Michael Connelly: The Reversal

“On the morning in question Jessup was working the Hancock Park patrol. At the Landy house, the family happened to be putting a pool in the backyard. Kensington Landy was a musician who scored films and was doing quite well at the time. So they were putting in a pool and there was a large open hole and giant piles of dirt in the backyard. The parents didn’t want the girls playing back there. Thought it was dangerous, plus on this morning the girls were in their church dresses. The house has a large front yard. The stepfather told the girls to play outside for a few minutes before the family was planning to go off to church themselves. The older one, Sarah, was told to watch over Melissa.”

“Did they go to Trinity United?” I asked.

“No, they went to Sacred Heart in Beverly Hills. Anyway, the kids were only out there about fifteen minutes. Mother was still upstairs getting ready and the stepfather, who was also supposed to be keeping an eye on the girls, was watching television inside. An overnight sports report on ESPN or whatever they had back then. He forgot about the girls.”

Bosch shook his head, and I knew exactly how he felt. It was not in judgment of the father but in understanding of how it could have happened and in the dread of any parent who knows how a small mistake could be so costly.

“At some point, he heard screaming,” Maggie continued. “He ran out the front door and found the older girl, Sarah, in the yard. She was screaming that a man took Melissa. The stepfather ran up the street looking for her but there was no sign. Like that, she was gone.”

My ex-wife stopped there for a moment to compose herself. Everyone in the room had a young daughter and could understand the shearing of life that happened at that moment for every person in the Landy family.

“Police were called and the response was quick,” she continued. “This was Hancock Park, after all. The first bulletins were out in a matter of minutes. Detectives were dispatched right away.”

“So this whole thing went down in broad daylight?” Bosch asked.

Maggie nodded.

“It happened about ten-forty. The Landys were going to an eleven o’clock service.”

“And nobody else saw this?”

“You gotta remember, this was Hancock Park. A lot of tall hedges, a lot of walls, a lot of privacy. People there are good at keeping the world out. Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything until Sarah started screaming, and by then it was too late.”

“Was there a wall or a hedge at the Landy house?”

“Six-foot hedges down the north and south property lines but not on the street side. It was theorized at the time that Jessup drove by in his tow truck and saw the girl alone in the yard. Then he acted impulsively.”

We sat in silence for a few moments as we thought about the wrenching serendipity of fate. A tow truck goes by a house. The driver sees a girl, alone and vulnerable. All in a moment he figures he can grab her and get away with it.

“So,” Bosch finally said, “how did they get him?”

“The responding detectives were on the scene in less than an hour. The lead was named Doral Kloster and his partner was Chad Steiner. I checked. Steiner is dead and Kloster is retired and has late-stage Alzheimer’s. He’s no use to us now.”

“Damn,” Bosch said.

“Anyway, they got there quickly and moved quickly. They interviewed Sarah and she described the abductor as being dressed like a garbage man. Further questioning revealed this to mean that he was wearing dirty coveralls like the city garbage crews used. She said she heard the garbage truck in the street but couldn’t see it through a bush where she had hidden from her sister during a game of hide-and-seek. Problem is that it was a Sunday. There was no garbage pickup on Sundays. But the stepfather hears this and puts it together, mentions the tow trucks that run up and down the street on Sunday mornings. That becomes their best lead. The detectives get the list of city contractors and they start visiting tow yards.

“There were three contractors who worked the Wilshire corridor. One of them is Aardvark, where they go and are told they have three trucks working in the field. The drivers are called in and Jessup is one of them. The other two guys are named Derek Wilbern and William Clinton-really. They’re separated and questioned but nothing comes up suspicious. They run ’em through the box and Jessup and Clinton are clean but Wilbern has an arrest but no conviction on an attempted rape two years before. That would be good enough to get him a ride downtown for a lineup, but the girl is still missing and there’s no time for formalities, no time to put together a lineup.”

“They probably took him back to the house,” Bosch said. “They had no choice. They had to keep things moving.”

“That’s right. But Kloster knew he was on thin ice. He might get the girl to ID Wilbern but then he’d lose it in court for being unduly suggestive-you know, ‘Is this the guy?’ So he did the next best thing he could. He took all three drivers in their overalls back to the Landy house. Each was a white man in his twenties. They all wore the company overalls. Kloster broke procedure for the sake of speed, hoping to have a chance to find the girl alive. Sarah Landy’s bedroom was on the second floor in the front of the house. Kloster takes the girl up to her room and has her look out the window to the street. Through the venetian blinds. He radios his partner, who has the three guys get out of two patrol cars and stand in the street. But Sarah doesn’t ID Wilbern. She points to Jessup and says that’s the guy.”

Maggie looked through the documents in front of her and checked an investigative chronology before continuing.

“The ID is made at one o’clock. That is really quick work. The girl’s only been gone a little over two hours. They start sweating Jessup but he doesn’t give up a thing. Denies it all. They are working on him and getting nowhere when the call comes in. A girl’s body has been found in a Dumpster behind the El Rey Theatre on Wilshire. That was about ten blocks from Windsor and the Landy house. Cause of death would later be determined to be manual strangulation. She was not raped and there was no semen in the mouth or throat.”

Maggie stopped her summary there. She looked at Bosch and then me and solemnly nodded, giving the dead her moment.

Tuesday, February 16, 4:48P.M.

Bosch liked watching her and listening to the way she talked. He could tell the case was already under her skin. Maggie McFierce. Of course that was what they called her. More important, it was what she thought about herself. He had been on the case with her for less than a week but he understood this within the first hour of meeting her. She knew the secret. That it wasn’t about code and procedure. It wasn’t about jurisprudence and strategy. It was about taking that dark thing that you knew was out there in the world and bringing it inside. Making it yours. Forging it over an internal fire into something sharp and strong that you could hold in your hands and fight back with.

Relentlessly.

“Jessup asked for a lawyer and gave no further statement,” McPherson said, continuing her summary. “The case was initially built around the older sister’s identification and evidence found in Jessup’s tow truck. Three strands of the victim’s hair found in the seat crack. It was probably where he strangled her.”

“There was nothing on the girl?” Bosch asked. “Nothing from Jessup or the truck?”

“Nothing usable in court. The DNA was found on her dress while it was being examined two days later. It was actually the older girl’s dress. The younger girl borrowed it that day. One small deposit of semen was found on the front hem. It was typed but of course there was no DNA in criminal prosecutions back then. A blood type was determined and it was A-positive, the second-most popular type among humans, accounting for thirty-four percent of the population. Jessup matched but all it did was include him in the suspect pool. The prosecutor decided not to introduce it at trial because it would’ve just given the defense the ability to point out to the jury that the donor pool was more than a million men in Los Angeles County alone.”