that pages and pages of the documents he was turning over were printed so lightly they were impossible or at least headache-inducing to read.

He now had to use all he knew in assessing this murder book. And experience dictated that his first job here was to put the book in the proper order. It was routine to shuffle the stacks of reports like a deck of cards, throw in a takeout menu or two, just to say fuck you to the defense attorney and his investigator. Each page turned over in discovery was stamped with a page number and date. This was done so that in court the attorneys from each side of the aisle could refer to the same page by a uniform number. So it didn’t matter if Bosch reordered the pages. He could put his own system in place. All Haller would have to do is use the stamped page number if he wanted to refer to one of the documents in court.

There was not a lot of difference between the reports filed by Sheriff’s investigators and the reports Bosch had authored for the LAPD. Some headings were different, a few report numbers as well. But Bosch easily had the book reshuffled and in correct order by the time his plate of thin-sliced pork chops arrived. He kept the stack of records front and center and the plate to the side so he could continue to work as he ate.

On top of the reordered stack was the Incident Report, which was always the first page of a murder book after the table of contents. But there was no table of contents — another fuck you from prosecution to defense — so the IR was on top. Bosch glanced at it but was not expecting to learn anything. It was all first-day information. If it wasn’t wrong, then it was incomplete.

The pork chops were thin and crispy, piled on top of fried rice on his plate. Bosch was using his fingers to eat them like potato chips. He now wiped his hands on the paper napkin so he could turn the pages on the stack without soiling them. He quickly went through several ancillary and meaningless reports until he got to the Chronological Log. This was the murder bible, the heart of any homicide investigation. It would detail all the moves of the lead detectives on the case. It would be where case theory would emerge. It would be where Bosch would be convinced of Da’Quan Foster’s guilt or find the same doubt that had crept into Mickey Haller’s gut.

Most detective pairings had a division of labor that was worked out over several cases. Usually one member of the detective team was charged with keeping reports and the murder book intact and up to date. The Chronological Log was the exception. It was kept on computer as a digital file and routinely accessed by both detectives so each could enter his or her movements on a case. It was periodically printed out on three-hole paper and clipped into a binder, or in this case added to a defense discovery package. But the most active version was always a digital file and it was a living document, growing and changing all the time.

The printout of the chrono in the discovery file was 129 pages long and was authored by Sheriff’s investigators Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt. Though over the years Bosch had had many interactions with Sheriff’s homicide investigators, he knew neither of them. This was a handicap because he had no measure of their skills or temperaments as he moved into their written work. He knew some of it would surface as he learned of their investigative moves and conclusions but Bosch still felt like he was behind the curve. He knew other investigators in the Sheriff’s homicide bureau he could call to discuss the pair, but he didn’t dare do that and possibly reveal that he was working against them. Word of Bosch’s betrayal to the cause would spread rapidly and jump from the Sheriff’s Department to the LAPD in hours if not minutes. Bosch didn’t want that. Yet.

The first seventy-five pages of the chrono documented the moves of the investigation before the DNA connection was made to Da’Quan Foster. Bosch carefully read these pages anyway because they gave insight into the investigators’ initial case theory as well as their thoroughness and determination. Lexi Parks’s husband was fully investigated and cleared and the efforts were well documented in the chrono. Though he had an ironclad alibi — involved in the pursuit and arrest of a car thief — for the time of his wife’s murder, the investigators were smart enough to know that he could have set the murder up to be carried out by others. Even though aspects of the murder — the sexual attack and brutality of the fatal beating — tended to point in another direction, the investigators were undaunted in their look at the husband. Bosch found a growing respect for Cornell and Schmidt as he read through these sequences in the chrono.

The early investigation also went in many other directions. The investigators interviewed a multitude of sex offenders living in the West Hollywood area, probed the victim’s personal background for enemies, and looked through her job activities and history for people she may have angered or who could have held grudges.

All of these efforts hit dead ends. Once they had DNA from the killer, it was used to clear anyone who even remotely approached suspect status. The victim’s personal background produced no deep conflicts, no spurned lovers, and no extramarital activity on her or her husband’s part. As an assistant city manager her reach into the city’s bureaucracy and politics was substantial, yet she carried the final say on few items of business and on none that were controversial.

A profile of the murderer drawn from the details of the crime scene was what eventually pointed the investigation away from the victim’s personal and professional life. The profile, put together by the Sheriff’s Department Behavioral Science Unit, concluded that the suspect was a psychopath who was filling a complex of psychological needs in the murder of Lexi Parks. No kidding, Bosch thought as he read the conclusion.

