Two Kinds of Truth

1

Bosch was in cell 3 of the old San Fernando jail, looking through files from one of the Esme Tavares boxes, when a heads-up text came in from Bella Lourdes over in the detective bureau.

Bosch was where he was at the start of most weeks: sitting at his makeshift desk, a wooden door he had borrowed from the Public Works yard and placed across two stacks of file boxes. After sending Lourdes a thank-you text, he opened the memo app on his phone and turned on the recorder. He put the phone screen-down on the desk and partially covered it with a file from the Tavares box. It was a just-in-case move. He had no idea why people from the District Attorney’s Office and his old police department were coming to see him first thing on a Monday morning. He had not received a call alerting him to the visit, though to be fair, cellular connection within the steel bars of the cell was virtually nonexistent. Still, he knew that the surprise visit was often a tactical move. Bosch’s relationship with the LAPD since his forced retirement three years earlier had been strained at best and his attorney had urged him to protect himself by documenting all interactions with the department.

While he waited for them, he went back to the file at hand. He was looking through statements taken in the weeks after Tavares had disappeared. He had read them before but he believed that the case files often contained the secret to cracking a cold case. It was all there if you could find it. A logic discrepancy, a hidden clue, a contradictory statement, an investigator’s handwritten note in the margin of a report — all of these things had helped Bosch clear cases in a career four decades long and counting.

There were three file boxes on the Tavares case. Officially it was a missing-persons case but it had gathered three feet of stacked files over fifteen years because it was classified as such only because a body had never been found.

When Bosch came to the San Fernando Police Department to volunteer his skills looking at cold case files, he had asked Chief Anthony Valdez where to start. The chief, who had been with the department twenty-five years, told him to start with Esmerelda Tavares. It was the case that had haunted Valdez as an investigator, but as police chief he could not give adequate time to it.

In two years working in San Fernando part-time, Bosch had reopened several cases and closed nearly a dozen — multiple rapes and murders among them. But he came back to Esme Tavares whenever he had an hour here and there to look through the file boxes. She was beginning to haunt him too. A young mother who vanished, leaving a sleeping baby in a crib. It might be classified as a missing-persons case but Bosch didn’t have to read through even the first box to know what the chief and every investigator before him knew. Foul play was most likely involved. Esme Tavares was more than missing. She was dead.

Bosch heard the metal door to the jail wing open and then footsteps on the concrete floor that ran in front of the three group cells. He looked up through the iron bars and was surprised by who he saw.

“Hello, Harry.”

It was his former partner, Lucia Soto, along with two men in suits whom Bosch didn’t recognize. The fact that Soto had apparently not let him know they were coming put Bosch on alert. It was a forty-minute drive from both the LAPD’s headquarters and the D.A.’s Office downtown to San Fernando. That left plenty of time to type out a text and say, “Harry, we are heading your way.” But that hadn’t happened, so he assumed that the two men whom he didn’t know had put the clamps on Soto.

“Lucia, long time,” Bosch said. “How are you, partner?”

It looked like none of the three were interested in entering Bosch’s cell, even if it had been repurposed. He stood up, deftly grabbing his phone from beneath the files on the desk and transferring it to his shirt pocket, placing the screen against his chest. He walked to the bars and stuck his hand through. Though he had talked to Soto intermittently by phone and text over the past couple of years he had not seen her. Her appearance had changed. She had lost weight and she looked drawn and tired, her dark eyes worried. Rather than shaking his hand, she squeezed it. Her grip was tight and he took that as a message: Be careful here.

It was easy for Bosch to figure out who was who between the two men. Both were in their early forties and dressed in suits that most likely came off the rack at Men’s Wearhouse. But the man on the left’s pinstripes were showing wear from the inside out. Bosch knew that meant he was wearing a shoulder rig beneath the jacket, and the hard edge of his weapon’s slide was wearing through the fabric. Bosch guessed that the silk lining had already been chewed up. In six months the suit would be toast.

“Bob Tapscott,” he said. “Lucky Lucy’s partner now.”

Tapscott was black and Bosch wondered if he was related to Horace Tapscott, the late South L.A. musician who had been vital in preserving the community’s jazz identity.

“And I’m Alex Kennedy, deputy district attorney,” said the second man. “We’d like to talk to you if you have a few minutes.”

“Uh, sure,” Bosch said. “Step into my office.”

He gestured toward the confines of the former cell now fitted with steel shelves containing case files. There was a long communal bench left over from the cell’s previous existence as a drunk tank. Bosch had files from different cases lined up to review on the bench. He started stacking them to make room for his visitors to sit, even though he was pretty sure they wouldn’t.

“Actually, we talked to your Captain Trevino, and he says we can use the war room over in the detective bureau,” Tapscott said. “It will be more comfortable. Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind if the captain doesn’t mind,” Bosch said. “What’s this about anyway?”

“Preston Borders,” Soto said.

Bosch was walking toward the open door of the cell. The name put a slight pause in his step.

“Let’s wait until we’re in the war room,” Kennedy said quickly. “Then we can talk.”

Soto gave Bosch a look that seemed to impart the message that she was under the D.A.’s thumb on this case. He grabbed his keys and the padlock off the desk, stepped out of the cell, and then slid the metal door closed with a heavy clang. The key to the cell had disappeared long ago and Bosch wrapped a bicycle chain around the bars and secured the door with the padlock.

They left the old jail and walked through the Public Works equipment yard out to First Street. While waiting for traffic to pass, Bosch casually pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked for messages. He had received nothing from Soto or anyone else prior to the arrival of the party from downtown. He kept the recording going and put the phone back in his pocket.

Soto spoke, but not about the case that had brought her up to San Fernando.

“Is that really your office, Harry?” she asked. “I mean, they put you in a jail cell?”

“Yep,” Bosch said. “That was the drunk tank and sometimes I think I can still smell the puke when I open it up in the morning. Supposedly five or six guys hung themselves in there over the years. Supposed to be haunted. But it’s where they keep the cold case files, so it’s where I do my work. They store old evidence boxes in the other two cells, so easy access all around. And usually nobody to bother me.”

He hoped the implication of the last line was clear to his visitors.

“So they have no jail?” Soto asked. “They have to run bodies down to Van Nuys?”

Bosch pointed across the street to the police station they were heading toward.

“Only the women go down to Van Nuys,” Bosch said. “We have a jail here for the men. In the station. State-of-the-art single cells. I’ve even stayed over a few times. Beats the bunk room at the PAB, with everybody snoring.”

She threw him a look as if to say he had changed if he was willing to sleep in a jail cell. He winked at her.

“I can work anywhere,” he said. “I can sleep anywhere.”

When the traffic cleared, they crossed over to the police station and entered through the main lobby. The detective bureau had a direct entrance on the right. Bosch opened it with a key card and held the door as the others stepped in.

The bureau was no bigger than a single-car garage. At its center were three workstations tightly positioned in a single module. These belonged to the unit’s three full-time detectives, Danny Sisto, a recently promoted detective named Oscar Luzon, and Bella Lourdes, just two months back from a lengthy injured-on-duty leave. The walls of the unit were lined with file cabinets, radio chargers, a coffee setup, and a printing station below bulletin boards covered in work schedules and departmental announcements. There were also numerous Wanted and Missing posters, including a variety showing photos of Esme Tavares that had been issued over a period of fifteen years.

Up high on one wall was a poster depicting the iconic Disney ducks Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which were the proud nicknames of the three detectives who worked in the module below. Captain Trevino’s office was to the right and the war room was on the left. A third room was subleased to the Medical Examiner’s Office and used by two coroner’s investigators, who covered the entire San Fernando Valley and points north.

All three of the detectives were at their respective workstations. They had recently cracked a major car-theft ring operating out of the city, and an attorney for one of the suspects had derisively referred to them as Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They took the group nickname as a badge of honor.

Bosch saw Lourdes peeking over a partition from her desk. He gave her a nod of thanks for the heads-up. It was also a sign that so far things were okay.

Bosch led the visitors into the war room. It was a soundproof room with walls lined with whiteboards and flat-screen monitors. At center was a boardroom-style table with eight leather chairs around it. The room was designed to be the command post for major crime investigations, task force operations, and coordinating responses to public emergencies such as earthquakes and riots. The reality was that such incidents were rare and the room was used primarily as a lunchroom, the broad table and comfortable chairs perfect for group lunches. The room carried the distinct odor of Mexican food. The owner of Magaly’s Tamales up on Maclay Avenue routinely dropped off free food for the troops and it was usually devoured in the war room.

“Have a seat,” Bosch said.

Tapscott and Soto sat on one side of the table, while Kennedy went around and sat across from them. Bosch took a chair at one end of the table so he would have angles on all three visitors.

“So, what’s going on?” he said.

“Well, let’s properly introduce ourselves,” Kennedy began. “You, of course, know Detective Soto from your work together in the Open-Unsolved Unit. And now you’ve met Detective Tapscott. They have been working with me on a review of a homicide case you handled almost thirty years ago.”

“Preston Borders,” Bosch said. “How is Preston? Still on death row at the Q last time I checked.”

“He’s still there.”

“So why are you looking at the case?”

Kennedy had pulled his chair close and had his arms folded and his elbows on the table. He drumrolled the fingers of his left hand as if deciding how to answer Bosch’s question, even though it was clear that everything about this surprise visit was rehearsed.

“I am assigned to the Conviction Integrity Unit,” Kennedy said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I have used Detectives Tapscott and Soto on some of the cases I’ve handled because of their skill in working cold cases.”

Bosch knew that the CIU was new and had been put into place after he left the LAPD. Its formation was the fulfillment of a promise made during a heated election campaign in which the policing of the police was a hot-ticket debate issue. The newly elected D.A. — Tak Kobayashi — had promised to create a unit that would respond to the seeming groundswell of cases where new forensic technologies had led to hundreds of exonerations of people imprisoned across the country. Not only was new science leading the way, but old science once thought to be unassailable as evidence was being debunked and swinging open prison doors for the innocent.

As soon as Kennedy mentioned his assignment, Bosch put everything together and knew what was going on. Borders, the man thought to have killed three women but convicted of only one murder, was making a final grab at freedom after nearly thirty years on death row.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?” Bosch said. “Borders? Really? You are seriously looking at that case?”

He looked from Kennedy to his old partner Soto.

He felt totally betrayed.

“Lucia?” he said

“Harry,” she said. “You need to listen.”

2

Bosch felt like the walls of the war room were closing in on him. In his mind and in reality, he had put Borders away for good. He didn’t count on the sadistic sex murderer ever getting the needle, but death row was still its own particular hell, one that was harsher than any sentence that put a man in general population. The isolation of it was what Borders deserved. He went up to San Quentin as a twenty-six-year-old man. To Bosch that meant fifty-plus years of solitary confinement. Less only if he got lucky. More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California.

“It’s not as simple as you think,” Kennedy said.

“Really?” Bosch said. “Tell me why.”

“The obligation of the Conviction Integrity Unit is to consider all legitimate petitions that come to it. Our review process is the first stage, and that happens in-house before the cases go to the LAPD or other law enforcement. When a case meets a certain threshold of concern, we go to the next step and call in law enforcement to carry out a due diligence investigation.”

“And of course everyone is sworn to secrecy at that point.”

Bosch looked at Soto as he said it. She looked away.

“Absolutely,” Kennedy said.

“I don’t know what evidence Borders or his lawyer brought to you, but it’s bullshit,” Bosch said. “He murdered Danielle Skyler and everything else is a scam.”

Kennedy didn’t respond, but from his look Bosch could tell he was surprised he still remembered the victim’s name.

“Yeah, thirty years later I remember her name,” Bosch said. “I also remember Donna Timmons and Vicki Novotney, the two victims your office claimed we didn’t have enough evidence to file on. Were they part of this due diligence you conducted?”

“Harry,” Soto said, trying to calm him.

“Borders didn’t bring any new evidence,” Kennedy said. “It was already there.”

That hit Bosch like a punch. He knew Kennedy was talking about the physical evidence from the case. The implication was that there was evidence from the crime scene or elsewhere that cleared Borders of the crime. The greater implication was incompetence or, worse, malfeasance — that Bosch had missed the evidence or intentionally withheld it.

“What are we talking about here?” he asked.

“DNA,” Kennedy said. “It wasn’t part of the original case in ’eighty-eight. The case was prosecuted before DNA was allowed into use in criminal cases in California. It wasn’t introduced and accepted by a court up in Ventura for another year. In L.A. County it was a year after that.”

“We didn’t need DNA,” Bosch said. “We found the victim’s property hidden in Borders’s apartment.”

Kennedy nodded to Soto.

“We went to property and pulled the box,” she said. “You know the routine. We took clothing collected from the victim to the lab and they put it through the serology protocol.”

“They did a protocol thirty years ago,” Bosch said. “But back then, they looked for ABO genetic markers instead of DNA. And they found nothing. You’re going to tell me that—”

“They found semen,” Kennedy said. “It was a minute amount, but this time they found it. The process has obviously gotten more sophisticated since this killing. And what they found didn’t come from Borders.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “Whose was it?”

“A rapist named Lucas John Olmer,” Soto said.

Bosch had never heard of Olmer. His mind went to work, looking for the scam, the fix, but not considering that he had been wrong when he closed the cuffs around Borders’s wrists.

“Olmer’s in San Quentin, right?” he said. “This whole thing is a—”

“No, he’s not,” Tapscott said. “He’s dead.”

“Give us a little credit, Harry,” Soto added. “It’s not like we went looking for it to be this way. Olmer was never in San Quentin. He died in Corcoran back in twenty fifteen and he never knew Borders.”

“We’ve checked it six ways from Sunday,” Tapscott said. “The prisons are three hundred miles apart and they did not know or communicate with each other. It’s not there.”

There was a certain gotcha smugness in the way Tapscott spoke. It gave Bosch the urge to backhand him across the mouth. Soto knew her old partner’s triggers and reached over to put a hand on Bosch’s arm.

“Harry, this is not your fault,” she said. “This is on the lab. The reports are all there. You’re right — they found nothing. They missed it back then.”

Bosch looked at her and pulled his arm back.

“You really believe that?” he said. “Because I don’t. This is Borders. He’s behind this — somehow. I know it.”

“How, Harry? We’ve looked for the fix in this.”

“Who’s been in the box since the trial?”

“No one. In fact, the last one in that box was you. The original seals were intact with your signature and the date right across the top. Show him the video.”

She nodded to Tapscott, who pulled his phone and opened up a video. He turned the screen to Bosch.

“This is at Piper Tech,” he said.

Piper Tech was a massive complex in downtown where the LAPD’s Property Control Unit was located, along with the fingerprint unit and the aero squadron — using the football field — size roof as a heliport. Bosch knew that the integrity protocol in the archival unit was high. Sworn officers had to provide departmental ID and fingerprints to pull evidence from any case. The boxes were opened in an examination area under twenty-four-hour video surveillance. But this was Tapscott’s own video, recorded on his phone.

“This was not our first go-round with CIU, so we have our own protocol,” Tapscott said. “One of us opens the box, the other person records the whole thing. Doesn’t matter that they have their own cameras down there. And as you can see, no seal is broken, no tampering.”

The video showed Soto displaying the box to the camera, turning it over so that all sides and seams could be seen as intact. The seams had been sealed with the old labels used back in the eighties. For at least the past couple of decades, the department had been using red evidence tape that cracked and peeled if tampered with. Back in 1988, white rectangular stickers with LAPD ANALYZED EVIDENCE printed on them along with a signature and date line were used to seal evidence boxes. Soto manipulated the box in a bored manner and Bosch read that as her thinking they were wasting their time on this one. At least up until that point, Bosch still had her in his court.

Tapscott came in close on the seals used on the top seam of the box. Bosch could see his signature on the top center sticker along with the date September 9, 1988. He knew the date would have placed the sealing of the box at the end of the trial. Bosch had returned the evidence, sealed the box, and then stored it in property control in case an appeal overturned the verdict and they had to go to trial again. That never happened with Borders, and the box had presumably stayed on a shelf in property control, avoiding any intermittent clear-outs of old evidence, because he had also clearly marked on the box “187” — the California penal code for murder — which in the evidence room meant “Don’t throw away.”

As Tapscott moved the camera, Bosch recognized his own routine of using evidence seals on all seams of the box, including the bottom. He had always done it that way, till they moved on to the red evidence tape.

“Go back,” Bosch said. “Let me just look at the signature again.”

Tapscott pulled the phone back, manipulated the video, and then froze the image on the close-up of the seal Bosch had signed. He held the screen out to Bosch, who leaned in to study it. The signature was faded and hard to read but it looked legit.

“Okay,” Bosch said.

Tapscott restarted the video. On the screen Soto used a box cutter attached by a wire to an examination table to slice through the labels and open the box. As she started removing items from the box, including the victim’s clothing and an envelope containing her fingernail clippings, she called each piece of property out so it would be duly recorded. Among the items she mentioned was a sea-horse pendant, which had been the key piece of evidence against Borders.

Before the video was over, Tapscott impatiently pulled the phone back and killed the playback. He then put the phone away.

“On and on like that,” he said. “Nobody fucked with the box, Harry. What was in it had been there since the day you sealed it after the trial.”

Bosch was annoyed that he didn’t get a chance to watch the video in its entirety. Something about Tapscott — a stranger — using his first name also bothered Bosch. He put that annoyance aside and was silent for a long moment as he considered for the first time that his thirty-year belief that he had put a sadistic killer away for good was bogus.

“Where’d they find it?” he finally asked.

“Find what?” Kennedy asked.

“The DNA,” Bosch said.

“One microdot on the victim’s pajama bottoms,” Kennedy said.

“Easy to have missed back in ’eighty-seven,” Soto said. “They were probably just using black lights then.”

Bosch nodded.

“So what happens now?” he asked.

Soto looked at Kennedy. The question was his to answer.

“There’s a hearing on a habeas motion scheduled in Department one-oh-seven a week from Wednesday,” the prosecutor said. “We’ll be joining Borders’s attorneys and asking Judge Houghton to vacate the sentence and release him from death row.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bosch said.

“His lawyer has also notified the city that he’ll be filing a claim,” Kennedy continued. “We’ve been in contact with the City Attorney’s Office and they hope to negotiate a settlement. We’re probably talking well into seven figures.”

Bosch looked down at the table. He couldn’t hold anyone’s eyes.

“And I have to warn you,” Kennedy said. “If a settlement is not reached and he files a claim in federal court, he can go after you personally.”

Bosch nodded. He knew that already. A civil rights claim filed by Borders would leave Bosch personally responsible for damages if the city chose not to cover him. Since two years ago Bosch had sued the city to reinstate his full pension, it was unlikely that he would find a single soul in the City Attorney’s Office interested in indemnifying him against damages collected by Borders. The one thought that pushed through this reality was of his daughter. He could be left with nothing but an insurance policy going to her after he was gone.

“I’m sorry,” Soto said. “If there were any other...”

She didn’t finish and he slowly brought his eyes up to hers.

“Nine days,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“The hearing’s in nine days. I have until then to figure out how he did it.”

“Harry, we’ve been working this for five weeks. There’s nothing. This was before Olmer was on anybody’s radar. All we know is he wasn’t in jail at the time and he was in L.A. — we found work records. But the DNA is the DNA. On her night clothes, DNA from a man later convicted of multiple abduction-rapes. All cases home intrusions — very similar to Skyler’s. But without the death. I mean, look at the facts. No D.A. in the world would touch this or go any other way with it.”

Kennedy cleared his throat.

“We came here today out of respect for you, Detective, and all the cases you’ve cleared over time. We don’t want to get into an adversarial position on this. That would not be good for you.”

“And you don’t think every one of those cases I cleared is affected by this?” Bosch said. “You open the door to this guy and you might as well open it for every one of the people I sent away. If you put it on the lab — same thing. It taints everything.”

Bosch leaned back and stared at his old partner. He had at one time been her mentor. She had to know what this was doing to him.

“It is what it is,” Kennedy said. “We have an obligation. ‘Better that one hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned.’”

“Spare me your bastardized Ben Franklin bullshit,” Bosch said. “We found evidence connecting Borders to all three of those women’s disappearances, and your office passed on two of them, some snot-nosed prosecutor saying there was not enough. This doesn’t fucking make sense. I want the nine days to do my own investigation and I want access to everything you have and everything you’ve done.”

He looked at Soto as he said it but Kennedy responded.

“Not going to happen, Detective,” he said. “As I said, we’re here as a courtesy. But you’re not on this case anymore.”

Before Bosch could counter, there was a sharp knock on the door, and it was cracked open. Bella Lourdes stood there. She waved him out.

“Harry,” she said. “We need to talk right now.”

There was an urgency in her voice that Bosch could not ignore. He looked back at the others seated at the table and started to get up.

“Hold on a second,” he said. “We’re not done.”

He stood up and went to the door. Lourdes signaled him all the way out with her fingers. She closed the door behind him. He noticed that the squad room was now empty — no one in the module, the captain’s door open, and his desk chair empty.

And Lourdes was clearly agitated. She used both hands to hook her short dark hair behind her ears, an anxiety habit Bosch had noticed the petite, compact detective had been exhibiting since coming back to work.

“What’s up?”

“We’ve got two down in a robbery at a farmacia on the mall.”

“Two what? Officers?”

“No, people there. Behind the counter. Two one-eighty-sevens. The chief wants all hands on this. Are you ready? You want to ride with me?”

Bosch looked back at the closed door of the war room and thought about what had been said in there. What was he going to do about it? How was he going to handle it?

“Harry, come on, I gotta go. You in or out?”

Bosch looked at her.

“Okay, let’s go.”

They moved quickly toward the exit that took them directly into the side lot, where detectives and command staff parked. He pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and turned off the recording app.

“What about them?” Lourdes said.

“Fuck them,” Bosch said. “They’ll figure it out.”

3

San Fernando was a municipality barely two and a half square miles and surrounded on all sides by the city of Los Angeles. To Harry Bosch it was the proverbial needle in the haystack, the tiny place and job he had found when his time with the LAPD ended with him still believing he had more to give and a mission unfulfilled, but seemingly no place to go. Racked by budgetary shortfalls in the years that followed the 2008 recession, and having laid off a quarter of its forty officers, the police department actively pursued the creation of a voluntary corps of retired law officers to work in every section of the department, from patrol to communications to detectives.

When Chief Valdez reached out to Bosch and said he had an old jail cell full of cold cases and no one to work them, it was like a lifeline had been thrown to a drowning man. Bosch was alone and certainly adrift, having unceremoniously left the department he had served for almost forty years, at the same time that his daughter left home for college. Most of all, the offer came at a time when he felt unfinished. After all the years he had put in, he never expected to walk out the door one day at the LAPD and not be allowed back in.

At a period in life when most men took up golf or bought a boat, Bosch felt resolutely incomplete. He was a closer. He needed to work cases, and setting up shop as a private eye or a defense investigator wasn’t going to suit him in the long run. He took the offer from the chief and soon was proving he was a closer at the SFPD. And he quickly went from part-time hours working cold cases to mentoring the entire detective bureau. Huey, Dewey, and Louie were dedicated and good investigators but together they had a total of less than ten years’ experience as detectives. Captain Trevino was only part-time in the unit himself, as he was also responsible for supervising both the communications unit and the jail. It fell to Bosch to teach Lourdes, Sisto, and Luzon the mission.

The mall was a two-block stretch of San Fernando Road that went through the middle of town and was lined with small shops, businesses, bars, and restaurants. It was in a historic part of the city and was anchored on one end by a large department store that had been closed and vacant for several years, the JC Penney sign still on the front facade. Most of the other signs were in Spanish and the businesses catered to the city’s Latino majority, mostly bridal and quinceañera salons, secondhand shops, and stores that sold products from Mexico.

It was a three-minute drive from the police station to the scene of the shooting. Lourdes drove her unmarked city car. Bosch tried his best to put the Borders case and what had been discussed in the war room behind him so that he could concentrate on the task at hand.

“So what do we know?” he asked.

“Two dead at La Farmacia Familia,” Lourdes said. “Called in by a customer who went in and saw one of the victims. Patrol found the second in the back. Both employees. Looks like a father and son.”

“The son an adult?”

“Yes.”

“Gang affiliation?”

“No word.”

“What else?”

“That’s it. Gooden and Sanders headed out when we got the call. Sheriff’s forensics have been called.”

Gooden and Sanders were the two coroner’s investigators who worked out of the subleased office in the detective bureau. It was a lucky break having them so close. Bosch remembered sometimes waiting for an hour or longer for coroner’s investigators when he worked cases for the LAPD.

While Bosch had solved three cold case murders since coming to work for San Fernando, this would be the first live murder investigation, so to speak, since his arrival. It meant there would be an active crime scene, with victims on the floor, not just photos from a file to observe. The protocol and pace would be quite different, and it invigorated him despite the upset from the meeting he had just escaped from.

As Lourdes turned in to the mall, Bosch looked ahead and saw that the investigation was already starting off wrong. Three patrol cars were parked directly in front of the farmacia, and that was too close. Traffic through the two-lane mall had not been stopped and drivers were going slowly by the business, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever had caused the police activity.

“Pull in here,” he said. “Those cars are too close and I’m going to move them back and shut down the street.”

Lourdes did as he instructed and parked the car in front of a bar called the Tres Reyes and well behind a growing crowd of onlookers gathering near the drugstore.

Bosch and Lourdes were soon out of the car and weaving through the crowd. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung between the patrol cars, and two officers stood conferring by the trunk of one car while another stood with his hands on his belt buckle, a common patrol officer pose, watching the front door of the farmacia.

Bosch saw that the front door of the store containing the crime scene was propped open with a sandbag, which had probably come from the trunk of a patrol car. There was no sign of Chief Valdez or any of the other investigators, and Bosch knew that meant they were all inside.

“Shit,” he said as he approached the door.

“What?” Lourdes asked.

“Too many cooks...,” Bosch said. “Wait out here for a minute.”

Bosch entered the pharmacy, leaving Lourdes outside. It was a small business with just a few retail aisles leading back to a rear counter, where the actual pharmacy was located. He saw Valdez standing with Sisto and Luzon behind the counter. They were looking down at what Bosch guessed was one of the bodies. There was no sign of Trevino.

Bosch gave a short, low whistle that drew their attention and then signaled them to come to the front of the store. He then turned around and walked back out the door.

Outside, he waited by the door with Lourdes, and when the three men stepped out, he pushed the sandbag out of the way with his foot and let the door close.

“Chief, can I start us off?” he asked.

Bosch looked at Valdez and waited for the chief to give him the nod. He was asking to take charge of the investigation and he wanted it clear to all parties.

“Take it, Harry,” Valdez said.

Bosch got the attention of the patrol officers huddled together and signaled them over as well.

“Okay, listen up everybody,” Bosch said. “Our number one priority here is to protect the crime scene, and we’re not doing that. Patrol, I want you guys to move your cars out and shut down this block on both ends. Tape it up. Nobody comes in without authorization. I then want clipboards on both ends, and you write down the name of every cop or lab rat that comes into the crime scene. You write down the license-plate number of every car you let out too.”

Nobody moved.

“You heard him,” Valdez said. “Let’s move it, people. We’ve got two citizens on the floor in there. We need to do this right by them and the department.”

The patrol officers quickly returned to their cars to carry out Bosch’s orders. Bosch and the other detectives then split up and started moving the gathered onlookers back up the street. Some shouted questions in Spanish but Bosch did not reply. He scanned the faces of those he was pushing back. He knew the killer could be among them. It wouldn’t be the first time.

After a two-zone crime scene had been established, Bosch and the chief and the three detectives reconvened by the door of the pharmacy. Bosch once more looked at Valdez for confirmation of his authority, because he didn’t expect his next moves to go over well.

“I still have this, Chief?” he asked.

“All yours, Harry,” Valdez said. “How do you want to do it?”

“Okay, we want to limit people inside the crime scene,” Bosch said. “We get this thing into court and a defense lawyer sees all of us crammed in there, wandering around, and it just gives him more targets to potshot, more confusion to throw at a jury. So there’s only going to be two people inside and that’s going to be Lourdes and me. Sisto and Luzon, you’ve got the exterior crime scene. I want you going down the street in both directions. We’re looking for witnesses and cameras. We—”

“We got here first,” Luzon said, pointing to himself and Sisto. “It should be our case and us inside.”

At about forty, Luzon was the oldest of the three full-time investigators, but he had the least experience as a detective. He was moved into the unit six months earlier after spending twelve years in patrol. He had gotten the promotion to fill the void left by Lourdes’s leave of absence and then Valdez found the money in the budget to keep him on board at a time when there was a spike in property crimes attributed to a local gang called the SanFers. Bosch had observed him since he’d gotten the promotion and concluded he was a good and earnest detective — a good choice by Valdez. But Bosch had not yet worked with him on a case and he had had that experience with Lourdes. He wanted her to take the lead on this.

