The Crossing

7

Entering his house, Bosch looked at the empty dining room table and was tempted to sit down and spread out the printouts and photos from the case. But he knew his daughter would be getting home at any time and he didn’t want to risk her stumbling onto a bad scene. He went down the hallway to his bedroom, closed the door, and started spreading things out on his bed — right after he made it and smoothed the top covers.

What he spread out were the 8 × 10 color copies of the crime scene photos from Lexi Parks’s house. These included several dozen of the victim’s body as it had been found on her bed. They were shots taken from many angles and from many different distances ranging from full room shots to extreme close-ups of specific wounds and parts of the body.

There were also photos taken from many angles of all the other rooms in the house, and his plan was to look at them second.

The crime scene photos created a grisly tableau on the bed. The murder of Lexi Parks had been excessively violent and the harshness of it was not buffered by the one-step-removed process of viewing the scene through photos. There was a stark quality to the shots that Bosch was familiar with. Police photographers were not artists. Their job was to unflinchingly reveal all, and the photographer on the Parks case did just that.

Bosch had spread the photos out in a matrix of eight across and eight down and he stood at the end of the bed, taking in the overall murder mosaic. He then picked up individual photos one by one and studied them. He took a magnifying glass from a drawer in his dresser so that he could see some aspects of the photos even closer up.

It was difficult work. Bosch never got accustomed to viewing crime scenes. He had been to hundreds of them and seen the result of human inhumanity too many times to count. He always thought that if he got used to it, then he had lost something inside that was needed to do the job right. You had to have an emotional response. It was that response that lit the match that started the fire of relentlessness.

What lit the match this time was Lexi Parks’s hands. She had obviously tried to fight her attacker. She had struggled and put her arms up to ward off the assault. But she was quickly overpowered by repeated blows to her face. Her hands fell back on the bed, palms up, almost as if she was raising them in surrender. It touched Bosch. It made him angry, made him want to find and hurt whoever had done this.

How could Haller defend the man who did this?

Harry went into the bathroom to fill a glass with water. He drank it while standing in the doorway and looking at the photos from the side. He worked to calm himself so that he could continue to professionally assess the photos and the crime scene.

He went back to the bed and studied the photos again and soon started drawing conclusions about the crime. He believed that the victim had been asleep in her bed. She was on the right side of a king, having left room for her husband on the left. It appeared to Bosch that the killer had surprised her in her sleep, straddling her and taking immediate control as she awoke. He probably put one hand over her mouth, maybe held a weapon with the other. She got her hands loose to fight and then he started striking her.

And he didn’t stop. Long after her defenses were down and she was incapacitated, she was struck over and over again with a hard object. The face of the victim in the photos bore no resemblance to the face Bosch had seen accompanying the many newspaper stories generated by her murder. The face of the victim in the photos in fact bore no resemblance to any face at all. The nose was literally gone, interred in the pulp of blood and tissue that had been her face. Both eye sockets were crushed and misshapen, pieces of broken teeth and bone shone brightly in the blood. The eyes were half-lidded and the normal singular focus was broken. One stared forward, the other down and to the left.

Bosch sat down on a chair in the corner of the room and looked at the grid of photos from afar. The only thing worse would have been his being at the real scene, which would have added a multisensory dimension to his revulsion. No murder scene ever smelled pleasant. No matter how fresh, no matter how clean the environment.

His eyes kept going to the hands and he noticed from his new position a slight discoloration to the victim’s skin on the left wrist. He got up to go back to the bed. The photo was a wide shot that displayed the entire body in situ. He bent over the photo with the magnifying glass and saw that the woman’s wrist had slight tan lines left by a thick bracelet or, most likely, a watch.

Since he had seen nothing in the summaries or reports about the murder being possibly motivated by robbery, the missing watch was curious to Bosch. Had the victim been wearing it at the time of the attack? Had she taken it off to sleep? Had it fallen or been pulled off during her struggle to live? Had it been taken by her attacker as a souvenir?

