“Almost twenty years. He was my client. He was no angel but there was something gentle about him. He wasn’t a killer. He was either too smart or too soft for that. Maybe both. Anyway, he turned things around and got out of the life. That’s why I know.”
“Know what?”
“That he didn’t do this.”
“I read some of the stories online. What about the rape arrest?”
“It was bullshit. I’ll show you the file. They brought him and about twenty other guys in. Let him go in less than a day.”
“Where are you in discovery? Did you get the murder book yet?”
“I got it. But if you are getting interested in this, I think you need to talk to my client. You read the book, and you’re going to get the other side’s case. You’re not going to—”
“I don’t care. It’s all about the book. It begins and ends with the book. When can I get a copy?”
“I can get it put together by tomorrow.”
“Good. Call me and I’ll come get it.”
“So then you’re in?”
“Just call me when you have the book ready.”
Bosch clicked off the call. He thought about the conversation and what he was feeling after reading the newspaper stories. He had made no commitment yet. He had crossed no line. But he couldn’t deny that he was getting close to the line. He also could not deny the growing feeling that he was about to get back on the mission.
5
Bosch and Skinner met at the Factory Kitchen off Alameda. It was a trendy Italian place in the Arts District. It was her style and her choice. His suggestions had been shot down.
It was crowded and voices echoed and clattered off the old factory’s brick walls. It was definitely the wrong kind of place to discuss the dissolution of a relationship but that was what they did.
Over a shared plate of tagliatelle with duck ragù, Skinner told Bosch that their time together as a couple was at an end. She was a reporter who had spent almost thirty years covering police and politics. She had a direct, sometimes abrupt delivery when discussing any subject, including romance and the fulfillment of her needs. She told Bosch he had changed. He was too consumed by the loss of his career and finding his place as a man without a badge to keep the relationship on the front burner.
“I think I need to step away and let you work things out, Harry,” she said.
Bosch nodded. He was not surprised by her pronouncement or the reasoning behind it. Somehow he knew that the relationship—not even a year old—could not go the distance. It had been born in the excitement and energy of a case he was working and a political scandal she was writing about. The nexus of the romance was those two things. When they were gone, they both had to wonder what they still had.
She reached over and touched his cheek in a wistful way.
“I’m only a few years behind you,” she said. “It will happen to me.”
“No, you’ll be fine,” Bosch said. “Your job is telling stories. Stories will always need to be told.”
After dinner they hugged at the valet stand while waiting for their cars. They promised to stay in touch but they both knew that would not happen.
6
Bosch met Haller at 11 a.m. Monday in a downtown parking lot beneath the outstretched hands of Anthony Quinn painted on the side of a building on Third. Bosch pulled his old Cherokee up close to the rear passenger door of the Lincoln and the window came down. Because of a bad angle and the tinting on the Lincoln’s windows Bosch could not see who was driving.
From the backseat Haller handed a thick, rubber-banded file out the window to him. Bosch had somehow thought it would be contained in a blue binder the way murder books were in the detective bureau. Seeing the file full of photocopies was a glaring reminder that what he was about to do wasn’t remotely close to working a case for the police department. He was going far out on his own here.
“What will you do now?” Haller asked.
“What do you think?” Bosch replied. “I’ll go off somewhere and read through all of this.”
“I know that, but what are you looking for?”
“I’m looking for the things that are missing. Look, I don’t want to get your hopes up. I read all the newspaper coverage this morning. I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. The guy’s a criminal. You know him because he’s a criminal. So right now all I’m promising to do—the one thing—is look through all of this and render an opinion. That’s it.”
Bosch held the unwieldy file up so Haller could see it again.
“If I don’t find something missing or something that flares on my radar, then I’m giving it all back and that’ll be it. Comprende, hermano?”
“Comprende. You know, it must be hard to be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Not believing in rehabilitation and redemption, that people can change. With you it’s ‘once a con always a con.’”
Bosch ignored the accusation.
“So the Times says your client’s got no alibi. What are you going to do about that?”
“He has an alibi. He was in his studio painting. We just can’t prove it—yet. But we will. They say he’s got no alibi but they’ve got no motive. He didn’t know this woman, had never even seen her or been in that neighborhood, let alone her house. It’s crazy to think he would do this. They tried to connect him somehow to the husband when he worked down in Lynwood—some kind of a gang revenge scheme, but it’s not there. Da’Quan was a Crip and the husband worked Bloods. There is no motive because he didn’t do it.”
“They don’t need motive. With a sex crime the sex is motive enough. What are you going to do about the DNA?”
“I’m going to challenge it.”
“I’m not talking about O.J. bullshit. Is there evidence of mishandling of the sample or test failure?”
“Not yet.”
“‘Not yet’—what’s that mean?”
“I petitioned the judge to allow for independent testing. The D.A. objected, saying there wasn’t enough material recovered, but that was bullshit and the judge agreed. I have an independent lab analyzing now.”