“That’s not how it works,” Bosch said. “Lourdes is going to be lead. I need you and Sisto to go two blocks in both directions. We’re looking for the getaway vehicle. We’re also looking for video and I need you guys to go find it. It’s important.”

Bosch could see Luzon fighting back the urge to again argue Bosch’s orders. But he looked at the chief, who stood with his arms folded in front of his chest, and saw no indication that the man ultimately in charge disagreed with Bosch.

“You got it,” he said.

He went in one direction, while Sisto headed off in the other. Sisto did not bother to complain about the assignment but had a hangdog look on his face.

“Hey, guys?” Bosch said.

Luzon and Sisto looked back. Bosch gestured to Lourdes and the chief to include them.

“Look, I’m not trying to be an arrogant ass,” he said. “My experience comes with a lot of fuckups. We learn from our mistakes, and in over thirty years of working homicides, I’ve made many. I’m just trying to use what I’ve learned the hard way. Okay?”

Reluctant nods came from Luzon and Sisto and they headed off to their assignments.

“Take down plates and phone numbers,” Bosch called after them, immediately realizing it was an unneeded directive.

Once they were gone, the chief stepped away from the huddle.

“Harry,” Valdez said. “Let’s talk for a second.”

Bosch followed him, awkwardly leaving Lourdes alone on the sidewalk. The chief spoke quietly.

“Look, I get what you’re doing with those two and what you said about learning the hard way. But I want you on lead. Bella’s good but she’s just back and getting her feet wet. This — homicide — is what you’ve been doing for thirty years. This is why you’re here.”

“I get that, Chief. But you don’t want me on lead. We have to think about when this gets into court. Everything’s about building a case for trial, and you don’t want a part-timer on lead. You want Bella. They try character assassination on her, and she’ll eat their lunch after what happened last year, what she went through and then her coming back to the job. She’s a hero and that’s who you want on the witness stand. On top of that, she’s good and she’s ready for this. And besides, I may have some problems coming up soon from downtown. Problems that could be a big distraction. You don’t want me on lead.”

Valdez looked at him. He knew that “downtown” meant from outside the SFPD, from Bosch’s past.

“I heard you had visitors this morning,” he said. “We’ll talk about that later. Where do you want me?”

“Media relations,” Bosch said. “They’ll get wind of this soon enough and will start showing up. ‘Two Dead on Main Street’ will be a story. You need to set up a command post and corral them when they start coming in. We want to control what information gets out there.”

“Understood. What else? You need more bodies for the canvass. I can pull people in from patrol, take one officer out of every car and run solo patrols till we get a handle on this.”

“That would be good. There were people in all of these shops. Somebody saw something.”

“You got it. What if I can get the old Penney’s open and we use that as the CP? I know the guy who owns the building.”

Bosch looked across the street and down half a block at the facade of the long-closed department store.

“We’re going to be out here late. If you can get lights on in there, go for it. What about Captain Trevino? Is he around?”

“I have him covering the shop while I am here. You need him?”

“No, I can fill him in on things later.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it. We really need a quick conclusion to this, Harry. If there is one.”

“Roger that.”

The chief headed off and Lourdes came up to Bosch.

“Let me guess, he didn’t want me as lead,” she said.

“He wanted me,” Bosch said. “But it was no reflection on you. I said no. I said it was your case.”

“Does that have something to do with the three visitors you had this morning?”

“Maybe. And it has to do with you being able to handle it. Why don’t you go in and watch over Gooden and Sanders? I’ll call the sheriff’s lab and get an ETA. First thing we want are photos. Don’t let those guys move the bodies around until we get the full photo spread.”

“Roger that.”

“The bodies belong to the coroner. But the crime scene is ours. Remember that.”

Lourdes headed toward the door of the farmacia and Bosch pulled his phone. The SFPD was so small, it did not have its own forensics team. It relied on the sheriff’s department crime scene unit and that often put it in second position for services. Bosch called the liaison at the lab and was told a team was on the road to San Fernando as they spoke. Bosch reminded the liaison that they were working a double murder and asked for a second team, but he was denied and told there wasn’t a second team to spare. They were getting two techs and a photographer/videographer, and that was it.

As he hung up, Bosch noticed one of the patrol officers he had given orders to earlier was standing at the new crime scene perimeter at the end of the block. Yellow tape had been strung completely across, closing the road through the mall. The patrol officer had his hands on his belt buckle and was watching Bosch.

Bosch put his phone away and walked up the street to the yellow tape and the officer manning it.

“Don’t look in,” Bosch said. “Look out.”

“What?” the officer asked.

“You’re watching the detectives. You should be watching the street.”

Bosch put his hand on the officer’s shoulder and turned him toward the tape.

“Look outward from a crime scene. Look for people watching, people who don’t fit. You’d be surprised how many times the doer comes back to watch the investigation. Anyway, you’re protecting the crime scene, not watching it.”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

The sheriff’s forensics team arrived shortly after that and Bosch ordered everyone out of the pharmacy so the photographer could go in and take a preliminary photo-and-video sweep of the crime scene with only the bodies in view.

While waiting outside, Bosch pulled on gloves and a pair of paper booties. Once the all clear came from the photographer, the whole team entered the farmacia, passing through a plastic crime scene containment curtain that had been hung by the techs over the door.

Gooden and Sanders separated and continued to process the bodies. Lourdes and Bosch first went behind the pharmacy counter, where Gooden and one of the crime scene techs were examining the first body. Lourdes had a notebook out and was writing down a description of what she was seeing. Bosch leaned close to his partner’s ear and whispered.

“Take the time to just observe. Notes are good but clear visuals are good to keep in your mind.”

“Okay. I will.”

When Bosch was a young homicide detective, he worked with a partner named Frankie Sheehan, who always kept an old milk crate in the trunk of their unmarked car. He’d carry it into every scene, find a good vantage point, and put the crate down. Then he’d sit on it and just observe the scene, studying its nuances and trying to take the measure and motive of the violence that had occurred there. Sheehan had worked the Danielle Skyler case with Bosch and had sat on his crate in the corner of the room where the body was left nude and viciously violated on the floor. But Sheehan was long dead now and would not be taking the free fall that was awaiting Bosch on the case.

4

La Farmacia Familia was a small operation that appeared to Bosch to rely mostly on the business of filling prescriptions. In the front section of the store, there were three short aisles of shelved retail items relating to home remedies and care, almost all of them in Spanish-language boxes imported from Mexico. There were no racks of greeting cards, point-of-purchase candy displays, or cold cases stocked with sodas and water. The business was nothing like the chain pharmacies scattered across the city.

The entire back wall of the store was the actual pharmacy, where there was a counter that fronted the storage area of medicines and a work area for filling prescriptions. The front section of the store seemed completely untouched by the crime that had occurred here.

Bosch moved down the aisle to the left, which brought him to a half door leading to the rear of the pharmacy counter. He saw Gooden squatting down behind the counter next to the first body, that of a man who appeared to be in his early fifties. He was lying on his back just behind the counter, his hands up and palms out by his shoulders. He was wearing a white pharmacist’s jacket with a name embroidered on it.

“Harry, meet José,” Gooden said. “At least he’s José until we confirm it with fingerprints. Through-and-through gunshot to the chest.”

He formed a gun with his thumb and finger as he gave the report and pointed the barrel against his chest.

“Point-blank?” Bosch asked.

“Almost,” Gooden said. “Six to twelve inches. Guy probably had his hands up and they still shot him.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He was in observation mode. He would form his own impressions about the scene and determine if the victim’s hands were up or down when he was shot. He didn’t need that information from Gooden.

Bosch squatted and looked across the floor around the body and bent down further to look under the counter.

“What is it?” Lourdes asked.

“No brass,” Bosch said.

No ejected bullet casings indicated one of two things to Bosch. Either the killer had taken the time to pick up the casings or he had used a revolver — which did not eject bullet casings. Either way, it was notable to Bosch. Picking up critical evidence showed a cool calculation to the crime. Using a revolver could indicate the same — a weapon chosen because it would not leave critical evidence behind.

He and Lourdes moved into the hallway to the left of the pharmacy counter. The twenty-foot passageway led to the work and storage areas and a restroom. There was a door at the end of the hall with double locks and an exit sign as well as a peephole. It presumably led to the back alley from which deliveries would come.

Just short of the door, Sanders, the second coroner’s tech, was on his knees next to the other body, also a male wearing a pharmacist’s coat. The body was chest down, one arm reaching out toward the door. There was a trail of blood smears on the floor, leading to the body. Lourdes walked down the side edge of the hallway, careful not to step in the blood.

“And here we have José Jr.,” Sanders said. “We have three points of impact: the back, the rectum, the head — most likely in that order.”

Bosch stepped away from Lourdes and crossed over the blood smears to the other side of the hallway so he could get an unobstructed view of the body. José Jr. was lying with his right cheek against the floor, eyes partially open. He looked like he was in his early twenties, a meager growth of whiskers on his chin.

The blood and bullet wounds told the tale. At the first sign of trouble, José Jr. had made a break for the rear door, running for his life down the hallway. He was knocked down with the first shot to the upper back. On the floor, he turned to look behind him, spilling his blood on the tiles. He saw the shooter coming and turned to try to crawl toward the door, his knees slipping on and smearing the blood. The shooter had come up and shot him again, this time in the rectum, then stepped up and ended it with the shot to the back of the head.

Bosch had seen the rectum shot in prior cases, and it drew his attention.

“The shot up the pipe — how close?” he asked.

Sanders reached over and used one gloved hand to pull the seat of the victim’s pants out taut so the bullet entry could be clearly seen. With the other hand he pointed to where the cloth had been burned.

“He got up in there,” Sanders said. “Point-blank.”

Bosch nodded. His eyes tracked up to the wounds on the back and head. It appeared to him that the two entrance wounds he could see were neater and smaller than the one shot to José Sr.’s chest.

“You thinking two different weapons?” he asked.

Sanders nodded.

“If I were betting,” he said.

“And no brass?”

“None evident. We’ll see when we roll the body but that would be a miracle if three shells ended up underneath.”

Bosch nodded in reply.

“Okay, do what you have to do,” he said.

He carefully stepped back down the hallway and moved into the pharmacy’s work- and drug-storage area. He started by looking up and immediately saw the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling over the door.

Lourdes entered the room behind him. He pointed up and she saw the camera.

“Need the feed,” he said. “Hopefully off-site or to a website.”

“I can check that,” she said.

Bosch surveyed the room. Several of the plastic drawers where stores of pills were kept were pulled out and dropped to the floor, and loose pills were scattered across it. He knew a difficult task of inventorying what had been in the pharmacy and what had been taken lay ahead. Some of the drawers on the floor were larger than others and he guessed that they had contained more commonly prescribed drugs.

On the worktable, there was a computer. There were also tools for measuring out and bottling pills in plastic vials as well as a label printer.

“Can you go out and talk to the photographer?” he asked Lourdes. “Make sure he got all of this stuff in here before we start stepping on pills and crunching them. Tell him he can start videoing the crime scene processing now, too.”

“On it,” Lourdes said.

After Lourdes went out, Bosch moved into the hallway again. He knew they would need to collect and document every pill and piece of evidence in the place. A homicide case always moved slowly from the center out.

In the old days, he would have stepped out at this point to smoke a cigarette and contemplate things. This time, he went out through the plastic curtain to just think. Almost immediately his phone vibrated in his pocket. The caller ID was blocked.

“That wasn’t cool, Harry,” Lucia Soto said when he answered.

“Sorry, we had an emergency,” he said. “Had to go.”

“You could have told us. I’m not your enemy on this. I’m trying to run interference for you, keep it below the radar. If you play this right, the blame will go on the lab or your former partner — the one who’s dead.”

“Are Kennedy and Tapscott with you right now?”

“No, of course not. This is just you and me.”

“Can you get me a copy of the report you turned in to Kennedy?”

“Harry...”

“I thought so. Lucia, don’t say you’re on my side, running interference for me, if you’re not. You know what I mean?”

“I can’t just share active files with—”

“Look, I’m in the middle of things here. Give me a call back if you change your mind. I remember there was a case that meant a lot to you once. We were partners and I was right there for you. I guess things are different now.”

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

“And one other thing? I’d never sell out a partner. Even a dead one.”

He disconnected. He felt a pang of guilt. He was being heavy-handed with Soto but felt he needed to push her toward giving him what he needed.

Since he had finished his career with the LAPD working cold cases, it had been many years since he had worked a live murder scene. With the return of crime scene instincts came the tug of old habits. He felt a deep need for a cigarette. He looked around to see if there was anyone he could borrow a smoke from and saw Lourdes approaching from the short end of the block. She had a troubled look on her face.

“What’s wrong?”

“I came out to talk to the photographer, and got signaled up to the tape. Mrs. Esquivel, the wife and mother of our victims, was stopped at the tape and she was hysterical. I just put her in a car and they’re taking her to the station.”

Bosch nodded. Keeping her away from the crime scene was the right move.

“You up for talking with her?” he asked. “We can’t leave her over there too long.”

“I don’t know,” Lourdes said. “I just ruined her life. Everything that’s important to her is suddenly gone. Husband and her only child.”

“I know, but you have to establish rapport. You never know, this case could go on for years. She’s going to need to trust the person carrying it. You’ve got Spanish and a lot of years ahead of you here. I don’t.”

“Okay, I can do it.”

“Focus on the son. His friends, what he did when he wasn’t working, enemies, all of that stuff. Find out where he lived, whether he had a girlfriend. And ask the mother if José Sr. was having any problems with him at work. The son is going to be the key to this.”

“You get all that from a shot up the ass?”

Bosch nodded.

“I’ve seen it before. On a case where we talked to a profiler. It’s an angry shot. It has payback written all over it.”

“He knew the shooters?”

“No doubt. Either he knew them or they knew him. Or both.”

5

Bosch didn’t get to his home until after midnight. He was beat from a long day working the crime scene and coordinating the efforts of the other detectives as well as the patrol division. He had also been drawn into briefing Chief Valdez on where the investigation stood before the chief faced the cameras and reporters that had gathered on the mall. The update was concise: no suspects, no arrests.

The assessment for the media was accurate but the investigators of the farmacia murders were not without leads. The murders and subsequent looting of the store’s supplies of prescription drugs had indeed been captured on three cameras inside the drugstore, and the full-color videos gave insight into the cold calculation of the crime. There had been two gunmen wearing black ski masks and carrying revolvers. They cut down José Esquivel Sr. and his son with a coldness that implied planning, precision, and intention. Bosch’s first thought after seeing the videos was that they were hit men there to do a job. Stealing pills was simply a cover for the true motive for the crime. Sadly, initial viewings of the video revealed few usable identifiers of either shooter. When one of the men extended his arm to shoot José Sr., his sleeve pulled back to reveal white skin. But nothing else stood out.

After parking in the carport, Bosch skipped the side-door entrance to the house and walked out front so he could check his mailbox. He saw that the top of the box attached to the house was held open by a thick manila envelope. He pulled it out and held it under the porch light to see where it had come from.

There was no return address and no postage on the envelope. Even his own address was missing. The envelope had only his name written on it. Bosch unlocked the door and carried it inside. He put the envelope and the mail he had received down on the kitchen counter while he opened the refrigerator to grab a beer.

After his first draw on the amber bottle, he tore open the envelope. He slid out a one-inch-thick sheaf of documents. He recognized the top report right away. It was a copy of the initial incident report relating to Danielle Skyler’s murder in 1987. Bosch riffled through the stack of documents and quickly determined that he had a copy of the current investigative file.

Lucia Soto had come through.

Bosch was dead tired but he knew that he would not be going to sleep anytime soon. He dumped the rest of the beer down the drain, then brewed a cup of coffee on the Keurig his daughter had given him for Christmas. He grabbed the stack of documents and went to work.

After his daughter had left for college, and family dinners became a rare occurrence, Bosch turned the dining room of the small house into a workspace. The table became a desk wide enough to spread investigative reports across — reports from cases he was pulling out of the jail cell at San Fernando or that he had taken on privately. He had also installed shelving on the two walls of the alcove and these were lined with more files and books on legal procedure and the California penal code as well as stacks of CDs and a Bose player for use when his vinyl collection and phonograph didn’t cover his musical needs.

Bosch slotted a disc called Chemistry in the Bose and put the volume at midrange. It was an album of duets between Houston Person on tenor sax and Ron Carter on double bass. It was part of an ongoing musical conversation, their fifth and most recent collaboration, and Bosch had the earlier recordings on vinyl. It was perfect for midnight work. He took his usual spot at the table, with his back to the shelves and the music, and started going through the cache of documents.

Initially he divided the documents along lines of old and new. Reports from the original investigation of Danielle Skyler’s murder — many of which he had written himself thirty years before — went into one pile, while the newer reports, prepared during the current reinvestigation, went into a second stack.

While he clearly remembered the original investigation, he knew that many of the small details of the case had receded in his memory and that it was prudent for him to start with the old before reviewing the new. He was first drawn to the chronological record, which was always the starting point for reviewing a case. It was essentially a case diary — a string of brief dated and timed entries describing the investigative moves made by Bosch and his partner, Frankie Sheehan. Many of the entries would be expanded upon in summary reports but the chrono was the place to start for a step-by-step overview of the investigation.

There was not a single computer in the Robbery-Homicide Division in 1987. Reports were either handwritten or typed out on IBM Selectrics. Most of the time chronos were handwritten. They were on lined paper in section 1 of the murder book. Each investigator, including those filling in or handling ancillary case tasks, would follow their own entries in the log with their initials, even though the different handwriting styles made the identity of the author obvious in most cases.

Bosch was looking at photocopies of the original case chrono and recognized his handwriting as well as Sheehan’s. He also recognized the two different report-writing styles he and Sheehan employed. Sheehan, who was the more experienced of their team, used fewer words and often wrote in incomplete sentences. Bosch was more verbose, a characteristic of his report writing that would change over time as he learned what Sheehan already knew: less is more, meaning the less time you spent on paperwork, the more time you had to follow the leads of the case. And fewer words on the page also meant fewer words for a defense attorney to twist into his own interpretation in court.

Bosch had gotten his detective’s badge in 1977 and spent five years working in various divisions and crime units before he was promoted to homicide detective and posted first at Hollywood Division and then eventually the elite Robbery-Homicide Division working out of Parker Center, downtown. At RHD he was paired with Sheehan, and the Skyler case was one of the first murders they handled as lead investigators.

Danielle Skyler’s story was the universal story of Los Angeles, with an added irony of origin. Raised by a single mother who worked as a motel maid in Hollywood, Florida, she filled the holes in her life with applause that came with success in beauty pageants and on the high school stage. Armed with her beauty and fragile confidence, she crossed the three thousand miles from Hollywood to Hollywood at age twenty. She found, as most do, that there was one of her from every small town in America. The paying jobs were few and she was often taken advantage of by the leeches who were part of the entertainment industry. But she persevered. She waited on tables, took acting classes, and went to an endless string of auditions for parts that usually didn’t have character names or many lines.

She also built a community — young men and women engaged in the same struggle for success and fame. She saw many of them at the same auditions and casting offices. They traded tips on jobs both in entertainment and hospitality — meaning the restaurant business. By the time she was five years into the struggle, she had managed to amass a handful of movie and TV credits where she was primarily cast as eye candy. She had also given numerous showcase performances in small playhouses across the Valley and had finally transitioned out of restaurant work to a part-time job as a receptionist for a freelance casting agent.

The five years in Los Angeles were also marked by several apartment moves, several roommate changes, and several relationships with different men ranging in age from five years younger than her to twenty-two years older. When she was found raped and strangled in the empty second bedroom of her Toluca Lake apartment, Bosch and Sheehan were faced with filling out a victim history that would take several weeks to complete.

As Bosch read through the case chronology, several details about Skyler and the moves he and Sheehan had made came back to him, and the case seemed as fresh to him as the killings in La Farmacia Familia that morning. He remembered the faces of the friends and associates interviewed and listed in the chrono. He remembered how sure he and his partner were when they zeroed in on Preston Borders.

Borders was also an actor who was struggling for a foothold in Hollywood. But he wasn’t doing it without a net. Unlike Danielle Skyler and thousands of other would-be artists who roll into L.A. each year with the certainty of the tide on Venice Beach, Borders didn’t have to work in hospitality or in phone sales or anywhere else. Borders was from a suburb of Boston and was staked by his parents in his efforts to become a movie star. His rent and car were paid for and his credit-card bills were sent to Boston. This allowed him to fill his days auditioning for film and TV roles and his nights moving through a seemingly endless rotation of clubs, where there were always numerous women like Skyler hoping for someone to clear their bar tab in exchange for a smile and conversation and maybe something more intimate if the feeling was right.

According to the chrono, Bosch and Sheehan connected Borders to Skyler on November 1, 1987, the ninth day of the investigation. That was when they knocked on the door of a Skyler acquaintance named Amanda Margot. At the time, Margot was another ingenue actress. Thirty years later she could count herself among the lucky ones. She’d had a solid career in the film and television arenas, appearing in small roles in several films and as a lead in a long-running show where she played a no-holds-barred homicide detective. Bosch had read interviews with her in which she said that she drew her TV character’s sympathy for victims from the real-life murder of a close friend.

Bosch remembered the initial interview with Margot like it was yesterday. At the time, the young actress had none of the trappings of success in her small Studio City apartment. Bosch and Sheehan sat on a threadbare couch from a secondhand store, and Margot sat on a chair she pulled into the living room from the kitchen.

The two detectives had been interviewing four or five friends and associates of the victim a day and Margot was high on their list, but she had secured a week’s work at an auto show in Detroit presenting cars and had left town shortly after the murder. The appointment was set up for when she returned.

Margot proved to be a font of information about Skyler. The two had been close, though they had never lived together. At the time of the murder, Skyler’s roommate had just moved out and given up on the dream of stardom. She had returned home to Texas, and Skyler was looking for a new roommate. Margot was in the last months of a lease and planned to move in with her friend right after the new year. Skyler was living by herself until then, though her family had told the investigators that her younger sister, traveling while on a gap year after high school, was planning on arriving for Thanksgiving and using the spare bedroom until both sisters went back to Florida for the Christmas holidays.

Margot and Danielle had met three years previously in the waiting room of a casting agency where they were auditioning for the same part. Rather than becoming competitors, they had hit it off. Neither of them got the part but they got coffee afterward and a friendship was born. They moved in similar circles both professionally and socially. They tried to look out for each other, tipping one another off to potential jobs and about which casting directors or acting coaches were lecherous.

Over time, they even dated some of the same men, and this was the point the detectives zeroed in on. Evidence and autopsy results indicated that Danielle Skyler had been brutally abused during the course of the night. She had been raped vaginally and anally and choked repeatedly. There were multiple thin furrow lines around her neck, some cutting through the skin, indicating that her killer had most likely choked her to unconsciousness and then brought her back for more abuse at least six times. It was possible that the garrote had been a necklace worn by the victim.

The body was also mutilated with a knife that matched others from the kitchen, but at autopsy it was determined that the slashes were postmortem.

It also appeared that the apartment had been tricked out to look like there had been an intruder. A sliding door on the second-floor balcony off the empty bedroom was left ajar, but there were no indications outside that anyone had climbed up and onto the balcony to pop the door and enter. The balcony’s metal railing had a thick layer of smog dust on it that had not been disturbed at any point on its entire length. This meant an intruder would have had to vault the railing without touching it to get to the sliding door. It was an improbable scenario, which led the investigators to consider the opposite — that Skyler’s killer had entered through the front door and without a struggle. It meant that he had known her on some level and wanted to disguise that fact from investigators.

Amanda Margot revealed during her interview that one night two weeks before Skyler’s death, the two young women had gotten together in Margot’s apartment to drink cheap wine and order takeout. They were joined by a third actress, named Jamie Henderson, whom they also knew from the audition circuit. At some point during the evening, they started talking about men and learned that they had dated several of the same men, having met them through acting schools, casting agencies, and talent showcases. The women started making a “one-and-done” list of men they agreed should never be dated again.

High on the list of reasons was that each man mentioned had been demanding and in some cases physically threatening when it came to wanting sex. Margot explained that many of the men they dated expected to have sex after one or two dates. It was the men who didn’t handle rejection well who were put on the one-and-done list.

Here was where Bosch and Sheehan’s pursuit of this angle paid off. Though the one-and-done list might have come out of an alcohol-fueled girls’-night gossip session, Margot still had the piece of paper torn from a notebook and attached by a bottle-opener magnet to her refrigerator door. She provided it to the detectives and was able to point out the four names that Danielle Skyler had contributed to the list. They weren’t full names, and some, like “Bad Breath Bob,” were just nicknames.

But number one on her list was the single name Preston. Margot said it was the name of a man only Skyler had dated and she couldn’t remember if it was a first or last name but she did recall the story that went with it. Danielle had said that Preston was a scholarship actor, meaning he had some kind of financial support and didn’t have to work a side job, and that he felt entitled to sex after a first date in which he had paid for dinner and drinks. Danielle said that he had grown very angry upon her rejection when she was being dropped off at her apartment and that he later came back to knock on her door and demand to be let in. She refused to open the door but he would not leave until she threatened to call the police.

Margot reported that the date with Preston had occurred two weeks before the night the three women got together, which made it about four weeks before Skyler’s murder. When pressed for more details about Preston and where he and Skyler may have first met, Margot said it could only have been through some kind of industry nexus, since both Danielle and Preston were actors.

The chronology revealed that finding Preston became a priority in the investigation. Bosch and Sheehan reworked ground already trodden, going back to those previously interviewed and asking about a man named Preston. They had no luck until they requested the audition logs from the prior three months of casting sessions conducted by the company Skyler had worked for as a receptionist. In the weeks leading up to the gossip session, the company had been casting secondary roles for a television show about people working in a hospital emergency room.

On the sign-in list for auditions held on September 14, 1987, was the name Preston Borders. That list had been kept on a clipboard at the desk of the agency’s receptionist, Danielle Skyler.

Bosch and Sheehan had found their one-and-done man.

6

The detectives carried out their due diligence and interviewed Jamie Henderson, the third woman involved in drawing up the one-and-done list. She confirmed Amanda Margot’s account of the evening and Danielle Skyler’s contributions to the list. They then identified and interviewed all the men Skyler had discussed, even Bad Breath Bob. But Bosch and Sheehan saved Preston Borders for last, because their instincts told them he could rise from the level of a person of interest to a suspect. A guy who would go back to the apartment of a woman who had rejected him, pound on the door, and demand to be allowed in for sex struck both detectives as behavior indicating the kind of psychosis found in sexual predators.

A week after interviewing Amanda Margot, the detectives positioned themselves on a surveillance of Borders’s apartment in Sherman Oaks and waited for him to exit for the day. They wanted to approach him away from the apartment in case he revealed something in the interview that would serve as probable cause to search his home. They didn’t want to knock on the door and give him the chance to hide or destroy incriminating evidence.

They were also working a hunch. With the help of Danielle Skyler’s mother and friends, they had inventoried her apartment and found only one piece of personal property missing. It was a blue sea-horse pendant that had been attached to a necklace made of braided twine. Her mother had given it to her on the day she left home for California. Danielle had gone to a high school that had the sea horse as a mascot, and the pendant was a reminder of the Hollywood Danielle had come from and that her mother didn’t want her to forget. Her mother had attached it to a necklace she had made herself. The piece of jewelry, though not outwardly valuable, was said to be the young woman’s most prized possession.

Despite three different searches of Skyler’s apartment, Bosch and Sheehan did not find the sea horse or necklace. They were certain Skyler had not lost it, as it was prominently shown in a new set of head shots taken a few weeks before her death. The detectives believed that the killer had taken the necklace and pendant as a souvenir after the murder. If they were found in a suspect’s possession, any blood residue on the twine could be type-matched to Danielle and would be a valuable piece of evidence.

Late in the morning of the surveillance, Borders emerged from his apartment on Vesper and walked a block south to Ventura Boulevard. Bosch and Sheehan gave him a lead and then followed on foot. Borders first entered the Tower Records store at the corner of Cedros and Ventura and browsed in the video section for more than a half hour. The detectives observing him debated whether they should approach and ask for an interview but decided to hang back and intercept him only if he started back to his apartment.

After leaving the record store, Borders walked back across Ventura and went into a restaurant called Le Café, where he had lunch by himself at the bar while chatting familiarly to the bartender. Bosch had been in Le Café several times because above the restaurant and bar was a jazz club called the Room Upstairs that was open late and featured world-class performers. He had seen Houston Person and Ron Carter perform there just a few months before.

