Майкл Коннелли - Two Kinds of Truth

As expected, Bosch’s call to DEA agent Charlie Hovan was not accepted. It had been Bosch’s experience over many years that DEA agents were a different breed of federal law officers. Because of the nature of their work, they were often treated with suspicion by others in law enforcement — as had been exhibited earlier by Chief Valdez. It was odd and unwarranted; all law officers deal with criminals. But there was a stigma attached to drug agents, as though the scourge of the particular crime they fought could rub off on them. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It was a phenomenon most likely rooted in the need for infiltration and undercover work in so many drug investigations. That stigma left agents paranoid, isolated, not interested in talking on the phone with strangers, even if they were law enforcement and it could be argued that they were all part of the same team protecting society.

Bosch suspected that he would not hear back from Hovan unless there was a pressing need on the agent’s part. Harry tried to give him that with one sentence left on the agent’s voice mail.

“This is Detective Bosch with the San Fernando Police Department and I’m looking for some intel on a guy who calls himself Santos and flies a plane in and out of an airstrip up here, where we just had a double murder in a pharmacy that was filling opioid scrips for him.”

Bosch left his phone number before disconnecting. He still believed that he might need to call Jerry Edgar in a day or two and ask him to vouch for him with Agent Hovan in order to prompt a simple conversation.

Bosch knew that it would probably take Lourdes a couple hours to write up a warrant for the Whiteman video archives and then get a telephonic approval from a Superior Court judge. It would take longer if she could not find a judge — the courthouses were closing now and most jurists would soon be in their cars, commuting home. Bosch’s plan was to use whatever time he had to dig further into the Skyler investigation. Despite the double murder being the priority of the moment, Bosch could not stop thinking about the Skyler case and the threat it posed to his public reputation and private self-worth. In his career, he had chased down hundreds of killers and put them in prison. If he was wrong about one, then it would put the lie to everything else.

It would cast him adrift.

He first had to push the file boxes from the Esmerelda Tavares case to the side. When he lifted one box to put it on top of another, a photo dropped onto his makeshift desk. It had slipped through a separation in the bottom seam of the box and fallen out. Bosch picked it up and studied it. He realized he had not seen it before. The photo was of the baby daughter who had been left in the crib when her mother went missing. Bosch knew she would be fifteen or sixteen now. He’d have to get her exact birthday and check the math on that.

A year after her mother’s disappearance, her father decided he could not raise her. He turned her over to the county’s foster care program and she was raised by a family that adopted her and eventually moved from Los Angeles up to Morro Bay. The photo reminded him that he had long planned to go up there to find her and talk to her about her mother. He wondered if she had any distant memories of her natural mother and father. But it was a long shot and he had never made the trip. He put the photo on top of the contents of the box so it would serve as a reminder next time he checked into the case.

Bosch split the Skyler files in half and put the stack of copies from the original investigation to the side. He then started reviewing the chronological record that Soto and Tapscott had begun keeping once assigned to reinvestigate the case.

It quickly became clear that the new look at the Skyler case began with a letter sent seven months earlier to the Conviction Integrity Unit from the man who was the nexus between both sexual predators involved. Attorney Lance Cronyn. Bosch put the chrono aside and looked through the stack until he found the document. It was on Cronyn’s letterhead, showing his office address on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys. The letter was directed to Kennedy’s boss and the head of the CIU, Assistant District Attorney Abel Kornbloom.

Mr. Kornbloom,

I write to you today in hopes that you will follow your sworn duty and right a terrible wrong and miscarriage of justice that has plagued our city and our state for three decades. It is a wrong that in some ways I helped propagate and extend. I now need your help fixing this.

I currently represent Preston Borders, who has resided on death row in San Quentin State Prison since 1988. I took on his representation only recently and quite frankly solicited him as a client. Attorney-client privilege in another case has prevented me from coming forward until this point. You see, until his death in 2015, I represented Lucas John Olmer, who was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and abduction in 2006 and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. He served that sentence until his death from cancer at California State Prison, Corcoran.

On July 12, 2013, I had occasion to meet with Mr. Olmer at Corcoran to discuss potential grounds for a final appeal of his conviction. During the course of this privileged conversation, Mr. Olmer revealed to me that he was responsible for the murder of a young woman in 1987 and that another man had been falsely convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. He did not name the victim but said that the crime had occurred in her home in Toluca Lake.

As you will understand, this was a privileged conversation between attorney and client. I could not reveal this information because to do so would be to put my own client at risk of a conviction leading to the death penalty.

Attorney-client privilege survives after death. However, there are exceptions to the rule of privilege — if revealing protected communication will help right a continuing wrong or prevent serious injury or death to an innocent person. And that is exactly what I am trying to do now. Charles Gaston, an investigator in my employ, took the facts as revealed to me by Olmer and investigated the matter. He determined that a young woman named Danielle Skyler was sexually assaulted and murdered in her home in Toluca Lake on October 22, 1987, and that Preston Borders was later convicted of the crime and sentenced to death after a trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.

I subsequently went to San Quentin to interview Borders and he retained me as his attorney. In that capacity I sincerely request that the murder of Danielle Skyler be reviewed by the Conviction Integrity Unit and that the District Attorney’s Office right this wrong. Preston Borders is factually innocent and has spent more than half his life in prison under the threat of state-sanctioned death. This miscarriage of justice must be remedied.

This request is the first of many options available to Mr. Borders. I intend to explore all avenues of amelioration, but I am starting with you. I look forward to your expedited reply.

Sincerely yours,

Bosch read the letter a second time and then quickly scanned a letter of receipt from Kornbloom to Cronyn that told him his request would be given the utmost priority and urged him not to take any other action until the CIU had the opportunity to review and investigate the matter. It was clear that Kornbloom didn’t want this case spilling into the media or referred to the Innocence Project, a privately funded legal group that had a national record of overturning wrongful convictions. It would be a political blunder if the work of an outside entity instead of the district attorney’s much ballyhooed unit led to a revelation of innocence.

Bosch went back to the chrono. The letter from Cronyn clearly got the ball rolling. Soto and Tapscott pulled the files and went to property control, where the evidence box was found and opened on camera. While the forensics unit studied the contents for new or overlooked evidence, the two detectives went to work reviewing and reinvestigating the case — this time with another suspect as the leading person of interest.