“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.