Майкл Коннелли - Two Kinds of Truth

“Sure. There’s a broomstick in the slider track.”

“That’s new.”

He put the shirt in the washer, which was located by the kitchen’s side door to the carport. He grabbed the bottle off the top of the refrigerator and took two glasses down from a shelf before joining Soto on the deck.

“Yeah, there’ve been a couple break-ins in the neighborhood lately,” he said. “Both times the guy climbed up a tree to get on the roof and then came down on the back deck, where people sometimes don’t lock their doors.”

He gestured with the bottle toward the house next door, which was cantilevered like Bosch’s. The rear deck hung out over the canyon and seemed impossible to get to other than from inside. But it was clear the roof gave access.

Soto nodded. Bosch could tell she wasn’t really interested. She wasn’t visiting as part of the Neighborhood Watch committee.

He opened the bottle and poured a healthy slug into each of the glasses. He handed one to Soto but they didn’t toast. Considering everything between them at the moment, it would not have felt right.

“So did he tell you how he did it?” Bosch asked.

“Who?” Soto said. “How who did what?”

“Come on. Spencer. How’d he rig the evidence box?”

“Spencer hasn’t told us jack shit, Harry. His lawyer won’t let him talk to us and he said he wasn’t going to testify either. Your lawyer lied to the judge during the proffer.”

“No, he didn’t lie. Not to the judge, at least. Check the record. He said Spencer was in the hallway and was ready to take the stand. That wasn’t a lie. Whether he was going to testify once he got up there or take the fifth was another matter.”

“Semantics, Harry. I never knew you to hide behind words.”

“It was a bluff and it worked. If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t know about it. But it got the truth out, didn’t it?”

“It did, and it got us a search warrant. We didn’t need Spencer to talk.”

Bosch looked sharply at her. She had solved the mystery.

“Tell me.”

“We opened his locker. He had a stack of the twenty-year-old evidence stickers they put on the boxes back then. They were supposed to be destroyed when we went to the red crackle tape. But somehow he got a leftover stack and kept it.”

“So he opened the box, planted Olmer’s DNA, and put new labels on it.”

“He opened the bottom seam, because your signature was on the labels on top. And because his labels were old and yellow, the box looked totally legit. The thing is, we don’t think it was the only time. We got a search warrant for his house too, and we found some receipts from a pawn shop in Glendale. We checked there and he’s a regular customer, selling jewelry mostly. We think he might have been raiding boxes from closed cases, looking for valuables to pawn. He probably thought since the cases were old and closed, nobody would ever look.”

“So when Cronyn asked Spencer if he could get something into a box, he said no problem.”

“Exactly.”

Bosch nodded. The mystery was solved.

“What about the Cronyns?” he asked. “I assume they’re going for a one-for-one deal, right?”

“Probably,” she said. “She walks and he takes the hit. He’ll get disbarred but then he’ll just prop her up. Everyone will know that if you hire her, you hire him.”

“And that’s it? No jail time? The guy used the law to try to break a killer out of prison. Death row, no less. He gets a slap on the wrist?”

“Well, last I heard, they were still in jail because Houghton won’t set bail till tomorrow. Anyway, it’s early in negotiations, Harry. But Spencer still isn’t talking, and the only one who is talking is Borders. When your one and only witness is a murderer on death row, you don’t have a case you want to take to a jury. This is going to come down to plea agreements all around, and maybe Cronyn goes to jail, maybe not. Truth is, they’re more interested in nailing Spencer because he was inside the wire. He betrayed the department.”

Bosch nodded. He understood the thinking on Spencer.

“The department’s management team has already moved in,” Soto said. “They’re revamping the whole booking-and-retrieving process so that something like this can never happen again.”

Bosch moved to the wooden railing and leaned his elbows down. It was still at least an hour from sundown. The 101 freeway down in the pass was clogged in both directions. But there were very few sounds of horns. Drivers in L.A. seemed resigned to a fate of waiting in traffic without the kind of impotent cacophony of horns that Bosch always seemed to hear in other cities he’d visited. He always thought his deck gave him a unique angle on that distinctive L.A. trait.

Soto joined him at the railing and leaned down next to him.

“I didn’t really come up here to talk about the case,” she said.

“I know,” Bosch said.

She nodded. It was time to get to it.

“A really good detective who used to mentor me taught me to always follow the evidence. That’s what I thought I was doing with this thing. But somewhere I got manipulated or I took a wrong turn and I ended up where the evidence told me something my heart should have known was flat-out wrong. For that I’m truly sorry, Harry. And I always will be.”

“Thank you, Lucia.”

Bosch nodded. He knew she could have easily blamed it all on Tapscott. He was the senior detective in the partnership and he called the final shots on case decisions. Instead, she put it all on herself. She took the weight. That took guts and that took a true detective. Bosch had to admire her for it.

Besides, how could he hold anything against Soto when he had heard in his own daughter’s voice a worry that it all might be true, that Harry had fixed a case against an innocent man?

“So...,” Lucia asked. “Are we good again, Harry?”

“We’re good,” Bosch said. “But I sure hope people read the paper tomorrow.”

“Fuck anybody who still has a doubt after today.”

“I’ll go with that.”

Soto straightened up. She had said what she’d come to say and was ready to go home. Soon she would be in the iron ribbon of traffic he was staring down at.

She poured the remainder of her bourbon into Bosch’s glass.

“I gotta go.”

“Okay. Thanks for coming here to talk. Means a lot, Lucia.”

“Harry, if you need anything or there’s anything I can do for you, I owe you. Thanks for the booze.”

She headed for the open slider. Bosch turned and leaned back against the railing.

“There is, actually,” he said. “Something you could do.”

She stopped and turned around.

“Daisy Clayton,” he said.

She shook her head, not getting it.

“Am I supposed to know that name?”

Bosch shook his head and stood straight.

“No. She was a murder victim from before you ever made it to homicide. But you’re on cold cases. I want you to pull the file and work it.”

“Who was she?”

“She was a nobody, and nobody cared. That’s why her case is still open.”

“I mean who was she to you?”

“I never knew her. She was only fifteen years old. But there’s somebody out there who took her and used her and then threw her away like trash. Somebody evil. I can’t work the case because it’s Hollywood. Not my turf anymore. But it is yours.”

“You know what year?”

“Oh-nine.”

Soto nodded. She had what she needed, at least to pull the case and review it.

“Okay, Harry, I’m on it.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll tell you what I know when I know it.”

“Good.”

“See you, Harry.”

“See you, Lucia.”