When lunch was finished, Borders left a twenty on the counter and left. Bosch and Sheehan quickly approached the three-sided bar and Bosch drew the bartender over to one side with a question about what bourbons he had available, while Sheehan went to the other side and placed the empty beer glass Borders had drunk from into a paper bag. He headed out and waited for Bosch on the sidewalk. Borders was nowhere to be seen at first when Bosch joined him but they checked a drugstore two businesses down and found him inside shopping with a plastic basket.

Borders bought a box of condoms and other toiletry items at the drugstore before heading back to his apartment. As he was unlocking the security gate, Bosch and Sheehan approached him from different sides. They had a plan for talking him into agreeing to a voluntary interview. His reported behavior with Skyler suggested a narcissistic personality, two hallmark traits of which were an inflated sense of self-importance and feelings of superiority. The detectives played to those traits by identifying themselves to Borders and saying they needed his help solving the murder of Danielle Skyler. Sheehan said they were grasping at straws and hoped, since Borders had dated her, he could give insight into her personality and lifestyle. Borders agreed to the interview without hesitation. Bosch and Sheehan read that as Borders believing that if he went with the detectives that he would learn more from them than they would from him. It was similar to the psychology that often led a murderer to volunteer to join the search for the missing person they had actually killed and buried. They had to get close to the investigation to learn what was going on, while hiding in plain sight also brought them psychological fulfillment.

They drove Borders over to the nearby Van Nuys station, where they had previously reserved an interview room with the detective commander. The room was wired for sound, and the interview was taped.

Bosch dropped off his reading of the chrono log and changed the CD as Chemistry came to an end. This time he put in Frank Morgan’s Mood Indigo and soon he was hearing “Lullaby,” one of his favorite recordings. He then looked back through the stack of old reports for the transcript of the interview conducted thirty years earlier with Borders. It was the thickest report in the stack, weighing in at forty-six pages. He quickly leafed through it to find the moment when Borders was caught in the lie that ultimately led to his arrest and conviction. It was two-thirds through the thirty-minute conversation and during a segment where Bosch was asking the questions. It was also after Borders had signed a consent form acknowledging his Miranda rights and agreeing to talk to the detectives.

HB: So you and Danielle didn’t have sex? You just dropped her at her place and took off?

PB: That’s right.

HB: Well, were you a gentleman? Did you walk her to her door?

PB: No, it was like she jumped out and was gone before I could even be a gentleman.

HB: You mean like she was mad at you?

PB: Sort of. She didn’t like what I’d had to say.

HB: Which was what?

PB: That there wasn’t any chemistry. You know, nice try but it wasn’t right. I thought she understood and thought the same thing but then she jumped out of the car and was gone without so much as a good-bye. It was rude but I guess she was disappointed. She liked me better than I liked her. Nobody likes getting rejected.

HB: And you said you had not picked her up at her place earlier?

PB: Yeah, she took a cab and we met at the restaurant, because she was coming from the Westside and for me to go all the way over the hill to get her would be a slog, man. I liked the girl, or at least I thought I did, but not that much, you know what I mean?

HB: Yeah, I get it.

PB: I mean, I’m not running a taxi service. Some of these girls think you are their chauffeur or [unintelligible]. Not me.

HB: Okay, so what you’re saying is that you didn’t pick her up and then you just dropped her at the curb and took off.

PB: That’s it. Not even a good-night kiss.

HB: And you were never in her apartment?

PB: Nope.

HB: Not even to her door?

PB: Never.

HB: What about after that night? You knew where she lived now. Did you ever come back?

PB: No, man, I’m telling you. I wasn’t interested.

HB: Well, then, we have a problem that we need to work out here.

PB: What problem?

HB: Why do you think we approached you today, Preston?

PB: I don’t know. You said you needed my help. I thought maybe one of her friends told you Skyler and I had dated.

HB: Actually, it was because we found your fingerprints on the front door of her apartment. The problem is, you just told me you’d never been to the door.

PB: I don’t understand. How’d you get my fingerprints?

HB: You know, that’s sort of funny. I tell you that your fingerprints were found at a murder scene and you ask how I got your fingerprints. I think most guys would’ve said something else, especially if they had previously said they were never, ever at that scene. Is there something you want to tell us, Preston?

PB: Yeah, I want to say this is all bullshit.

HB: You’re sticking with the story that you were never there?

PB: That’s right, everything else is bullshit. You don’t have any prints.

HB: What if I told you that she told two different friends about you trying to break down her door after she rejected your sexual advances on the night of the date?

PB: Oh, man, I see it now. I get it. Those bitches are lining up against me. Let me tell you, she didn’t reject me. Nobody rejects me. I rejected her.

HB: Answer my question, did you go to her door on the night of your date with Danielle? Yes or no?

PB: No, I did not, and there are no fucking fingerprints, and I’m done talking to you. Get me a lawyer if you want to ask any more questions.

HB: Fine, who do you want?

PB: I don’t know. I don’t know any lawyers.

HB: Then I’ll get you the yellow pages.

Bosch had lied about the fingerprints. Multiple prints had been found on the door and in the apartment, but they had found no prints for Borders on file. Prints subsequently taken from the collected beer glass would not match any from Skyler’s apartment. But Bosch was on steady legal ground. Courts across the country had long approved the use of deception and trickery by police in an interview setting with a suspect, holding that an innocent person would see through the deception and not falsely confess to the crime.

The interview with Borders was the only time he ever spoke to anyone in law enforcement. Based on the contradiction between what Margot and Henderson had reported about Skyler’s account of the ill-fated date and Borders’s denying that he had returned to the apartment, he was arrested in the interview room on suspicion of murder and booked two floors up, in the Van Nuys jail. The case at that point was beyond weak and Bosch and Sheehan knew it. Catching Borders in the lie about not coming to the victim’s door supported their belief that he was the killer, but it was based on hearsay. It relied on the memories of two friends of the victim, and Danielle’s story had been told while all three women were drinking. The bottom line was that it would be their word against the suspect’s. Defense attorneys thrived and reasonable doubt lived in the gray areas in between.

The detectives knew that they needed to find corroborating evidence or kick Borders loose at the end of the forty-eight-hour arrest hold. Using the witness statements from Margot and Henderson connecting victim and suspect, they got a friendly judge to issue a search warrant based upon probable cause. It gave them twenty-four hours to search Preston Borders’s car and home.

They got lucky. Three hours into the search of the Vesper apartment, Bosch noticed that a set of wooden shelves had been put together without two screws that held the bottom shelf in place on the unit’s base. Bosch figured that if someone was going to cut corners on assembling a set of shelves, they would do it at the top, not the base.

Once he removed the books and other items from the shelf, he was able to easily lift up the laminated board, revealing a hiding space within the base of the shelving unit. He found the sea-horse pendant there wrapped in a tissue. The braided twine necklace was gone. He found several other pieces of women’s jewelry as well and a collection of pornographic magazines specializing in sadomasochism and bondage.

With the discovery of the sea-horse pendant, the case against Borders went from weak to strong. Skyler’s mother was still in town, having made arrangements for her daughter’s body to be returned to Florida for burial. Bosch and Sheehan met her at her hotel and she identified the pendant as the one she had given her daughter.

The detectives were overjoyed and felt they had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. That night after filing the case with the District Attorney’s Office, they would go out and click martini glasses at the Short Stop in Echo Park.

Thirty years later, Bosch remembered the thrill of finding the key evidence. He savored the moment across time as he stacked the loose pages of the interview transcript. He remained unshaken in his confidence in the case he and Sheehan had built, and in his belief that Borders had murdered Danielle Skyler.

In the run-up to the trial, Bosch and Sheehan attempted to link the other pieces of jewelry found in the hiding place to other cases. They pulled all unsolved murders and disappearances of young women during the four years Borders had lived in Los Angeles. They believed he was good for at least two other sex slayings. Both victims were women who had tangential connections to the entertainment industry and who moved in the same Ventura Boulevard bar circuit as Borders. They found photos of the women wearing jewelry that they believed matched pieces from the hiding place in his apartment, but expert analysis could not confirm the connections and the D.A.’s Office decided to try Borders only for the Skyler murder. Bosch and Sheehan objected to the decision but the prosecutor always got final call.

At trial Borders and his lawyer had to scramble to explain the sea-horse pendant. But the effort seemed desperate. Defense attorney David Siegel, known in courthouse circles as Legal Siegel because of his shrewd understanding and use of the law, attempted to challenge the authentication of the piece of jewelry as Skyler’s.

The prosecution had presented the victim’s mother, who identified the piece and tearfully told the story behind it, as well as the photos of Skyler taken just a few weeks before the murder in which the pendant could be seen hanging around her neck. Siegel presented a representative of the jewelry piece’s manufacturer, who testified that several thousand sea-horse pendants in the exact color and style were made and distributed across the country, including hundreds in Los Angeles — area retail stores.

Borders testified in his own defense and claimed he had bought the pendant found in his apartment at a store on the Santa Monica pier. He explained that he had remembered seeing a similar pendant on Skyler during their date and liking it. He bought his own to give at some point as a gift and that was why he had hidden the piece as well as other women’s jewelry in the shelving unit. He kept the jewelry as potential gifts for women he dated and he didn’t want the cache stolen should there be a break-in at his apartment.

Siegel backed his client’s testimony with the introduction of burglary statistics for the Van Nuys Division, but the strained explanation for possession of the sea-horse pendant did not impress the jury, particularly when juxtaposed with a playback of the audiotape from the interview with Borders. The jury deliberated for six hours before delivering a guilty verdict. After a separate hearing, the same jurors took only two hours deliberating on the horrors to which Skyler was subjected to recommend the death penalty. The judge followed through and imposed the ultimate sanction on Borders.

Bosch completed his review of the initial investigation at four a.m. The music had stopped without his noticing. He was tired and he knew he had an all-hands meeting at seven thirty in the war room at SFPD to discuss where the farmacia murder investigation stood. He decided to grab a couple hours’ sleep and get to the new investigation conducted by Soto and Tapscott as soon as the next break came up in the current case.

He headed down the hallway to his bedroom, remembering the moment when he had found the sea horse and knew in the deep folds of his heart that Borders was the murderer and that he was going to pay for his crime.

7

Bosch was on the road at seven, gulping home-brewed coffee as he drove down the ramp at Barham Boulevard onto the northbound 101 freeway. It was a cool, crisp morning and the mountains that ringed the Valley and usually trapped smog under the crosscurrents were clear across the northern horizon. After transitioning onto the 170, the second of three freeways that would take him to San Fernando, he pulled his phone and called the number he had for the Investigative Services Unit at San Quentin State Prison.

The call was answered by a human voice and Bosch asked for an investigator named Gabe Menendez. The prison had its own squad of investigators who handled inmate-on-inmate crimes and also gathered intel on the activities of the criminals housed within the prison. Bosch had worked with Menendez in years past and knew him as a straight shooter.

After a short delay, a new voice came on the line.

“This is Lieutenant Menendez. How can I help you?”

He had gotten a promotion since the last time Bosch had spoken to him.

“This is Harry Bosch down in L.A. Sounds like you’ve been moving up in the world.”

Bosch was careful not to say he was calling from the LAPD. He was skirting the reality of his situation because he believed he would get better cooperation if Menendez believed he was dealing with the LAPD than with the tiny SFPD.

“That’s been a while, Detective Bosch,” Menendez said. “What can I do for you?”

“One of your guys on death row,” Bosch said. “Name’s Preston Borders. I put him there.”

“I know him. Been here longer than me.”

“Yeah, well, then you may have heard. He’s trying to change that.”

“I may have heard something about it, yeah. We just got travel orders for him. He’s heading your way next week. I thought a guy like him being here so long, his appeals would have run out.”

“They did, but this is a new angle he’s playing. What I need to know is his visitor history and who is on his list.”

“I don’t think that will be a problem. How far back you want to go?”

Bosch thought about when Lucas John Olmer had died.

“How about going back two years?” he asked.

“Not a problem,” Menendez said. “I’ll put someone on it and get back to you. Anything else?”

“Yeah, I was wondering, does Borders have phone and computer access on death row?”

“Not directly, no. No phone and no computer but he has access to regular mail. There are a number of websites out there that facilitate communication between death row inmates and pen pals, things like that. He connects to them through mail.”

Bosch thought about that for a moment before continuing.

“Is that monitored?” he asked. “The mail, I mean.”

“Yes, it all goes through readers,” Menendez said. “Somebody in this unit. It’s on a rotation. Nobody can stand doing it for too long.”

“Any record of it kept?”

“Only if follow-up action is required. If there’s nothing suspicious about the letter, it’s passed on.”

“Do you know if Borders gets much mail?”

“They all do. Remember Scott Peterson? His mail is off the charts. There are a lot of fucked-up women out there, Bosch. They fall in love with the bad guys. Only this is safe for them, because these bad guys aren’t getting out. Usually.”

“Right. What about letters going out?”

“Same thing. It goes through vetting before it’s sent. If there’s an issue with it, we turn it back to the inmate. Usually when we do that, it’s because the guy’s spinning some sick sex fantasy or something. Like what he’d do to the girl if they ever met up, shit like that. We don’t allow that out.”

“Got it.”

“Anyway, I’ve got your number on my Rolodex. I’m the last guy around here who still uses one. Let me find somebody to put on this and we’ll get back to you.”

“Then let me give you my cell. I’m out and about on another case — a double murder yesterday — and the cell is best. You can put it in your Rolodex.”

Bosch gave him the number and thanked him before disconnecting. He realized after the call that the information he was seeking might already be in the reports Soto had slipped to him. The new investigation should have covered who Borders was meeting with or communicating with, but Menendez gave no indication that he had received a similar request already. It left Bosch thinking that either Soto and Tapscott had dropped the ball or Menendez had just been playing him.

Either way Bosch would find out soon enough.

Bosch next called his lawyer, Mickey Haller, who also happened to be his half brother. Haller had handled the legal issues that had come up when Bosch left the LAPD, ultimately suing the department for a full pension payout. The department folded and Bosch received an additional $180,000 that went into the kitty he hoped one day to leave to his daughter.

Haller answered with what Bosch would describe as a reluctant grunt.

“It’s Bosch. I wake you?”

“No, man, I’m awake. I usually don’t answer blocked calls this early. It’s usually one of my clients saying, ‘Mick, the cops are knocking on my door with a warrant, what do I do?’ Stuff like that.”

“Well, I got a problem, but a little different.”

“My brutha from another mutha, what’s wrong? DUI?”

Haller was fond of the line and said it every time, always employing a half-assed impression of the Texas-bred Matthew McConaughey, the actor who had played him in a movie six years earlier.

“No, no DUI. Worse.”

Bosch proceeded to tell Haller about the visit the day before from Soto, Tapscott, and Kennedy. “So my question is, should I be putting my pension and my house and everything else in Maddie’s name right now? I mean, all of this is for her, not Borders.”

“First of all, fuck that. You won’t pay a dime to that guy. Let me ask a couple of questions. Did these people who came to see you say or imply that there was any malfeasance on your part? Like you planted evidence or you withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense during the trial? Anything like that?”

“Not so far. They acted like it was a lab fuckup, if there even was one. Back then they didn’t have the same techniques they use today. No DNA or any of that.”

“That’s what I mean. So if something was missed during the due diligence and you were just carrying out your job in good faith, then the city has to cover you in any action Borders might take against you. Simple as that, and we’ll sue the city if it doesn’t. Wait till the union gets ahold of that and realizes the city isn’t covering guys just doing their jobs.”

Bosch thought about what Soto had said about casting blame on Sheehan. It had not come up in the meeting with Kennedy. Was she trying to tip him off to another issue raised in the reinvestigation? He decided not to bring it up until he had been able to review the entire file.

“Okay,” he said.

He felt some relief from talking to Haller. He might soon face a career-ending humiliation but it appeared that at least his finances and his daughter’s inheritance would be protected.

“What’s the name of the DA from CIU who came to see you?” Haller said. “I’ve dealt with those people a few times.”

“Kennedy,” Bosch said. “I can’t remember his first name.”

“Alex Kennedy. He’s a real D-bag. He may have played the respect card with you but that guy’s going to come up with the knife behind your back and try to take your scalp.”

So much for the relief Bosch felt. He was now on the 5 freeway and approaching the exit for San Fernando.

“The good news is, fuck him,” Haller said. “If this is all based on new evidence and not malfeasance of duty, then, like I said, the city will have to cover you. You want me to get involved with this?”

“Not yet,” Bosch said. “I’m looking into it. I reviewed my own investigation and I don’t think I was wrong back then. Borders did this and I’m going to find the fix. But the hearing is scheduled for next Wednesday. What are my options there?”

“Depending on what you find out between now and then, I could always file a motion challenging the whole shooting match and asking to be heard on the matter. It might stay the ruling, give the judge something to think about for a week or so. But we’ll eventually have to put up or shut up.”

Bosch thought about that. If he needed more time to investigate the case, that might be an option.

“That would be weird, though,” Haller said.

“What would?” Bosch asked.

“Me going into court to ask a judge not to release a prisoner on death row. That would be a first, as a matter of fact. I might have to farm it out to an associate. Being on the wrong side of this could be bad for business, bro. Just saying.”

“You wouldn’t be on the wrong side.”

“All I’m saying is, DNA is the great equalizer. How often do you think the cops get it wrong and send innocent people to prison?”

“Not very often.”

“One percent of the time? I mean, nobody’s perfect, right?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

“In this country, there are two million people in prison. Two million. If the system gets it wrong one percent of the time, that is twenty thousand innocent people in jail. Lower it to a half of a percentage point and you’re still at ten thousand people. This is what keeps me awake at night. Why I always say, the scariest client is the innocent man. Because there is so much at stake.”

“Maybe you are the wrong guy for this, then.”

“Look, I’m just saying that the system is imperfect. There are innocent people in prison, innocent people on death row, innocent people executed. These are facts, and you have to think about that before you go whole hog on this. No matter what, you are personally protected. Just remember that.”

“I will. But I gotta go now. I have a meeting.”

“All right, bro. Call me when you need me.”

Bosch disconnected the call, now feeling worse about his situation than when he had started out from the house that morning.

8

Bosch entered the war room shortly before seven thirty, but Lourdes was already putting up case details and task lists on one of the whiteboards.

“Morning, Bella.”

“Hey, Harry. There’s a fresh pot in the squad.”

“I’m all right for now. You get some sleep?”

“A little. Hard to sleep with the first live murder case we’ve had around here in four years.”

Bosch pulled out a chair at the head of the table and sat down so he could study what she was putting up. To the left she had started two columns with a vertical line between them. One was marked “José” and the other “Junior.” Basic facts about each of the victims were listed below their names. He knew that she had spent most of the afternoon after the murders with the wife and mother of the two victims and she had gathered good intel on the family dynamic. Fresh out of pharmacy school, José Jr. was living at home but he was at odds with his parents over the living and working arrangements.

Lourdes was now writing on a second board and listing investigative leads and tasks that needed to be assigned and performed. Some she wrote in black ink and some in red. There were the autopsies and ballistics to cover. Video from the farmacia’s cameras going back thirty days prior to the murders was available and would take several hours to review. There were other pharmacy robberies in Los Angeles in recent years that needed to be reviewed for similarities.

“Why the red?” Bosch asked.

“High priority,” Lourdes said.

“What is MBC?”

She had written and underlined the letters in red, then drawn an arrow to her own initials. It was a lead she was going to handle.

“Medical Board of California,” Lourdes said. “I was in Junior’s room yesterday and found a letter from the MBC saying they were in receipt of his complaint and would be in contact after an investigator had reviewed it.”

“Okay,” Bosch said. “What makes it a priority?”

“A couple things. One is that he had the letter in his room in a drawer, like he was hiding it.”

“From who? His parents?”

“I don’t know yet. The other is that the mother gave up that Junior and his father had been fighting lately. She didn’t know what it was about but it was something to do with work. They weren’t talking at home. My hunch is it has something to do with the complaint he made to the medical board. It seems like it’s worth checking out.”

“I agree. Let me know what you get.”

The door opened and Sisto and Luzon entered, followed by Captain Trevino. They all had steaming mugs of coffee.

Trevino was midfifties, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a shaved head. He was in uniform, which was his routine but always seemed odd to Bosch because he was in charge of the detective bureau, where no one wore uniforms. It was known within the department that he was the heir apparent to the chief, but there was no sign that the chief, a lifelong resident of the town, was going anywhere. Bosch’s perception was that this left Trevino frustrated and he channeled it into being a stickler for rules and discipline.

“I’m going to sit in and update the chief after,” Trevino said. “He’s got a Business Leaders breakfast and needs to be there.”

In a small town like San Fernando, the chief had to be equal parts police administrator, politician, and community cheerleader. A double murder on one of the main business and community-gathering streets would be a hot topic, and Valdez would need to calm nerves and promote confidence in the investigation. In some ways that was as important as the investigation itself.

“No problem,” Bosch said.

He and Trevino had gotten off to a rough start when Bosch first came to the department. Based on Bosch’s history with the LAPD, the captain viewed Bosch as a loose cannon who had to be closely monitored. That didn’t work for Bosch, but things smoothed out some a year later when an investigation by Bosch and Lourdes identified and led to the arrest of a serial rapist who had been targeting women in the small city for over four years. The subsequent publicity created a groundswell of community support for the department, with Trevino receiving the lion’s share of credit as the man in charge of the detective squad. Since then, Trevino had been content to give Bosch free rein as he worked through the cold case files and evidence boxes in the city’s old jail. But Bosch sensed that suspicion remained and he knew that as soon as Trevino found out about the Borders situation, he would start whispering in the chief’s ear that Bosch had to go.

“Why don’t we start by looking at the video from the pharmacy?” Bosch said. “Not all of us have seen it. Then we can go around the room and summarize yesterday’s work so Captain Trevino can keep the chief up to speed. Bella?”

Lourdes picked up a remote and turned on one of the screens on the wall opposite the whiteboards. The video from the farmacia was already cued up because Bosch and Lourdes had watched it several times the night before, their last work before heading home.

There were three cameras in the farmacia, and the ceiling camera over the prescription counter offered the most complete recording of the murders. The five people in the war room watched silently as the video advanced in slow motion.

On the screen both José Esquivel and his son were behind the counter in the pharmacy section. They were setting up for the day, as the farmacia opened at ten o’clock each day except Sunday. José Sr. was at the counter, going through a plastic basket with several small white bags in it — packaged prescriptions waiting for pickup. José Jr. was standing at a computer at the end of the counter, apparently checking for new prescriptions sent by medical offices. There were no other employees in the store. It had been determined through interviews the day before that the father and son were the only full-time employees. There was a part-time employee who worked on the busiest days of the week or when one of the Esquivels was off, but she was not a pharmacist and she functioned primarily as a cashier.

At 10:14, according to the timer on the video, the front door of the pharmacy opened and two men entered, already with ski masks pulled down and holding their weapons with gloved hands at their sides. They didn’t run but walked quickly as they separated into two of the retail aisles and moved toward the counter at the rear of the store.

José Sr. looked up first and saw the man in an aisle leading directly toward his position. It could not be known from the camera angle if he realized there were two men. But he immediately moved to his right and pushed a forearm into his son’s side, shoving him away from the computer and alerting him to the approaching danger.

Though the video was silent, it was clear that José Sr. yelled something to his son. José Jr. then turned to his right toward the half door that led to the hallway and the rear exit. It appeared that he did not realize that this put him in the path of the man moving down the other aisle. José Jr. started to run into the hallway. The gunman emerged from the aisle and followed, both of them disappearing off camera into the rear of the pharmacy.

The other gunman continued without hesitation toward the counter and raised his weapon. José Sr. raised his hands palms out in surrender. The gunman extended the gun between Esquivel’s raised hands and shot him nearly point-blank in the chest, a through-and-through shot that tore into the cabinets behind him. José Sr. took a step back and bumped into the cabinets, then collapsed to the floor, his arms still extended up by his shoulders.

“Holy shit, that’s cold,” said Sisto, who had not seen the video previously.

No one responded. They watched in stunned silence.

Moments after Esquivel went down, the second gunman appeared in the doorway, coming from the rear hallway, presumably after shooting and killing José Jr. He moved to the counter and reached underneath to a white plastic trash can. He dumped its contents on the floor and then started moving among the drug cabinets, opening drawers and dumping the stores of pills and capsules into the trash can. The other gunman kept his eyes trained on the front door, two hands on his weapon and ready to use it. Bosch again realized how lucky it was that there had not been more victims — customers wandering into the store, not knowing the danger awaiting them. These killers were clearly not going to leave witnesses.

It could have been a massacre.

Ninety seconds after the gunmen had entered through the front door, they moved into the back hallway and disappeared for good, having gone out the rear exit.

“We think they must’ve had a car and driver in the alley,” Lourdes said. “Anybody want to see it again?”

“No, thanks,” Trevino said. “Any video from where the son got hit?”

“No, the rear hallway wasn’t covered by camera,” Lourdes said.

“What about the street?” Trevino pressed. “We have anything that shows those two bastards without masks on?”

“Nothing,” Luzon said. “There are cameras on both ends of the mall but they didn’t pick up shit.”

“We think they were dropped off in the alley and went in the back door of the Three Kings,” said Sisto, using the English name for the bar located two doors down from the pharmacy.

“They walked through the bar and out the front door,” Luzon said. “Then down to La Familia and pulled down their masks before going in.”

“They knew what they were doing,” Sisto added. “And where the cameras were.”

“We get descriptions out of the Kings?” Trevino asked.

“Not a very cooperative group in there, Captain,” Luzon said. “We got nothing other than the bartender saying he saw two guys walk through real quick. He said they were white and that’s about it.”

Trevino frowned. He knew full well that the Tres Reyes was the source of frequent patrol calls because of fighting, gambling, drunk and disorderly conduct, code violations, and other disruptive issues. The establishment was a sore spot on the mall, and the department had for years been under community pressure to do something about it. Chief Valdez routinely visited roll calls at the station and singled out the establishment for proactive enforcement, meaning he wanted patrol officers to walk through the bar several times a shift — a practice not welcomed by anyone on either side of the bar. Subsequently, the relations between the police and the bar’s management and clientele were not good. There would not be much help coming from the Tres Reyes on this case.

“Okay, what else?” Trevino asked. “This match up with any recent cases in the city?”

He meant Los Angeles. Most residents of San Fernando referred to it as the town and Los Angeles as the city.

“We have two similars,” Sisto said. “Both in the city. I’m getting details and video today. But the basics are the same — two white men in ski masks, driver waits outside. Only difference is, nobody got hurt in those. They were straight robberies — one in Encino and the other in West Hills.”

Bosch involuntarily shook his head and Trevino noticed.

“Not our suspects?” the captain asked.

“I don’t think so,” Bosch said. “I think our suspects wanted us to think that. But this was a hit.”

“Okay,” Trevino said. “Then where’s our focus?”

“On the son,” Lourdes said.

“How so?” the captain asked.

“Well, as far as we can tell, the kid was a straight shooter. He graduated last year from the pharmacy school at Cal State — Northridge. No arrest record, no known gang affiliation. ‘Most likely to succeed’ in his high school class. But Mrs. Esquivel said he was going through a rough patch relating to the family business and his living at home.”

“Do we know any more than that and how it might connect?”

“Not at the moment but we’re working on it. I need to take another run at Mrs. Esquivel. Last night was not the right time.”

“Then why do we think it’s about the kid?”

Bosch pointed to the screen where the image was frozen on a shot that showed José Sr. sprawled dead on the floor of his business.

“The video,” he said. “It looks like the father recognized what was about to happen and tried to get his son out of there. Then you have the overkill — the father shot once, the kid shot three times.”

“Plus nothing says it’s personal like a shot up the ass,” added Sisto.

Trevino computed all of this and nodded.

“Okay, what about next moves?” he asked.

The caseload was then chopped up, with Luzon assigned the autopsies and ballistics, with a rush order to find out what weapons were used in the killings and if they matched other cases in the databases containing ballistic profiles. Sisto got video duty, with instructions to go back through video from the farmacia to look for indications that the two gunmen had cased the place earlier in the month as well as to study the relationship between father and son. Sisto would also check in with the LAPD about the two similar pharmacy robberies and see if he could look at video from those crimes.

Lourdes said she would follow up on backgrounding the son and checking out the complaint he had made to the state’s medical board. Bosch would serve as case coordinator and back Lourdes when her inquiries took her out of the station.

Picking up on that, Trevino gave the final instruction to all.

“This is a murder investigation, so the stakes are higher,” he said. “That goes for everybody, including our shooters. I know we are a small department, but nobody should go out on the street on this case without a partner. You never know what you might walk into. Roger that?”