“When will you hear something?”
“The court fight took two months. I just got the material to them and am hoping to hear something any day. At least they’re faster than the Sheriff’s lab.”
Bosch was unimpressed. He assumed the analysis would conclude what the Sheriff’s analysis concluded—that the DNA belonged to Da’Quan Foster. The next step would be to go after the handlers of the evidence. It was the kind of tactic defense attorneys took all the time. If the evidence is against you, then taint the evidence any way you can.
“So aside from that, what’s your theory?” he asked. “How’d your client’s DNA end up in the victim?”
Haller shook his head.
“I don’t think it was. Even if my lab says it’s his DNA, I still won’t believe he did it. He was set up.”
Now Bosch shook his head.
“Jesus,” he said. “You’ve been around the block more times than most of the lawyers I know. How can you think this?”
Haller looked at Bosch and held his eyes.
“Maybe because I have been around the block a few times,” he said. “You been at it as long as me, you get to know who’s lying to you. I got nothing else, Harry, but I have my gut and it tells me something’s wrong here. There’s a setup, there’s a fix, there’s something somewhere, and this guy didn’t do this. Why don’t you go talk to him and see what your gut tells you?”
“Not yet,” Bosch said. “Let me read the book. I want to know everything there is to know about the investigation before I talk to him. If I talk to him.”
Haller nodded and they parted ways, Bosch promising to keep in touch. Each man drove off to a different parking lot exit. While waiting for traffic on Third to open up for him, Bosch looked up at Anthony Quinn, his arms stretched out as if to show he had nothing.
“You and me both,” Bosch said.
He pulled out on Third and then took a right on Broadway, driving through the civic center and into Chinatown. He found street parking and went into Chinese Friends for an early lunch. The place was empty. Carrying the file Haller had passed to him, Bosch took a table in the corner where his back would be to the wall and no one would be able to look over his shoulder at what he was reading. He didn’t want anyone losing their appetite.
Bosch ordered without looking at the menu. He then took the rubber bands off the file and opened it on the table. For more than two decades he had put together discovery packages for attorneys defending the men and women he had arrested for murder. He knew every trick there was when it came to planting obfuscation and misdirection in a murder book. He could write a how-to manual on the art of turning the discovery process into a nightmare for a defense attorney. It had been his routine practice back in the day to redact words in reports without rhyme or reason, to intermittently remove the toner cartridge from the squad room photocopier so that pages and pages of the documents he was turning over were printed so lightly they were impossible or at least headache-inducing to read.
He now had to use all he knew in assessing this murder book. And experience dictated that his first job here was to put the book in the proper order. It was routine to shuffle the stacks of reports like a deck of cards, throw in a takeout menu or two, just to say fuck you to the defense attorney and his investigator. Each page turned over in discovery was stamped with a page number and date. This was done so that in court the attorneys from each side of the aisle could refer to the same page by a uniform number. So it didn’t matter if Bosch reordered the pages. He could put his own system in place. All Haller would have to do is use the stamped page number if he wanted to refer to one of the documents in court.
There was not a lot of difference between the reports filed by Sheriff’s investigators and the reports Bosch had authored for the LAPD. Some headings were different, a few report numbers as well. But Bosch easily had the book reshuffled and in correct order by the time his plate of thin-sliced pork chops arrived. He kept the stack of records front and center and the plate to the side so he could continue to work as he ate.
On top of the reordered stack was the Incident Report, which was always the first page of a murder book after the table of contents. But there was no table of contents—another fuck you from prosecution to defense—so the IR was on top. Bosch glanced at it but was not expecting to learn anything. It was all first-day information. If it wasn’t wrong, then it was incomplete.
The pork chops were thin and crispy, piled on top of fried rice on his plate. Bosch was using his fingers to eat them like potato chips. He now wiped his hands on the paper napkin so he could turn the pages on the stack without soiling them. He quickly went through several ancillary and meaningless reports until he got to the Chronological Log. This was the murder bible, the heart of any homicide investigation. It would detail all the moves of the lead detectives on the case. It would be where case theory would emerge. It would be where Bosch would be convinced of Da’Quan Foster’s guilt or find the same doubt that had crept into Mickey Haller’s gut.
Most detective pairings had a division of labor that was worked out over several cases. Usually one member of the detective team was charged with keeping reports and the murder book intact and up to date. The Chronological Log was the exception. It was kept on computer as a digital file and routinely accessed by both detectives so each could enter his or her movements on a case. It was periodically printed out on three-hole paper and clipped into a binder, or in this case added to a defense discovery package. But the most active version was always a digital file and it was a living document, growing and changing all the time.
