The Reversal

Forty-five

Friday, April 9, 2:20 P.M .

Harry Bosch and I sat on opposite sides of a picnic table, watching the ME’s disinterment team dig. They were on the third excavation, working beneath the tree where Jason Jessup had lit a candle in Franklin Canyon.

I didn’t have to be there but wanted to be. I was hoping for further evidence of Jason Jessup’s villainy, as though that might make it easier to accept what had happened.

But so far, in three excavations, they had found nothing. The team moved slowly, stripping away the dirt one inch at a time and sifting and analyzing every ounce of soil they removed. We had been here all morning and my hope had waned into a cold cynicism about what Jessup had been doing up here on the nights he was followed.

A white canvas sheet had been strung from the tree to two poles planted outside the search zone. This shielded the diggers from the sun as well as from the view of the media helicopters above. Someone had leaked word of the search.

Bosch had the stack of files from the missing persons cases on the table. He was ready to go with records and descriptors of the missing girls should any human remains be found. I had simply come armed with the morning’s newspaper and I read the front-page story now for a second time. The report on the events of the day before was the lead story in the Times and was accompanied by a color photo of two SIS officers pointing their weapons into the open trapdoor on the Santa Monica Pier. The story was also accompanied by a front-page sidebar story on the SIS. Headline: ANOTHER CASE, ANOTHER SHOOTING, SIS’s BLOODY HISTORY.

I had the feeling this would be a story with legs. So far, no one in the media had found out that the SIS knew Jessup had obtained a gun. When that got out-and I was sure it would-there would no doubt be a firestorm of controversy, further investigations and police commission inquiries. The chief question being: Once it was established that it was likely that this man had a weapon, why was he allowed to remain free?

It all made me glad I was no longer even temporarily in the employ of the state. In the bureaucratic arena, those kinds of questions and their answers have the tendency to separate people from their jobs.

I needed not worry about the outcome of such inquiries for my livelihood. I would be returning to my office-the backseat of my Lincoln Town Car. I was going back to being private counsel for the defense. The lines were cleaner there, the mission clearer.

“Is Maggie McFierce coming?” Bosch asked.

I put the paper down on the table.

“No, Williams sent her back to Van Nuys. Her part in the case is over.”

“Why isn’t Williams moving her downtown?”

“The deal was that we had to get a conviction for her to get downtown. We didn’t.”

I gestured to the newspaper.

“And we weren’t going to get one. This one holdout juror is telling anybody who’ll listen that he would’ve voted not guilty. So I guess you can say Gabriel Williams is a man who keeps his word. Maggie’s going nowhere fast.”

That’s how it worked in the nexus of politics and jurisprudence. And that’s why I couldn’t wait to go back to defending the damned.

We sat in silence for a while after that and I thought about my ex-wife and how my efforts to help her and promote her had failed so miserably. I wondered if she would begrudge me the effort. I surely hoped not. It would be hard for me to live in a world where Maggie McFierce despised me.

“They found something,” Bosch said.

I looked up from my thoughts and focused. One of the diggers was using a pair of tweezers to put something from the dirt into a plastic evidence bag. Soon she stood up and headed toward us with the bag. She was Kathy Kohl, the ME’s forensic archaeologist.

She handed Bosch the bag and he held it up to look. I could see that it contained a silver bracelet.

“No bones,” Kohl said. “Just that. We’re at thirty-two inches down and it’s rare that you find a murder interment much further down than that. So this one’s looking like the other two. You want us to keep digging?”

Bosch glanced at the bracelet in the bag and looked up at Kohl.

“How about another foot? That going to be a problem?”

“A day in the field beats a day in the lab anytime. You want us to keep digging, we’ll keep digging.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“You got it.”

She went back to the excavation pit and Bosch handed the evidence bag to me to examine. It contained a charm bracelet. There were clots of dirt in the links and its charms. I could make out a tennis racket and an airplane.

“Do you recognize it?” I asked. “From one of the missing girls?”

He gestured to the stack of files on the table.

“No. I don’t remember anything about a charm bracelet in the lists.”

“It could’ve just been lost up here by somebody.”

“Thirty-two inches down in the dirt?”

“So you think Jessup buried it, then?”

“Maybe. I’d hate to come away from this empty-handed. The guy had to have come up here for a reason. If he didn’t bury them here, then maybe this was the kill spot. I don’t know.”

I handed the bag back to him.

“I think you’re being too optimistic, Harry. That’s not like you.”

“Well, then what the hell do you think Jessup was doing up here all those nights?”

“I think he and Royce were playing us.”

“Royce? What are you talking about?”

“We were had, Harry. Face it.”

Bosch held the evidence bag up again and shook it to loosen the dirt.

“It was a classic misdirection,” I said. “The first rule of a good defense is a good offense. You attack your own case before you ever get to court. You find its weaknesses and if you can’t fix them, then you find ways of deflecting attention away from them.”

