Майкл Коннелли: Two Kinds of Truth

According to the chrono, Bosch and Sheehan connected Borders to Skyler on November 1, 1987, the ninth day of the investigation. That was when they knocked on the door of a Skyler acquaintance named Amanda Margot. At the time, Margot was another ingenue actress. Thirty years later she could count herself among the lucky ones. She’d had a solid career in the film and television arenas, appearing in small roles in several films and as a lead in a long-running show where she played a no-holds-barred homicide detective. Bosch had read interviews with her in which she said that she drew her TV character’s sympathy for victims from the real-life murder of a close friend.

Bosch remembered the initial interview with Margot like it was yesterday. At the time, the young actress had none of the trappings of success in her small Studio City apartment. Bosch and Sheehan sat on a threadbare couch from a secondhand store, and Margot sat on a chair she pulled into the living room from the kitchen.

The two detectives had been interviewing four or five friends and associates of the victim a day and Margot was high on their list, but she had secured a week’s work at an auto show in Detroit presenting cars and had left town shortly after the murder. The appointment was set up for when she returned.

Margot proved to be a font of information about Skyler. The two had been close, though they had never lived together. At the time of the murder, Skyler’s roommate had just moved out and given up on the dream of stardom. She had returned home to Texas, and Skyler was looking for a new roommate. Margot was in the last months of a lease and planned to move in with her friend right after the new year. Skyler was living by herself until then, though her family had told the investigators that her younger sister, traveling while on a gap year after high school, was planning on arriving for Thanksgiving and using the spare bedroom until both sisters went back to Florida for the Christmas holidays.

Margot and Danielle had met three years previously in the waiting room of a casting agency where they were auditioning for the same part. Rather than becoming competitors, they had hit it off. Neither of them got the part but they got coffee afterward and a friendship was born. They moved in similar circles both professionally and socially. They tried to look out for each other, tipping one another off to potential jobs and about which casting directors or acting coaches were lecherous.

Over time, they even dated some of the same men, and this was the point the detectives zeroed in on. Evidence and autopsy results indicated that Danielle Skyler had been brutally abused during the course of the night. She had been raped vaginally and anally and choked repeatedly. There were multiple thin furrow lines around her neck, some cutting through the skin, indicating that her killer had most likely choked her to unconsciousness and then brought her back for more abuse at least six times. It was possible that the garrote had been a necklace worn by the victim.

The body was also mutilated with a knife that matched others from the kitchen, but at autopsy it was determined that the slashes were postmortem.

It also appeared that the apartment had been tricked out to look like there had been an intruder. A sliding door on the second-floor balcony off the empty bedroom was left ajar, but there were no indications outside that anyone had climbed up and onto the balcony to pop the door and enter. The balcony’s metal railing had a thick layer of smog dust on it that had not been disturbed at any point on its entire length. This meant an intruder would have had to vault the railing without touching it to get to the sliding door. It was an improbable scenario, which led the investigators to consider the opposite — that Skyler’s killer had entered through the front door and without a struggle. It meant that he had known her on some level and wanted to disguise that fact from investigators.

Amanda Margot revealed during her interview that one night two weeks before Skyler’s death, the two young women had gotten together in Margot’s apartment to drink cheap wine and order takeout. They were joined by a third actress, named Jamie Henderson, whom they also knew from the audition circuit. At some point during the evening, they started talking about men and learned that they had dated several of the same men, having met them through acting schools, casting agencies, and talent showcases. The women started making a “one-and-done” list of men they agreed should never be dated again.

High on the list of reasons was that each man mentioned had been demanding and in some cases physically threatening when it came to wanting sex. Margot explained that many of the men they dated expected to have sex after one or two dates. It was the men who didn’t handle rejection well who were put on the one-and-done list.

Here was where Bosch and Sheehan’s pursuit of this angle paid off. Though the one-and-done list might have come out of an alcohol-fueled girls’-night gossip session, Margot still had the piece of paper torn from a notebook and attached by a bottle-opener magnet to her refrigerator door. She provided it to the detectives and was able to point out the four names that Danielle Skyler had contributed to the list. They weren’t full names, and some, like “Bad Breath Bob,” were just nicknames.

But number one on her list was the single name Preston. Margot said it was the name of a man only Skyler had dated and she couldn’t remember if it was a first or last name but she did recall the story that went with it. Danielle had said that Preston was a scholarship actor, meaning he had some kind of financial support and didn’t have to work a side job, and that he felt entitled to sex after a first date in which he had paid for dinner and drinks. Danielle said that he had grown very angry upon her rejection when she was being dropped off at her apartment and that he later came back to knock on her door and demand to be let in. She refused to open the door but he would not leave until she threatened to call the police.

Margot reported that the date with Preston had occurred two weeks before the night the three women got together, which made it about four weeks before Skyler’s murder. When pressed for more details about Preston and where he and Skyler may have first met, Margot said it could only have been through some kind of industry nexus, since both Danielle and Preston were actors.

The chronology revealed that finding Preston became a priority in the investigation. Bosch and Sheehan reworked ground already trodden, going back to those previously interviewed and asking about a man named Preston. They had no luck until they requested the audition logs from the prior three months of casting sessions conducted by the company Skyler had worked for as a receptionist. In the weeks leading up to the gossip session, the company had been casting secondary roles for a television show about people working in a hospital emergency room.

On the sign-in list for auditions held on September 14, 1987, was the name Preston Borders. That list had been kept on a clipboard at the desk of the agency’s receptionist, Danielle Skyler.

Bosch and Sheehan had found their one-and-done man.

The detectives carried out their due diligence and interviewed Jamie Henderson, the third woman involved in drawing up the one-and-done list. She confirmed Amanda Margot’s account of the evening and Danielle Skyler’s contributions to the list. They then identified and interviewed all the men Skyler had discussed, even Bad Breath Bob. But Bosch and Sheehan saved Preston Borders for last, because their instincts told them he could rise from the level of a person of interest to a suspect. A guy who would go back to the apartment of a woman who had rejected him, pound on the door, and demand to be allowed in for sex struck both detectives as behavior indicating the kind of psychosis found in sexual predators.