“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.”