He received a chorus of confirmations back.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s find these guys.”

9

After the war room meeting, Bosch left the station, while Lourdes attempted to get hold of someone in the investigations unit of the state medical board. He walked two blocks to a shopping plaza on Truman and into a bodega that sold throwaway phones to new immigrants who could not establish addresses and the credit histories required by the big service providers. He bought a throwaway with texting capability and a full charge. He then stepped out of the store and sent a two-word text to Lucia Soto.

He checked his watch and started walking back to the station. Five minutes later he was standing in the side parking lot and made the call. Soto took the call but said nothing.

“Lucia, it’s me.”

“Harry? What are you doing? Where’s your phone?”

“This is a burner. I thought you wouldn’t want to have any record of talking to me.”

“Don’t be silly. What is going on? What are you thanking me for?”

“For the file.”

“What file?”

“Okay, if that’s how you want to play it, fine. I get it. I have to tell you, I got through the old case — my part in it — and it’s all there, Lucia. It was a solid case. Circumstantial, yes, but solid down the line to the verdict. You need to stop this whole thing and not put this guy back on the street.”

“Harry...”

She didn’t finish.

“What, Lucia? Look, don’t you understand? I’m trying to save you from getting caught in the middle of a big problem here. Somehow, some way, this is a scam. Can you get me a copy of that video Tapscott showed me of you two opening the box?”

There was another long pause before Soto responded.

“I think the only one with a big problem here is you, Harry.”

Bosch had nothing to say to that. He sensed that something had changed in her view of him. He had fallen in her eyes, and she had sympathy for him but not the respect she’d once had. He was missing something here. He had to get back to the investigative file he knew she had stuffed into his mailbox, whether she acknowledged it or not. He now had to consider that she had done so not to help him but to warn him about what lay ahead.

“Listen to me,” Soto said. “I’m putting my neck out here for you because... because we were partners. You need to let this play out without setting a fire. If you don’t, you are going to get hurt in a big way.”

“You don’t think it’s going to hurt in a big way to see that guy — that killer — walk out of San Quentin a free man?”

“I need to go now. I suggest you read the whole file.”

She disconnected and Bosch was left holding a phone that he’d just spent forty dollars for and would probably never use again.

He headed toward his car. He had brought the Skyler file with him from the house and left it on the rear floorboard. Soto had clearly just directed him back to the file. There was something in the new investigation that she was pushing him toward and that, at least in Alex Kennedy’s mind, invalidated the old investigation. Bosch suspected it was more than DNA.

Before he made it to the car, the side door of the station opened and Lourdes stepped out.

“Harry, I was coming to get you. Where are you going?”

“Just getting something from my car. What’s up?”

“Let’s take a ride. I talked to an investigator for the state medical board.”

Bosch shoved the burner into his pocket and followed her to her city ride. He got in the passenger side and she started backing out. He saw that she had put a piece of scratch paper down on the center console that said “S.F. and Terra Bella,” which he knew was an intersection in the nearby Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was to the immediate south of San Fernando.

“Pacoima?” he asked.

“José Jr. sent an e-mail to the medical board, complaining that a clinic down in Pacoima was overprescribing oxycodone,” she said. “I just want to do a drive-by, check the place out.”

“Got it. When did Junior send the e-mail?”

“Two months ago. He sent it to the Central Complaint Unit in Sacramento, where it sat for a while before being sent down to the enforcement unit in L.A. I tracked down the guy who caught it there. He said he was early stages with it. Never talked to José Jr. and was gathering data before making any sort of enforcement move.”

“Gathering data? You mean like how much the clinic was prescribing?”

“Yes, identifying the clinic, what doctors were in there, licensing, prescription counts, all of that kind of stuff. Early stages, which I think was his way of saying nothing had happened yet. He did say that this clinic was not on their radar and that it sounded like a fly-by-night pill mill. Here today, gone as soon as authorities take notice. The thing is, he said, most of the time they don’t use legit pharmacies. Usually the pharmacies are in cahoots, or at least willing to look the other way and fill the prescriptions.”

“So, let’s say José Sr. was looking the other way. The son graduates from pharmacy school all wide-eyed and naive and thinks he’s doing a good thing, pointing his finger at a shady clinic.”

Lourdes nodded.

“Exactly,” she said. “I told you he was a straight shooter. He saw what was going on and made the complaint to the board.”

“So this is what the father and son were having issues with — why they were fighting,” Bosch added. “Either José Sr. liked the money the bogus prescriptions brought in, or he was afraid of the danger the complaint might bring in.”

“Not only that, Junior said in his e-mail that he was going to stop filling prescriptions from the clinic. That could have been the most dangerous move of all.”

Bosch felt a dull pain in his chest. It was guilt and embarrassment. He had underestimated José Esquivel Jr. He had first asked about gang affiliation and jumped to the conclusion that Junior’s activities and associations would be the motivating factor in the murders. He was probably correct in one sense, but he was far off the mark about the young man. The truth revealed that he was an idealist who saw something wrong and was blindly trying to do the right thing. And it cost him his life.

“Damn,” he said. “He didn’t know what he was doing if he stopped filling scrips.”

“Which makes it so sad,” added Lourdes.

Bosch was silent after that as he thought about his mistake. It bothered him deeply because a relationship was always established between a victim and the detective charged with solving the crime. Bosch had doubted the goodness of his victim and let him down. In doing so he had let himself down as well. It made him want to double-down on his efforts to find the two men who had moved so swiftly and lethally through the pharmacy the morning before.

Bosch thought about the terror José Jr. must have felt as he tried to make it down the hallway to the exit door. The horror of knowing he had left his father behind.

Bosch couldn’t be sure, because there was no sound on the video and the shooting of José Jr. was off camera, but he guessed that the father had been shot first, and in the hallway his son had heard it as he tried to escape. Just before he too was shot and his killer came up on him to commit a final indignity and finish the job.

They took Truman south to where it merged with San Fernando Road and soon they crossed the city limits and into Pacoima. There was no “Welcome to Los Angeles” sign and the difference between the two communities was stark. The streets here were trash-strewn, the walls marked with graffiti. The medians were brown and weed-filled. Plastic bags were snagged on the fence line that guarded the Metro tracks that paralleled the road. To Bosch it was depressing. Though Pacoima had the same ethnic makeup as San Fernando, there was a visible disparity in the economic levels of the side-by-side communities.

Soon they were driving along the south perimeter of Whiteman Airport, a small general-aviation field ironically named, considering that it was surrounded by a community that was overwhelmingly brown and black. Lourdes slowed the car as they approached Terra Bella. Bosch could see a white one-story building on the corner. It stood out because its paint was fresh and shining in the sun and because there was no door or any signage announcing it as a clinic or anything else.

Lourdes made the turn on Terra Bella so they could check the side of the building. They spotted the double-door entrance on the side but there was no indication that the clinic was in operation. The new paint and lack of signage made it appear to be a clinic not quite open for business.

Lourdes kept driving south.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “You want to watch for a while, see if we can tell if it’s even open for business? Or you could just pull over and I could go try that door.”

Lourdes pondered what to do, while the car continued down the street.

“I don’t like barging in there when we don’t know what we’ve got,” she finally said.

She turned into the entrance drive of a company that manufactured fire sprinkler systems, then backed out to turn the car around.

“Let’s watch for a while,” she said. “See what happens.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Bosch said.

She drove a half block back up Terra Bella and then parked at the curb behind a sedan. It gave them a blind but still allowed them to keep eyes on the clinic’s door. They sat in comfortable silence for almost fifteen minutes before Lourdes spoke.

“You still tight with Lucy Soto?” she asked.

Bosch had forgotten that Lourdes and Soto knew each other at least casually through a Latina law enforcement organization.

“We talk now and then but I think yesterday was the first time I’d seen her in a couple years,” Bosch said.

He knew that Lourdes was angling to find out what the visit from downtown the day before was all about, but he wasn’t interested in talking about it. He changed the subject.

“Your son excited about the Dodgers this year?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Lourdes said. “He picked his games and I need to get the tickets. He thinks they are going to win it all this year.”

“About time.”

“Yeah.”

“You know that Soto’s never been to a Dodgers game? Her grandparents and her father were kicked out of Chavez Ravine back in the fifties and she’ll never set foot in that place. She doesn’t even like going to the academy.”

Bosch was talking about the forced relocation of an entire Latino neighborhood to make way for the baseball stadium near downtown. The bitterness of the move — including many tearful and violent evictions recorded on news cameras — still blemished the history of the much-loved team. The LAPD academy was on the edge of one of the stadium’s vast parking lots.

“I guess I understand all of that,” Lourdes said. “But it was a long time ago. Baseball is baseball. Like I’m going to deny a little boy his love of baseball because of something that happened before his mother was even born?”

“His mother’s love of baseball too,” Bosch said.

He smiled. Before Lourdes could formulate a comeback, they both saw a van turn the corner from San Fernando onto Terra Bella. Bosch at first thought it was heading to the sprinkler manufacturer, but it stopped directly in front of the door to the clinic. Bosch and Lourdes watched silently as the side door of the van slid open and people started climbing out and heading to the door of the clinic.

Bosch counted eleven people, not including the driver, who remained in the van. They disappeared into the clinic.

“So what was that?” Lourdes asked.

“Got me,” Bosch said. “Maybe they picked people up at an old folks home or something.”

“They weren’t all old.”

“Mostly old.”

“And they looked more like they were homeless than from a home.”

Bosch nodded and they dropped back into silence as they continued to watch. The van’s driver remained in place behind the wheel and the side door remained open.

About twenty minutes after they disembarked from the van, the passengers started coming out of the clinic and getting in line to get back in the van. Bosch looked more closely this time. They were diverse in gender and race but consistent in the scruffy clothing that hung loose on their bony frames. To Bosch it looked like a line for a soup kitchen on 5th Street in downtown.

“What do you think?” Lourdes asked.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “What kind of clinic doesn’t have a sign out front?”

“The illegitimate kind.”

“And those are patients?”

“Maybe pill shills. Jerry, the medical board investigator, called them that. They go to the so-called clinic, get a prescription, and then go collect the pills at the pharmacy. They’re paid a dollar a pill. I guess it’s not bad if you’re picking up sixty pills a pop.”

“But then what do the pills sell for on the street?”

“He said that depends on dosage and what you’re buying. Generally, a dollar a milligram. Oxycodone scrips usually come in thirty-milligram pills. But he said the holy grail of hillbilly heroin these days is the eighty-meg dose. Also something called oxymorphone. It’s the next big thing. The high is supposedly ten times as powerful as you get with oxycodone.”

Bosch took out his phone and opened up the camera app. Steadying the phone on the dashboard, he started taking photos of the clinic and the van. He used the zoom to get a closer look at the people waiting to climb in but their features blurred.

“You think the van’s going to start taking them around to pharmacies now?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Lourdes said. “Jerry said old people make the best shills. They’re prized.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because they want people who look old enough to be on Medicare. They give them counterfeit Medicare D cards — they buy the names of legit cardholders — and then they don’t have to pay full price for the prescriptions they fill.”

Bosch shook his head in disbelief.

“So Medicare pays the pharmacy back for the drugs,” he said. “In other words, the federal government finances the operation.”

“A lot of it,” Lourdes said. “According to Jerry.”

One last man came out of the clinic’s door and headed toward the van. By Bosch’s count, twelve men and women were now crammed into the back. They were white, black, and brown, the one unifying factor being that they all looked like they had been down rough roads. They had gaunt faces and a shabbiness about them that unmistakably came from the hard life. The driver, wearing sunglasses and a black golf shirt, got out and went around the front of the van to slide the door closed. By the time Bosch had zoomed in his camera, it was too late to get the shot. The driver was in the van and hidden behind reflections on the windshield.

The van pulled away from the clinic and headed down Terra Bella in the direction of the two detectives. Bosch pulled his phone down below the dashboard.

“Shit,” Lourdes said.

There was no disguising that Bosch and Lourdes were in an unmarked police car. It was black and had government hubs and flashers mounted behind the front grille.

But the van went by without slowing, the driver preoccupied with a call on his cell phone. Bosch noticed he had a goatee and a gold ring on the hand that held his phone.

Lourdes watched in her side-view mirror until the van went two blocks down to El Dorado and turned right.

“Should we?” she asked.

“Might as well,” Bosch said.

She pulled the car away from the curb and made a three-point turn. She punched it to get down to El Dorado and made the same turn the van did. They caught up to the van as it made another right at Pierce and then drove north, crossing San Fernando and the Metro tracks before entering Whiteman Airport.

“Didn’t expect this,” Lourdes said.

“Yeah, weird,” Bosch added.

The van pulled up to a gate across from an entrance to the private hangar area, and the driver’s window came down. An arm extended from the window and held a key card to a reader. The gate lifted and the van went through. Lourdes and Bosch couldn’t go through but there was a perimeter road that ran parallel to the internal road and allowed them to follow the van from outside the restricted area. They watched it pull into an open hangar and then lost sight of it from their angle.

They parked on the side of the perimeter road and waited.

“What are you thinking?” Lourdes asked.

“No idea,” Bosch said. “Let’s just see what happens.”

They watched in silence after that, and a few minutes later a single-engine plane, its prop a spinning blur, emerged from the hangar and started moving toward the runway. After it cleared the hangar, the van pulled out and headed back toward the gate.

“The van or plane?” Lourdes asked.

“Let’s stay here with the plane,” Bosch said. “I have the plate off the van.”

Bosch counted seven windows running down the side of the plane behind the cockpit. Shades were pulled down inside each window. He pulled a pen and notebook out of his pocket and wrote down the tail number of the plane. He also noted down the time. Then, raising his phone again, he started taking photos of the plane as it taxied to the runway.

“What the hell are we looking at here?” Lourdes asked.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “But I got the tail number. If they filed a flight plan, we can get it.”

Bosch checked the hangar and saw the big, wide door slowly coming down. There was an advertisement in faded paint on the corrugated metal.

Bosch turned his attention back to the runway and watched silently as the plane moved down the tarmac. It was white with a burnt-orange stripe running down its side. It had an overhead wing and a jump deck below the outline of a wide passenger door.

Bosch switched the camera to video and filmed as the plane picked up speed and then lifted into the air. It flew off to the east and then banked south below the sun.

Bosch and Lourdes watched until it disappeared.

10

The air traffic control tower at Whiteman was up a staircase from a small general administration building. There was one receptionist between the public and the stairs and she folded at the sight of the police badges. Bosch and Lourdes went up the stairs and knocked on a door with a sign on it that said A.T.C. — NO ADMITTANCE.

A man answered the door and started raising his hand to point to the words “No Admittance,” when he too saw the badges.

“Officers,” he said. “Is this about the drag racers?”

Bosch and Lourdes looked at each other, not expecting the question.

“No,” Lourdes said. “We want to ask about that plane that just took off.”

The man turned and looked back into the room behind him and out the window to the airfield as if to confirm he was at an airport and that a plane had just taken off. He then looked back at Lourdes.

“You’re talking about the Cessna?” he asked.

“The jump plane,” Bosch said.

“Yeah, the Grand Caravan. Also known as the minivan. Not much else I can tell you beyond that.”

“Is there room in there for us to come in and talk? This is a homicide investigation.”

“Uh, sure. Be my guests.”

He held his arm out for them to enter. Bosch pegged him as late sixties with a military background — something about his bearing and the way he held out his hand like he was snapping off a salute.

The tower was a small space with the requisite windows offering a full view of the airfield. There were two seats in front of a radar-and-communications console. Bosch signaled Lourdes to take one of the seats and he leaned against a four-drawer filing cabinet next to the door.

“Can we start with your name, sir?” Lourdes said.

The man took the remaining seat after turning it to face the two detectives.

“Ted O’Connor,” he said.

“How long have you worked here, Mr. O’Connor?” she asked.

“Oh, let’s see, about twenty years now over two different stints. Came here after the Air Force — put in twenty-five there, dropping napalm and shit on foreign lands. Then I came here for ten, retired, then decided I didn’t like being retired and came back after a year. That was twelve years ago. You might think sitting up here all day is boring but you try spending a summer in a double-wide with a single-wide AC unit, you want hot and boring. Anyway, who gives a shit, really? You want to know about that Cessna.”

“Do you know how long it has been here?”

“Offhand, I can tell you it’s been hangared here longer than I have and it’s changed hands quite a few times over the years. The owner for the past couple years is a company from down in Calexico. At least that’s where Betty downstairs tells me the hangar and fuel invoices go.”

“What’s the name of the company?”

“Betty will have to get you that. She told me but I don’t remember. Cielo something or other. It’s a Spanish name and I don’t have much Spanish.”

“Is it still used for skydiving?”

“I hope not. The people I see getting on that plane wouldn’t make it to the ground alive.”

Bosch leaned forward and looked out through the windows. He saw that O’Connor had a direct line of vision into the hangar. The binoculars on the console would give him a close-up view inside when the big door was open.

“So, what do you see going on in that hangar, Mr. O’Connor?” Bosch asked.

“I see a lot of people coming in and out,” O’Connor said. “A lot of people as old as... well, me.”

“Every day?”

“Just about. I’m only here four days a week, but every day that I am, I see that plane either landing or taking off and sometimes both.”

“Do you know if that plane is still configured inside for skydiving?”

“As far as I know.”

“Long jump benches on both sides?”

“That’s right.”

“So, how many people can they put in there at once?”

“That plane’s a stretch model with the big tail section. You can get fifteen, maybe twenty, in there if you have to.”

Bosch nodded.

“Did you ever report what you saw to anyone?” Lourdes asked.

“Report what?” O’Connor said. “What’s the crime in getting on a plane?”

“Did they file a flight plan today?”

“They never file a flight plan. They don’t have to. They don’t even need to check in with the tower as long they’re flying VFR.”

“VFR, what’s that?”

“Visual flight rules. See, I’m here to provide radar to those who request it and to guide instrument fliers in or out if they need it. Trouble is, you mighta noticed we’re in California, and if it’s sunny out, you’re gonna go VFR, and there is no FAA rule requiring a pilot to make contact with the tower on a general aviation airfield. The guy flying the Caravan today? He said one thing to me, and that was it.”

“What was it he said?”

“That he was positioning for an easterly takeoff. And I told him the field was his.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it, except he said it with a Russian accent. I think because we have a westerly wind today, he was letting me know he was going down to the other end in case I had somebody coming in.”

“How do you know it was a Russian accent?”

“Because I just do.”

“Okay, so no flight plan means there’s no documentation of where he’s going or when he’s due back?”

“Not required at an airfield like this and for a plane like that.”

O’Connor pointed out the window as though the plane in question were hovering out there. Lourdes looked at Bosch. She was clearly surprised by the lack of security and control of who came in and out of the airport.

“If you think the days are wide open here, you should check this place out at night,” O’Connor said. “We close the tower at eight. It’s an uncontrolled field after that. People can come in and out as they please — and they do.”

“You just leave the runway lights on?” Bosch asked.

“No, the lights are radio controlled. Anybody in a plane can toggle them on and off. The only thing you have to worry about are the drag racers.”

“Drag racers?”

“They sneak out onto the tarmac at night and have their races. We had a guy coming in here about a month ago, flicked on the lights and almost put it down on top of one of those hot rods.”

They were interrupted by a call on the radio, and O’Connor turned to the console to handle it. It sounded to Bosch like a plane was coming in from the west. O’Connor told the pilot the airfield was his. Harry looked at Lourdes. She raised her eyebrows and Bosch nodded. The message between them was clear. They didn’t know if what they were asking about had anything to do with their investigation, but what they had just seen — several men and women transported from the clinic directly to a plane and then flown away without so much as a head count — was highly unusual, and the ease with which it was done was surprising.

O’Connor stood and leaned over the console to look through the windows. He picked up the binoculars and held them to his eyes as he looked out.

“We’ve got one coming in,” he said.

Bosch and Lourdes remained silent. Bosch was unsure if he should interrupt O’Connor’s observation and handling of the landing. Soon a small single-engine plane came gliding over the airfield from the west and safely landed. O’Connor wrote the plane’s tail number down on a log page on a clipboard and then hung it on a hook on the wall to his right. He then turned back to the detectives.

“What else can I tell you?” he asked.

Bosch pointed to the clipboard.

“You document every takeoff and landing that occurs during business hours?” he asked.

“We don’t have to,” O’Connor said. “But we do, yes. If we’re here.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

O’Connor took the clipboard back off the wall and handed it to Bosch. There were several pages documenting the comings and goings at the airport. The single aircraft that made the most takeoffs and landings had the tail number Bosch had written down earlier — the jump plane.

He handed the clipboard back. His plan was to officially reclaim it with a search warrant.

“Are there cameras on the runways and in the hangars?” he asked.

“Yes, we have cameras,” O’Connor said.

“How long is the video archived?”

“Not sure. I think a month. The LAPD was out here to look at video of the drag racing, and they went back a few weeks, I heard.”

Bosch nodded. It was good to know they could come back to look at video if needed.

“So, in summary,” Lourdes said. “This airport essentially has unrestricted access in and out. No flight plans required, no passenger or cargo manifests required, nothing like that.”

“That’s about right,” O’Connor said.

“And there’s no way to tell where that plane — the Grand Caravan — is heading?”

“Well, that depends. You’re supposed to fly with your transponder on. If he’s following the rules, then he’s got the transponder on and that will register as that plane moves through airspace from one ATC region to the other.”

“Can you get that in real time? Like right now?”

“No, we would need to get the unique transponder code from the plane and put out the request. Might take a day. Maybe longer.”

Lourdes looked at Bosch. He nodded. He had nothing more to ask.

“Thank you, Mr. O’Connor,” she said. “We appreciate your cooperation. We would also appreciate it if you would keep this conversation to yourself.”

“Not a problem,” O’Connor said.

Bosch and Lourdes waited until they were back in the car before discussing what they had learned in the last hour.

“Holy shit, Harry,” Lourdes said. “I mean, where the fuck’s TSA when you need them? Somebody could just get in a plane here, load it up with whatever they want, and fly it downtown or to a water reservoir or wherever and do who knows what.”

“Scary,” Bosch said.

“No matter what, we need to tell somebody about this. Leak it to the media or something.”

“Let’s see how it figures into our thing before we get the media crawling all over this.”

“Got it. But speaking of our thing, where to next?”

Bosch thought for a moment.

“Downtown to the Reagan. Let’s go talk to your medical board guy.”

Lourdes nodded and started the engine.

“Jerry Edgar. He told me he was LAPD back in the day.”

Bosch shook his head once in surprise.

“What, you know him?” Lourdes asked.

“Yeah, I know him,” Bosch said. “We worked together in Hollywood. Back in the day. I knew he retired but I thought he was selling houses in Las Vegas.”

“Well, he’s back here now,” Lourdes said.

11

The Medical Board of California had offices inside the Ronald Reagan State Office Building on Spring Street three blocks from the LAPD headquarters. It was a forty-five-minute slog in heavy traffic down from Pacoima. Along the way, Lourdes had called Jerry Edgar and said that she and her partner were on their way to see him. When Edgar balked, saying he had a meeting to attend and wanted to set up an appointment, she identified her partner as Harry Bosch, and Edgar couldn’t refuse. He said he would clear space in his schedule.

They parked in a pay lot and Edgar was waiting for them in the lobby of the state building. He greeted Bosch warmly but with an awkward embrace. It had been several years since they had been in each other’s company, professionally or otherwise. The last message Bosch could remember coming from Edgar was one of condolence about Bosch’s ex-wife several years before. Bosch had heard that his old partner had retired after that, but he had not gotten an invite to a retirement party, though he did not know if there had actually been one. Still, they had cleared several cases together while assigned to the homicide table at Hollywood Division. Now there wasn’t even a homicide unit in Hollywood. All murders were handled out of West Bureau detectives or RHD. Things change.

It was said among cops that a true test of a partnership came when there was an officer-needs-help call. The response is to drop everything and go, pinning the accelerator to the floor and blowing through traffic lights with the siren blaring to get to the officer in need. True partners each take one side of every intersection as they speed through. The driver takes the left, the passenger takes the right, each calling out “Clear!” as the car screams through red lights and intersections. It takes an inordinate amount of trust not to cheat and check the other side, even as your partner calls it clear. With a true partner, you don’t need to check the other side. You know. You believe. When Bosch and Edgar were partners, Bosch always found himself checking the other side of the street. An outsider might view it as a distance forged in the racial divide between them. Edgar was black and Bosch was white. But for each man it was something else, something well below the skin. It was the gap between how each man viewed the job. It was the difference between how a cop works a case and a case works a cop.

But none of that surfaced as the two men smiled at each other and tentatively hugged. Edgar’s head was shaved now and Bosch wondered if he would even have recognized him if he hadn’t known it was his old partner.

“Last I heard, you pulled the pin, moved to Vegas, and were selling real estate,” Bosch said.

“Nah,” Edgar said. “That lasted about two years and I came back here. But look at you. I knew you’d never be able to give it up, but I thought you’d end up with the D.A.’s Office or something. S-F-P-D. They call themselves the Mission City, right? That’s perfect for Harry Bosch.”

Lourdes smiled and Edgar pointed at her.

“You know what I’m talkin’ about,” he said, smiling. “Harry’s always the man on the mission.”

Edgar dropped the smile and the subject when he read Bosch’s frozen look as a hint he was pushing the main difference between them too far. He signaled them to follow him into the elevator alcove and they moved into a crowded box. Edgar pushed the button for the fourth floor.

“Anyway, how’s your daughter doin’?” he asked.

“She’s in college,” Bosch said. “Second year.”

“Wow,” Edgar said. “Crazy.”

Bosch just nodded. He hated carrying on conversations in crowded elevators. Besides, Edgar had never met Maddie, so it was clear that they were now down to idle banter. He said nothing else as they rode up. They got off on the fourth floor, and Edgar used a key card to enter a suite of offices with a large government seal on the wall that showed a seven-pointed star surrounded by the words California Department of Consumer Affairs.

“My crib’s back here,” Edgar said.

“Are you Consumer Affairs?” Lourdes asked.

“That’s right, Health Quality Investigation Unit. We handle enforcement for the medical board.”

He led them to a small private office with a crowded desk and chairs for two visitors. Once they were sitting, they got down to business.

“So this case you’re working,” Edgar said. “You think it’s linked to the complaint one of your victims sent to us?”

Edgar looked at Lourdes as he spoke, but Bosch and Lourdes had agreed on the ride down that Harry would take lead in the meeting, even though Bella had first made contact with Edgar. Bosch had the history with Edgar and would know best how to work the conversation to their advantage.

“We’re not a hundred percent on that yet,” Bosch said. “But it’s getting there. The whole thing was on video, and our read on it is that this was a hit disguised as a robbery. Two shooters, masks, gloves, in and out, no brass left behind. We’re looking at the kid as the target and that brings us to the complaint he sent. He was a good kid — no record, no gangs, most-likely-to-succeed sort of kid just out of pharmacy school. He and his father were at issue about something and it might have been filling prescriptions from that clinic.”

“The sad irony here is that the kid probably went to pharmacy school on money the old man banked filling shady scrips,” Edgar said.

“That is sad,” Bosch said. “So what happened with the kid’s complaint?”

“Okay,” Edgar said. “Well, like I told Detective Lourdes, the complaint landed on my desk but I had not acted on it yet. I pulled it up when we spoke, and judging by the date it was sent and received, this thing was gathering dust in Sacramento for about five or six weeks before they took a look at it and sent it down here to me. Bureaucracy — you know about that, right, Harry?”

“Right.”

“The statute of limitations on these offenses is three years. I would have gotten to it sooner rather than later, but the harsh reality is, it would have been a couple months before I’d have acted on it. I’ve got more open files than I can handle.”

He gestured to the stacks of files on his desk and a shelf to his right.

“Like everybody else in this building, we are critically understaffed. We are supposed to have six investigators and two clerical support slots in this unit to cover the whole county but we have four and one and they added half of Orange County to our territory last year. Just driving down and back to the OC on a case takes half a day.”

Edgar seemed to be going out of his way to explain why the complaint hadn’t yet been followed up on and Bosch realized that it was because of their prior history. Bosch had been so demanding as a partner that Edgar always felt under pressure to perform, and after all these years, he was still making excuses and trying to justify himself to Bosch. It made Bosch regretful and impatient at the same time.

“We understand all of that,” Bosch said. “Nobody’s got enough bullets — that’s the system. We’re just sort of trying to jump-start some stuff here because we’ve got a double murder. What can you tell us about this clinic over in Pacoima that the pharmacist was complaining about?”