The profile stated that the killer was most likely a stranger to Parks and that she could have crossed his path anywhere recently or long ago. Because she was a public figure who appeared regularly on West Hollywood’s public-access cable channel as well as at public events, the circle of possibilities was even greater. Her killer could have simply seen her on the news or at a televised city council meeting. The crossing could have happened anywhere.

The killing seemed to be both carefully planned and reckless in terms of the overkill in violence and the DNA evidence left behind. Other crime scene details that influenced the profile included the fact that the victim had not been tied up in any way — indicating the killer did not need bindings to overpower and control her. The victim was also found by her husband with a pillow over her face, hiding the intense damage of the fatal beating from view and possibly indicating remorse on the part of the killer.

Since her husband was a law enforcement officer, several security measures had been installed in the home, including an alarm system and multiple locks on all doors. The killer had gained entrance through the window of a home office, removing a screen and leaving it leaning against the back wall of the house, then jimmying the lock on the window. The victim apparently had not set the alarm system and her husband said that she rarely did so despite his often-repeated request that she set it when he was working at night and she was home alone.

All of this and other details added up to the profile of a suspect who was opportunistic and relentless as a predator. Parks had gone to the Pavilions supermarket on Santa Monica Boulevard on the evening of her murder. For several days the investigators scoured security video from the store and shopping plaza where it was located, tracking Parks’s visit and hoping to find the point of intersection between victim and predator. But nothing came of it. In the store, Parks saw and acknowledged several acquaintances whom she knew socially or from her government work. But all of them were checked out and eventually cleared, either through voluntary DNA comparison or otherwise.

It all added up to spinning wheels, but they were wheels that needed to be spun. Bosch’s review of the first eighty pages of the chrono left him with the belief that Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt had conducted a very thorough investigation — one that he would be proud to have put his name on himself.

And all of it was for naught. That is, until the twenty-seventh day of the investigation when they received a letter from the California Department of Justice informing them that the DNA sample they had submitted to the state’s CODIS database had been matched to a convicted offender named Da’Quan Foster.

Until that moment, neither Cornell nor Schmidt had ever heard of Da’Quan Foster in regard to Parks or any other case. But they started planning for when they would eventually meet him. He was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance to see if he made any moves that could be useful in his prosecution or threatened to harm another woman. Meanwhile, he was backgrounded and the investigation proceeded under the tightest security so that no word would leak to the media or to the husband of the victim.

Eleven days after the DNA match came in from the state, the two lead investigators entered the artist’s studio where Foster was alone, having just finished teaching a small class of children about primary colors. Leimert Park was in the City of Los Angeles. The investigators were accompanied by two uniformed LAPD officers from the South Bureau Gang Unit. Cornell and Schmidt asked Foster if he would accompany them to the Homicide Unit, where they wanted to ask him questions.

Da’Quan Foster agreed.

Bosch looked up and realized he had worked through the lunch rush in the restaurant. His check was sitting on the edge of the table and he had not noticed it. Feeling sheepish about not turning the table over during lunch, he put thirty dollars down on the table for the ten-dollar check, then gathered the reports back together and headed out. He cursed his luck when he found a parking ticket under the Cherokee’s windshield wiper. He had paid for two hours on the meter but had been in the restaurant for two and a half. He took the ticket from beneath the rubber blade and shoved it into his pocket. He never had to worry about parking tickets when he was driving a city car, when he carried a badge. It was another reminder of how his life had changed in the last six months. He used to feel like an outsider with an insider’s job. From now on he would be a full-time outsider.

For some reason Bosch didn’t want to go home to finish reading the chrono and the rest of the discovery reports. He felt as though reviewing the case at the dining room table where he had worked on so many cases as an LAPD homicide detective would be some kind of betrayal. He took Third Street out of downtown and out to West Hollywood. Before reading further into the chrono log, he wanted to drive by the house where Lexi Parks had been murdered. He thought it would be good to get out of the paper and to see some of the physical touchstones of the case.

The home was located on Orlando south of Melrose in a neighborhood of modest bungalows. Bosch pulled to the opposite curb and studied the house. It was almost entirely hidden by a tall privacy hedge with an arched entry cut through it. He could see the front door beyond the passage. There was a FOR SALE sign posted in front of the hedge. Bosch wondered how difficult it would be to sell a house where a brutal murder had recently occurred. He decided that living in the house where your wife had been the victim of that murder would be even more difficult.

His phone buzzed and he answered while still staring at the house.

“Bosch,” he said.

“It’s me,” Haller said. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going.”