Bosch studied the bed table next to the body. There was a bottle of water, a prescription bottle, and a paperback novel, but the watch wasn’t there. He went back to the printouts and looked at the property report. Since the victim was murdered in her own home, the property report dealt primarily with items from the crime scene and the house that were specifically examined by the investigators or forensics team. There was nothing here about the watch. It had apparently not come off in the victim’s struggle. It had not been noted as having been found in the bedding, on the floor, or anywhere else.

Bosch next flipped back into the Chronological Log to check if he had missed a mention of the watch in the early stages of the investigation — before there was a focus on Da’Quan Foster. He found nothing and wrote a note about the watch on the outside of the file below his other notations.

He collected all the photos of the body from the bed and put the stack to the side in case his daughter came home. He then moved to the second stack of photos, which were the shots taken of every room in the victim’s house at the time of the on-site investigation. This was a sign of the thoroughness of the investigation. Bosch knew that the photos from other rooms of the house would have been a call and request made by the lead investigators. It showed they were not cutting corners.

There were several photos taken in each room of the house and it took Bosch more than a half hour to work his way through them. He saw only the things that looked like the normal trappings of a neatly kept home where there were no children and both husband and wife worked full-time jobs and had active lifestyles. A second bedroom was used as a home gym and a third used as an office. The single-car garage was used to store bikes, surfboards, and camping equipment. There was no room to park a car.

The home office drew Bosch’s attention the longest. It looked to him like the room was primarily used by Lexi Parks. The knickknacks and souvenirs on the desk and on the bookcase shelves behind it appeared to have been collected during her duties as a city employee. There was a paperweight from the West Hollywood Rotary Club and framed certificates of appreciation from various gay and lesbian groups in regard to her involvement in the permitting process for the annual gay pride parade that drew participants and watchers from around the world. On the wall beside the desk was a framed diploma from Pepperdine University with the name Alexandra Abbott Parks. Clipped to the sides of the frame were various name tags from functions she had attended as part of her job. Bosch realized there was a large social component to Lexi Parks’s work that most likely added a layer of difficulty to the effort of tracking the point where she may have encountered her killer — whether it was Foster or someone else.

His eye held on the diploma frame when he saw a name tag that was unlike the others. It was a red-and-white juror tag that would have been issued by the county and worn by Parks when she was called in for jury service. All that was visible in the photo was a bar code — in keeping with juror anonymity — and no visible indication of when or in which courthouse the juror had served.

More than anything he had seen so far the juror tag bothered him. He had seen nothing in the chrono or other files about this being a branch of the investigation. Though Bosch would freely admit that an investigation was a subjective matter always open to second-guessing — by lawyers, judges, juries, and other investigators — this struck him as something that was either missed or hidden. If Lexi Parks had served on a criminal courts jury, that would have been an important arena for investigators to look into. It would have put her in a building where there was a routine flow of criminals and accused criminals. In a case like this, where the victim appeared to be chosen at random, there is always a crossing point. The place where the predator first encounters his prey. The job of the investigators is to find the crossing, the place where the circle of the victim’s life overlaps the circle of the predator.

Now Bosch had to consider whether investigators Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt had missed this possible crossing or whether it was something they purposely left out of discovery to obfuscate the prosecution’s case.

He put the thought aside for the time being and went back to the other photographs. The office had two closets. Both were photographed from multiple angles. One was packed with summer dresses and blouses on hangers and shoe boxes on the shelves above. It looked like Parks rotated seasonal clothing. At the time of her death in February temperatures were cooler.

The second closet was used to store boxes from computers, printers, and other household items. On the top shelf Bosch saw a small square box that was made of what looked like brown leather. There was no brand name or logo but Bosch thought it might be a box that a watch would come in. He studied the photo with the magnifying glass. He knew there was no telling whether the box was empty, or whether it was for a woman’s or man’s watch. Brown leather favored it being a man’s watch box.

Bosch heard the front door of the house open. His daughter was home. He had started stacking the second set of photos when he heard her call to him.

“In my room,” he called back. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

He then stacked all the files and photos together on his bureau. He got out his phone and called Mickey Haller. The defense attorney answered right away and Bosch could tell by the background noise that he again was in his car.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’m ready to talk.”