Майкл Коннелли - Law of Innocence

“Where the hell is Wuhan?” Bosch said.

His words rescued me from the downward spiral of my thoughts.

“Who?” I asked.

He pointed to the radio.

“Not who,” he said. “It’s a place somewhere in China. Were you listening?”

“No, I was thinking,” I said. “What was it?”

“They’ve got a mystery virus over there, killing people.”

“Well, at least it’s there and not here.”

“Yeah, for how long?”

“You ever been over there, China?”

“Just to Hong Kong.”

“Oh, right … Maddie’s mom. Sorry I brought it up.”

“Long time ago.”

I attempted to change the subject.

“So, what’s Opparizio like?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Bosch responded.

“Well, I just remember, when I had him on the stand nine years ago, he was restrained at first but then out came the animal. He wanted to jump out of that chair and tear my throat out or something. He seemed more Tony Soprano than Michael Corleone, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, so far I haven’t laid eyes on the guy. That’s not what I’ve been doing.”

I looked out the window and tried to blunt my shock and upset. I then turned back to engage.

“Harry, then what have you been doing?” I asked. “You had Opparizio, remember? You should’ve—”

“Hold on, hold on,” he said. “I know I have Opparizio but it wasn’t about putting eyes on him. This isn’t a surveillance job. It’s about finding out what he was doing and whether or not it somehow connects to Scales and you. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“Okay, then stop with the whole mystery trip thing. Where are we going?”

“Just take it easy. We’re almost there and you’ll be enlightened.”

“Really? ‘Enlightened’? Like divine intervention or something?”

“Not quite. But I think you’ll like it.”

He was right about one thing. We were almost there. I looked around to get my bearings and saw that we had crossed the 405 and were just a few miles from the end of the Harbor Freeway at Terminal Island. Through the windshield and to the left I could see the giant gantry cranes that loaded containers on and off cargo ships.

We were in San Pedro now. Once a small fishing village, it was now part of the giant Port of Los Angeles complex, serving as a bedroom community for many of those who worked on the docks and in the shipping and oil industries. It had once had a full courthouse where I appeared regularly on behalf of clients accused of crimes. But the justice complex was shuttered by the county in a cost-cutting move and the cases moved up to a courthouse by the airport. The San Pedro courthouse had now stood abandoned for well over a decade.

“I used to come down to Pedro a lot on cases,” I said.

“I used to come down when I was a teenager,” Bosch said. “Sneak out of whatever place they put me, come down to the docks. I got tattooed down here once.”

I just nodded. It looked like he was reliving the memory and I didn’t want to intrude. I knew very little about Bosch’s early life beyond what I had read once in an unauthorized profile in the Times. I remembered foster homes and an early enlistment in the army, with Vietnam as the destination. This was decades before we learned of our blood connection.

We crossed the Vincent Thomas, the tall green suicide bridge that connected to Terminal Island. The entire island was dedicated to port and industrial operations, with the exception of the federal prison at the far end. Bosch exited the freeway and used surface streets to get us moving along the northern edge of the island and next to one of the deep port channels.

“Taking a wild guess,” I said. “Opparizio has some kind of smuggling operation here. Stuff coming in on cargo containers. Drugs? Humans? What?”

“Not that I know of,” Bosch said. “I’m going to show you something else. You see this area?”

He pointed through the windshield toward a vast parking lot filled with plastic-wrapped cars fresh off the boats from Japan.

“There used to be a Ford Motor plant here,” Bosch said. “It was called Long Beach Assembly and they made the Model A. My mother’s father supposedly worked there in the thirties on the Model A line.”

“What was he like?” I asked.

“I never met him. Only heard the story.”

“And now it’s Toyotas.”

I gestured toward the vast parking lot of new cars ready to be disseminated to dealers across the West.

Bosch turned onto a crushed-shell road that ran alongside a rock jetty lining the channel. A black-and-white oil tanker the length of a football field, including the end zones, was slowly making its way down the channel to the port. Bosch pulled to a stop by what looked like an abandoned railroad spur and killed the engine.

“Let’s walk up to the jetty,” he said. “I’ll show you what we’ve got as soon as this tanker goes by.”

We followed an uphill walk to the top of a berm that ran behind the jetty as a barrier against high tides. By standing on top of it we got a solid view across the channel of the various petroleum refining and storage facilities vital to the operations of the port.

“Okay, so this is the Cerritos Channel right here and we are looking north,” Bosch said. “That’s Wilmington directly across the water and Long Beach to the right.”

“Okay,” I said. “What exactly are we looking at?”

“The center of the California oil business. You’ve got the Marathon, Valero, Tesoro refineries right there. Chevron is farther up. The oil comes in here from all over—even Alaska. Comes to port by supertanker, barge, rail, pipeline, you name it. Then it goes over there to the refineries and it gets processed and from there into distribution. Into tanker trucks and out to your local gas station and then into your own gas tank.”

“What’s it all got to do with the case?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. You see that refinery at the end there with the catwalks around the tanks?”

He pointed to the right and at a small refinery with a single stack billowing a white plume of smoke into the sky. An American flag was draped around the upper section of the stack. There were two side-by-side storage tanks that looked to be at least four stories tall and were surrounded by multiple catwalks.

“I see it,” I said.

“That’s BioGreen Industries,” Bosch said. “You won’t find Louis Opparizio’s name attached to any of the ownership documents but he holds the controlling interest in BioGreen. No doubt about it.”

Bosch had my undivided attention now.

“How did you find that out?” I asked.

“I followed the honey,” Bosch said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, nine years ago you were able to drag Opparizio through the legal wood chipper at the trial for your client Lisa Trammel. I pulled the transcript and read his testimony. He—”

“You don’t have to tell me. I was there, remember?”

Another tanker was coming down the channel. It was so wide, it had little margin for error as it navigated between the jagged rocks that lined both sides.

“I know you were there,” Bosch said. “But what you might not know is that Louis Opparizio learned a lot from getting pounded by you that day on the stand. Number one, he learned never again to be connected by legal documentation to any of his companies—legit or not. He currently owns nothing in his name and is connected to no company, board, or reported investment to anything. He uses people as fronts.”

“I’m damn proud I was able to teach him how to be a better criminal. How did you get around it?”

“The Internet is still a pretty useful tool. Social media, newspaper archives. Opparizio’s father died four years ago. There was a service in New Jersey and a virtual visitation book. Friends and family signed in, and damn if the funeral home’s website doesn’t still have it online.”