Michael Connelly: The Crossing

Bosch looked through the printouts until he found the stack of witness statements. He started paging through them, checking the summaries for who they were and what they said. The great majority were witnesses from the Lexi Parks side of the investigation: friends, co-workers, professional acquaintances who were interviewed as the investigation took shape. There were also statements from her husband and several Sheriff’s deputies who knew Parks through him. The second half of the stack contained interviews from people who knew Da’Quan Foster. Many of these were LAPD officers who knew of him from his active gang days. There were also statements from former parole officers, neighbors, fellow shopkeepers, and the suspect’s wife, Marta.

Bosch found what he was looking for on a twofer — a report page that had statements from two witnesses summarized on it. It was an old discovery trick. Turn over reams of paper as a way of hiding the one thing you don’t want the defense attorney to notice. The prosecution had not violated the rules of discovery but had made finding the important piece of information a needle in the haystack.

The top half of the witness report contained the summary of an interview with a neighbor of Da’Quan Foster’s who said he did not see Foster’s car parked in front of his house on the night of the murder. It was a relatively harmless comment because Foster was not claiming that he was at home. He was claiming he spent the night painting in his studio.

But just a line below the neighbor’s statement was the start of another statement from someone identified only as M. White. This statement said M. White stopped by Foster’s studio on the night of the murder to see Foster but the painter was not there. That was all that was included in the report but it was enough for Bosch to know that Cornell and Schmidt had found someone who could counter Foster’s claim that he had spent the entire night in the studio painting.

The subterfuge employed by the detectives to hide the identity and value of the witness known as M. White didn’t really bother Bosch. He assumed that “M. White” was not the witness’s name but rather his gender and race. He knew all Haller would have to do is file a motion citing insufficient discovery and the sheriffs would have to cough up the real identity. It was all part of the game and he had pulled the haystack move himself on occasion as a cop. What troubled him was the fact that now there was an alibi issue added to the DNA match that put Foster at the crime scene.

It was enough to make him want to drop the review of the case right there and then.

Harry thought about it for a little bit while he finished his coffee and gave his eyes a rest. He took off his reading glasses and looked out through the window at the busy intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica. He knew he still had the autopsy and the crime scene photos to go through to complete his review of the murder file. He had saved the photos for last because they would be the most difficult to look at — and were not something he would risk doing in a public place like a coffee shop.

His eyes suddenly caught on a familiar face across the intersection. Mickey Haller smiling from the back of a bus moving south on Fairfax. The advertisement carried a slogan that made Bosch want to dump the whole file in the trash can.

Bosch got up from the table and went to the trash can. He dropped his empty cup in and headed out the door.

Entering his house, Bosch looked at the empty dining room table and was tempted to sit down and spread out the printouts and photos from the case. But he knew his daughter would be getting home at any time and he didn’t want to risk her stumbling onto a bad scene. He went down the hallway to his bedroom, closed the door, and started spreading things out on his bed — right after he made it and smoothed the top covers.

What he spread out were the 8 × 10 color copies of the crime scene photos from Lexi Parks’s house. These included several dozen of the victim’s body as it had been found on her bed. They were shots taken from many angles and from many different distances ranging from full room shots to extreme close-ups of specific wounds and parts of the body.

There were also photos taken from many angles of all the other rooms in the house, and his plan was to look at them second.

The crime scene photos created a grisly tableau on the bed. The murder of Lexi Parks had been excessively violent and the harshness of it was not buffered by the one-step-removed process of viewing the scene through photos. There was a stark quality to the shots that Bosch was familiar with. Police photographers were not artists. Their job was to unflinchingly reveal all, and the photographer on the Parks case did just that.

Bosch had spread the photos out in a matrix of eight across and eight down and he stood at the end of the bed, taking in the overall murder mosaic. He then picked up individual photos one by one and studied them. He took a magnifying glass from a drawer in his dresser so that he could see some aspects of the photos even closer up.

It was difficult work. Bosch never got accustomed to viewing crime scenes. He had been to hundreds of them and seen the result of human inhumanity too many times to count. He always thought that if he got used to it, then he had lost something inside that was needed to do the job right. You had to have an emotional response. It was that response that lit the match that started the fire of relentlessness.

What lit the match this time was Lexi Parks’s hands. She had obviously tried to fight her attacker. She had struggled and put her arms up to ward off the assault. But she was quickly overpowered by repeated blows to her face. Her hands fell back on the bed, palms up, almost as if she was raising them in surrender. It touched Bosch. It made him angry, made him want to find and hurt whoever had done this.

How could Haller defend the man who did this?

Harry went into the bathroom to fill a glass with water. He drank it while standing in the doorway and looking at the photos from the side. He worked to calm himself so that he could continue to professionally assess the photos and the crime scene.

He went back to the bed and studied the photos again and soon started drawing conclusions about the crime. He believed that the victim had been asleep in her bed. She was on the right side of a king, having left room for her husband on the left. It appeared to Bosch that the killer had surprised her in her sleep, straddling her and taking immediate control as she awoke. He probably put one hand over her mouth, maybe held a weapon with the other. She got her hands loose to fight and then he started striking her.

And he didn’t stop. Long after her defenses were down and she was incapacitated, she was struck over and over again with a hard object. The face of the victim in the photos bore no resemblance to the face Bosch had seen accompanying the many newspaper stories generated by her murder. The face of the victim in the photos in fact bore no resemblance to any face at all. The nose was literally gone, interred in the pulp of blood and tissue that had been her face. Both eye sockets were crushed and misshapen, pieces of broken teeth and bone shone brightly in the blood. The eyes were half-lidded and the normal singular focus was broken. One stared forward, the other down and to the left.

Bosch sat down on a chair in the corner of the room and looked at the grid of photos from afar. The only thing worse would have been his being at the real scene, which would have added a multisensory dimension to his revulsion. No murder scene ever smelled pleasant. No matter how fresh, no matter how clean the environment.