Edgar nodded and opened a thin file on his desk. It had a single page of notes in it, and Bosch got the feeling that Edgar hadn’t done much with it until Lourdes called and mentioned Bosch and that they were on their way downtown.

“I checked it out,” Edgar said. “The clinic is licensed and doing business as Pacoima Pain and Urgent Care. The doctor who owns it is listed as Efram Herrera, but then I checked his DEA number and he—”

“What’s a DEA number?” Bosch asked.

“Every physician needs a DEA number to write prescriptions. Every pharmacy is supposed to check that on the scrip before putting pills in the bottle. There is a lot of abuse with phony numbers and stolen numbers. I checked Dr. Herrera’s number and he wrote no prescriptions at all for two years and then came back with a vengeance last year and has been writing them like a madman. I’m talking hundreds a week.”

“Hundreds of pills, or hundreds of prescriptions?”

“Prescriptions. Scrips. As far as pills go, you’re talking thousands.”

“So what’s that tell you?”

“It confirms that the place is a pill mill and no doubt the kid pharmacist’s complaint was on target.”

“I know you told Bella some of this already, but can you school me a little bit? How does a pill mill — how does all of this work?”

Edgar nodded vigorously as Bosch asked the question, jumping at the opportunity to show some expertise to the man who had always doubted him.

“They call the people involved in the mills ‘cappers,’” he said. “They run the show and you need unscrupulous doctors and pharmacies in the mix to make it all work.”

“The cappers are not the doctors or pharmacists?” Bosch asked.

“No, they’re the bosses. It starts with them either opening a clinic or going into an existing clinic in a marginal neighborhood. They go to a dirtbag doctor, somebody just this side of having their license revoked. A lot of docs that worked in the medical marijuana joints are perfect candidates. The capper goes in and says, ‘Doc, how’d you like to make five grand a week for a couple mornings in my clinic?’ That’s good money for somebody like that and they sign up.”

“And they start writing prescriptions.”

“Exactly, the cappers line up the shills in the morning, and they get their scrips from the doctor — no good-faith physical exam, nothing legit about it — and then they go out and get in a van and the capper drives them to the pharmacies to get the pills. Usually, it’s more than one pharmacy in cahoots so they can spread it out and try to fly under the radar for as long as possible. A lot of them have multiple IDs, so they hit two, three, places a day and it doesn’t come up on the computer. Doesn’t matter that the phony IDs are for shit, because the pharmacist is in on it. He doesn’t look too close at anything.”

“And then the pills go to the capper?”

“Exactly right. Most of these shills, they’re addicts themselves. That capper is the straw boss and he reports to somebody down the line, and he’s gotta make sure nobody guzzles those pills. So he keeps everybody in the van and they hit the pharmacies, maybe two going in at a time, and they turn those pills over right away when they get back to the van. The capper will front them what they need out of the day’s haul to maintain their addiction and keep them working. He keeps them high and keeps them moving. It’s a trap. They get in and they can’t get out.”

Bosch thought about the man in the sunglasses with the goatee who was driving the van of old people that he and Lourdes had tailed.

“What happens next?” Bosch asked.

“The pills get distributed,” Edgar said. “They hit the streets, go to the addicts. Fifty-five thousand dead and counting since this all started. Almost as many as we lost in the Vietnam War. That is sadly quantifiable, but the money, forget it. It’s off the charts. So many people are making money off this crisis — it’s the growth industry of this country. Remember what they used to say about the banks and Wall Street being too big to fail? It’s like that. But too big to shut down.”

“David and Goliath,” Bosch said.

“Worse than that,” Edgar said. “Let me tell you one story that to me says it all. Opiate addiction, in case you don’t know, clogs the pipes. It stunts the gastrointestinal tract. Bottom line is, you can’t shit. So one of the big pharmaceutical companies comes up with a prescription laxative that does the job and costs about twenty times what your over-the-counter laxative runs. The next thing you know the pharma’s stock goes through the roof. They’re selling so much of this that they’re advertising on national television. Of course, they don’t say dick about addiction or anything like that. They just show some guy mowing the lawn and, oh, he can’t shit, so get your doctor to give you this. So now you’ve got Wall Street invested and the national media selling ads. Everybody is making bank, Harry, and when that happens it can’t be stopped.”

“I thought they were trying to change things in Washington,” Lourdes offered. “You know, new laws, putting a big focus on this.”

“Not likely,” Edgar said. “The pharmas are major campaign contributors. Nobody’s going to bite the hand that feeds them.”

Edgar seemed to be using the national picture to justify his own local inertia. Bosch wanted to keep the focus small for the moment. You always start small and go big.

“So going back to this particular case in Pacoima, the capper got to Dr. Herrera. He went from signing no prescriptions to doing hundreds.”

“That’s right and these are big prescriptions. Sixty pills, sometimes ninety. There’s nothing subtle about it. I pulled his records and he’s seventy-three years old. It looks like he retired and they brought him back, reopened the clinic, and put a prescription pad in front of him. For all we know, the guy might be senile. We’ve seen that. They drag some schnook out of retirement because he’s still got that DEA number and a license to practice. ‘You want to make an extra twenty K a month?’ and so on.”

Bosch was quiet as he tried to digest all of the information. Edgar went on unprompted.

“Another thing they do with these old doctors is they go through all their old records and pull legit names to phony up IDs and Medicare cards. They use real people who have no idea their names are being used in all of this. The government thinks the subsistence requests are legit.”

“That’s crazy,” Lourdes said.

“So then what do you guys do about it?” Bosch asked.

“When we can identify it, we can shut the doctor down,” Edgar said. “We work with the DEA to get the number revoked and then we yank the license to practice. But it is a long administrative process and most of the time these cappers have moved on to the next guy. A guy like Efram Herrera is left holding the bag. Not that I have any sympathy for the doctors, but the real villains here are elusive. I don’t have to tell you how frustrating that is.”

“I can see that. The pill shills, have you heard of them being moved around by plane?”

Bosch asked the question casually, but it came out of the blue and gave Edgar pause. Bosch read in the hesitation that they might be onto something out of the routine with the Esquivel case.

“Is that what you have up there?” Edgar asked.

“It looks like it,” Bosch said. “We followed a van from the clinic to Whiteman Airport and several people were loaded onto an old jump plane. It took off and headed south. They didn’t file a flight plan. We checked with the tower. A guy said the plane comes in and goes out every day. The clinic is right across the street from the airport.”

“The fuel bills from Whiteman go to a company down in Calexico,” Lourdes added.

Bosch could see a change come over Edgar, an added level of concern working its way into his eyes and the deep set of his brow. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk.

“Things make a little more sense now,” he said.

“How so?” Bosch asked.

“I mean as far as killing the kid. One of the biggest operators in the pill-mill business in the country is a Russian-Armenian syndicate. Most of the pills that come out of these small operations go to them, and they feed Chicago, Las Vegas, all the hot spots.”

Bosch threw a sideways glance at Lourdes. O’Connor at the Whiteman tower had said the pilot spoke with a Russian accent. Lourdes exchanged eye contact and then returned attention to Edgar, who was still talking.

“Supposedly they use planes to keep people in motion, hitting multiple clinics and pharmacies a day,” he said. “The planes help keep the shills in circulation, cashing out scrips for pills. Like I said before, they have multiple IDs and they’re moved through three, four, pharmacies a day. We are talking big money and with big money comes big danger. This kid had no idea what he was bringing on when he decided to stand tall.”

“They would hit him just to send a message?” Bosch asked.

“Entirely possible. ‘If you ain’t filling my scrips, you ain’t filling nobody’s scrips.’ Like that.”

“Where is this syndicate based? Here?”

“You need to be talking to the DEA, Harry. This is a whole different level of—”

“I’m talking to you, Jerry. Tell me what you know.”

“Not a lot, Harry. We handle enforcement for the medical board, man. This isn’t an organized crime unit. What I heard through my contact at Drug Enforcement is that they’re out there in the desert.”

“Which desert? Las Vegas?”

“No, down toward the border and Calexico. Out near Slab City, Bombay Beach — that no-man’s-land they call the south side of nowhere. There’s all kinds of airstrips down there abandoned by cartels, even the U.S. military, and that’s what they use when they’re flying people around. Out in the middle of nowhere it’s like a gypsy caravan or something. They stay mobile. They sense trouble, they move like fucking nomads.”

“What about names? Who runs the syndicate?”

“Some Armenian guy who uses Russian enforcers and pilots. He calls himself Santos because he looks Mexican, but he isn’t. And that’s all I’ve got on that.”

“If they know where these people are and what they’re doing, why don’t they move in and take them down?”

“That’s a DEA question, man. I wonder the same thing. I think it’s Santos. They want him and he’s like smoke.”

“Give me a name at DEA.”

“Charlie Hovan. He’s their expert on Armenian drug dealers. He told me his family Americanized the name from Hovanian or something like that.”

“Charlie Hovan. Thanks, Jerry.”

Bosch looked at Lourdes to see if she had anything else to ask. She shook her head. She was ready to go. Bosch looked back at his old partner.

“So we’ll leave you to it,” he said. “Thanks for the cooperation.”

Bosch stood up and Lourdes followed.

“Harry, there’s a story about Santos,” Edgar said. “I don’t know if it’s true but you should know.”

“Go.”

“The DEA flipped one of his shills. Guy was an oxy addict and they leveraged him. He was supposed to keep working the game and feed intel back to the narcs.”

“What happened?”

“Somehow Santos figured it out or got wind of it. One day the informant got on the plane with a bunch of other shills and took off for a day’s work. But when the plane landed, he wasn’t on it anymore.”

“He got tossed.”

Edgar nodded.

“They’ve got the Salton Sea down there,” he said. “Supposedly the high salt content of the water chews a body up pretty quick.”

Bosch nodded.

“Good to know who we’re dealing with,” he said.

“Yeah, you two watch yourselves out there,” Edgar added.

12

After leaving the meeting in the Reagan Building, Bosch and Lourdes walked over to the Nickel Diner on Main Street for a late lunch. Bosch was a regular at the restaurant when he had worked downtown for the LAPD but had not been back since he’d left the department. Monica, one of the owners, welcomed him warmly and still remembered his routine order of a BLT sandwich.

Bosch and Lourdes discussed the information they had gotten from Edgar and debated whether to reach out to the DEA agent they had gotten a line on. Ultimately, they decided to wait until they had a better handle on their case and knew more about the activities surrounding La Farmacia Familia and the clinic in Pacoima. They still had nothing connecting the two things other than José Esquivel Jr.’s complaint about the clinic.

On the drive back up to the Valley, Lourdes took a call from Sisto, who said he had found a few things during his review of video from the pharmacy cameras that he wanted everybody on the team to see. Lourdes told him to set it up in the war room and they’d be back by four.

Exhaustion started to settle over Bosch as the car moved slowly in early rush-hour traffic. He made the mistake of leaning his head against the passenger-door window and soon he was out. It was the buzzing of his phone in his pocket that woke him up a half hour later.

“Shit,” he said as he dug the phone out. “Was I snoring?”

“A little bit,” Lourdes said.

He answered the call before it went to message. He was still disoriented from sleep when he mumbled his name into the device.

“Yes, sir, this is Officer Jericho with San Quentin ISU. Did you say you are Detective Bosch?”

“Yes, Bosch. That’s me.”

“Lieutenant Menendez asked me to handle an inmate research request and get back to you. The inmate is Preston Ulrich Borders.”

“Yes, what’ve you got?”

Bosch reached in his pocket for a notebook and pen. He tilted his head to hold the phone between his ear and shoulder and got ready to write.

“Not a lot, sir,” Jericho said. “He only has one approved visitor and that is his attorney. His name is Lance Cronyn.”

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Do you have any cross-outs? People who used to be approved?”

“This is off a computer, sir. We don’t have cross-outs.”

“Okay, do you have a visitation history with the lawyer?”

“Yes, sir. It shows he received approved-visitor status in January last year. He has made regular visits on the first Thursday of every month ever since. Except he missed December last year.”

“That’s a lot of visits, isn’t it? I mean that’s like fourteen or fifteen visits so far.”

“I wouldn’t know what would constitute a lot of visits, sir. These guys on death row get a lot of legal attention.”

“Okay, what about mail? Did the lieutenant ask you to see what was going on with mail that goes to Borders?”

“Yes, he did. I reviewed that, sir, and Inmate Borders receives about three pieces of mail per day and it goes through a review process. He has had mail rejected because the letters were pornographic in nature or contained pornography. Nothing else unusual.”

“Do you keep any sort of entry log for knowing who is sending the mail to him?”

“No, sir, we don’t do that.”

Bosch thought for a moment. The results of his request to Menendez were coming up dry. He looked out the windshield at a freeway sign and realized that he had slept through almost the entire drive back to San Fernando. They would be on Maclay in five minutes.

He took a long shot on one last tack with Jericho.

“You said you’re on a computer, right?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Jericho said.

“Can you look up inmates anywhere in the DOC system or just San Quentin?”

“This is the system-wide database.”

“Good. Can you look up another inmate for me? His name is—”

“Lieutenant Menendez didn’t ask me to check multiple inmates.”

“That’s okay, I can hold while you ask him.”

There was a pause while Jericho decided whether he really wanted to ask his lieutenant if it was okay to look up another name.

“What is the name?” he finally asked.

“Lucas John Olmer. He’s probably listed as deceased.”

Jericho asked Bosch to spell the full name and he heard typing.

“Yes, deceased,” Jericho said. “D-O-D November ninth, twenty fifteen.”

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Is there still an approved-visitor list on the file?”

“Uh, hold one.”

Bosch waited.

“Yes,” Jericho finally said. “He had five visitors approved.”

“Give them to me,” Bosch said.

He wrote the names Jericho recited in his notebook.

Bosch stared at the list. One was obviously a family member, and the other women were probably prison groupies, women attracted to a man of danger as long as the danger is incarcerated. Only Cronyn’s name was important. The lawyer currently representing Preston Borders had previously represented the now dead inmate who supposedly committed the murder that Borders was held on death row for.

“How did you know?” Jericho asked.

“Know what?” Bosch said.

“That the lawyer was on both visitor lists.”

“I didn’t until now.”

But it was an obvious thing to check, and Bosch knew Soto and Tapscott had to have made the connection as well. And yet it had not hindered the conclusion that Borders was innocent in the killing of Danielle Skyler.

Bosch knew he needed to get to the file and review the second half — the recent investigation. He thanked Jericho for his time and asked him to pass on his appreciation to Lieutenant Menendez. He then put both his phone and notebook away.

“Harry, what’s going on?” Lourdes asked.

“It’s a personal matter,” Bosch said. “It’s not related to our case.”

“It is if it’s keeping you up at night and then you’re falling asleep in my car.”

“I’m an old man. Old men take naps.”

“I’m not kidding. You need to be on your game for this.”

“Don’t worry. It won’t happen again. I’m on my game.”

They drove in silence the rest of the way to the SFPD station. They entered the detective bureau through the side door and immediately went to the war room, where Sisto, Luzon, and Trevino were waiting.

“Whatcha got?” Lourdes asked.

“Take a look,” Sisto said.

He was holding the remote for one of the screens. There was a frozen image from the camera over the prescription counter at La Farmacia Familia. Sisto hit the play button. Bosch first noted the time-and-date stamp. The video was recorded thirteen days before the murders.

Everyone stood in front of the screen in a semicircle to watch. On the screen José Esquivel Sr. was standing behind the counter, his fingers on the computer keyboard. A customer stood on the other side of the counter, a young woman holding a baby. There was a white prescription bag on the counter.

While the customer transaction was taking place, a man entered the store through the front door. He was wearing a black golf shirt and sunglasses and had a goatee. Bosch immediately recognized him as the man he and Lourdes had seen driving the van from the clinic to Whiteman Airport that morning. The capper. He went along two of the aisles and idly perused the shelves as if he were looking for something.

But it was clear he was waiting.

Esquivel finished his computer work and handed what appeared to be an insurance card back to the woman holding the baby. He then handed her the prescription bag and nodded as the interaction was completed. The woman turned and left the store and then the man in the black shirt stepped up to the counter.

There was no sign of José Jr. in the store. The playback was without sound, but it was clear from the body language and hand gestures that the man in black was angry and began to confront Esquivel. The pharmacist took a step back from the counter to put some space between himself and the angry visitor. The visitor first held a finger up like he was saying one more thing or one last time. He then pointed it at Esquivel’s chest and leaned across the counter to drive home the point.

That was when Esquivel apparently made a mistake. He gestured with his own hands in defense and started to say something. It appeared that he was engaging in the argument, verbally pushing back. Suddenly the visitor’s arm shot out and he grabbed Esquivel by the lapel of his lab coat. He jerked the pharmacist forward and half over the counter. He then got right in his face, their noses inches apart. Esquivel went up on his toes, his thighs braced against the edge of the counter. He instinctively raised his hands to show contrition and that he was not resisting. The visitor held him in the awkward position and continued to talk, his head jerking in a paroxysm of anger.

And then came the moment Sisto wanted everybody to see. The visitor raised his left hand and formed a gun, forefinger pointing and thumb up. He put the finger against Esquivel’s temple and pantomimed shooting him in the head, his hand even jerking back to show the recoil. He then pushed the pharmacist back over the counter and released his hold. Without another word he turned and walked through the pharmacy and out the front door. José was left disheveled and trying to pull himself together.

Sisto raised the remote to stop the playback.

“Wait,” Bosch said. “Let’s watch him.”

On the screen the pharmacist paced for a moment behind the counter. He rubbed his face with both hands and then looked up as if asking the heavens for guidance. His face was clear on the overhead camera angle, and José Esquivel Sr. seemed like a man carrying a tremendous burden. He then put his hands on the edge of the counter and leaned down.

Everything about his face and body language said What am I going to do?

Finally straightening up, he opened a drawer in the counter. He took out a pack of cigarettes and a throwaway lighter. He pushed through the half door to the back hallway and out of sight, presumably going to the back alley to smoke and calm his nerves.

“Okay,” Sisto said. “Then there’s this.”

He fast-forwarded the video playback for twenty seconds and then returned to normal play. Bosch checked the time counter as Sisto narrated.

“This is two hours later on the same day,” the young detective said. “Watch when the son comes in.”

On the screen José Sr. was standing behind the pharmacy counter, looking at the computer’s screen. His son entered the business through the front door and walked behind the pharmacy counter. As he pulled his pharmacist’s coat from a hook, José Sr. looked up from the screen and waited for his son to turn around.

An argument ensued between the father and son, with the father making pleading gestures — hands clasped together as if in prayer — and the son looking away, even shaking his head. It ended with the son removing the coat he had just put on — and days later would be murdered in — and throwing it into the air as he stormed out of the store. Once again the father was left leaning against the counter, supporting himself by both hands and shaking his head in dismay.

“He saw it coming,” Luzon said.

They all took seats at the big table to talk about what they had seen and what it meant. Lourdes looked at Harry and they exchanged nods, a silent communication that they were on the same page.

“We think we know who the guy in the black shirt and shades is,” she began.

“Who?” Trevino asked.

“He’s what they call a capper. He works for a clinic operating as a pill mill. We saw him today driving people around. People who take illegitimate prescriptions to pharmacies like the Esquivel family’s. We think the father was neck-deep in the whole thing and the son was probably trying to get them out of it.”

Trevino made a low whistling sound and told Lourdes to fill in the story. With Bosch pitching in here and there, she proceeded to bring the team up-to-date on their activities during the day, including the Whiteman angle and the visit with Edgar downtown at the Reagan Building. Trevino, Sisto, and Luzon asked few questions and seemed duly impressed by the progress Lourdes and Bosch had made on the case.

Halfway through the session, Chief Valdez entered the war room, pulled out a chair, and sat down at the end of the table. Trevino asked if he wanted Bosch and Lourdes to start at the top and Valdez demurred, saying he was just trying to catch some of the update.

When Lourdes concluded her report, Bosch asked Sisto if he could put a freeze-frame of the capper on the screen next to a freeze-frame of the killers in the pharmacy. It took Sisto a few minutes to accomplish this and then everyone stood in front of the screens to compare the man who had threatened José Esquivel Sr. to the men who had killed him and his son. The conclusion based on body size was unanimous: neither of the killers was the man who had threatened José Sr. Additionally, Lourdes noted, the capper had used his left hand to pantomime shooting José Sr., while the two shooters had held their weapons in their right hands.

“So,” Trevino said. “Next moves?”

Bosch held back, letting Lourdes take the lead, but she hesitated.

“Search warrant,” Bosch said.

“For what?” Trevino asked.

Bosch pointed to the man in black on the video screen.

“My read is that he threatened to kill Esquivel and then those two guys were brought in to actually do the job,” he said, pointing to the second screen. “What we’re hearing is that this organization is operating south of here and uses planes to move people around. We get a search warrant to look at video at Whiteman going back maybe twenty-four hours from our shooting. We see if they flew the shooters in.”

The police chief nodded and that made Trevino follow suit.

“I’ll write the warrant,” Lourdes said. “We can take it over there tonight before O’Connor leaves.”

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Meantime, I’ll try to make contact with Edgar’s guy at the DEA. Maybe they already have a line on our shooters.”

“Can we trust the DEA with this?” Valdez asked.

“The medical board guy happens to be my old partner,” Bosch said. “He vouched for the guy, so I think we’re good.”

“Good,” the chief said. “Then let’s do it.”

After the meeting ended, Bosch walked out to the parking lot before heading over to his desk in the old jail. He grabbed the copy of the Skyler case file out of his car and carried it with him across the street. It was time to go back to work on it.

13

As expected, Bosch’s call to DEA agent Charlie Hovan was not accepted. It had been Bosch’s experience over many years that DEA agents were a different breed of federal law officers. Because of the nature of their work, they were often treated with suspicion by others in law enforcement — as had been exhibited earlier by Chief Valdez. It was odd and unwarranted; all law officers deal with criminals. But there was a stigma attached to drug agents, as though the scourge of the particular crime they fought could rub off on them. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It was a phenomenon most likely rooted in the need for infiltration and undercover work in so many drug investigations. That stigma left agents paranoid, isolated, not interested in talking on the phone with strangers, even if they were law enforcement and it could be argued that they were all part of the same team protecting society.

Bosch suspected that he would not hear back from Hovan unless there was a pressing need on the agent’s part. Harry tried to give him that with one sentence left on the agent’s voice mail.

“This is Detective Bosch with the San Fernando Police Department and I’m looking for some intel on a guy who calls himself Santos and flies a plane in and out of an airstrip up here, where we just had a double murder in a pharmacy that was filling opioid scrips for him.”

Bosch left his phone number before disconnecting. He still believed that he might need to call Jerry Edgar in a day or two and ask him to vouch for him with Agent Hovan in order to prompt a simple conversation.

Bosch knew that it would probably take Lourdes a couple hours to write up a warrant for the Whiteman video archives and then get a telephonic approval from a Superior Court judge. It would take longer if she could not find a judge — the courthouses were closing now and most jurists would soon be in their cars, commuting home. Bosch’s plan was to use whatever time he had to dig further into the Skyler investigation. Despite the double murder being the priority of the moment, Bosch could not stop thinking about the Skyler case and the threat it posed to his public reputation and private self-worth. In his career, he had chased down hundreds of killers and put them in prison. If he was wrong about one, then it would put the lie to everything else.

It would cast him adrift.

He first had to push the file boxes from the Esmerelda Tavares case to the side. When he lifted one box to put it on top of another, a photo dropped onto his makeshift desk. It had slipped through a separation in the bottom seam of the box and fallen out. Bosch picked it up and studied it. He realized he had not seen it before. The photo was of the baby daughter who had been left in the crib when her mother went missing. Bosch knew she would be fifteen or sixteen now. He’d have to get her exact birthday and check the math on that.

A year after her mother’s disappearance, her father decided he could not raise her. He turned her over to the county’s foster care program and she was raised by a family that adopted her and eventually moved from Los Angeles up to Morro Bay. The photo reminded him that he had long planned to go up there to find her and talk to her about her mother. He wondered if she had any distant memories of her natural mother and father. But it was a long shot and he had never made the trip. He put the photo on top of the contents of the box so it would serve as a reminder next time he checked into the case.

Bosch split the Skyler files in half and put the stack of copies from the original investigation to the side. He then started reviewing the chronological record that Soto and Tapscott had begun keeping once assigned to reinvestigate the case.

It quickly became clear that the new look at the Skyler case began with a letter sent seven months earlier to the Conviction Integrity Unit from the man who was the nexus between both sexual predators involved. Attorney Lance Cronyn. Bosch put the chrono aside and looked through the stack until he found the document. It was on Cronyn’s letterhead, showing his office address on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys. The letter was directed to Kennedy’s boss and the head of the CIU, Assistant District Attorney Abel Kornbloom.

Bosch read the letter a second time and then quickly scanned a letter of receipt from Kornbloom to Cronyn that told him his request would be given the utmost priority and urged him not to take any other action until the CIU had the opportunity to review and investigate the matter. It was clear that Kornbloom didn’t want this case spilling into the media or referred to the Innocence Project, a privately funded legal group that had a national record of overturning wrongful convictions. It would be a political blunder if the work of an outside entity instead of the district attorney’s much ballyhooed unit led to a revelation of innocence.

Bosch went back to the chrono. The letter from Cronyn clearly got the ball rolling. Soto and Tapscott pulled the files and went to property control, where the evidence box was found and opened on camera. While the forensics unit studied the contents for new or overlooked evidence, the two detectives went to work reviewing and reinvestigating the case — this time with another suspect as the leading person of interest.

Bosch knew it was not the right way to work a murder case. Rather than looking for a suspect, they started with the suspect already in hand. It narrowed the possibilities. Here they started with the name Lucas John Olmer and they stuck with it. Their efforts to confirm that he had been in Los Angeles at the time of the Skyler murder were less than conclusive. They found employment records at the billboard company where he worked as an installer that appeared to place him in L.A. but little else in terms of housing records or live witnesses who could attest to his whereabouts. It wasn’t nearly enough to take the case further, but then the lab reported finding a minute amount of semen on the victim’s clothing. The material had not been stored under today’s DNA evidence protocols, but because the piece of clothing had been in a sealed paper bag, it was in remarkably good condition and could be tested against samples from both Olmer and Borders.

Olmer’s DNA was already in the state’s offender data bank. It had been used at trial to link him to the rapes of seven different women. But genetic material had never been collected from Borders because he had been convicted and sentenced to death row a year before DNA was approved for use in California in courts and by law enforcement. Tapscott flew up to San Francisco to go to San Quentin and collect a sample from Borders. It was then analyzed by an independent lab and comparisons were made between the evidence taken from Danielle Skyler’s pajamas and the samples from Olmer and Borders.

After three weeks, the lab finally reported that the DNA on the victim’s clothing had come from Olmer and not Borders.

Just reading it in the chronological record made Bosch break into a cold sweat. He had been as sure of Borders’s guilt as that of any other killer he had taken to trial and put in prison. And now the science said he was wrong.

Then he remembered the sea horse. The sea horse put the lie to all of this. Danielle Skyler’s favorite piece of jewelry had been found in the secret place in the apartment where Borders lived. DNA could not explain that away. It might be possible that Borders and Olmer knew each other and had committed the crime together, but possession of the sea horse made Borders culpable in a big way. At his trial Borders had testified that he’d bought an exact duplicate of Skyler’s sea horse at the Santa Monica pier because he wanted one for himself. The jury didn’t buy it then, and Soto and Tapscott should not have bought it now.

Bosch switched back to the chrono and soon found out why they did. After the DNA matching came back, the investigators as a pair returned to San Quentin to interview Borders. The entire transcript of the interview was available in the documents but the chrono referenced the specific pages where discussion about the sea horse took place.

Bosch read the short section of the transcript again and then moved on to two amendments that were attached. One was an obituary from the California Bar Journal for Borders’s original attorney, David Siegel, who had retired from the practice of law a decade after the Borders trial and passed away soon after. The second amendment was actually a timeline constructed by Soto that showed when it was during the investigation that Bosch wrote the initial report stating that Danielle Skyler’s prized sea-horse necklace was missing. The timeline showed all the days that went by and the case developments that occurred during which he would have had to hold on to the sea horse before planting it in the hiding place in Borders’s apartment. The report was clearly an attempt by Soto to delineate the tenuousness of the claim that Bosch planted evidence in the case.

Bosch appreciated Lucia’s efforts on his behalf and believed it might have been the reason she got him a copy of the file on the down low. She wanted him to know that what was happening was not a betrayal on her part, that she was watching out for her former mentor but letting the chips — and the evidence — fall where they may.

That aside, the allegation that Bosch had planted evidence in the case thirty years ago was now part of the record of the case and it could blow up publicly at any moment. It was clearly the leverage that Kennedy, the prosecutor, hoped to use to quiet any protest from Bosch about the move to vacate the conviction. If Bosch objected, he would get smeared.