“You still reading the discovery material?”

“About halfway through.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I’m still reading.”

“I just thought maybe you might have—”

“Look, don’t push me on this, Mick. I’m doing what I have to do. If I want to take it further when I’m finished, I’ll tell you. If I don’t, I’ll drop all of this stuff back with you.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Good. I’ll catch you later.”

Bosch disconnected. He continued to look at the house. He noticed that there was a BEWARE OF DOG sign posted in a planter beside the front door. He had not read anything in the discovery so far that mentioned Parks and her husband having a dog. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he thought about that. He felt strongly that if the couple owned a dog it would have been noted up front in the reports. House pets always leave trace evidence in a home. It was something that had to be accounted for in an investigation.

Bosch’s conclusion was that there was no dog and that the sign was posted as a deterrent. The next best thing to having a dog was pretending you had a dog. The question was did the killer know there was no dog? And if so, how?

Finally, he drove away and went up Orlando to Santa Monica Boulevard. He turned east toward home but pulled over again when he spotted a Starbucks at Fairfax. This time he bought four hours of time on the meter and went in with the discovery file.

With a cup of steaming black coffee in hand, he settled into a chair in the corner with a small round table next to it. There was no room to open the file and spread the stack, so he just pulled out the chrono to continue reading where he had left off. Before doing so he took a pen out of his shirt pocket and wrote a quick note on the outside of the file folder.

He needed to confirm his conclusion about the dog. Jotting the one-word question down was an almost involuntary response to what he had seen while sitting outside the murder house. But as soon as he wrote it, he realized that something as small as writing a single word on the file was a big step toward buying into the case. He had to ask himself the question. Did he miss the work so much that he could actually cross the aisle and work for an accused murderer? Because that was what it would be. Haller was the attorney of record but the client was sitting in a cell accused of raping a woman and beating her to death. If he accepted the job offer, Bosch would be working for him.

He felt the burn of humiliation on the back of his neck. He thought of all the guys before him who retired and the next thing you know they were working for defense lawyers or even the Public Defender’s Office. He had dropped relationships with those guys as though they were criminals themselves. The moment he heard someone had crossed, Bosch considered him persona non grata.

And now...

He took a sip of scalding coffee and tried to put the discomfort aside. He then took up the investigation where he had left off.

After picking up Foster at his studio, the Sheriff’s investigators drove him to the Lynwood station, where they borrowed a room in the detective bureau. The interview was short and its entire transcript was placed into the chronological record. Foster was asked only a few questions before realizing the depth of the trouble he was in and asking for Mickey Haller by name.

Cornell and Schmidt never told him that they had connected his DNA to a murder scene. They attempted to pad their case by flushing out an admission from Foster. But the effort failed. Cornell began the session by reading Foster his constitutional rights — always a quick way to put a willing interview subject on high alert.

Cornell: Okay, Mr. Foster, are you willing to talk to us a little bit, maybe answer some questions and clear up some details?

Foster: I guess so, but what’s it about? What do you people think I did?

Cornell: Well, it’s about Lexi Parks. You know her, right?

Foster: That name, it rings a bell for some reason but I don’t know. Maybe I sold her a painting or she’s one of the mothers of the kids I got come in the studio.

Cornell: No, sir, Lexi Parks didn’t buy a painting. She is the woman up in West Hollywood. You remember you visited her at her house?

Foster: West Hollywood? No, I ain’t been to West Hollywood.

Cornell: What about Vince Harrick, do you know him?

Foster: No, I don’t know no Vince Harrick. Who’s he?

Cornell: That’s Lexi’s husband. Deputy Harrick. Did you know him when he worked in this station?

Foster: What? I don’t know him. I’ve never been here before you took me.

Schmidt: Can you tell us where you were the night of February eighth going into the morning of February ninth of this year? That was a Sunday night. Where were you that night, Mr. Foster?

Foster: How the fuck would I know? That’s like two months ago. Tell you what, every night I’m either at home with my family, puttin’ my boys to sleep, or at the studio, doin’ my work. I stay over a lot at night to get things done. I’m not teachin’ anybody anything and I get to work on my own stuff, you understand? I mean, like I got people who want my pictures and they’ll pay. So I do the work. So you can take your pick between me bein’ at home or me bein’ at the studio because that’s it. There’s no other place. And I know my rights here and you people are up to no good on me. I think I want my lawyer now. I’m thinking I want Mickey Haller to represent me in this matter — whatever the fuck it is.

Cornell: Then let’s get it on the record right here, Mr. Foster. Tell us why you chose Lexi Parks.