“Okay.”

“The biggest weakness to the defense’s case was Eddie Roman. Royce was going to put a liar and a drug addict on the stand. He knew that given enough time, you would either find Roman or find out things about him or both. He needed to deflect. Keep you occupied with things outside the case at hand.”

“You’re saying he knew we were following Jessup?”

“He could’ve easily guessed it. I put up no real opposition to his request for an OR release. That was unusual and probably got Royce thinking. So he sent Jessup out at night to see if there was a tail. As we already considered before, he probably even sent Jessup to your house to see if he would engage a response and confirm surveillance. When it didn’t, when it got no response, Royce probably thought he was wrong and dropped it. After that, Jessup stopped coming up here at night.”

“And he probably thought he was in the clear to go build his dungeon under the pier.”

“It makes sense. Doesn’t it?”

Bosch took a long time to answer. He put his hand on top of the stack of files.

“So what about all these missing girls?” he asked. “It’s all just coincidence?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We may never know now. All we know is that they’re still missing and if Jessup was involved, then that secret probably died with him yesterday.”

Bosch stood up, a troubled look on his face. He was still holding the evidence bag.

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“Where do you go from here?”

Bosch shrugged.

“The next case. My name goes back into the rotation. What about you?”

I splayed my hands and smiled.

“You know what I do.”

“You sure about that? You made a damn good prosecutor.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for that, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Besides, they’d never let me back on that side of the aisle. Not after this.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re going to need somebody to blame for all of this and it’s going to be me. I was the one who let Jessup out. You watch. The cops, the Times, even Gabriel Williams will eventually bring it around to me. But that’s okay, as long as they leave Maggie alone. I know my place in the world and I’m going to go back to it.”

Bosch nodded because there was nothing else to say. He shook the bag with the charm bracelet again and worked it with his fingers, removing more dirt from its surfaces. He then held it up to study closely and I could tell he saw something.

“What is it?”

His face changed. He was keying on one of the charms, rubbing dirt off it through the plastic bag. He then handed it to me.

“Take a look. What is that?”

The charm was still tarnished and dirty. It was a square piece of silver less than a half inch wide. On one side there was a tiny swivel at center and on the other what looked like a bowl or a cup.

“Looks like a teacup on a square plate,” I suggested. “I don’t know.”

“No, turn it over. That’s the bottom.”

I did and I saw what he saw.

“It’s one of those… a mortarboard. A graduation cap and this swivel on the top was for the tassel.”

“Yeah. The tassel’s missing, probably still in the dirt.”

“Okay, so what’s it mean?”

Bosch sat back down and quickly started looking through the files.

“You don’t remember? The first girl I showed you and Maggie. Valerie Schlicter. She disappeared a month after graduating from Riverside High.”

“Okay, so you think…”

Bosch found the file and opened it. It was thin. There were three photos of Valerie Schlicter, including one of her in her graduation cap and gown. He quickly scanned the few documents that were in the file.

“Nothing here about a charm bracelet,” he said.

“Because it probably wasn’t hers,” I said. “This is a long shot, don’t you think?”

He acted as though I had said nothing, his mind shutting out any opposing response.

“I’m going to have to go out there. She had a mother and a brother. See who’s still around and can look at this thing.”

“Harry, you sure you-”

“You think I have a choice?”

He stood back up, took the evidence bag back from me and gathered up the files. I could almost hear the adrenaline buzzing through his veins. A dog with a bone. It was time for Bosch to go. He had a long shot in his hand but it was better than no shot. It would keep him moving.

I got up, too, and followed him to the excavation. He told Kohl that he had to go check out the bracelet. He told her to call him if anything else was found in the hole.

We moved to the gravel parking lot, Bosch walking quickly and not looking back to see if I was still with him. We had driven separately to the dig.

“Hey,” I called to him. “Wait up!”

He stopped in the middle of the lot.

“What?”

“Technically, I’m still the prosecutor assigned to Jessup. So before you go rushing off, tell me what the thinking is here. He buried the bracelet here but not her? Does that even make sense?”

“Nothing makes sense until I ID the bracelet. If somebody tells me it was hers, then we try to figure it out. Remember, when Jessup was up here, we couldn’t get close to him. It was too risky. So we don’t know exactly what he was doing. He could’ve been looking for this.”

“Okay, I can maybe see that.”

“I gotta go.”

He continued on to his car. It was parked next to my Lincoln. I called after him.

“Let me know, okay?”

He looked back at me when he got to his car.

“Yeah,” he said. “I will.”

He then dropped into the car and I heard it roar to life. Bosch drove like he walked, pulling out quickly and throwing dust and gravel into the air. A man on a mission. I got in the Lincoln and followed him out of the park and up to Mulholland Drive. After that, I lost him on the curving road ahead.