What Kennedy, Soto, and Tapscott could not know was what Bosch knew in the deepest, darkest part of his heart. That he had not planted evidence against Borders. That he had never planted evidence against any suspect or adversary in his life. And this knowledge gave Bosch an affirming jolt of adrenaline and purpose. He knew there were two kinds of truth in this world. The truth that was the unalterable bedrock of one’s life and mission. And the other, malleable truth of politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers, and their clients, bent and molded to serve whatever purpose was at hand.

Borders, either with or without his attorney’s knowledge, had lied to Soto and Tapscott at San Quentin. In doing so, he had corrupted their investigation from the start. It confirmed for Bosch that this was a scam and that it was up to him to root out those who plotted against him wherever they were. He was coming for them now. The weight and guilt of possibly having made a horrible mistake so long ago was lifted.

It was Bosch who felt like the man proven innocent and released from a cage.

14

The killers of José Esquivel and his son had acted in the pharmacy video with the assurance of men who had done this kind of work before. They used revolvers both to prevent their weapons jamming and to avoid leaving behind critical evidence. They showed no hesitation, no remorse. Bosch knew that in every large criminal enterprise, there was a need for such men, enforcers willing to do what had be done to ensure the survival and success of the organization. In reality, such men were rare. This was what led to his suspicion that the killers were brought in from far outside San Fernando to deal with the problem created by the idealistic but naive José Esquivel Jr.

That suspicion seemed to be confirmed when Bosch, Lourdes, and Sisto returned to Whiteman Airport early that evening with a warrant to view surveillance footage from the airstrip’s cameras. Beginning their review of video at noon Sunday, they fast-forwarded through the hours, slowing to real-time speed only when the occasional plane landed or took off, or when a vehicle approached the row of hangars that ran along the edge of the airfield. They were in the airport’s cramped utility room beneath the tower. It also served as the security office. The space was so tight that Bosch could smell Sisto’s nicotine gum.

At 9:10 a.m. on the video, their vigil paid off when the same van they had seen pick up the lineup of pill shills at the clinic drove up to the hangar, opened its two doors wide by remote control, and then waited, its driver getting out and going inside only briefly before returning.

Fourteen minutes later the jump plane landed and taxied to and then into the hangar. Only two men disembarked — white men in dark clothing that appeared very similar to that worn by the farmacia shooters. They walked directly to the van and climbed in through the side door. The van drove off before the plane’s propeller had even stopped turning.

“It’s them,” Sisto said. “Fuckers now go to the mall and kill our victims.”

He said it with a tone of anger Bosch liked, but he knew that emotional belief and evidence were two different things.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Oh, come on,” Sisto said. “It’s gotta be. The timing is perfect. They fly in, do the job, and you watch: they’re going to fly them out again after it’s over.”

Bosch nodded.

“I’m there with you, but what we know and what we can prove are two different things,” he said. “The men in the pharmacy were masked.”

He pointed to the video monitor.

“Can we prove that’s them?” he asked.

“We can ask the sheriff’s lab to try to clean this up,” Lourdes said. “Make it clearer.”

“Maybe,” Bosch said. “Speed it up.”

Sisto was handling the remote. He boosted the playback to 4x speed and they waited. Bosch watched the minutes go by on the video timer. At the 10:15 a.m. mark, he told Sisto to drop it back to real-time playback. The pharmacy video that had captured the murders placed the time of the killings at 10:14 a.m., and the drugstore was approximately two miles from Whiteman.

At 10:21 the van returned to the airport. It traveled within the speed limit, no hurry as it went through the gate and approached the hangar. Once it was there, the side door slid open and the two men exited and walked directly to the jump plane. Its prop was already turning and it taxied back out to the runway for takeoff.

“In and out, just like that, and two people are dead,” Lourdes said.

“We gotta get these guys,” Sisto said.

“We will,” Bosch said. “But I want the guy who made the call. The man who put those two hitters on the plane.”

“Santos,” Lourdes said.

Bosch nodded. It was a moment of true resolve for the three detectives.

Sisto finally broke the silence.

“So, what’s our next move, Harry?” he asked.

“The van,” Bosch said. “Tomorrow we bring in the driver and see what he has to say.”

“We work our way up the ladder,” Sisto said. “I like it.”

“Easier said than done,” Bosch said. “We have to assume that anybody working for Santos is working for him because he’s a trusted soldier. He won’t be afraid of prison time and that will make him hard to crack.”

“Then, what do we do?”

“We put the fear of God in him. We make him afraid of Santos if he’s not afraid of us.”

Before leaving the airport, Bosch sent Lourdes up the tower to talk to O’Connor and use the second warrant to collect the clipboard log that documented the comings and goings of the jump plane, in particular the landing on Monday morning before the pharmacy shooting. It would be marked as evidence with the video itself. The detectives then called it a day, agreeing to meet in the war room at eight the following morning to plan the takedown of the van driver. From there Sisto and Lourdes headed to Magaly’s for a late dinner, while Bosch decided to head home. He wanted to put in some time on the Borders case file before sleep deprivation caught up and knocked him down.

There was a time when Bosch could easily go two days on a case without sleep. But that time was long gone.

It was late enough for the freeway to be clear and he moved easily into the slipstream of traffic. He called his daughter, whom he had not talked to in several days except through customary good-night texts. She surprised him by answering. Usually at night she was too busy to talk.

“Hey, Dad.”

“How are you, Mads?”

“Stressed. I’ve got midterms this week. I’m about to go to the library.”

This was a sore subject with Bosch. His daughter liked to study at the school library because the place helped her focus. But she often stayed until midnight or later and that left her walking by herself to her car, parked in an underground garage. They had discussed this repeatedly but she had dug in on it and was unwilling to accept the ten p.m. curfew Bosch had tried to impose.

When he didn’t respond, his daughter did.

“Please don’t add to my stress by lecturing me on the library. It’s perfectly safe and I will be there with lots of kids.”

“I’m not worried about the library. I’m worried about the garage.”

“Dad, we’ve been over this. It’s a safe campus. I’ll be fine.”

There was a saying in police work, that places were safe until they weren’t. It only took one moment, one bad actor, one chance crossing of predator and prey, to change things. But he had already shared all of this with her and didn’t want to turn the call into an argument.

“If you have midterms, does that mean you’ll be coming up to L.A. after?”

“No, sorry, Dad. Me and the roomies are going down to IB as soon as we’re all free. I’ll come up next time I can.”

Bosch knew that one of her three roommates was from Imperial Beach down by the border.

“Just don’t go across, okay?”

“Da-ad.”

She drew the word out like it was a life sentence.

“Okay, okay. What about spring break? I thought we were going to go to Hawaii or something.”

“This is spring break. I’m going to IB for four days and then back up here, because spring break isn’t really a break. I have two psych projects to work on.”

Bosch felt bad. He had fumbled the Hawaii idea, having mentioned it a few months earlier and then not followed through. Now she had plans. He knew his time with her and being part of her life was fleeting, and this was a reminder.

“Well, look, save one night for me, would you? You name the night and I’ll come down and we can eat somewhere on the circle. I just want to see you.”

“Okay, I will. But actually there’s a Mozza down here in Newport. Can we go there?”

It was her favorite pizza place in L.A.

“Wherever you want.”

“Great, Dad. But I gotta go.”

“Okay, love you. Be safe.”

“You, too.”

Then she was gone.

Bosch felt a wave of grief. His daughter’s world was expanding. She was going places and it was the natural way of things. He loved seeing it and hated living it. She had only been a daily part of his life for a few years before it was time for her to go. Bosch regretted all the lost years before.

When he got to his house, there was a car parked out front with a figure slumped in the front seat. It was nine p.m. and Bosch was not expecting company. He parked in the carport and walked out to the street, coming up behind the car blocking the front walkway to his house. As he approached, he turned on the light on his phone and shined it through the driver’s open window.

Jerry Edgar was asleep behind the wheel.

Bosch tapped lightly on his shoulder until Edgar startled and looked up at him. Because there was a streetlight above and behind him, Bosch was in silhouette.

“Harry?”

“Hey, partner.”

“Shit, I fell asleep. What time is it?”

“About nine.”

“Shit, man. I was out.”

“What’s up?”

“I came by to talk to you. I checked the mail in the box and saw you’re still in the same house.”

“Then let’s go in.”

Bosch opened the car door for him. They went in the front door after Bosch gathered the mail Edgar had checked.

“Honey, I’m home,” Bosch called out.

Edgar gave him an are-you-kidding-me look. He’d always known Bosch to be a loner. Bosch smiled and shook his head.

“Just kidding,” he said. “You want a drink? I’m out of beer. I’ve got a bottle of bourbon and that’s about it.”

“Bourbon’s good,” Edgar said. “Maybe with a cube or two.”

Bosch signaled him into the living room, while he cut right into the kitchen. He got two glasses out of a cabinet and dropped some ice into them. He heard Edgar pull the broomstick out of the sliding door track and open the slider. Bosch grabbed the bottle of bourbon off the top of the refrigerator and went out to the deck. Edgar was standing at the railing, looking down into the Cahuenga Pass.

“Place still looks the same,” Edgar said.

“You mean the house or the canyon?” Bosch asked.

“I guess both.”

“Cheers.”

Bosch handed him both glasses so he could crack the seal on the bottle and pour.

“Wait a minute,” Edgar said when he saw the label. “Are you kidding me?”

“About what?” Bosch asked.

“Harry, do you know what that stuff is?”

“This?”

Now Bosch looked at the label. Edgar turned and dumped the ice over the railing. He then held the empty glasses out to Bosch.

“You don’t put ice in Pappy Van Winkle.”

“You don’t?”

“That’d be like putting ketchup on a hot dog.”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t get the comparison Edgar was making.

“People put ketchup on hot dogs all the time,” he said.

Edgar held out the glasses, and Bosch started pouring.

“Easy now,” Edgar said. “Where’d you get this?”

“It was a gift from somebody I did some work for,” Bosch said.

“He must be doing pretty good. You look this stuff up on eBay and you’ll wish you never cracked the seal. You coulda bought your daughter a car.”

“It’s a she. The one I did the work for.”

Bosch looked at the label on the bottle again. He held the opening to his nose and picked up a deep, smoky tang.

“A car, huh?” he said.

“Well, at least a down payment,” Edgar said.

“I almost regifted this and gave it to the chief up at San Fernando. I guess it would’ve made his Christmas.”

“More like his whole year.”

Bosch put the bottle down on the two-by-four railing cap, and Edgar immediately panicked. He grabbed the bottle before an earthquake or a Santa Ana wind could send it down into the dark arroyo below. He put it safely down on a table next to the lounge chair.

He came back and they leaned side by side on the rail and sipped and looked into the pass. At the bottom, the 101 freeway was still a ribbon of white light coming up through Hollywood and one of red light going south.

Bosch waited for Edgar to get down to the reason for his visit but nothing came. His old partner seemed content to sip rare bourbon and view the lights.

“So what made you drive up here tonight?” Bosch finally asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Edgar said. “Something about seeing you today. Seeing that you’re still in the game made me think. I hate my job, Harry. We never get anything done. Sometimes I think the state wants to protect bad doctors, not get rid of them.”

“Well, you’re still pulling down a paycheck. I’m not — unless you count the hundo they give me a month for equipment costs.”

Edgar laughed.

“That much, huh? You’re rolling in the green.”

He held out his glass, and Bosch clicked his off of it.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Making bank.”

“How about fucking Hollywood?” Edgar said. “Don’t even have a homicide table anymore.”

“Yeah. Things change.”

“Things change.”

They clicked glasses again and sipped for a few quiet moments before Edgar finally got down to what he had come up the hill to say.

“So Charlie Hovan called me up today, wanted to know all about you.”

“What did you say?”

Edgar turned and looked directly at Bosch. It was so dark on the deck that Bosch could only see a glint of reflection in his eyes.

“I said you were good people. I said trust you and treat you right.”

“I appreciate that, J. Edgar.”

“Harry, whatever this is, I want in. I’ve been sitting on the sidelines too long, watching this shit go down. I’m asking you to include me.”

Bosch took a draw of smoky bourbon before responding.

“We could use all the help we can get. Today I thought you just wanted to get us out of the office.”

“Yeah, because you were a reminder of what I should be fucking doing.”

Bosch nodded. When he and Edgar were partners in Hollywood twenty-five years before, he had never had the sense that Edgar was all in. But he knew the need for redemption comes in all kinds of ways at all kinds of times.

“You know where San Fernando even is?” Bosch asked.

“Sure,” Edgar said. “Went up to the courthouse in San Fernando a few times on cases.”

“Well, if you want in, be at San Fernando PD at eight tomorrow. We’ve got a strategy meeting. We’re going to take down a capper and start fishing. We’ll probably bring Dr. Herrera in at some point too. We could probably use your help with that.”

“Do you have to clear it first?”

“I think the chief will take all the help he can get on this. I’ll talk to him.”

“I’ll be there, Harry.”

He took down the last of his bourbon in one gulp, savored it, and then swallowed. He put the empty glass on the railing and pointed at the glass as he backed away.

“Smooth. Thanks for that, Harry.”

“Want another hit?”

“Would love it, but early start tomorrow. I should go home.”

“You got somebody there waiting, Jerry?”

“Matter of fact, I do. I got remarried when I was working in Vegas. Nice girl.”

“I got married in Vegas once.”

It was the first time Bosch had thought about Eleanor Wish in a long time. Edgar gave him a sad smile.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

He clapped Bosch on the upper arm and headed back into the house and toward the front door. Bosch remained on the deck, sipping his expensive bourbon and thinking about the past. He heard Edgar’s car start up and pull away into the night.

15

In the morning Bosch ate breakfast at the counter at the Horseless Carriage, a diner located in the center of the vast Ford dealership in Van Nuys. It would only be a few miles from there to San Fernando and he had grown tired of eating the free breakfast burritos dropped off in the war room each morning. The Horseless had a fifties feel to it and was a lasting reminder of the population and expansion boom that swept the Valley after World War II. The car became king and Van Nuys was an auto-buying mecca, with dealerships lined up side by side and offering coffee shops and restaurants as draws to their customers.

Bosch ordered the French toast and watched the video he had been texted the night before on the burner phone he had bought to communicate with Lucia Soto. The video had come from a strange number, which he assumed belonged to a burner Soto was now using herself.

The video was Tapscott’s recording of the opening of the evidence box in the Danielle Skyler case. Bosch had watched it repeatedly the night before until he was too tired to keep his eyes open, but no matter how many times he viewed it, he could not figure out how the evidence box had been tampered with. The old and yellowed evidence labels were clearly intact as the box was presented to the camera and then cut open by Soto.

This continually agitated Bosch, because he knew there was a kink in the line somewhere between property control and the lab table where Lucas John Olmer’s DNA was found on Skyler’s clothing. If he started with the bedrock knowledge that Olmer’s DNA had been planted, then he had to figure out two things. One was how DNA from a man who died two years earlier had been procured in the first place, and the other was how it had been planted on the clothing contained in a sealed evidence box.

The first question had been answered — to Bosch’s satisfaction, at least — the night before, after Edgar left and he finally got the chance to review the Borders investigative file for a second time. This time, he paid careful attention to the file within the file — the records from Olmer’s prosecution and conviction on multiple rape charges in 1998. In his first swing through the records Bosch had paid closer attention to the investigative side of the case, exhibiting a detective’s bias that a case was put together during the investigation and that the prosecution was only the strategic revelation of the accumulated facts and evidence to the jury. Therefore, he believed, anything in the prosecution files would already have been covered in the investigative files.

Bosch learned how wrong he had been about this mind-set when he read through a sheaf of motions and countermotions filed by both the prosecution and defense. Most were boilerplate legal arguments: motions to suppress evidence or testimony made by the prosecution or defense. Then Bosch came across a defense motion stating that it was Olmer’s intention at trial to challenge the DNA evidence in the case. The motion asked the judge to order the state to provide the defense with a portion of the genetic evidence collected during the investigation so that independent analysis could take place. The motion was not challenged by the state, and Judge Richard Pittman ordered the District Attorney’s Office to split the genetic material with the defense.

The defense motion had been written by Olmer’s attorney, Lance Cronyn. It was a routine pretrial move, but what drew Bosch’s attention was the witness list submitted by the defense at the start of the trial. There were only five witnesses on the list and after each name, there was a summary of who the person was and what they would testify to. None of the five were chemists or forensic specialists. This told Bosch that during the trial, Cronyn did not put forth alternate DNA findings, as the motion filed earlier had suggested. He had gone in another direction, which could have been anything from claiming the sex was consensual to hammering at the state’s own DNA collection protocol and analysis. Whatever it was, it didn’t work. Olmer went down on all charges and was shipped off to prison. And there was no record in the file of what happened to the genetic material signed over to his lawyer by the judge.

Bosch knew that the DA’s Office should have requested the return of the material after the trial, but there was nothing in the records to indicate this had been done. Olmer was convicted and sent away on a sentence he couldn’t possibly outlive. The reality, Bosch knew, was that institutional entropy probably took over. Prosecutors and investigators moved on to other cases and trials. The missing DNA was unaccounted for, and therefore it could have been the source of the genetic material found on Danielle Skyler’s pajamas. Proving it, though, was another matter, especially when Bosch could not figure out how that microdot of DNA got there.

Still, for the moment, he had what was certainly a crack in the facade of a seemingly solid case for wrongful conviction. There was DNA unaccounted for and the defense lawyer who moved between the two cases in question may have had access to it.

He pushed his plate away and checked his watch. It was seven forty and time to get to the war room. He stood up, left a twenty on the counter, and headed out to his car. He stayed on surface streets, taking Roscoe over to Laurel Canyon and then heading up. Along the way he took a call from Mickey Haller.

“Funny, I was going to call you,” Bosch said.

“Oh, yeah?” Haller said. “About what?”

“I’ve decided I definitely want to engage your services. I want to come in as a third party at the hearing next week and oppose the release of Preston Borders. Whatever that takes in legal terms.”

“All right. We can do that. You want any media on it? This is going to be an unusual hearing with a retired detective going up against the D.A. It’s a good story.”

“Not yet. It’s going to get ugly when it comes up that Borders claims I planted evidence and the D.A. apparently agrees.”

“What the fuck?”

“Yeah, I’ve been through the whole file. Borders claims that I planted the key evidence — the sea-horse pendant — in his apartment. Accusing me is the only way to sell this.”

“Did he offer any proof of this?”

“No, but he doesn’t have to. If the DNA points to a convicted rapist, then the only plausible evidence for Borders being in possession of the pendant is that it was planted.”

“Okay, understood. You’re right, this is going to get down and dirty, and I see why you want to keep the media out of it if possible. But now the big question: Whaddaya got that knocks down this house of cards?”

“I’m only halfway there. I know where and how they could’ve gotten Olmer’s DNA. I just need to find out how they were then able to salt the evidence with it.”

“Sounds like you’ve done the easy part, if you ask me.”

“I’m working on the hard part. Is that why you called? To encourage me?”

“No, actually I’ve got a little gift for you.”

“What’s that?”

Bosch was now off of Laurel Canyon and cruising up Brand Boulevard and passing the “Welcome to San Fernando” sign.

“Well, when you first told me about this, the name Preston Borders rang a bell. I remembered it but I couldn’t place it. I was in law school at Southwestern and of course I didn’t know about you at the time. Anyway, I used to go to the Criminal Courts Building between classes and sit in courtrooms, watch defense lawyers work.”

“Never interested in how prosecutors worked?”

“Not really. Not with my father — our father — having been a defense attorney. The point is, I’m pretty sure I watched some of the Borders trial, and that would have put you and me in the same room without knowing each other thirty years ago. I thought that was sort of neat.”

“Yeah, neat. That’s why you called? That’s the gift?”

“No, the gift is this: Our father died young — in fact, I never saw him in a courtroom — but he had a young partner who carried on, and that’s the guy I used to go watch at the CCB.”

“You’re talking about David Siegel? He was the partner?”

“That’s right. And he defended Preston Borders in that trial in nineteen eighty-eight. I grew up calling him Uncle David. He was a great lawyer and they called him Legal Siegel around the courthouse. He’s the one who sent me to law school.”

“What happened to his practice? Do you think there are any records still around from the trial? They might be useful.”

“You see, that’s my gift to you, my brother. You don’t need records; you’ve got Legal Siegel.”

“What are you talking about? He’s dead. There’s an obit in the file — I read it last night.”

Bosch had to wait at the crossing a block from the station for a Metro train to go screaming through. Haller heard it over the phone and waited for silence before responding.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “When he retired from the practice of law, Legal Siegel did not want to be found by any of the, let’s say, unsavory clients he represented over the years, especially those who might not have been pleased with the outcome of their interaction.”

“He didn’t want guys getting out of prison and looking him up,” Bosch said. “Geez, I wonder why.”

“I’ve had the experience myself and it’s not pleasant. So Legal Siegel sold his practice and pulled a disappearing act. He even had one of his sons send an obituary of his own creation to the newsletter of the California bar. I remember reading it. It called him a legal genius.”

“That’s what I read. Soto and Tapscott put it in the file because they said Siegel was dead. You’re telling me he’s still alive?”

“He’s going on eighty-six years old and I try to visit him every few weeks or so.”

Bosch pulled into a parking space in the SFPD’s side lot. He checked the dash clock and saw he was late. The personal cars of all the other detectives were already there.

“I need to talk to him,” he said. “In the new files, Borders throws him under the bus. He’s not going to like that.”

“I’m sure he won’t,” Haller said. “But that’s a good break for you. If you impugn the reputation of a lawyer, he’s allowed to fight back. I’ll set up an interview and we’ll record it. What’s your availability going to be?”

“The sooner the better. You said he was pushing eighty-six. Is he all there?”

“Absolutely. Sharp as a stiletto mentally. Physically, not so much. He’s bedridden. They move him around in a wheelchair. Bring him a sandwich from Langer’s or Philippe’s and he’ll go on a nostalgic bender about old cases. That’s what I do. I love to hear him talk cases.”

“All right, set it up and let me know.”

“I’m on it.”

Bosch killed the engine and opened the Jeep’s door. He quickly tried to remember if there was anything else he needed to ask Haller.

“Oh, one other thing,” he said. “You remember at Christmas when we got those bottles of bourbon from Vibiana at the Fruit Box Foundation?”

Vibiana Veracruz was an artist both Haller and Bosch had encountered on a private case they had worked the year before.

“Happy Pappy, yes, I do,” Haller said.

“I remember you offered me a hundred bucks for mine,” Bosch said. “I almost took it.”

“Offer still stands. Unless you finished that sucker off.”

“No, I didn’t even crack it open until last night. And that’s when I found out I could’ve gotten about twenty times what you offered.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. You’re a scoundrel, Haller. Just wanted you to know I’m onto you.”

Bosch could hear Haller chuckling at the other end of the line.

“Laugh it up,” Bosch said. “But I’m keeping it.”

“Hey, there are no morals and no ethics when it comes to choice Kentucky bourbon,” Haller said. “Especially Pappy Van Winkle.”

“I’m going to remember that.”

“You do that. Talk to you later.”

The call ended and Bosch went in the side door to the station. He walked through the empty detective bureau and opened the door to the war room. He was immediately hit with the fresh smell of breakfast burritos.

It was a full house. Sitting around the table and eating were Lourdes, Sisto, Luzon, Captain Trevino, and Chief Valdez. Jerry Edgar was also in attendance with a man Bosch had never seen before. He was late thirties with dark hair and a deep tan. He wore a golf shirt with sleeves tight on his expanded biceps.

“Sorry I’m late,” Bosch said. “I didn’t know it was going to be all hands on deck.”

“We were eating while waiting,” Lourdes said. “Harry, this is Agent Hovan from the DEA.”

16

The man with the tight sleeves stood up and reached across the table to shake Bosch’s hand. As he did so, he assessed Bosch the way an art critic might look the first time at a sculpture, or a college football coach at a high school cornerback.

After freeing his hand from Hovan’s grip, Bosch pulled out a chair at the end of the table and sat down. Lourdes picked up the tray of breakfast burritos and offered to pass it down but Bosch put up his hand and shook his head.

“So,” he said. “Agent Hovan, what brings you here first thing this morning?”

“You called, I wanted to respond,” Hovan said. “Since it was Jerry who referred me to you, I spoke with him yesterday about you and the case and thought it would be best if we all met in person.”

“To brief us all on Santos?” Bosch asked.

Before Hovan answered, the chief spoke up.

“Agent Hovan came in to see me first thing this morning,” he said. “He’s going to brief us all, but he also has a couple ideas about our investigation.”

“Our investigation,” Bosch said.

“Harry, don’t get ruffled,” Valdez said. “It’s not what you think. Just hear the man out.”

“I think Harry’s right,” Sisto said. “When the feds come in, they come in to take things over. This is our case.”

“Could we just give him a chance to talk?” the chief insisted.

Bosch made a gesture, giving Hovan the go-ahead, but he admired Sisto for standing up.

“Okay, I think I got the lay of the land from your chief and Jerry,” Hovan said. “You got the two-bagger and you’ve zeroed in on the clinic over in Pacoima. Today you were probably going to come in here, put your heads together, and decide to go small to get big. Am I right?”

“What does that mean?” Lourdes asked.

“You were going to pick off a pill shill or a capper and start trading up, right?” Hovan said. “It’s how it usually works.”

“And that’s a problem?” Lourdes asked. “It’s usually the way it works because it’s what works.”

She glanced at Bosch to back her up.

“Yes, that was the plan,” Bosch said. “But I suppose the DEA has an alternate suggestion.”

“Correct,” Hovan said. “If you want to get the man who ordered the hit on that pharmacy, then you’re talking about Santos, and there ain’t nobody in the world who knows Santos and his operation like I do. And I can tell you, catching small fish to go after the big fish is not going to work.”

“Why is that?” Lourdes asked.

“Because the big fish is too insulated,” Hovan said. “Based on what I’ve been told about this case, I would say you have it right. Those two hitters were sent by Santos, but you’ll never make that connection. For all we know, those two are already dead and buried in the desert. Santos doesn’t take chances.”

“So then how do we get him?” Lourdes ask.

The tone of her voice revealed her dislike of the idea of the big-shot fed dropping in to school them on their own case.

“You need somebody inside,” Hovan said.

“That’s your idea?” Lourdes asked.

“That’s it,” he said. “You have an opportunity here. A way in.”

“Me,” Sisto said. “I’ll go undercover.”

Everyone turned to look at Sisto. His eagerness to assume a key role in the case was outweighing his inexperience and the danger of undercover work.

“No, not you,” Hovan said.

He pointed across the table at Bosch.

“Him,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Lourdes asked.

“How old are you, Detective Bosch?” Hovan asked. “Over sixty-five, I’m guessing?”

“Yes,” Bosch said.

Hovan gestured as if presenting Bosch to the others at the table.

“We take Detective Bosch, make him look a little older, a little more worn, and a little more hungry. We give him a new ID and Medicare card. We change his clothes, take away his razor and soap for a few days. What we do is follow the clinic’s van and arrest a few of the shills at a pharmacy, make it look like a random enforcement operation. Jerry and I take care of that. Then, when the capper gets back to the clinic and is a few bodies short and looking at being a few thousand pills short by the end of the month, in walks the perfect recruit.”

Hovan used his hands again to offer Bosch to the group.

“The ‘perfect recruit’?” Luzon said.

“He’s the right age and just what they’ll be looking for,” Hovan said. “You ever work undercover, Detective?”

All eyes went to Bosch.

“Not really,” he said. “A few times here and there on cases. Nothing serious. Just how close would I be able to get to Santos if I’m being run around the state to pharmacies all day?”

“Put it this way: closer than anybody else in law enforcement,” Hovan said. “Santos is a phantom. He’s the Howard Hughes of hillbilly heroin. Nobody’s seen him in nearly a year. Our intel photos of him are even older. But here’s the thing.”

Hovan opened a thin manila file that had been on the table in front of him. It contained a two-page document stapled together. He held it up for all to see.

“This is a John Doe arrest warrant for Santos. It’s a RICO case and it’s solid, and this warrant was issued more than a year ago. We have not executed it because we can’t identify or find the guy. But you might be able to. You get recruited and you might get close enough to signal us in. We’ll set you up with all you need. You see Santos, you call us in and we take him down. You take down the man who ordered the hit on that pharmacy. Maybe we even get the shooters.”

Hovan had spun the plan with an urgent tone in his voice. It was met with a long silence as it was considered. Bosch held his hand out for the file containing the warrant, and Hovan passed it over. Harry took a quick glance at it to make sure it hadn’t been a prop. It looked legit. John Doe AKA “Santos” charged under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It was the catchall law used by the feds to go after mobsters for almost fifty years.

