“He was right?”
“Dead on. We found her in the garage in an unplugged freezer with three air holes drilled in it. It was like a coffin. The receiver part of the monitor was in there with her. She later told us that Hagen talked to her incessantly whenever he was in the house. He sang to her, too. Top forties. He’d change the words and sing about raping and killing her.”
McCaleb nodded. He wished he had been there on the case, for he knew what Bosch had felt, that sudden moment of coalescing, when the atoms smash together. When you just knew. A moment as thrilling as it was dreadful. The moment every homicide detective privately lives for.
“The reason I tell this story is because of what Bosch did and said after. Once we had Hagen in the back seat of one of the cars and started searching the house, Bosch stayed in the living room with that baby monitor. He turned it on and he spoke to her. He never stopped until we found her. He said, ‘Jennifer, we’re here. It’s all right, Jennifer, we’re coming. You’re safe and we’re coming for you. Nobody’s going to hurt you.’ He never stopped talking to her, soothing her like that.”
She stopped for a long moment and McCaleb saw her eyes were on the memory.
“After we found her we all felt so good. It was the best high I’ve ever had on this job. I went to Bosch and said, ‘You must have kids. You spoke to her like she was one of your own.’ And he just shook his head and said no. He said, ‘I just know what it’s like to be alone and in the dark.’ Then he sort of walked away.”
She looked from the door back at McCaleb.
“Your talking about darkness reminded me of that.”
He nodded.
“What do we do if we come to a point that we know flat out that it was him?” she asked, her face turned back to the glass.
McCaleb answered quickly so that he wouldn’t have to think about the question.
“I don’t know,” he said.
After Winston had put the plastic owl back in the evidence box, gathered all of the pages he had shown her and left, McCaleb stood at the sliding door and watched her make her way up the ramp to the gate. He checked his watch and saw there was a lot of time before he needed to get ready for the night. He decided he would watch some of the trial on Court TV.
He looked back out the door and saw Winston putting the evidence box into the trunk of her car. Behind him somebody cleared his throat. McCaleb abruptly turned and there was Buddy Lockridge in the stairwell looking up at him from the lower deck. He had a pile of clothes clasped in his arms.
“Buddy, what the hell are you doing?”
“Man, that’s one weird case you’re working on.”
“I said what the hell are you doing?”
“I was going to do laundry and I came over here ’cause half my stuff was down in the cabin. Then you two showed up and when you started talking I knew I couldn’t come up.”
He held the pile of clothes in his arms up as proof of his story.
“So I just sat down there on the bed and waited.”
“And listened to everything we said.”
“It’s a crazy case, man. What are you going to do? I’ve seen that Bosch guy on Court TV. He kind of looks like he’s wound a little too tight.”
“I know what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to talk about this with you.”
He pointed to the glass door.
“Leave, Buddy, and don’t tell a word of this to anybody. You understand me?”
“Sure, I understand. I was just -”
“Leaving.”
“Sorry, man.”
“So am I.”
McCaleb opened the slider and Lockridge walked out like a dog with his tail between his legs. McCaleb had to hold himself back from kicking him in the rear. Instead he angrily slid the door closed and it banged loudly in its frame. He stood there looking out through the glass until he saw Lockridge make it all the way up the ramp and over to the facilities building where there was a coin laundry.
His eavesdropping had compromised the investigation. McCaleb knew he should page Winston immediately and tell her, see how she wanted to handle it. But he let it go. The truth was, he didn’t want to make any move that might take him out of the investigation.
Chapter 19
After putting his hand on the Bible and promising the whole truth, Harry Bosch took a seat in the witness chair and glanced up at the camera mounted on the wall above the jury box. The eye of the world was upon him, he knew. The trial was being broadcast live on Court TV and locally on Channel 9. He tried to give no appearance of nervousness. But the fact was that more than the jurors would be studying him and judging his performance and personality. It was the first time in many years of testifying in criminal trials that he did not feel totally at ease. Being on the side of the truth was not a comfort when he knew the truth had to run a treacherous obstacle course set before it by a wealthy, connected defendant and his wealthy, connected attorney.
He put the blue binder – the murder book – down on the front ledge of the witness box and pulled the microphone toward him, creating a high-pitched squeal that hurt every set of ears in the courtroom.
“Detective Bosch, please don’t touch the microphone,” Judge Houghton intoned.
“Sorry, Your Honor.”
A deputy sheriff who acted as the judge’s bailiff came over to the witness box, turned the microphone off and adjusted its location. When Bosch nodded at its new position, the bailiff turned it back on. The judge’s clerk then asked Bosch to state his full, formal name and spell it for the record.
“Very well,” the judge said after Bosch finished. “Ms. Langwiser?”
Deputy District Attorney Janis Langwiser got up from the prosecution table and went to the attorney’s lectern. She carried a yellow legal tablet with her questions on it. She was second seat at the prosecution table but had worked with the investigators since the start of the case. It had been decided that she would handle Bosch’s testimony.
Langwiser was a young up-and-coming lawyer in the DA’s office. In the span of a few short years she had risen from a position of filing cases for more experienced lawyers in the office to handle to taking them all the way to court herself. Bosch had worked with her before on a politically sensitive and treacherous case known as the Angels Flight murders. The experience resulted in his recommendation of her as second chair to Kretzler. Since working with her again, Bosch had found his earlier impressions were well founded. She had complete command and recall of the facts of the case. While most other lawyers would have to sift through evidence reports to locate a piece of information, she would have the information and its location in the reports memorized. But her skill was not confined to the minutiae of the case. She never took her eye off the big picture – the fact that all their efforts were focused on putting David Storey away for good.
“Good afternoon, Detective Bosch,” she began. “Could you please tell the jury a bit about your career as a police officer.”
Bosch cleared his throat.
“Yes. I’ve been with the Los Angeles Police Department twenty-eight years. I have spent more than half of that time investigating homicides. I am a detective three assigned to the homicide squad of the Hollywood Division.”