“I’ve had a number of cases before Houghton over the years. He likes to get the full story on things. I think he’ll want to hear what Legal has to say. What about Borders? Will he testify at this thing?”
“I doubt it. That would be a mistake. But he’ll be there and I want to see his face when we put Legal Siegel on the video screen.”
Bosch nodded. He thought about facing Borders again himself after so many years. He realized that he wasn’t even sure what the man looked like. In his mind and memory Borders was a shadowy figure with piercing eyes. He had taken on the dimensions of a monster from imagination.
“You need to step things up now,” Haller said.
“How so?” Bosch asked.
“What we’ve got is good, but it’s not good enough. We’ve got you, we’ve got Legal Siegel, and we’ve got the DNA in question being in Cronyn’s possible possession. But we need more. We need the whole frame. That’s what this is. They’re framing you for hanging this on an innocent man.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Then work harder, my brother.”
Haller opened his car door, ready to go.
“I’ll have Cisco give you a call,” he said.
“Appreciate it,” Bosch said. “And, uh, you might not hear from me for a few days. I’ve got something I’ve gotta do on my San Fernando case. I probably won’t be available.”
“What case, man? This should be your only case. Priority one.”
“I know, but this other thing can’t wait. I’ve got it covered. I’ll figure out the frame and then we’re home free.”
“Famous last words, ‘home free.’ Don’t stay away too long.”
Haller dropped into his car and closed the door. Bosch watched him back out and leave.
18
Bosch had made a deal with Bella Lourdes on the San Fernando case. He would go off to take care of some personal business and prep for his undercover assignment while she and the remaining members of the detective team continued to pursue all avenues of the investigation and prepare for Friday’s operation. That left Bosch a solid day and a half to pursue the Borders frame, as Haller had termed it, as well as take a meeting set by Hovan with a DEA undercover training team.
Bosch had realized after talking with Haller that he might have had his focus on Borders wrong from the start. Because he knew Borders was guilty of the crime he was on death row for, Bosch had put him at the origin of the frame. He was the evildoer, the monster, and so this was all his cunning orchestration, his one last manipulation of the system and attempt to escape from prison through legal means.
But now he understood that this was wrong. The starting point was Lance Cronyn. The attorney was at the center of every stage of this case. While he had cast himself as a lawyer with a conscience just bringing a miscarriage of justice to the attention of the powers that be, it was clear now that he was the one pulling the strings of the D.A.’s Office, the LAPD, and most likely Borders himself.
Still sitting in his car outside Legal Siegel’s nursing home, Bosch rested his wrist on the steering wheel and drummed his fingers on the dashboard as he thought about next moves. He had to be careful. If Cronyn picked up on any investigation directed by Bosch toward him, then he would go running to the judge and the D.A. and claim intimidation. Bosch wasn’t sure yet what the first step was, but he had always employed a battering-ram philosophy when he found himself stuck on the logic of a case. He would step back and then move quickly forward, hoping the momentum of what he did know would carry him through the block.
He went back to the beginning of how Cronyn could have engineered the frame and then carried it out. He decided it had to have started with the death of Lucas John Olmer. From there Bosch started free-associating, using the knowns of the case as the waypoints between the unknowns.
He figured it began when Cronyn got the word that his client Olmer had died in prison. What did he do? Clear space in the files, send everything collected over the years on Olmer to archives? Did he take one last look for old time’s sake? For whatever reason, Cronyn reviewed the files and was reminded of the strategy not taken: semen identified as Olmer’s taken in evidence on the rape cases. The judge had ordered the police lab to share the genetic material with the private lab of Cronyn’s choosing. It was sent there and either tested or not and that is the last record of the material’s whereabouts.
Bosch kept rolling with it, putting pieces together. Upon his client’s death, Cronyn could have reached out to the lab and requested that the material be returned. The suspect was dead, the case was closed, and the attorney was tying up all loose ends. Cronyn ended up with the material and then needed to figure out a way to use it.
What was his goal? To make money? Bosch believed so. It was always about money. In the case at hand, Borders stood to make millions in a city payout for wrongful conviction. The attorney who brokered that deal would get as much as a third of it.
Going back to his evolving case theory, Bosch knew that Cronyn was Olmer’s longtime attorney and therefore would have more knowledge of the rapist and his activities than anyone else. Cronyn goes back in time in Los Angeles, looking through newspaper archives for a case that will fit the bill. A case before the advent of DNA evidence. A case in which he could use DNA as an out.
He comes across Preston Borders. Convicted of murder in a largely circumstantial case, with the exception of the sea-horse pendant being the only hard evidence against him. Cronyn knows that dropping the DNA of a serial rapist into the case would be like setting off a bomb. Eliminate the sea-horse pendant and the DNA is like a golden key that unlocks the door to death row.
Bosch liked it. It worked so far. But Cronyn would not have taken a step further with it without first enlisting Borders as a willing component in the plan. Of course this would not have been a difficult sell. Borders was on death row, out of appeals, and running out of time, given the recent statewide vote in favor of a measure to speed up the culmination of death penalty cases. Cronyn shows up and offers a potential get-out-of-jail card with a seven- or maybe eight-figure chaser: Walk out of prison and death row and have the City of Los Angeles pay you for your troubles. What was Borders going to say, “I pass”?
Bosch realized he had a way to partially confirm his theory. He reached over the seat to where he had placed the Borders case files. He brought the rubber-banded top half of the stack forward and quickly went to the letter Cronyn had sent to the Conviction Integrity Unit. It was the official starting point of the frame. All Bosch was interested in was the date on it. It had been sent by Cronyn in August of the previous year. He realized that he’d had a small piece of evidence of the frame all along. Officer Jericho had said that Cronyn had visited Borders the first Thursday of every month since January of the previous year.
Cronyn had gone up to San Quentin and had several meetings with Borders before sending the letter to the D.A.’s Office. If that didn’t show the making of a conspiracy and the plan to frame, then he didn’t know what did.
Buzzed by having made a connection that could be documented at the hearing the following week, Bosch had the battering ram moving with high velocity. The block was still the application of the plan. He had Cronyn and Borders tied together. He had Olmer’s DNA in Cronyn’s possession. He just needed step three. The execution of the plan.
Bosch decided to break the possibilities into two pieces, with the separator between them being the video that Tapscott took of Lucia Soto opening the evidence box, presumably after many years of its sitting undisturbed on a shelf in LAPD property control.
If the planted evidence was already in place when Soto opened the box, then the fix came before — most likely in the window between Cronyn journeying to San Quentin to meet Borders in January, and August, when he sent the letter to the D.A.’s Office, having presumably reached some form of agreement with Borders on the plan. That was a lot of time and Bosch knew that realistically he would need Soto’s help in identifying who might have had access to the box.