Michael Connelly - The Reversal

Haller leaned forward and nodded.

“Suppose you dig and you find the remains of one of these girls. Even if you can confirm the ID-and that’s going to be a big if-you still don’t have any evidence connecting her death to Jessup. All you have is his guilty knowledge of the burial spot. That is very significant but is it enough to go into court with? I don’t know. I think I’d rather be defense counsel than prosecutor on that one. I think Maggie’s right, there are any number of defenses that he could employ to explain his knowledge of the burial sites. He could invent a straw man-somebody else who did the killings and told him about them or forced him to take part in the burials. Jessup’s spent twenty-four years in prison. How many other convicts has he been exposed to? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many of them were murderers? He could lay this whole thing on one of them, say that he heard in prison about these burial spots and he decided to come and pray for the souls of the victims. He could make up anything.”

He shook his head again.

“The bottom line is, there are a lot of ways to go with a defense like this. Without any sort of physical evidence connecting him or a witness, I think you would have a problem.”

“Maybe there is physical evidence in the graves that connects him,” Bosch offered.

“Maybe, but what if there isn’t?” Haller shot right back. “You never know, you could also pull a confession out of Jessup. But I doubt that, too.”

McPherson took it from there.

“Michael mentioned the big if, the remains. Can they be IDed? Will we be able to establish how long they were in the ground? Remember, Jessup has an ironclad alibi for the last twenty-four years. If you pull up a set of bones and we can’t say for sure that they’ve been down there since at least ’eighty-six, then Jessup would walk.”

Haller got up and went to the whiteboard, grabbing a marker off the ledge. In a clear spot he drew two circles side by side.

“Here’s what we’ve got so far. One is our case and one is this whole new thing you’ve come up with. They’re separate. We have the case with the trial about to go and then we have your new investigation. When they’re separate like this we’re fine. Your investigation has no bearing on our trial, so we can keep the two circles separate. Understand?”

“Sure,” Bosch said.

Haller grabbed the eraser off the ledge and wiped the two circles off the board. He then drew two new circles, but this time they overlapped.

“Now if you go out there and start digging and you find bones? This is what happens. Our two circles become connected. And that’s when your thing becomes our thing and we have to reveal this to the defense and the whole wide world.”

McPherson nodded in agreement.

“So then, what do we do?” Bosch asked. “Drop it?”

“No, we don’t drop it,” Haller said. “We just be careful and we keep them separate. You know what is universally held as the best trial strategy? Keep it simple, stupid. So let’s not complicate things. Let’s keep our circles separate and go to trial and get this guy for killing Melissa Landy. And when we’re done that, we go up to Mulholland with shovels.”

“Done with .”

“What?”

“When we’re done with that.”

“Whatever, Professor.”

Bosch’s eyes moved from Haller’s connected circles on the board to the row of faces. All his instincts told him that at least some of those girls did not get any older than they were in the photos. They were in the ground and had been buried there by Jason Jessup. He hated the idea of them spending another day in the dirt but knew that they would have to wait a little longer.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep working it on the side. For now. But there’s also one other thing from the profiler that you should know.”

“The other shoe drops,” McPherson said. “What?”

Haller had returned to his seat. Bosch pulled out a chair and sat down himself.

“She said a killer like Jessup doesn’t reform in prison. The dark matter inside doesn’t go away. It stays. It waits. It’s like a cancer. And it reacts to outside pressures.”

“He’ll kill again,” McPherson said.

Bosch slowly nodded.

“He can visit the graves of his past victims for only so long before he’ll feel the need for… fresh inspiration. And if he feels under pressure, the chances are good he’ll move in that direction even sooner.”

“Then we’d better be ready,” Haller said. “I’m the guy who let him out. If you have any doubts about him being covered, then I want to hear them.”

“No doubts,” Bosch said. “If Jessup makes a move, we’ll be on him.”

“When are you planning on going out with the SIS again?” McPherson asked.

“Whenever I can. But I’ve got my daughter, so it’s whenever she’s on a sleepover or I can get somebody to come in.”

“I want to go once.”

“Why?”

“I want to see the real Jessup. Not the one in the papers and on TV.”

“Well…”

“What?”

“Well, there are no women on the team and they’re constantly moving with this guy. There won’t be any bathroom breaks. They piss in bottles.”

“Don’t worry, Harry, I think I can handle it.”

“Then I’ll set it up.”

Friday, March 19, 10:50 A.M .

I checked my watch when I heard Maggie say hello to Lorna in the reception room. She entered the office and dropped her case on her desk. It was one of those slim and stylish Italian leather laptop totes that she never would have bought for herself. Too expensive and too red. I wanted to know who gave it to her like I wanted to know a lot of things she would never tell me.

But the origin of her red briefcase was the least of my worries. In thirteen days we would start picking jurors in the Jessup case and Clive Royce had finally landed his best pretrial punch. It was an inch thick and sat in front of me on my desk.

“Where have you been?” I said with a clear note of annoyance in my voice. “I called your cell and got no answer.”

She came over to my desk, dragging the extra chair with her.

“More like, where were you?”

I glanced at my calendar blotter and saw nothing in the day’s square.

“What are you talking about?”

“My phone was turned off because I was at Hayley’s honors assembly. They don’t like cell phones ringing when they are calling the kids up to get their pins.”

“Ah, shit!”

She had told me and copied me on the e-mail. I printed it out and put it on the refrigerator. But not on my desk blotter or into my phone’s calendar. I blew it.

“You should’ve been there, Haller. You would’ve been proud.”

“I know, I know. I messed up.”

“It’s all right. You’ll get other chances. To mess up or stand up.”

That hurt. It would’ve been better if she had chewed my ass out like she used to. But the passive-aggressive approach always got deeper under the skin. And she probably knew that.

“I’ll be at the next one,” I said. “That’s a promise.”

She didn’t sarcastically say Sure, Haller, or I’ve heard that one before . And somehow that made it worse. Instead, she just got down to business.

“What is that?”

She nodded at the document in front of me.

“This is Clive Royce’s last best stand. It’s a motion to exclude the testimony of Sarah Ann Gleason.”

“And of course he drops it off on a Friday afternoon three weeks before trial.”

“More like seventeen days.”

“My mistake. What’s he say?”

I turned the document around and slid it across the desk to her. It was held together with a large black clip.