It was Lourdes who broke the silence.

“We heard your last inside man took a plane ride and never came back,” she said.

“Yeah, but he wasn’t a cop,” Hovan said. “He was an amateur and made an amateur mistake. That wouldn’t happen with Bosch. He’d be prepped and pretty — that’s what we call being totally ready to go under. I mean, this is a perfect opportunity here.”

Hovan looked directly at Bosch to make his final pitch.

“I gotta admit, when I checked you out with Jerry and heard you were an old guy, my mind started working overtime. We don’t get guys your age doing UC work. I mean, none. You’re the perfect way in.”

Bosch was beginning to bristle.

“Yeah, enough with the ‘old guy’ stuff,” he said. “I get your point.”

Chief Valdez cleared his throat and stepped into the conversation before anybody else could respond.

“If Harry gets on a plane, he could end up anywhere,” he said. “I don’t like that.”

“Most likely he’d be taken down to Slab City,” Hovan said.

“And what exactly is Slab City?”

“A retired military base down near the bottom of the Salton Sea. When they closed the base, they pulled everything out of there except the hard surfaces. That’s the landing strips and the slabs they built the Quonsets on. Squatters came in and took over, built their own places. Then the Santos operation came in, uses the airstrips, and built a tent city for his operation.”

“Why don’t you just go in and shut it all down?” Lourdes asked.

“Because we want Santos,” Hovan said. “We don’t care about the addicts he runs as shills. They’re a dime a dozen. We want the head of the snake, and that’s why we need somebody inside to send out the signal when he’s there.”

“Okay, we need to think about this,” Valdez said. “Detective Bosch also needs to decide if this is something he would even be willing to do. He is a reserve officer in the department and I’m not going to order him to do anything with a risk factor like you’re talking about here. So give us a day or two and we’ll get back to you with an answer.”

Hovan raised his palms in a hands-off manner.

“Hey, roger that,” Hovan said. “I just wanted to come up here and make my pitch. I’ll let you people get back to work. You call me with your decision.”

He stood up to leave but Bosch stopped him with three words.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

Hovan looked at him, and a smile started to spread on his face.

“Harry, wait a minute,” Valdez said. “I think we should take our time and consider other options.”

“Harry, are you sure?” Lourdes added. “This is a dangerous—”

“Give me a couple days to get ready,” Bosch said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

“Okay, okay,” Hovan said. “Don’t shave and don’t bathe. Body odor is a tell. If you don’t stink, you ain’t a user.”

“Good to know,” Bosch said.

“I can hook you up with a user if you want to research it,” the agent offered.

“No,” Bosch said. “I think I know somebody I can talk to. When do we do this?”

Bosch looked at the faces surrounding the table. The looks of concern far outweighed the look of excitement on Hovan’s face.

“How about we go Friday?” Hovan said. “That’ll give us time to work out logistics and request a shadow team. Maybe get you some time with our UC trainers.”

“I’ll want full coverage on him,” Valdez said. “I don’t have the people to do it but I don’t want Harry out there with his ass in the breeze.”

“He won’t be,” Hovan said. “We’ll have him covered.”

“What about when he’s on that plane?” Lourdes asked.

“We’ll have air support,” Hovan said. “We won’t lose him. We’ll be so high above that plane, they won’t even know we’re there.”

“And when he lands?” Edgar asked.

“I’m not going to candy-coat it. When he gets to Slab City, he’s on his own. But we’ll be nearby and ready for the signal.”

That ended the questions from Lourdes. Hovan looked at the chief.

“You have a photo of Bosch we can use to make a dummy DL?”

Valdez nodded.

“We have the shot we made his police ID with,” he said. “Captain Trevino can take you into the op center to get that.”

Trevino got up to lead Hovan out. The DEA agent said he would be in touch and would come back Friday morning ready to go with the undercover operation.

After he was gone, all eyes returned to Bosch.

“What?” he said.

“I still want you to think about this,” Valdez said. “Any second thoughts and we pull out.”

Bosch thought about José Jr. and his naive bravery.

“No,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

“Why, Harry?” Lourdes asked. “You’ve done your part for years and years. Why are you doing this?”

Bosch shrugged. He didn’t like all the attention on him.

“I think about that kid going to college to learn how to do what his father did,” he said. “Then he graduates and gets into the business and finds the corruption of it. He goes through all of that and — big surprise — he does the right thing and it gets him killed. People can call him stupid or naive. I call him a hero and that’s why I’m all in. I want Santos more than Agent Hovan does.”

He had their rapt attention now.

“What they did to José Esquivel shouldn’t just go by,” Bosch added. “If this is the best shot we have at Santos, then I want to take it.”

Valdez nodded.

“Okay, Harry, we get it,” he said. “And we’re with you one hundred percent.”

Bosch nodded his thanks and looked across the table at his old partner Edgar. He nodded too. He was on board.

17

Haller set up the Legal Siegel interview for that afternoon. The former defense attorney presumed dead by many, including Lance Cronyn and his client Preston Borders, was living in a nursing home in the Fairfax area. Bosch met Haller in the parking lot at two p.m. It was one of the rare occasions Bosch saw Haller emerge from the front seat of his Lincoln and the lawyer explained that he was between drivers at the moment. They proceeded inside. Haller held a briefcase that he told Bosch he was using to carry a video camera and to smuggle in a French dip sandwich from Cole’s in downtown.

“This is a kosher joint,” Haller explained. “No food allowed in from the outside.”

“What happens if they catch you?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe I get banned for life.”

“So he’s cool with doing the interview?”

“Said he was. Once he eats, he’ll want to talk.”

In the lobby, they signed in as David Siegel’s lawyer and investigator. They then took an elevator up to the third floor. Signing in as Haller’s investigator reminded Bosch of something.

“How’s Cisco doing?” he asked.

Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski was Haller’s longtime investigator. Two years earlier he and his Harley were taken down on Ventura Boulevard in an intentional hit-and-run. He went through three surgeries on his left knee and came out with a Vicodin addiction that took him six months to recognize before he treated it cold turkey.

“He’s good,” Haller said. “Real good. He’s back and busy.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“Not a problem. Can I tell him what it’s about?”

“Got a friend I think is addicted to hillbilly heroin. I want to ask him what to look for and what to do.”

“Then he’s your man. I’ll call him for you as soon as we get out of here.”

They exited the elevator on the third floor and Haller informed the woman posted at the nursing station that he was visiting his client David Siegel and should not be disturbed. They proceeded down the hallway to Siegel’s private room. Haller pulled a doorknob hanger out of the inside pocket of his suit coat. It said “Legal Conference: Do Not Disturb.” He winked at Bosch as he hung it on the knob and closed the door.

The wall-mounted TV was blaring a CNN report on a congressional investigation into Russia’s meddling with the presidential election the year before. An old man propped up on a hospital bed was watching it. He looked like he didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, and he had wispy white hair that surrounded his head on the pillow like a halo. He wore an old golf shirt with the Wilshire Country Club crest. His arms were skinny, the skin wrinkled and mottled with age spots. His hands looked lifeless and were folded on top of the blanket that was tucked up neatly under his arms and over his chest.

Haller moved around the bed and waved to get the bedridden man’s attention.

“Uncle David,” Haller said loudly. “Hi. I’m going to turn this down.”

Haller took the TV remote off a side table and killed the sound from the TV.

“Damn Russians,” Siegel muttered. “I hope I live long enough to see that guy impeached.”

“Spoken like a true lefty,” Haller said. “But I doubt that’s gonna happen.”

He turned back to the man in the bed.

“So how are you?” Haller said. “This is Harry Bosch, my half brother. I’ve told you about him.”

Siegel put his watery eyes on Bosch and studied him.

“You’re the one,” he said. “Mickey told me about you. He said you came to the house one time.”

Bosch knew he was talking about Michael Haller Sr., his father. Bosch had met him only the one time, in his Beverly Hills mansion. He was sick and soon to die. Bosch was fresh back from war in Southeast Asia. When he entered the house he saw a boy of about five or six standing with a housekeeper. He knew then that he had a half brother. A month later he stood on a hillside and watched as their father was put into the ground.

“Yes,” Bosch said. “That was a long time ago.”

“Well,” Siegel said. “For me everything was a long time ago. The longer you live, the more you can’t believe how things change.”

He gestured weakly toward the silent TV screen.

“I brought you something that hasn’t changed in a hundred years,” Haller said. “Dropped by Cole’s on my way over and got you a French dip.”

“Cole’s is good,” Siegel said. “I didn’t eat at lunch because I knew you were coming. Raise me up.”

Haller grabbed another remote off the table and tossed it to Bosch. While Haller opened his briefcase to get out the sandwich, Bosch raised the upper portion of the bed until Siegel was in an almost seated position.

“We’ve met before,” Bosch said. “Sort of met. You cross-examined me on the stand in the case we are going to talk about today.”

“Of course,” Siegel said. “I remember. You were very thorough. A good witness for the prosecution.”

Bosch nodded his thanks as Haller tucked a napkin into the open collar of the old man’s shirt. He then slid the over-bed table across his lap and unwrapped the sandwich in front of him. He opened up a Styrofoam sidecar of jus and put it down on the table as well. Siegel immediately picked up one half of the sandwich, dipped the edge into the juice, and started eating it, taking small bites and savoring each one of them.

While Siegel ate his sandwich and thought about the old days, Haller took the mini-camcorder out of his briefcase and set it up on a mini-tripod on the over-bed table. He adjusted the table while looking at the framing of the shot, and then they were ready.

It took Legal Siegel thirty-five minutes to eat his French dip sandwich.

Bosch waited patiently while Haller asked the old man questions about days gone by, getting him ready for the interview. Finally, Siegel balled up the sandwich wrap and was done. He tossed it toward a trash can in the corner and came well short. Haller picked up the debris and put it back in his briefcase.

“You ready, Uncle Dave?” he asked.

“Been ready,” Siegel said.

Haller pulled the napkin out of the collar of Siegel’s shirt and adjusted the camera once more before holding his finger on the record button.

“All right, here we go,” he said. “Look at me, not at the camera.”

“Don’t worry, they had video cameras back when I was practicing,” Siegel said. “I’m not that much of a relic.”

“I just thought maybe you were out of practice.”

“Never.”

“Okay, then we’ll start. Three, two, one, recording.”

Haller introduced Siegel and stated the date, time, and location of the interview. Though the camera was solely focused on Siegel, he identified himself and Bosch as well. Then he began.

“Mr. Siegel, how long did you practice law in Los Angeles County?”

“Almost fifty years.”

“You specialized in criminal defense?”

“Specialized? That was the entire practice, yes.”

“Did there come a time when you represented a man named Preston Borders?”

“Preston Borders engaged my services in his defense of a murder charge in late nineteen eighty-seven. The trial ensued the following year.”

Haller proceeded to walk him through the case, first the preliminary hearing to determine if the charge was valid, then on to the jury trial. Haller was careful to avoid any questions regarding the internal discussions of the case, as they were privileged attorney-client communications. Once the case was summarized to the point of a guilty verdict and the subsequent sentence of death, Haller moved on to contemporary times.

“Mr. Siegel, are you aware of a new legal effort being undertaken on your former client’s behalf to vacate his conviction after almost thirty years?”

“I am aware of it. You made me aware of it.”

“And are you aware that in the legal filings, Mr. Borders makes the claim that you suborned his perjury during the trial by telling him to testify about things that you both knew were untrue?”

“I’m aware of it, yes. He threw me under the bus, to use today’s terminology.”

Siegel’s voice had drawn tight with contained anger.

“Specifically, Borders makes the claim that you furnished him with the sworn testimony regarding his purchase of a sea-horse pendant on the Santa Monica pier. Did you provide that testimony to Mr. Borders?”

“I certainly did not. If he lied, he did so on his own and at his own counsel. As a matter of fact, I did not want him to testify during the trial, but he insisted. I felt I had no choice, so I let him and he talked himself onto death row. The jury did not believe a word he said. I talked to several of the jurors after the verdict and they confirmed that.”

“Did you ever consider putting forth a defense that included the allegation that the lead detective on the case had planted the sea-horse pendant in your client’s home in order to frame him?”

“No, I didn’t. We had both of the detectives on the case checked out and challenging their integrity was not an option. We didn’t try it.”

“Have you allowed me to interview you today freely and without outside pressure?”

“I volunteered. I’m an old man but you don’t trash me and the integrity of a forty-nine-year career in law without a word from me about it. Fuck them.”

Haller leaned away from the camera, not expecting the off-color language. He tried not to put laughter on the sound track.

“One final question,” he managed to say. “Do you understand that giving this interview today could result in an investigation and sanctions against you from the California bar?”

“They can come and get me if they want. I’ve never been afraid of a fight. They were stupid enough to believe and print the obit I sent them. Let them come at me.”

Haller reached over and turned off the recorder.

“That was good, Uncle David,” he said. “I think it’s going to help.”

“Thank you,” Bosch said. “I know it will help.”

“Like I said, fuck them,” Siegel said. “They want a fight, they got it.”

Haller started packing up the camera.

Siegel turned his head slightly and looked at Bosch.

“I remember you at that trial,” he said. “I knew you spoke the truth and Borders was done for. You know, in forty-nine years, he was the only one of mine to end up on the row. And I never felt bad about it. He was where he was supposed to be.”

“Well,” Bosch said, “with any luck he’ll stay there.”

Twenty minutes later Bosch and Haller stood by their cars in the parking lot.

“So what do you think?” Bosch asked.

“I think they picked the wrong lawyer to mess with,” Haller said. “I loved that ‘fuck them’ line.”

“Yeah. But they thought he was dead.”

“They’re going to be shitting bricks next Wednesday, that’s for sure. Just need to keep this all under wraps if we can.”

“Why shouldn’t we be able to?”

“It’s about standing. I’ll file for you as an intervening party. The D.A. will probably object, saying they represent you as the lead on the case. If I lose that battle, then I may have to file on Legal Siegel’s behalf to get in the door. That’s all we want, a foot in the door to make our case.”

“You think the judge will allow the interview in?”

“He’ll look at some of it, at least. I started out with the basic stuff on purpose. To lull Cronyn and Kennedy into thinking it’s fluff. Then — boom — I ask the question about perjury. It crosses the line into privilege, so we’ll see. I’m hoping the judge will be a little bit pregnant by then and say he wants to watch the whole thing. I checked him out. We got lucky there. Judge Houghton’s been on the bench twenty years and was practicing law for twenty before that. That means he was around when Legal was active. I’m hoping he’ll cut the old guy a break and hear him out.”

“I’ve had a number of cases before Houghton over the years. He likes to get the full story on things. I think he’ll want to hear what Legal has to say. What about Borders? Will he testify at this thing?”

“I doubt it. That would be a mistake. But he’ll be there and I want to see his face when we put Legal Siegel on the video screen.”

Bosch nodded. He thought about facing Borders again himself after so many years. He realized that he wasn’t even sure what the man looked like. In his mind and memory Borders was a shadowy figure with piercing eyes. He had taken on the dimensions of a monster from imagination.

“You need to step things up now,” Haller said.

“How so?” Bosch asked.

“What we’ve got is good, but it’s not good enough. We’ve got you, we’ve got Legal Siegel, and we’ve got the DNA in question being in Cronyn’s possible possession. But we need more. We need the whole frame. That’s what this is. They’re framing you for hanging this on an innocent man.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Then work harder, my brother.”

Haller opened his car door, ready to go.

“I’ll have Cisco give you a call,” he said.

“Appreciate it,” Bosch said. “And, uh, you might not hear from me for a few days. I’ve got something I’ve gotta do on my San Fernando case. I probably won’t be available.”

“What case, man? This should be your only case. Priority one.”

“I know, but this other thing can’t wait. I’ve got it covered. I’ll figure out the frame and then we’re home free.”

“Famous last words, ‘home free.’ Don’t stay away too long.”

Haller dropped into his car and closed the door. Bosch watched him back out and leave.

18

Bosch had made a deal with Bella Lourdes on the San Fernando case. He would go off to take care of some personal business and prep for his undercover assignment while she and the remaining members of the detective team continued to pursue all avenues of the investigation and prepare for Friday’s operation. That left Bosch a solid day and a half to pursue the Borders frame, as Haller had termed it, as well as take a meeting set by Hovan with a DEA undercover training team.

Bosch had realized after talking with Haller that he might have had his focus on Borders wrong from the start. Because he knew Borders was guilty of the crime he was on death row for, Bosch had put him at the origin of the frame. He was the evildoer, the monster, and so this was all his cunning orchestration, his one last manipulation of the system and attempt to escape from prison through legal means.

But now he understood that this was wrong. The starting point was Lance Cronyn. The attorney was at the center of every stage of this case. While he had cast himself as a lawyer with a conscience just bringing a miscarriage of justice to the attention of the powers that be, it was clear now that he was the one pulling the strings of the D.A.’s Office, the LAPD, and most likely Borders himself.

Still sitting in his car outside Legal Siegel’s nursing home, Bosch rested his wrist on the steering wheel and drummed his fingers on the dashboard as he thought about next moves. He had to be careful. If Cronyn picked up on any investigation directed by Bosch toward him, then he would go running to the judge and the D.A. and claim intimidation. Bosch wasn’t sure yet what the first step was, but he had always employed a battering-ram philosophy when he found himself stuck on the logic of a case. He would step back and then move quickly forward, hoping the momentum of what he did know would carry him through the block.

He went back to the beginning of how Cronyn could have engineered the frame and then carried it out. He decided it had to have started with the death of Lucas John Olmer. From there Bosch started free-associating, using the knowns of the case as the waypoints between the unknowns.

He figured it began when Cronyn got the word that his client Olmer had died in prison. What did he do? Clear space in the files, send everything collected over the years on Olmer to archives? Did he take one last look for old time’s sake? For whatever reason, Cronyn reviewed the files and was reminded of the strategy not taken: semen identified as Olmer’s taken in evidence on the rape cases. The judge had ordered the police lab to share the genetic material with the private lab of Cronyn’s choosing. It was sent there and either tested or not and that is the last record of the material’s whereabouts.

Bosch kept rolling with it, putting pieces together. Upon his client’s death, Cronyn could have reached out to the lab and requested that the material be returned. The suspect was dead, the case was closed, and the attorney was tying up all loose ends. Cronyn ended up with the material and then needed to figure out a way to use it.

What was his goal? To make money? Bosch believed so. It was always about money. In the case at hand, Borders stood to make millions in a city payout for wrongful conviction. The attorney who brokered that deal would get as much as a third of it.

Going back to his evolving case theory, Bosch knew that Cronyn was Olmer’s longtime attorney and therefore would have more knowledge of the rapist and his activities than anyone else. Cronyn goes back in time in Los Angeles, looking through newspaper archives for a case that will fit the bill. A case before the advent of DNA evidence. A case in which he could use DNA as an out.

He comes across Preston Borders. Convicted of murder in a largely circumstantial case, with the exception of the sea-horse pendant being the only hard evidence against him. Cronyn knows that dropping the DNA of a serial rapist into the case would be like setting off a bomb. Eliminate the sea-horse pendant and the DNA is like a golden key that unlocks the door to death row.

Bosch liked it. It worked so far. But Cronyn would not have taken a step further with it without first enlisting Borders as a willing component in the plan. Of course this would not have been a difficult sell. Borders was on death row, out of appeals, and running out of time, given the recent statewide vote in favor of a measure to speed up the culmination of death penalty cases. Cronyn shows up and offers a potential get-out-of-jail card with a seven- or maybe eight-figure chaser: Walk out of prison and death row and have the City of Los Angeles pay you for your troubles. What was Borders going to say, “I pass”?

Bosch realized he had a way to partially confirm his theory. He reached over the seat to where he had placed the Borders case files. He brought the rubber-banded top half of the stack forward and quickly went to the letter Cronyn had sent to the Conviction Integrity Unit. It was the official starting point of the frame. All Bosch was interested in was the date on it. It had been sent by Cronyn in August of the previous year. He realized that he’d had a small piece of evidence of the frame all along. Officer Jericho had said that Cronyn had visited Borders the first Thursday of every month since January of the previous year.

Cronyn had gone up to San Quentin and had several meetings with Borders before sending the letter to the D.A.’s Office. If that didn’t show the making of a conspiracy and the plan to frame, then he didn’t know what did.

Buzzed by having made a connection that could be documented at the hearing the following week, Bosch had the battering ram moving with high velocity. The block was still the application of the plan. He had Cronyn and Borders tied together. He had Olmer’s DNA in Cronyn’s possession. He just needed step three. The execution of the plan.

Bosch decided to break the possibilities into two pieces, with the separator between them being the video that Tapscott took of Lucia Soto opening the evidence box, presumably after many years of its sitting undisturbed on a shelf in LAPD property control.

If the planted evidence was already in place when Soto opened the box, then the fix came before — most likely in the window between Cronyn journeying to San Quentin to meet Borders in January, and August, when he sent the letter to the D.A.’s Office, having presumably reached some form of agreement with Borders on the plan. That was a lot of time and Bosch knew that realistically he would need Soto’s help in identifying who might have had access to the box.

In a space the size of a football field, the archives were strictly monitored and access was documented on multiple levels. A fleet of bonded civilian employees comprised the staff and worked under the on-site supervision of a police captain. Access to evidence was restricted to law enforcement officers, who needed to provide proper identification and a thumbprint for all requests, and there were also cameras that kept the evidence viewing areas under surveillance 24/7.

If the genetic evidence was planted after Tapscott and Soto retrieved the box from property control, then there were a number of places along the chain of custody where that could have happened. The detectives would have hand delivered the contents of the evidence box to the lab at Cal State L.A. for examination and analysis in the serology unit. This brought into play several lab technicians who could have had access to the clothing being examined. But it was a lot of could haves. Bosch knew that these cases were randomly assigned to technicians and that there were several integrity checks built into the protocols and personnel of the DNA unit to guard against corruption, cross-contamination, and evidence tampering, intended or not. In the early days of DNA use in criminal proceedings, the science and protocols were challenged from every angle and with such frequency that over time a firewall of integrity had made the lab nearly impervious. Bosch knew this side of the equation was a long shot.

The more Bosch considered the two possibilities, the more he believed that it was unlikely that the frame had occurred in the lab. The random assignment of a technician to each case alone seemed to undercut the possibility. Even in the unlikely event that Cronyn had a corrupt technician in hand, there seemed to be no way for him to be sure that his tech would even get the case, let alone have access to plant DNA on Danielle Skyler’s pajamas.

Bosch kept coming back to the evidence box and the possibility of it being tampered with before Soto cut through his seals and opened it under Tapscott’s camera. He pulled out the burner phone he had the video on and once again watched the opening of the box. The evidence seals were intact as Soto cut through them and opened the flaps of the box. Bosch saw nothing wrong and again it confounded him.

He thought about texting Soto and asking if she had access to the archive’s overhead cameras and whether she had asked to view them. But he knew such a question would likely make her suspicious of Bosch’s activities. It would also make her angry. After all, Tapscott had filmed Soto opening the box because the two detectives wanted video confirmation that the box’s seals were unbroken. They had filmed the process themselves as a means of avoiding having to request the footage from the overhead cameras. It was unlikely they would be interested in doing it for Bosch now. They were satisfied that there had been no tampering and that Olmer’s DNA had been in the box on the pajamas since day one.

Bosch watched the video again, this time muting Tapscott’s commentary so he could concentrate on the images as Soto used a box cutter to slice through the seals. Halfway through, his real phone buzzed in his pocket and he paused the playback and dropped the burner into a cup holder in the center console. He pulled his phone and saw a number he didn’t recognize but he took the call anyway.

“Hello.”

“Harry Bosch?”

“Yes.”

“Cisco. Mickey said you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yes, how are you doing?”

“Doin’ good. What’s up?”

“I’d like to meet and talk to you about something. It’s confidential. I’d rather do it in person.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Uh, sitting in a parking lot near Fairfax High.”

“I’m not too far. The upstairs at Greenblatt’s will be pretty quiet this time of day. Meet there?”

“Yeah, I can head there.”

“You don’t want to give even a hint about what this is?”

Bosch had always felt a low-grade friction from Cisco during the few times they had been in each other’s company. Bosch had chalked it up to the standard hostility between those who work for the defense and those who work for the prosecution. Added to this was the fact that since before Haller had hired him, Cisco had been associated with the Road Saints — a motorcycle gang in the police’s estimation, a club in the membership’s own view. And there was also a bit of jealousy thrown in. Bosch and Cisco’s boss shared a blood connection, which gave them a unique closeness that Cisco could not have. Bosch thought Cisco might be worried that one day Bosch was going to replace him as Haller’s defense investigator. In Harry’s mind, that was improbable.

Bosch decided to give him more than a hint.

“I want you to help me go undercover as a functioning oxycodone addict,” he said.

There was a pause before Cisco responded.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “I can do that.”

19

Fifteen minutes later, Bosch was sitting in a booth in the upstairs dining room of Greenblatt’s on Sunset, nursing a cup of coffee and watching the muted video on his burner again. The place was empty except for one other table on the other side of the room.

Bosch heard the slow, methodical sound of heavy footsteps coming up the wooden stairs. He paused the video and soon Cisco emerged. He was a big man who worked out like a fiend and as usual was wearing a black Harley T-shirt stretched tight by his muscular chest and biceps. He had gray hair tied back in a ponytail and dark Wayfarer sunglasses. He was carrying a black cane with flames painted on it and what looked like a wraparound knee brace.

“Hey, Bosch,” he said as he slid into the booth.

They bumped fists across the table.

“Cisco,” Bosch said. “We could have met downstairs so you didn’t have to make the climb.”

“Nah, it’s quiet up here and stairs are good for the knee.”

“How’s that going?”

“It’s all good. Back on the bike, back on the job. Only time I complain is in the mornings when getting out of bed. That’s when the knee still hurts like a motherfucker.”

Bosch nodded and gestured toward the items Cisco had brought.

“What’s all of this?”

“These are your props. They’re all you need.”

“Tell me.”

“You want to pharmacy-shop, right? Stack prescriptions? It’s what addicts do.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I did it for a year. I was never turned away once. You go in these places, they want to make money like everybody else. They aren’t looking to turn you away, they’re looking to be convinced. You put on the knee brace — be sure to wear it outside your pants — and use the cane, and you won’t have any problems.”

“That’s it?”

Cisco shrugged.

“Worked for me. I bought a prescription pad off a bent doctor in La Habra for five grand. Had him sign the line on every slip. I did the rest. Filled them out and went to every mom-and-pop farmacia in East L.A. In six weeks I accumulated over a thousand pills. That’s when I made the deal with myself. When those pills ran out, I was going to rise up and beat it. And I did.”

“I’m glad you did, Cisco.”

“Fucking A. Me, too.”

“So no help from the V.A.?”

“Fuck them, the docs at the V.A. were the ones got me hooked in the first place after my surgeries. Then they cut me loose and I’m on the street, strung out, trying to keep a job, trying to keep my wife. Fuck the V.A. I’ll never go back to them.”

The story was not surprising to Bosch. It was the story of the epidemic. People start out hurt and just want to kill the pain and get better. Then they’re hooked and need more than the prescriptions allow. People like Santos fill the space, and there is no turning back.

“When the pills ran out, what did you do?”

“I bought a can opener.”

“What?”

“A can opener and thirty days of rations. I then had a friend put me in a windowless room with a toilet and nail the door shut. He came back in thirty days and I was clean. I’ll never take another pill again. I’ll take a fucking root canal but I still won’t take a pill.”

Bosch could only nod at the end of that story. A waitress came by and Cisco asked for an iced tea and one of their garlic pickles sliced into quarters.

“You want more than that?” Bosch asked. “I’ll buy you lunch.”

“Nah, I’m good. I like the pickles they have here. The garlic brine. One other thing is no eye contact. In the pharmacy. Keep your head down, hand them the piece of paper and your ID, and don’t make eye contact.”

“Got it. The people I’m dealing with are giving me a Medicare card too.”

“Of course, saves you a ton of money. Sticks it on the government.”

Bosch nodded.

“You mind me asking why you’re doing this?” Cisco asked.

“I’m working a case,” Bosch said. “Two pharmacists murdered up in San Fernando. A father and son.”

“Yeah, I read about that. Looks like some dangerous people. You got backup? I’m free at the moment.”

“I do. But I appreciate the offer.”

“I’ve been in the black hole, man. I know what it’s like. Anything I can do to help.”