Foster: Chose her for what? I don’t know her and I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Cornell: You killed her, didn’t you? You beat her and you killed her and then you raped her.

Foster: You people are crazy. You’re really fucking crazy. Get me my goddamned lawyer. Now.

Cornell: Yeah, you bet, asshole. One lawyer coming right up.

Schmidt: You sure you don’t want to clear this up right here? Now’s the time. You bring a lawyer into this and it goes out of our hands.

Foster: I want my motherfucking lawyer.

Schmidt: You got it. But he’s not going to be able to explain how we found your DNA in Lexi Parks. Only you can—

Foster: DNA? What DNA? Lord, what is happening here? What is — I can’t believe you motherfuckers. I ain’t killed nobody. I want my lawyer and I’m not saying another word to you people.

Cornell: In that case, stand up, sir. You are under arrest for the murder of Lexi Parks.

End of Interview

Bosch read the entry twice and then made a note to remind Haller to get a video version of the interview. The interview room was most likely outfitted with a camera. If he stayed with the case, he would want to see Foster’s body language and hear the tone of each voice. It would tell him more than the words on the printout. Still, knowing that, his take on the transcript of the brief interview was that Foster had not seen the questions about Lexi Parks coming. There appeared to be real surprise and then panic in his words. He knew that didn’t really mean anything. Sex murders were usually the work of psychopaths and with that psychology was an innate ability to lie, to act, to feign surprise and horror when it was needed. Psychopaths were great liars.

Bosch noted one of the lines in the transcript. Cornell had accused Foster of beating and killing Lexi Parks and then raping her. Harry had not reviewed the autopsy yet but the question from Cornell was the first hint that the rape had occurred post-mortem. If that was what the evidence revealed, then it rolled a whole new set of psychological factors into the case.

Bosch continued to read. The rest of the chrono outlined the efforts of Cornell and Schmidt to find a connection between Da’Quan Foster and Lexi Parks, either through her husband and his work, which would put the motivation in the arena of revenge, or through a random intersection of predator and prey, which would better fit the profile and type of assault. But neither effort was fruitful. As Foster said during his brief interview, he had never been to the Sheriff’s Lynwood station, where Vincent Harrick had last worked five years ago. The investigators could find no evidence to the contrary and the reality was that there would be no logical reason for a Rollin’ 40s Crip out of Leimert Park to be conducting gang business all the way east in Lynwood. That was Bloods territory and it didn’t add up.

Cornell’s focus was on the Lynwood/Harrick angle and backgrounding Foster, while Schmidt worked the sexual predator angle. Schmidt’s task was the more difficult to investigate and prove because it relied upon the happenstance of Lexi Parks somehow, somewhere crossing the radar of a sexual sadist on the hunt. Bosch, like Cornell and Schmidt, had already read and seen enough to know the murder was not a crime of opportunity. There was more than enough evidence that the victim was stalked and the crime planned. The BEWARE OF DOG sign was the starting point of this supposition. According to the discovery, there was no dog in the house, and the killer seemed to know it. That suggested that the house on Orlando had been cased. Other factors such as the alarm system not being engaged and the husband working a midnight shift also added to the theory.

Schmidt carefully documented the victim’s activities in the six weeks prior to her death, trying to find the place where Foster and Parks crossed paths. She looked at hundreds of hours of video taken from cameras along Lexi’s path but she never found Foster in one digital frame. Bosch knew that this was the juncture where cases could go wrong. They had a suspect in custody and a DNA match. Some would already call that a slam-dunk case. But the investigators were being thorough. They were looking for more and in doing so they were sliding into the tunnel. The tunnel was the place where vision narrows and the investigator sees only the bird in hand. Bosch had to wonder if Schmidt had been looking for any other faces on those videos besides Foster’s.

Bosch made another note on the outside of the file, a reminder to tell Haller he should make a discovery request to be allowed access to all of the videos Schmidt had studied.

The chrono had an oblique reference to a witness interviewed by Cornell and identified only as AW — which Bosch recognized as shorthand for alibi witness. It was not uncommon to use coded abbreviations in reports to safeguard witnesses who were not officially given confidential informant status. Bosch also knew that AW could be a witness fortifying or knocking down a suspect’s alibi. In this case the chrono said that Cornell met with the AW seven days after Foster’s arrest and that the meeting lasted an hour.

