Майкл Коннелли - The Law of Innocence

“What did they tell you?” I asked.

“Well, they’re pretty pissed off over at the D.A.’s Office because of the way you sandbagged Berg,” Bosch said.

“They get caught cheating and they’re pissed at us,” Jennifer said. “That’s just beautiful.”

“What’s the upshot?” I said. “What are they going to do about it?”

“For one, they’re going to go after special circumstances like it’s the holy grail,” Bosch said. “They want to punish you for that stunt today, put you back in jail.”

“That’s bullshit,” Cisco said.

“Yeah, but they can do it,” Bosch said, “if they find the evidence.”

“There is no evidence,” Jennifer said. “Financial gain? Murder for hire? It’s ridiculous.”

“All I’m saying is they’re looking,” Bosch said, staring at me as though the others at the table didn’t count. “And you have to be careful with your own moves.”

“I don’t understand,” Lorna said.

“You raised hell about car and phone data,” Bosch said. “I assume you need it to prove you never left your house. That might just end up being evidence supporting that you paid somebody to grab Scales and bring him to you. That gets you close to murder for hire.”

“Like I said, bullshit,” Cisco said.

“I’m saying, this is how they’re thinking,” Bosch said. “It’s how I would think.”

“Sam owed me money,” I said. “Never paid me the back end on the last case and we sued him. What was it, Lorna? Sixty K?”

“Seventy-five,” Lorna said. “With interest and penalty, it’s over a hundred now. But we did it just to get a judgment and lien. We knew he’d never pay.”

“Still, they could point to that, make it look like murder for financial gain,” I said. “If they could prove Sam had money, the lien would carry over in death.”

“Did he?” Bosch asked. “Have money? They have a newsclip that says he ripped off ten million dollars through all his cons. Where’d it go?”

“I remember that article,” I said. “‘The Most Hated Man in America,’ they called him. It was exaggerated and didn’t make me any friends, especially at home. But Sam was always on the con. He always had money coming in. It went somewhere.”

“But this is crazy,” Jennifer said. “They think you would kill a former client for an unpaid bill? For seventy-five thousand dollars? A hundred thousand?”

“No, they don’t think that,” I said. “That’s not the point. The point is, they’re pissed and if they can push this into special circumstances, my bail is pulled and I go back to Twin Towers. That’s what they want. To fuck me over. To tilt the table their way. Doesn’t matter if the added charge doesn’t hold up later in court.”

Jennifer shook her head.

“It still makes no sense,” she said. “I think your sources are crap.”

She looked pointedly at Bosch. He was the new guy, the outsider, and was suspect in her eyes. I tried to push past the moment.

“Okay, so how long do I have before they pull this shit?” I asked.

“They have to find the money and prove you knew about it,” Bosch said. “If they get there, they’ll drop the current charges and go back to the grand jury. Then they refile with special circumstances.”

“That will restart the speedy-trial clock and mean the money posted today for bond goes down the toilet,” Jennifer said. “You go to jail, the bond is forfeited.”

“That’s bullshit,” Cisco said again.

“Okay, well, we should be ready to go in to see Warfield the minute this all breaks,” I said. “Harry, you let us know what you hear when you hear it. Jennifer, we’ll need an argument. They’re subverting speedy trial, maybe vindictive prosecution, something.”

“I’m on it,” Jennifer said. “This makes me so fucking mad.”

“Don’t let your emotions into it,” I cautioned. “Let’s not go in mad, let’s make the judge mad. I saw some of that today when we played the tape. I know it took her back to when she was a defense attorney. If the D.A. is doing this just to fuck with me, then Warfield will see it before we say it.”

Both Jennifer and Bosch responded with nods.

“Fucking cowards,” Cisco said. “Afraid to go straight up with you, boss.”

I liked that my team seemed angrier about the prosecution’s end run than I was. It would help keep them sharp in the days and weeks running up to trial.

I returned my attention to Bosch. I realized more than the others what an incredibly good break it was to have him in our court. I had taken his side the year before and now he was taking mine. But the moral support paled in comparison with what he brought as an investigator.

“Harry, did you ever work with Drucker and Lopes?” I asked.

Kent Drucker and Rafael Lopes were the LAPD leads on the case. They worked out of the elite Robbery-Homicide Division, where Bosch had worked until the end of his LAPD career.

“Never directly on a case,” Bosch said. “They were in the squad but there wasn’t a lot of crossover on things. They were good detectives, though. You don’t get to RHD if you’re not. The question becomes, What do you do when you get there? — rest on your laurels or keep chopping wood? The fact that they were assigned this case answers that one.”

I nodded. Bosch looked hesitant. I wondered whether he had heard more, something he didn’t realize was valuable or was holding back until he could fill it out.

“What?” I asked. “You have something else?”

“Sort of,” he said.

“Might as well get it out so we can discuss it,” I said.

“Well, one of my last cases at RHD, I had an investigation where there was a financial fraud involved,” Bosch said. “A guy was embezzling funds, got found out, killed the guy who found out to shut him up. Pretty clean but we couldn’t find the money. His lifestyle showed nothing. He wasn’t spending it, he was hiding it, so we hired a financial forensics analyst to follow the money. Help us find it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Did it work?”

“Yeah, we found the money offshore and made the case,” Bosch said. “I bring it up now because my partner from back then is still on the job in RHD. She told me that Drucker came to her and asked for the contact info for the financial forensics guy.”

“We should look into getting our own,” Jennifer added.

She wrote a note down on a small pad on the table in front of her.

“Let’s look again through our files on Sam’s past cases,” I said. “Maybe there’s something in them with info on how he moved and hid cash. Harry, anything else?”

I looked over my shoulder for Arturo. It wasn’t that I was starving, but I couldn’t wait to have a real meal for the first time in six weeks.

“Just on the discovery file,” Bosch said. “I’ve been through the photos and the autopsy. It was all pretty self-explanatory, no surprises. But then I saw this.”

He was looking through his copy of the discovery and pulled out two documents and a crime scene photo. He handed them around the table and waited a moment until everyone had a look and they came back to him.

“The autopsy report stated that the victim’s fingernails were scraped for samples of what looked like dirt or grease,” he said. “Then the lab report came in, identifying the substance as a combination of vegetable oil, chicken fat, and some sugarcane — cooking grease, according to the report.”

“I saw that in the discovery,” I said. “Why is it significant?”

“Well, when you look at the crime scene photos, you see that all of this guy’s fingernails were dirty with this stuff,” Bosch said.

“I’m still not following,” I said. “If it was blood or something, I could—”