Bosch nodded. He was aware that the Road Saints, Cisco’s motorcycle “club,” had once been suspected of being a primary manufacturer and mover of crystal meth, a drug with similarly devastating consequences for the addicted. The waitress arrived with iced tea and a sliced pickle, saving Bosch from bringing up the irony of Cisco’s offer.

Cisco used his fingers to take a slice of pickle off the dish and slid it into his mouth in two bites. When the waitress had brought the plate, Bosch had moved his phone out of the way and accidentally activated its screen. Cisco pointed a wet finger at it.

“What’s that?” he asked.

The screen was frozen on an image of Soto using the cutter on the evidence box. Bosch picked up the phone.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s another case. I was trying to figure something out while I was waiting for you.”

“Is that what you’re working with Mickey on?” Cisco asked.

“Uh, yeah. But I have to figure the thing out before we can go into court.”

“Can I see?”

“Nah, it’s kind of meant to be private. I can’t show — well, you know, why not?”

Bosch realized he was grasping at straws when it came to the sealed box. Maybe fresh eyes would bring a fresh idea.

“It’s a video of a detective cutting open an old evidence box, and they filmed it to prove it hadn’t been tampered with. To prove nobody had gotten into it.”

Bosch started the playback from the beginning of the video and then put the phone down on the table and turned it toward Cisco. He took it off mute as well, hoping the couple eating on the other side of the room would not object.

Cisco leaned down and watched the screen while eating another slice of pickle. When it was over, he straightened back up.

“Looked legit to me,” he said.

“Like it hadn’t been tampered with?” Bosch asked.

“Right.”

“Yeah, that’s my take too.”

Bosch took the phone off the table and buried it in his pocket.

“Who’s the guy?” Cisco asked.

“Her partner,” Bosch said. “He took it on his phone and narrated. He talks too much.”

“No, the other guy. The one watching.”

“What guy watching?”

“Give me the phone.”

Bosch pulled the phone out again, set up the video playback, and handed it across the table. This time Cisco held it and poised one of his pickle fingers over the play button. Bosch waited. Cisco eventually stabbed at the screen several times.

“Come on, stop. Shit. I have to go back.”

He manipulated the phone’s screen until it was playing again and once again hit the play/stop button.

“This guy.”

He handed the phone to Bosch, who quickly looked at the screen. It was nearly in the identical spot where he had paused the playback when Cisco had arrived. Soto was cutting through the seals down the lengthwise seam on the top of the box. Bosch was about to ask what Cisco was talking about, when he saw the face in the background. It startled him because he had not noticed it before. But someone had been watching Soto from outside the viewing room. Someone from the next room was leaning across the property counter and looking in.

During all his previous viewings of the video Bosch had been so consumed with checking the integrity of the seals on the evidence box that his eyes had not wandered to the borders of the frame. And now he saw it. A counterman who was interested enough in what Soto and Tapscott were doing to lean over to watch them.

Bosch recognized the man but couldn’t immediately recall his name. Bosch had worked cold cases the last several years of his time with the LAPD and had gone to property control often to look at old evidence for new clues. The man on the screen had pulled the boxes for him on numerous occasions, but it was one of those quick bureaucratic relationships that never went much past the “Howyadoin’?” phase. He thought his name was Barry or Gary or something along those lines.

Bosch looked up from the phone to Cisco.

“Cisco, you working on something right now for Haller?”

“Uh, no. Just sort of standing by till he needs me. Like I said, I’m free at the moment.”

“Good. I’ve got a job for you. It’s the thing I’m doing with Haller, so it won’t be a problem.”

“What do I do?”

Bosch held the phone up so Cisco could see the screen.

“You see this guy? I want to know everything there is to know about him.”

“He a cop?”

“No, a civilian employee called a property officer. He works in Property Control at Piper Tech downtown. He’ll get off at five and come out past the guard shack on Vignes. If you set up under the freeway underpass, you should get a look at him when he puts his car window down and key-cards the exit gate. Tail him from there.”

“You paying or Mick?”

“Doesn’t matter. I pay you or he pays you and charges me. It’s part of the same case. I’m calling him as soon as we’re done here.”

“When do you want me to start?”

“Right now. I’d do it myself but this guy knows me. If he saw me tailing him, the whole thing could blow up.”

“Okay, what’s his name?”

“I can’t remember. I meant that he knows me on sight — from when I was LAPD. If he’s part of this and he saw me, the cat’s out of the bag.”

“Got it. I’m on it.”

“Call me when you have him at his home. But you need to go. You’re going to get caught in traffic going downtown.”

“Lane splitting — it’s why I ride a Harley.”

“Oh, right.”

Cisco finished the last slice of pickle and then climbed out of the booth.

From the parking lot behind the deli, Cisco rode off on his Harley, and Bosch headed home to wait to hear from him. The first thing he did when he got there was text the video from his burner to his real phone. He then e-mailed it to himself and for the first time watched the video on the thirteen-inch screen of his laptop.

Though he studied the opening of the box once more, his eyes were drawn now to the figure who was momentarily caught watching Soto cut through the labels. On the larger screen Bosch saw a clearer expression on the man’s face but could not read whether he was watching out of curiosity or something more. His excitement over Cisco’s find began to give way to disappointment. They were chasing a dead end and Bosch was back to the question: How did Cronyn get the DNA into the evidence box?

He stepped away from the computer, taking the cane and knee brace Cisco had given him down the hall to his daughter’s bedroom. The room seemed so still. She had not been up to L.A. in weeks. He sat on the bed and wrapped the brace around his left knee and over his pants, then secured it tightly with the buckles and straps. He then got up and walked stiff-legged to the center of the room, where he could see himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

Holding the cane in his right hand, he walked toward the mirror, the brace minimizing the mobility of his knee. He pushed against the restraint and practiced walking. He didn’t want to present himself as someone who was actually injured. Rather, he wanted to be a man using props to appear injured. There was a difference, and in that difference was the secret to being the perfect pill shill.

Soon he was moving about the house, working the brace and the cane into a rocking gait that he thought would be effective in his undercover capacity. At one point, he accidentally put the rubber tip of the cane into the sliding door track as he stepped onto the back deck. The cane momentarily became stuck and he twisted his wrist to pull it free. He felt the curved handle turn loose from the barrel of the cane. Thinking he might have broken it, he examined the handle and saw a seam just below its curve. He grasped the barrel and pulled, sliding the two pieces apart. The handle was attached to a four-inch blade with a dagger point.

Bosch smiled. It was what every undercover pill shill needed.

Satisfied with his physical prep work, Bosch went to the kitchen to make an early dinner. He was spreading peanut butter on a piece of whole wheat bread when his cell buzzed. It was Cisco. Bosch answered the call with a question.

“Hey, how come you didn’t tell me the cane was a deadly weapon?”

There was a pause before Cisco answered.

“Holy shit, I forgot about that. The blade. Sorry, man, I hope that didn’t get you in trouble. Don’t try to go through TSA with that thing.”

“The kind of flying I’m expecting to do, there won’t be any TSA. Actually, it’s all good. I like having a little something up my sleeve if I need it in a jam. What’s happening with our guy?”

“I’ve got him tucked in already at home. Not sure if that’s for the night or what.”

“Where’s he live?”

“Altadena. Has a house.”

“Were you able to get his name yet?”

“I got his whole package, man. This is what I do. His name is Terrence Spencer.”

“Terry, yeah, I knew it was something like that. Terry Spencer.”

Bosch ran the name through his memory to see if it came up in any other way besides the routine interactions at the property control counter. No other connections came to light.

“What’s the whole package include?” he asked.

“Well, no criminal record, or I guess he wouldn’t be working there,” Cisco said. “I pulled his credit history. He’s owned the house I’m sitting here looking at for eighteen years and is carrying a mortgage of five-sixty-five on it. I’d say that is a bit high for this neighborhood. He’s probably maxed out on it. He’s been spotty making his payments the past few years, a couple months late here and there, but about seven years ago he went through a real shaky period. The house went into foreclosure. He apparently fought it off somehow and got the refi he’s on now. But that and his late-payment dings have pretty much tanked his credit score.”

Bosch wasn’t really interested in Spencer’s credit score.

“Okay, what else?”

“Drives a six-year-old Nissan, is married, his wife drives a newer Jaguar. Both cars were financed but paid off over time. Don’t know about kids. This guy’s fifty-four, so if he had them, they’re probably out of the house. I can knock on doors in the neighborhood if you want me to go deeper.”

“No, nothing like that. I don’t want to alert him.”

Bosch thought for a few moments about Cisco’s report. Nothing stood out in a big way. The mortgage trouble was of note, but since the financial crash a decade earlier, the middle class was squeezed, and missing payments and dodging foreclosure were not unusual. Spencer, however, was essentially a clerk, and the size of his mortgage would stand out if it were not for the fact that he had owned the house for eighteen years. In that length of time it was likely that the property’s value had more than doubled. If he took equity out of it, then it might explain how he got stuck with a high-six-figure note.

“Any idea what his wife does?” Bosch asked.

“Lorna’s still working on that,” Cisco said.

Bosch knew that Lorna Taylor was Mickey Haller’s ex-wife and office manager, even though he didn’t have an office. She was also currently married to Cisco, completing an incestuous circle in which everybody was somehow happy and worked together.

“You want me to stay on him?” Cisco asked.

Bosch thought about making a move that would bring clarity to the Spencer situation and allow Bosch to move on or focus in. He checked his watch. It was six fifteen.

“Tell you what,” he finally said. “Sit tight for a few minutes. I gotta make a quick call and then I’ll call you right back.”

“I’ll be here,” Cisco said.

Bosch disconnected and went to his laptop in the dining room. He closed down the Tapscott video on the laptop and Googled the name Lance Cronyn. He got a website and the general number for a law firm called Cronyn & Cronyn.

He then pulled the burner phone out of his pocket and called the number. Most law offices were nine-to-five establishments but the call for defense attorneys could come at any hour, and most often those hours were at night. Most lawyers specializing in criminal defense had answering services or forwarding numbers so they could be reached quickly — especially by paying customers.

As expected, Bosch’s call eventually reached a live human being.

“I need to speak to Lance Cronyn right away,” Bosch said. “It’s an emergency.”

“Mr. Cronyn has left for the day,” said the voice. “But he will check soon for messages. Can I have your name?”

“Terry Spencer. I need to talk to him tonight.”

“I understand and will give him the message as soon as he checks in. What number should he call?”

Bosch gave the burner’s number, repeated that it was an emergency situation, and disconnected. He knew that saying Cronyn would check in for messages was just a way of giving the lawyer an out if he didn’t want to call back. Bosch was certain that the go-between would forward his message right away.

He got up and went to the kitchen to finish making his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Before he was done, he heard the burner’s generic ringtone in the other room. He left the sandwich on the counter and went to the phone. He didn’t recognize the number on the screen but assumed it was Cronyn’s cell phone or home number. He answered with one word spoken into the palm of his hand in an attempt to disguise it.

“Yes.”

“Why are you calling me? I’m not your contact.”

Bosch stood frozen. There it was. Cronyn obviously knew who Spencer was. The annoyed tone and the intimacy of what was said showed without a doubt that the lawyer knew who he was talking to.

“Hello?”

Bosch said nothing. He just listened. It sounded as though Cronyn was in a car, driving.

“Hello?”

For Bosch, there was something absolutely energizing about the moment and listening silently to Cronyn’s puzzled tone. Thanks to Cisco’s one-look view of the video, Bosch had now made the jump to the next level. He was closer to the frame.

Cronyn disconnected on his end and the line went silent.

20

Bosch drove down out of the hills and was sitting dead still behind a long line of red lights on the Barham overpass when he took a call back from Cisco.

“Hey, he’s on the move, and this time, I can tell, he’s looking for a tail.”

Bosch immediately surmised that Cronyn had made contact with Spencer by other means and learned that it had not been Spencer who had left the emergency message. Now the question was whether they had decided to meet somewhere or whether Spencer was simply trying to determine if he was being surveilled.

“Can you stay with him? I’m not going to get there in time. Traffic.”

“I can try but what is more important to you — to see where he’s going or to make sure I don’t get made? Tailing on a Harley has its drawbacks when the target’s on high alert. Namely, it’s loud.”

That was confirmed by the background sound. Bosch could hear the wind whistling into Cisco’s earpiece, as well as the baritone sounds of his bike’s illegal muffler.

“Shit.”

“Yeah, if I knew I was going to be doing this, I would have been prepped and I could’ve tagged his car, you know? Hung back on him. But I went straight from Greenblatt’s to downtown to make sure I didn’t miss him. Didn’t have the equipment.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m not blaming you. I’m thinking you should let him go. I think I just spooked them with a call I made. It confirms this guy’s part of this thing, so he might just be trying to see if he has a tail. Let him keep wondering.”

“He’s done a couple pullovers and rectangle moves.”

Bosch knew a rectangle move was when you took four rights around a block and came back to where you were. It usually revealed all followers.

“Then maybe you’ve already been made.”

“Nah, I didn’t fall for his bullshit. He’s an amateur. Right now I got him four blocks ahead on Marengo. You sure you want me to let him go?”

Bosch thought for a moment and second-guessed his first instincts. He was torn. He might be passing up an opportunity to see Spencer and Cronyn together. One photograph of such a meeting would blow the whole case open. If he texted that to Soto, she would rethink everything and there probably would be no hearing on vacating Borders’s sentence. But would Cronyn really be stupid enough to call for a meeting after getting the scam call from Bosch?

Harry didn’t think so. Spencer was up to something else.

“I changed my mind; stay on him,” he finally said. “Very loose. If you lose him, you lose him. Just don’t get made.”

“Got it. Did you hear from Mick yet?”

“No. About what?”

“He’s got more on this guy’s mortgage. Some good stuff and maybe an angle to play. At least that’s what he said.”

“I’ll call him. Let me know about Spencer. And thanks for jumping in on this, Cisco.”

“What I do.”

“Call me if you figure out what he’s up to.”

They disconnected and Bosch called Haller next.

“I was just on with Cisco. He said you have some good stuff.”

“You bet. My girl Lorna has kicked some major ass on this. She was able to pull up the foreclosure record and I think crack this thing open.”

“Tell me.”

“I have to make a quick search on the computer first and then I’ll have everything. You want to catch dinner in a bit and talk then?”

“Yeah. Where?”

“I feel like pot roast. You ever been to Jar?”

“Yeah, I like eating at the counter there.”

“Of course, you’re a counter sort of guy. You’re like the guy sitting by himself in that Hopper painting.”

“I’ll see you at Jar. When?”

“Half an hour.”

Bosch disconnected. He wondered if there was some kind of psychic connection between himself and his half brother. He had often considered himself to be like that man at the counter in Hopper’s Nighthawks.

He realized that he had not moved on the overpass in nearly ten minutes. Something was wrong up ahead on Barham. The cars were lined up all around the bend where it went down into Burbank and the Warner’s lot. He reached over, opened his glove compartment, and looked at the mobile police light. Because he was only a reserve officer at SFPD, he was not given a city ride. In lieu of that, he had been given the blue strobe light he could throw on the roof of his personal car, but it came with the proviso that it not be used unless Bosch was inside the bounds of San Fernando.

“Fuck it,” he said.

He grabbed the light and put it out through the window and up onto the roof, a magnet on the bottom holding it in place. He plugged the juice line into the cigarette lighter and started seeing the flashing blue light reflecting off the rear window of the car in front of him. The car blocking his way inched forward enough for Bosch to make a U-turn and head back to Cahuenga Boulevard. Cars stopped at the intersection and he breezed through. He started heading south.

After he slipped by the Hollywood Bowl and onto Franklin, the traffic slackened off enough for Bosch to pull the plug out of the cigarette lighter. He got to Jar, down on Beverly, well ahead of Haller, and he took one of the stools at the counter. He was nursing his first martini when Haller came through the door fifteen minutes later. He asked for a table in the corner of the dining room for privacy. Bosch followed with his martini.

Haller matched Bosch’s drink order and got down to business as soon as they were alone.

“I like the way you put my investigator to work without consulting me,” he said.

“Hey, I’m the client here,” Bosch retorted. “You’re working for me and that means he works for me too.”

“I’m not sure I agree with that logic, but it is what it is. You’re going to love what we’ve got.”

“Cisco filled me in on some of it.”

“Not the really good stuff.”

“So tell me.”

Haller waited for his martini to be put down in front of him. The waiter was also about to hand out menus, when he was cut off with a wave of Haller’s hand.

“Two orders of pot roast and a side of duck fried rice,” Haller said.

“Perfect,” said the waiter.

He went away.

“I like the way you order for me without consulting me first,” Bosch said.

“Must be something in our father’s blood,” Haller said.

“I actually already ate a sandwich.”

“So eat again — this is the good stuff. Anyway, I don’t know if you remember this but during the mortgage crisis, I shifted a lot of my business over to foreclosure defense. I made out, too. Remember, I hired Jennifer Aronson as an associate and we made some good money for a few years there.”

“I remember something about that, yeah.”

“Well, that’s my way of telling you I know the ins and outs of that illustrious time in our nation’s financial history. I wasn’t the only one making bank and I know how others made out as well.”

“Okay, so what’s it have to do with our man Spencer?”

“His foreclosure suit is public record. You just need to know how to find it, and lucky for us, Lorna does. So I’ve spent the past hour with it and, like I said, you’re going to like it. Check that. Love it.”

“So get to it. What do you have?”

“Spencer got in over his head. He bought the house in two thousand, saw it go up in value, and pulled the value out in a home-equity loan six years later. I don’t know what he did with the money but he didn’t put enough aside to pay his now two mortgages. He then took the first step down the road of desperation. He combined those two loans into a single refi with one reasonable payment on an adjustable rate.”

“And let me guess, it didn’t solve anything.”

“No, in many ways it made matters worse. He can’t keep up and then the crash happens and he is circling the drain financially. He gets so far upside down on his mortgage he’s breathing dirt. He stops making payments altogether and the bank starts foreclosure proceedings. He does a smart thing and hires a lawyer. The only thing is, he hired the wrong lawyer.”

“He should have hired you, is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, it couldn’t have hurt. The lawyer he does hire doesn’t really know what she’s doing, because she’s like all the other lawyers in town and jumping into the foreclosure business with both feet.”

“Like you.”

“Like me. I mean, paid criminal defense work dried up. Nobody had any money. I was taking referrals from the public defender and working for chump change. I couldn’t even make my child-support payments on time. So I went into foreclosure work. But I did my goddamn homework on it, and I hired a smart young associate out of the kind of law school that puts a chip on your shoulder and gives you something to prove.”

“Okay, I get it, you did it right and Spencer’s lawyer did it wrong. What happened?”

“Well, the one thing she got right was the assessment that a legitimate bank wasn’t going to touch Spencer’s dumb ass. So she puts him into hard money.”

“What’s hard money?”

“It doesn’t come from a bank. It comes from investor pools, and because it’s not a bank, they charge points up front and interest rates above market — sometimes damn close to the rates the mafia guys charge for money on the street.”

“And so Spencer’s problems only got worse.”

“Oh, yeah. This poor guy’s trying to hold on to his house and make his payments. Meantime, he’s sitting on a big fat seven-year balloon. And guess what, that balloon is about to pop.”

“Back up and speak English. I paid off my house twelve years ago. I don’t know what any of this means. What’s the balloon?”

“Spencer made a deal with an investor pool called Rosebud Financial. I heard about them back then, that they had money to bail people out. Supposedly it came from a bunch of guys in Hollywood and it was run by another guy, named Ron Rogers, a real shark. He cut these deals and didn’t care whether the taker could pay or not. If there was enough bottom-line equity in the property, he’d cut the deal, because he knew he’d get two shots at foreclosure: either when the poor slob homeowner couldn’t make his monthly payments or at the end of the term, when there was a balloon payment for the balance.”

“So, the deal is, you pay these high monthlies, and then at the end you still have to pay off the whole note.”

“Exactly. These hard-money deals were short-term mostly. Two years, five years. Spencer got a seven-year deal, which was pretty long, but the seven years is up in July and he’ll owe all the money.”

“Can’t he now go to a real bank and refinance again? The financial markets are pretty good now.”

“He could but he’s fucked. His credit rating is shit and Rosebud Financial is putting the boots to him. They’ve dinged him every time he pays late by a week. You see? They want to put him in a corner. They know he’s got no money to pay the balloon and he can’t refinance the debt because of his record. In July they’re going to take the house from him. And this is where it gets good. You know what Zillow is?”

“Zillow? No.”

“It’s an online real-estate database. You can plug in a property address and get a ballpark valuation based on neighborhood comps and other factors. That was the thing I had to check before we talked, and sure enough, Spencer’s property comes in at high six figures — almost a million bucks.”

“Then why doesn’t he just sell it, pay off the balloon, and walk away with the profit?”

“Because he can’t. That deal he cut with Rosebud requires company approval before a sale can be made. And that’s where he hired the wrong lawyer. The fine print on the contract — she either didn’t read it, didn’t understand it, or didn’t care. She just wanted to put him into that loan and move on, maybe even getting a kickback in the process.”

“Rosebud’s not letting him sell.”

“That’s correct.”

“So, they won’t let him sell. He can’t pay the balloon. Rosebud’s going to take the house, sell it, and split the profits among the Hollywood investors.”

“You’re getting good at this, Bosch.”

Bosch sipped the last of his martini and thought about the scenario. Spencer was facing the loss of his house unless he could come up with more than a half million in cash to pay off the balloon. If that didn’t make him vulnerable to corruption, nothing would.

Haller sipped his martini and nodded as he watched Bosch track it all. Then he smiled.

“I saved the kicker for last,” he said.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“Spencer’s lawyer? The dumb one? Her name was Kathy Zelden. I knew her back in those days. She was a junior lawyer in a small firm, and her boss would send her to the courthouse the first Monday of every month, because that’s when they published the foreclosures list. I was there, she was there, Roger Mills, a bunch of us — first Monday of every month. We’d buy a copy of the list and then the flyers would go out in the mail. ‘In foreclosure? Call the Lincoln Lawyer.’ Like that. Everybody on the list got flyers in the mail, phone calls, e-mails, the works. That’s how I got most of my clients.”

“That’s your kicker?”

“No, the kicker is that I’m talking seven, eight, years ago, when I knew her as Kathy Zelden. She was a real looker, and a year or two later her boss got his hand caught in her cookie jar. It was a mini-scandal. He ended up divorcing his wife of like twenty-five years and marrying Kathy. So the last five years, Kathy Zelden’s been known as Kathy Cronyn.”

Haller held up his glass for a well-earned toast. Bosch was empty but he took his glass and banged it hard enough to draw attention from nearby tables.

“Holy shit,” he said. “We got ’em.”

“We fucking-A do,” Haller said. “I am going to blow their shit right out of the water when we get to that hearing next week.”

He drained his glass just as the waiter brought their dishes of pot roast and duck fried rice.

“Gentlemen,” the waiter said. “It looks like we are in need of more essential vitamins.”

Haller picked up his empty glass and offered it.

“We definitely are,” he said. “We definitely are.”

21

After the pot roast and fried rice, Bosch and Haller tried to piece things together. They agreed that the whole scheme likely started when Spencer, facing the upcoming balloon payment with no money and no approval to sell his home, went to the lawyer who put him into the Rosebud deal: Kathy Cronyn née Zelden.

“She says, ‘Sorry, pal, but next year that balloon is going to pop and you’re going to be fucked,’” Haller said. “‘But let me introduce you to my husband and law partner. There might be a way for you to get the money you need before July.’ She makes the intro, and Lance tells him that all he has to do is figure out how to get something into one of the sealed boxes in that big warehouse where he works. Guys like Spencer probably sit around on their breaks talking about ways to defeat the system. Idle work gossip becomes a real thing and the way out of the mess he’s in.”

“We still have to figure that out,” Bosch said.

“My guess is that when all of this hits the fan, Spencer’s going to cut a deal and tell us exactly how he did it. If he hires the right lawyer this time, he can probably come out of this looking like a victim. Everybody likes the lawyer for the villain. The D.A. will trade Spencer for Cronyn and Cronyn in a heartbeat.”

“Spencer’s no victim. He’s part of the frame. He’s trying to put me in the dirt.”

“I know that. I’m just giving you the reality of it. How it will play out. Spencer’s a guy who got in over his head and was played by these people.”

“Then we should go at him now. Confront him, show him the video. Get him on our side before next week.”

“Might be worth a try, but if he doesn’t crack, then we’re giving Lance Cronyn a head start on Wednesday. I’d rather sandbag the whole bunch of them in the courtroom.”

Bosch nodded. It was probably the better plan. Just then, thoughts of confronting Spencer reminded him that the property officer was currently under surveillance. He pulled his phone.

“I forgot about Cisco,” he said. “He’s watching him right now.”

Bosch made the call and Cisco answered with a whisper.

“What’s happening?” Bosch asked.

“He drove around for an hour until he was sure he had no tail,” Cisco said. “Then he drove down into Pasadena and met somebody — a woman — in the parking lot of Vroman’s.”

“What’s Vroman’s?”

“It’s a big bookstore with a big parking lot at the edge of Old Town. They’re parked window to window, you know, like cops do.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“I don’t know. She’s got dealer blanks, so I can’t run a plate.”

“Does it look like a new car?”

“No, it’s a scratched-up Prius.”

“Can you get a photo of her without getting noticed? I’m here with Haller and he might know who she is.”

“I can try. I can do the old walk-by on a call and grab video. I’ll text it to both of you.”

“Do it.”

Bosch disconnected. He knew the maneuver Cisco was undertaking. He’d start recording on his phone’s video app, then hold the phone to his ear like he was on a call and walk by the front of the subject’s car, hopefully focusing on the woman behind the wheel.

“Spencer is talking to a woman,” he reported to Haller. “Cisco’s going for some video.”

Haller nodded and they waited.

“At some point I should tell Soto,” Bosch said, mostly to himself.

“What do you mean?” Haller asked.

“She’s my ex-partner. We sandbag Cronyn, we sandbag her.”

“Do I have to remind you that she’s part of a machine that’s trying to take everything you have away from you?”

“She’s following a case where it goes.”

“Well, she took a wrong turn, didn’t she?”

“It happens.”

“Do me a favor, don’t talk to her. Not yet, at least. Wait till we’re closer and we’ve confirmed some of these theories as facts. Don’t give the LAPD the chance to flip this on us.”

“Fine. I can wait. But she wouldn’t flip things. If we set her straight with facts, we wouldn’t have to go after Cronyn or Spencer or Borders. She would.”

Before Haller could respond, their phones buzzed in unison as a text came to them both. It was the video from Cisco. They each watched on their phones. Bosch saw an unsteady frame as the camera moved down a line of cars in the bookstore parking lot. It was accompanied by the audio of Cisco’s fake phone-call banter, which was designed to help document the time and place of the recording.

“Hi, I’m at Vroman’s, the bookstore in Pasadena. It’s eight o’clock Wednesday and I’ll be here for a while. Hit me back...”

The camera moved across a row of parked cars as Cisco spoke until it came to one backed into a spot. The camera moved across the windshield and showed a woman behind the wheel. She was in profile because she was turned toward the open side window and was talking to someone in the car parked next to her. Cisco wisely stopped his faux message as he crossed in front of the car. It allowed the camera to pick up a snippet of dialogue as it was spoken by the woman and Spencer, who could not be seen in the other car.

“You’re overreacting,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

“I’m telling you, it better be,” he said.

A few steps past the two cars, Cisco turned the phone’s camera on his own face and identified himself.

“This is Dennis Wojciechowski, California private investigator license oh-two-sixty-two, ending this recording. Ciao.”

The video ended. Bosch looked expectantly at Haller.

“It’s not a good view and I haven’t seen Kathy Cronyn since she was Kathy Zelden,” he said.

He was replaying the video and froze the playback at one point and then used two fingers to enlarge the image. He paused for a long moment as he studied it.

“Well?” Bosch finally asked.

“Yes,” Haller said. “I’m pretty sure it’s her. Katherine Cronyn.”

Bosch immediately called Cisco back. He answered Bosch with a question.

“Did he ID her?”

“He did. Katherine Cronyn. You did good, Cisco. You’re done for the night.”

“Just let him go?”

“Yeah, we got what we need and we don’t want to risk them finding out we know.”

“You got it. Tell Mick I’ll check in with him in the morning.”

“Will do.”

Bosch disconnected and looked at Haller. He was beaming.

“Can you run with it from here?” Bosch asked. “Like I told you, I’m going to drop out for a few days. At least.”

“I can run with it, but are you sure you’ve got to drop out?” Haller said. “You’re a part-timer up there. Can’t somebody else take the reins on that case?”

Bosch thought about it. His mind filled with the image of José Esquivel Jr. sprawled on the floor of the back hallway.

“No,” he finally said. “Only me.”