Bosch skimmed through the remaining pages of the chrono and nothing else caught his eye. There were routine entries on preparations for the case to move toward trial. Cornell and Schmidt found nothing that directly tied Foster to the victim but they had his DNA, and apart from the O. J. Simpson case twenty years before, DNA was as good as it got when it came to closing out a case. Cornell, Schmidt, and the prosecutor assigned to the case were locked and loaded. They sailed through a four-hour preliminary hearing in April and were now ready for trial.

The prosecutor was a woman — always a good edge to have when it was a sex crime. Her name was Ellen Tasker and Bosch had worked with her on some big cases early in her career. She was good and lived up to her name when it came to making sure cases were ready for trial. She was a lifer in the D.A.’s Office, a prosecutor who kept her head below the level of office politics and just did her job. And she did it well. Bosch could not recall Tasker ever losing a case.

Before moving on, he called Haller.

“You said that your client had an alibi but you just couldn’t prove it.”

“That’s right. He was in the studio painting. He did that a lot — worked all night. But he worked alone. How am I going to prove that?”

“Did he have a cell phone?”

“No, no cell so no pinging record. Just the landline in the studio. Why?”

“There is a reference in the Chronological Log to one of the detectives meeting with an alibi witness. You know anything about that?”

“No, and if they found somebody who supports DQ’s alibi, they have to bring them forward.”

“DQ?”

“Da’Quan. He signs his paintings DQ. By the way, you know that’s how I’m getting paid, right? In paintings. I figure we get an acquittal and the value will go way up.”

Bosch didn’t care how Haller was getting paid.

“Listen to me. I’m not saying this witness supports his alibi. It’s probably the opposite. It was referenced in the chrono and I just wanted to know if you were aware.”

“No, I didn’t see that.”

“It was coded and brief — which makes me think it might be significant. I’ll look through the witness reports and see if I can find anything.”

“If you don’t find it, then that’s trouble for them. Violation of discovery.”

“Whatever. I’ll call you later.”

Clicking off, Bosch realized he needed to be more guarded with Haller and not just throw things out to him that he might tee up and take into court, dragging Bosch along with him.

Bosch looked through the printouts until he found the stack of witness statements. He started paging through them, checking the summaries for who they were and what they said. The great majority were witnesses from the Lexi Parks side of the investigation: friends, co-workers, professional acquaintances who were interviewed as the investigation took shape. There were also statements from her husband and several Sheriff’s deputies who knew Parks through him. The second half of the stack contained interviews from people who knew Da’Quan Foster. Many of these were LAPD officers who knew of him from his active gang days. There were also statements from former parole officers, neighbors, fellow shopkeepers, and the suspect’s wife, Marta.

Bosch found what he was looking for on a twofer — a report page that had statements from two witnesses summarized on it. It was an old discovery trick. Turn over reams of paper as a way of hiding the one thing you don’t want the defense attorney to notice. The prosecution had not violated the rules of discovery but had made finding the important piece of information a needle in the haystack.

The top half of the witness report contained the summary of an interview with a neighbor of Da’Quan Foster’s who said he did not see Foster’s car parked in front of his house on the night of the murder. It was a relatively harmless comment because Foster was not claiming that he was at home. He was claiming he spent the night painting in his studio.

But just a line below the neighbor’s statement was the start of another statement from someone identified only as M. White. This statement said M. White stopped by Foster’s studio on the night of the murder to see Foster but the painter was not there. That was all that was included in the report but it was enough for Bosch to know that Cornell and Schmidt had found someone who could counter Foster’s claim that he had spent the entire night in the studio painting.

The subterfuge employed by the detectives to hide the identity and value of the witness known as M. White didn’t really bother Bosch. He assumed that “M. White” was not the witness’s name but rather his gender and race. He knew all Haller would have to do is file a motion citing insufficient discovery and the sheriffs would have to cough up the real identity. It was all part of the game and he had pulled the haystack move himself on occasion as a cop. What troubled him was the fact that now there was an alibi issue added to the DNA match that put Foster at the crime scene.

It was enough to make him want to drop the review of the case right there and then.

Harry thought about it for a little bit while he finished his coffee and gave his eyes a rest. He took off his reading glasses and looked out through the window at the busy intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica. He knew he still had the autopsy and the crime scene photos to go through to complete his review of the murder file. He had saved the photos for last because they would be the most difficult to look at — and were not something he would risk doing in a public place like a coffee shop.

His eyes suddenly caught on a familiar face across the intersection. Mickey Haller smiling from the back of a bus moving south on Fairfax. The advertisement carried a slogan that made Bosch want to dump the whole file in the trash can.

Bosch got up from the table and went to the trash can. He dropped his empty cup in and headed out the door.