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.