Майкл Коннелли: Two Kinds of Truth

HB: You’re sticking with the story that you were never there?

PB: That’s right, everything else is bullshit. You don’t have any prints.

HB: What if I told you that she told two different friends about you trying to break down her door after she rejected your sexual advances on the night of the date?

PB: Oh, man, I see it now. I get it. Those bitches are lining up against me. Let me tell you, she didn’t reject me. Nobody rejects me. I rejected her.

HB: Answer my question, did you go to her door on the night of your date with Danielle? Yes or no?

PB: No, I did not, and there are no fucking fingerprints, and I’m done talking to you. Get me a lawyer if you want to ask any more questions.

HB: Fine, who do you want?

PB: I don’t know. I don’t know any lawyers.

HB: Then I’ll get you the yellow pages.

Bosch had lied about the fingerprints. Multiple prints had been found on the door and in the apartment, but they had found no prints for Borders on file. Prints subsequently taken from the collected beer glass would not match any from Skyler’s apartment. But Bosch was on steady legal ground. Courts across the country had long approved the use of deception and trickery by police in an interview setting with a suspect, holding that an innocent person would see through the deception and not falsely confess to the crime.

The interview with Borders was the only time he ever spoke to anyone in law enforcement. Based on the contradiction between what Margot and Henderson had reported about Skyler’s account of the ill-fated date and Borders’s denying that he had returned to the apartment, he was arrested in the interview room on suspicion of murder and booked two floors up, in the Van Nuys jail. The case at that point was beyond weak and Bosch and Sheehan knew it. Catching Borders in the lie about not coming to the victim’s door supported their belief that he was the killer, but it was based on hearsay. It relied on the memories of two friends of the victim, and Danielle’s story had been told while all three women were drinking. The bottom line was that it would be their word against the suspect’s. Defense attorneys thrived and reasonable doubt lived in the gray areas in between.

The detectives knew that they needed to find corroborating evidence or kick Borders loose at the end of the forty-eight-hour arrest hold. Using the witness statements from Margot and Henderson connecting victim and suspect, they got a friendly judge to issue a search warrant based upon probable cause. It gave them twenty-four hours to search Preston Borders’s car and home.

They got lucky. Three hours into the search of the Vesper apartment, Bosch noticed that a set of wooden shelves had been put together without two screws that held the bottom shelf in place on the unit’s base. Bosch figured that if someone was going to cut corners on assembling a set of shelves, they would do it at the top, not the base.

Once he removed the books and other items from the shelf, he was able to easily lift up the laminated board, revealing a hiding space within the base of the shelving unit. He found the sea-horse pendant there wrapped in a tissue. The braided twine necklace was gone. He found several other pieces of women’s jewelry as well and a collection of pornographic magazines specializing in sadomasochism and bondage.

With the discovery of the sea-horse pendant, the case against Borders went from weak to strong. Skyler’s mother was still in town, having made arrangements for her daughter’s body to be returned to Florida for burial. Bosch and Sheehan met her at her hotel and she identified the pendant as the one she had given her daughter.

The detectives were overjoyed and felt they had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. That night after filing the case with the District Attorney’s Office, they would go out and click martini glasses at the Short Stop in Echo Park.

Thirty years later, Bosch remembered the thrill of finding the key evidence. He savored the moment across time as he stacked the loose pages of the interview transcript. He remained unshaken in his confidence in the case he and Sheehan had built, and in his belief that Borders had murdered Danielle Skyler.

In the run-up to the trial, Bosch and Sheehan attempted to link the other pieces of jewelry found in the hiding place to other cases. They pulled all unsolved murders and disappearances of young women during the four years Borders had lived in Los Angeles. They believed he was good for at least two other sex slayings. Both victims were women who had tangential connections to the entertainment industry and who moved in the same Ventura Boulevard bar circuit as Borders. They found photos of the women wearing jewelry that they believed matched pieces from the hiding place in his apartment, but expert analysis could not confirm the connections and the D.A.’s Office decided to try Borders only for the Skyler murder. Bosch and Sheehan objected to the decision but the prosecutor always got final call.

At trial Borders and his lawyer had to scramble to explain the sea-horse pendant. But the effort seemed desperate. Defense attorney David Siegel, known in courthouse circles as Legal Siegel because of his shrewd understanding and use of the law, attempted to challenge the authentication of the piece of jewelry as Skyler’s.

The prosecution had presented the victim’s mother, who identified the piece and tearfully told the story behind it, as well as the photos of Skyler taken just a few weeks before the murder in which the pendant could be seen hanging around her neck. Siegel presented a representative of the jewelry piece’s manufacturer, who testified that several thousand sea-horse pendants in the exact color and style were made and distributed across the country, including hundreds in Los Angeles — area retail stores.

Borders testified in his own defense and claimed he had bought the pendant found in his apartment at a store on the Santa Monica pier. He explained that he had remembered seeing a similar pendant on Skyler during their date and liking it. He bought his own to give at some point as a gift and that was why he had hidden the piece as well as other women’s jewelry in the shelving unit. He kept the jewelry as potential gifts for women he dated and he didn’t want the cache stolen should there be a break-in at his apartment.

Siegel backed his client’s testimony with the introduction of burglary statistics for the Van Nuys Division, but the strained explanation for possession of the sea-horse pendant did not impress the jury, particularly when juxtaposed with a playback of the audiotape from the interview with Borders. The jury deliberated for six hours before delivering a guilty verdict. After a separate hearing, the same jurors took only two hours deliberating on the horrors to which Skyler was subjected to recommend the death penalty. The judge followed through and imposed the ultimate sanction on Borders.

Bosch completed his review of the initial investigation at four a.m. The music had stopped without his noticing. He was tired and he knew he had an all-hands meeting at seven thirty in the war room at SFPD to discuss where the farmacia murder investigation stood. He decided to grab a couple hours’ sleep and get to the new investigation conducted by Soto and Tapscott as soon as the next break came up in the current case.

He headed down the hallway to his bedroom, remembering the moment when he had found the sea horse and knew in the deep folds of his heart that Borders was the murderer and that he was going to pay for his crime.

Bosch was on the road at seven, gulping home-brewed coffee as he drove down the ramp at Barham Boulevard onto the northbound 101 freeway. It was a cool, crisp morning and the mountains that ringed the Valley and usually trapped smog under the crosscurrents were clear across the northern horizon. After transitioning onto the 170, the second of three freeways that would take him to San Fernando, he pulled his phone and called the number he had for the Investigative Services Unit at San Quentin State Prison.