The printout of the chrono in the discovery file was 129 pages long and was authored by Sheriff’s investigators Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt. Though over the years Bosch had had many interactions with Sheriff’s homicide investigators, he knew neither of them. This was a handicap because he had no measure of their skills or temperaments as he moved into their written work. He knew some of it would surface as he learned of their investigative moves and conclusions but Bosch still felt like he was behind the curve. He knew other investigators in the Sheriff’s homicide bureau he could call to discuss the pair, but he didn’t dare do that and possibly reveal that he was working against them. Word of Bosch’s betrayal to the cause would spread rapidly and jump from the Sheriff’s Department to the LAPD in hours if not minutes. Bosch didn’t want that. Yet.
The first seventy-five pages of the chrono documented the moves of the investigation before the DNA connection was made to Da’Quan Foster. Bosch carefully read these pages anyway because they gave insight into the investigators’ initial case theory as well as their thoroughness and determination. Lexi Parks’s husband was fully investigated and cleared and the efforts were well documented in the chrono. Though he had an ironclad alibi—involved in the pursuit and arrest of a car thief—for the time of his wife’s murder, the investigators were smart enough to know that he could have set the murder up to be carried out by others. Even though aspects of the murder—the sexual attack and brutality of the fatal beating—tended to point in another direction, the investigators were undaunted in their look at the husband. Bosch found a growing respect for Cornell and Schmidt as he read through these sequences in the chrono.
The early investigation also went in many other directions. The investigators interviewed a multitude of sex offenders living in the West Hollywood area, probed the victim’s personal background for enemies, and looked through her job activities and history for people she may have angered or who could have held grudges.
All of these efforts hit dead ends. Once they had DNA from the killer, it was used to clear anyone who even remotely approached suspect status. The victim’s personal background produced no deep conflicts, no spurned lovers, and no extramarital activity on her or her husband’s part. As an assistant city manager her reach into the city’s bureaucracy and politics was substantial, yet she carried the final say on few items of business and on none that were controversial.
A profile of the murderer drawn from the details of the crime scene was what eventually pointed the investigation away from the victim’s personal and professional life. The profile, put together by the Sheriff’s Department Behavioral Science Unit, concluded that the suspect was a psychopath who was filling a complex of psychological needs in the murder of Lexi Parks. No kidding, Bosch thought as he read the conclusion.
The profile stated that the killer was most likely a stranger to Parks and that she could have crossed his path anywhere recently or long ago. Because she was a public figure who appeared regularly on West Hollywood’s public-access cable channel as well as at public events, the circle of possibilities was even greater. Her killer could have simply seen her on the news or at a televised city council meeting. The crossing could have happened anywhere.
The killing seemed to be both carefully planned and reckless in terms of the overkill in violence and the DNA evidence left behind. Other crime scene details that influenced the profile included the fact that the victim had not been tied up in any way—indicating the killer did not need bindings to overpower and control her. The victim was also found by her husband with a pillow over her face, hiding the intense damage of the fatal beating from view and possibly indicating remorse on the part of the killer.
Since her husband was a law enforcement officer, several security measures had been installed in the home, including an alarm system and multiple locks on all doors. The killer had gained entrance through the window of a home office, removing a screen and leaving it leaning against the back wall of the house, then jimmying the lock on the window. The victim apparently had not set the alarm system and her husband said that she rarely did so despite his often-repeated request that she set it when he was working at night and she was home alone.
All of this and other details added up to the profile of a suspect who was opportunis
tic and relentless as a predator. Parks had gone to the Pavilions supermarket on Santa Monica Boulevard on the evening of her murder. For several days the investigators scoured security video from the store and shopping plaza where it was located, tracking Parks’s visit and hoping to find the point of intersection between victim and predator. But nothing came of it. In the store, Parks saw and acknowledged several acquaintances whom she knew socially or from her government work. But all of them were checked out and eventually cleared, either through voluntary DNA comparison or otherwise.
It all added up to spinning wheels, but they were wheels that needed to be spun. Bosch’s review of the first eighty pages of the chrono left him with the belief that Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt had conducted a very thorough investigation—one that he would be proud to have put his name on himself.
And all of it was for naught. That is, until the twenty-seventh day of the investigation when they received a letter from the California Department of Justice informing them that the DNA sample they had submitted to the state’s CODIS database had been matched to a convicted offender named Da’Quan Foster.
Until that moment, neither Cornell nor Schmidt had ever heard of Da’Quan Foster in regard to Parks or any other case. But they started planning for when they would eventually meet him. He was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance to see if he made any moves that could be useful in his prosecution or threatened to harm another woman. Meanwhile, he was backgrounded and the investigation proceeded under the tightest security so that no word would leak to the media or to the husband of the victim.
Eleven days after the DNA match came in from the state, the two lead investigators entered the artist’s studio where Foster was alone, having just finished teaching a small class of children about primary colors. Leimert Park was in the City of Los Angeles. The investigators were accompanied by two uniformed LAPD officers from the South Bureau Gang Unit. Cornell and Schmidt asked Foster if he would accompany them to the Homicide Unit, where they wanted to ask him questions.