Michael Connelly: The Crossing

On top of the reordered stack was the Incident Report, which was always the first page of a murder book after the table of contents. But there was no table of contents — another fuck you from prosecution to defense — so the IR was on top. Bosch glanced at it but was not expecting to learn anything. It was all first-day information. If it wasn’t wrong, then it was incomplete.

The pork chops were thin and crispy, piled on top of fried rice on his plate. Bosch was using his fingers to eat them like potato chips. He now wiped his hands on the paper napkin so he could turn the pages on the stack without soiling them. He quickly went through several ancillary and meaningless reports until he got to the Chronological Log. This was the murder bible, the heart of any homicide investigation. It would detail all the moves of the lead detectives on the case. It would be where case theory would emerge. It would be where Bosch would be convinced of Da’Quan Foster’s guilt or find the same doubt that had crept into Mickey Haller’s gut.

Most detective pairings had a division of labor that was worked out over several cases. Usually one member of the detective team was charged with keeping reports and the murder book intact and up to date. The Chronological Log was the exception. It was kept on computer as a digital file and routinely accessed by both detectives so each could enter his or her movements on a case. It was periodically printed out on three-hole paper and clipped into a binder, or in this case added to a defense discovery package. But the most active version was always a digital file and it was a living document, growing and changing all the time.

The printout of the chrono in the discovery file was 129 pages long and was authored by Sheriff’s investigators Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt. Though over the years Bosch had had many interactions with Sheriff’s homicide investigators, he knew neither of them. This was a handicap because he had no measure of their skills or temperaments as he moved into their written work. He knew some of it would surface as he learned of their investigative moves and conclusions but Bosch still felt like he was behind the curve. He knew other investigators in the Sheriff’s homicide bureau he could call to discuss the pair, but he didn’t dare do that and possibly reveal that he was working against them. Word of Bosch’s betrayal to the cause would spread rapidly and jump from the Sheriff’s Department to the LAPD in hours if not minutes. Bosch didn’t want that. Yet.

The first seventy-five pages of the chrono documented the moves of the investigation before the DNA connection was made to Da’Quan Foster. Bosch carefully read these pages anyway because they gave insight into the investigators’ initial case theory as well as their thoroughness and determination. Lexi Parks’s husband was fully investigated and cleared and the efforts were well documented in the chrono. Though he had an ironclad alibi — involved in the pursuit and arrest of a car thief — for the time of his wife’s murder, the investigators were smart enough to know that he could have set the murder up to be carried out by others. Even though aspects of the murder — the sexual attack and brutality of the fatal beating — tended to point in another direction, the investigators were undaunted in their look at the husband. Bosch found a growing respect for Cornell and Schmidt as he read through these sequences in the chrono.

The early investigation also went in many other directions. The investigators interviewed a multitude of sex offenders living in the West Hollywood area, probed the victim’s personal background for enemies, and looked through her job activities and history for people she may have angered or who could have held grudges.

All of these efforts hit dead ends. Once they had DNA from the killer, it was used to clear anyone who even remotely approached suspect status. The victim’s personal background produced no deep conflicts, no spurned lovers, and no extramarital activity on her or her husband’s part. As an assistant city manager her reach into the city’s bureaucracy and politics was substantial, yet she carried the final say on few items of business and on none that were controversial.

A profile of the murderer drawn from the details of the crime scene was what eventually pointed the investigation away from the victim’s personal and professional life. The profile, put together by the Sheriff’s Department Behavioral Science Unit, concluded that the suspect was a psychopath who was filling a complex of psychological needs in the murder of Lexi Parks. No kidding , Bosch thought as he read the conclusion.

The profile stated that the killer was most likely a stranger to Parks and that she could have crossed his path anywhere recently or long ago. Because she was a public figure who appeared regularly on West Hollywood’s public-access cable channel as well as at public events, the circle of possibilities was even greater. Her killer could have simply seen her on the news or at a televised city council meeting. The crossing could have happened anywhere.

The killing seemed to be both carefully planned and reckless in terms of the overkill in violence and the DNA evidence left behind. Other crime scene details that influenced the profile included the fact that the victim had not been tied up in any way — indicating the killer did not need bindings to overpower and control her. The victim was also found by her husband with a pillow over her face, hiding the intense damage of the fatal beating from view and possibly indicating remorse on the part of the killer.

Since her husband was a law enforcement officer, several security measures had been installed in the home, including an alarm system and multiple locks on all doors. The killer had gained entrance through the window of a home office, removing a screen and leaving it leaning against the back wall of the house, then jimmying the lock on the window. The victim apparently had not set the alarm system and her husband said that she rarely did so despite his often-repeated request that she set it when he was working at night and she was home alone.

All of this and other details added up to the profile of a suspect who was opportunistic and relentless as a predator. Parks had gone to the Pavilions supermarket on Santa Monica Boulevard on the evening of her murder. For several days the investigators scoured security video from the store and shopping plaza where it was located, tracking Parks’s visit and hoping to find the point of intersection between victim and predator. But nothing came of it. In the store, Parks saw and acknowledged several acquaintances whom she knew socially or from her government work. But all of them were checked out and eventually cleared, either through voluntary DNA comparison or otherwise.

It all added up to spinning wheels, but they were wheels that needed to be spun. Bosch’s review of the first eighty pages of the chrono left him with the belief that Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt had conducted a very thorough investigation — one that he would be proud to have put his name on himself.

And all of it was for naught. That is, until the twenty-seventh day of the investigation when they received a letter from the California Department of Justice informing them that the DNA sample they had submitted to the state’s CODIS database had been matched to a convicted offender named Da’Quan Foster.

Until that moment, neither Cornell nor Schmidt had ever heard of Da’Quan Foster in regard to Parks or any other case. But they started planning for when they would eventually meet him. He was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance to see if he made any moves that could be useful in his prosecution or threatened to harm another woman. Meanwhile, he was backgrounded and the investigation proceeded under the tightest security so that no word would leak to the media or to the husband of the victim.