Michael Connelly - The Reversal

“What injuries are we talking about?” he asked.

Walling stood up in order to lean over. She used the point of a pen to outline the places she wanted Bosch to look on each of the photos. She circled discolorations on the victim’s neck.

“Her neck injuries,” she said. “If you look you see the oval-shaped bruising on the right side of the neck, and on the other side you have a larger corresponding bruise. This evidence makes it clear that she was choked to death with one hand.”

She used the pen to illustrate what she was saying.

“The thumb here on her right side and the four fingers on the left. One-handed. Now, why one-handed?”

She sat back down and Bosch leaned back away from the photos himself. The idea that Melissa had been strangled with one hand was not new to Bosch. It was in Kloster’s original profile of the murder.

“Twenty-four years ago, it was suggested that Jessup strangled the girl with his right hand while he masturbated with his left. This theory was built on one thing-the semen collected from the victim’s dress. It was deposited by someone with the same blood type as Jessup and so it was assumed to have come from him. You follow all of this?”

“I’m with you.”

“Okay, so the problem is, we now know that the semen didn’t come from Jessup and so the basic profile or theory of the crime in nineteen eighty-six is wrong. It is further demonstrated as being wrong because Jessup is right-handed according to a sample of his writing in the files, and studies have shown that with right-handers masturbation is almost always carried out by the dominant hand.”

“They’ve done studies on that?”

“You’d be surprised. I sure was when I went online to look for this.”

“I knew there was something wrong with the Internet.”

She smiled but was not a bit embarrassed by the subject matter of their discussion. It was all in a day’s work.

“They’ve done studies on everything, including which hand people use to wipe their butts. I actually found it to be fascinating reading. But the point here is that they had this wrong from the beginning. This murder did not occur during a sex act. Now let me show you a few other photos.”

She reached across the table and slid all of the photos together in one stack and then put them to the side. She then spread out photos taken of the inside of the tow truck Jessup was driving on the day of the murder. The truck actually had a name, which was stenciled on the dashboard.

“Okay, so on the day in question, Jessup was driving Matilda,” Walling said.

Bosch studied the three photos she had spread out. The cab of the tow truck was in neat order. Thomas Brothers maps-no GPS back then-were neatly stacked on top of the dashboard and a small stuffed animal that Bosch presumed was an aardvark hung from the rearview mirror. A cup holder on the center console held a Big Gulp from 7-Eleven and a sticker on the glove compartment door read Grass or Ass-Nobody Rides for Free .

With her trusty pen, Walling circled a spot on one of the photos. It was a police scanner mounted under the dashboard.

“Did anybody consider what this means?”

Bosch shrugged.

“Back then, I don’t know. What’s it mean now?”

“Okay, Jessup worked for Aardvark, which was a towing company licensed by the city. However, it wasn’t the only one. There was competition among tow companies. The drivers listened to scanners, picking up police calls about accidents and parking infractions. It gave them the jump on the competition, right? Except that every tow truck had a scanner and everybody was listening and trying to get the jump on everyone else.”

“Right. So what’s it mean?”

“Well, let’s look at the abduction first. It is pretty clear from the witness testimony and everything else that this was not a crime of great planning and patience. This was an impulse crime. That much they’ve had right from the beginning. We can talk about the motivating factors at length in a little while, but suffice it to say, something caused Jessup to act out in an almost uncontrollable way.”

“I think I might have motivating factors covered,” Bosch said.

“Good, I’m eager to hear about it. But for now, we will assume that some sort of internal pressure led Jessup to act on an undeniable impulse and he grabbed the girl. He took her back to the truck and took off. He obviously didn’t know about the sister hiding in the bushes and that she would sound the alarm. So he completes the abduction and drives away, but within minutes he hears the report about the abduction on the police scanner he has in the truck. That brings home to him the reality of what he’s done and what his predicament is. He never imagined things would move so fast. He more or less comes to his senses. He realizes he must abandon his plan now and move into preservation mode. He needs to kill the girl to eliminate her as a witness and then hide her body in order to prevent his arrest.”

Bosch nodded as he understood her theory.

“So what you’re saying is, the crime that occurred was not the crime that he intended.”

“Correct. He abandoned the true plan.”

“So when Kloster went to the bureau looking for similars, he was looking for the wrong thing.”

“Right again.”

“But could there actually have been a plan? You just said yourself that it was a crime of compulsion. He saw an opportunity and within a few seconds acted on it. What plan could there have been?”

“Actually, it is more than likely that he had a complex and complete plan. Killers like these have a paraphilia-a set construct of the perfect psychosexual experience. They fantasize about it in great detail. And as you can expect, it often involves torture and murder. The paraphilia is part of their daily fantasy life and it builds to the point where the desire becomes the urge which eventually becomes a compulsion to act out. When they do cross that line and act out, the abduction of the victim may be completely unplanned and improvisational, but the killing sequence is not. The victim is unfortunately dropped into a set construct that has played over and over in the killer’s mind.”

Bosch looked at his notebook and realized he had stopped taking notes.

“Okay, but you’re saying that didn’t happen here,” he said. “He abandoned the plan. He heard the abduction report on the scanner, and that took him from fantasy to reality. He realized that they could be closing in on him. He killed her and dumped her, hoping to avoid detection.”

“Exactly. And therefore, as you just noted, when investigators attempted to compare elements of this murder to others’, they were comparing apples and oranges. They found nothing that matched and believed that this was a onetime crime of opportunity and compulsion. I don’t think it was.”

Bosch looked up from the photos to Rachel’s eyes.

“You think he did this before.”

“I think the idea that he had acted out before in this way is compelling. It would not surprise me if you were to find that he was involved in other abductions.”

“You’re talking about more than twenty-four years ago.”

“I know. And since there was no linking of Jessup to known unsolved murders, we are probably talking about missing children and runaways. Cases where there was never a crime scene established. The girls were never found.”

Bosch thought of Jessup’s middle-of-the-night visits to the parks along Mulholland Drive. He thought he might now know why Jessup would light a candle at the base of a tree.

Then a more stunning and scary thought pushed through.

“Do you think a guy like this would use those crimes from so long ago to feed his fantasy now?”

“Of course he would. He’s been in prison, what other choice did he have?”