“Four and a half, actually. But she says she didn’t do it. And she wants out now.”
“And you believe her?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Fontaine turned her eyes to Bosch.
“What about you, Bosch?” she asked. “You worked homicide.”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe,” Bosch said. “The evidence isn’t there for conviction.”
“Then why did she plead guilty?” Fontaine asked.
“Because she had no choice,” I said. “And actually, she pled nolo. There’s a difference.”
Fontaine just stared at us for a few moments.
“Gentlemen, we’re done here,” she finally said. “I have nothing more to say about those cases. They’re closed. Justice was done. And I’m going to be late for court.”
She started stacking files on her desk and getting ready to go.
“I’d rather talk now than have to subpoena you,” I said.
“Well, good luck with that,” Fontaine said.
“The most damning piece of evidence you had on her was the GSR. I’ll tell you right now, we can blow that up.”
“You’re a defense lawyer. You can find a so-called expert to say whatever you want. But over here we deal in facts, and the fact is she shot her ex-husband and is where she deserves to be.”
She stood up and dumped her gathered files into a leather bag with initials in gold near the handle. Bosch started to stand up. But I didn’t.
“I’d hate to see you dragged through the shit that’s about to come out,” I said. “When this gets to court.”
“Is that a threat?” Fontaine asked.
“It’s more like a choice. Work with us to find the truth. Or work against us and hide it.”
“That’ll be the day, when I find a defense attorney really interested in the truth. Now, you need to go or I’m going to call security to escort you out.”
I took my time standing up, holding her angry stare as I did.
“Just remember,” I said. “We gave you the choice.”
“Just go,” she said loudly. “Now!”
Bosch and I didn’t speak until we were on the elevator going down.
“I’d say you succeeded in rattling her cage,” Bosch said.
“Hers and a few others down the line, I’m sure,” I said.
“Are we ready for that? What happened to ‘no footprints’?”
“Changing course. Besides, somebody out there already knows what we’re doing.”
“How do you know that?”
“Easy. Somebody broke into your house because they wanted us to know.”
Bosch nodded and we were silent while the old elevator made its way down.
When we stepped out into the lobby, Bosch brought up what I had been mulling over myself.
“So,” he said. “Fontaine. Think she’s bent or is she a victim?”
“Good question,” I said. “They threatened the defense attorney into doing what they wanted. Maybe they did it with the prosecutor too. Or maybe she’s just as corrupt as the Cucos.”
“Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. She was pressured into protecting the sheriff’s department from scandal. It is, after all, the sister agency to the DA’s office.”
“I think you’re being too kind, Harry. You gotta remember, two years after this shit went down, she gets a transfer from Antelope fucking Valley to Major Crimes downtown. That feels like a payoff to me.”
“True, I guess.”
“We can’t guess. We have to have it down solid before we get into court.”
“You’ll subpoena her as a witness?”
“Not with what we know now. Too many things that aren’t clear. It would be too dangerous to bring her in. No telling what she’d say on the stand.”
We pushed through the heavy doors onto Temple Street and headed back to the Lincoln.
20
I wanted to get home so I could start writing the real petition that I would file on behalf of Lucinda Sanz. No more props, no more games. It was time to put together the narrative that would make the case for my client’s actual innocence. As I had told Lucinda, the world was turned upside down. She was now considered guilty until proven innocent. The initial document I would write in the next few days needed to make clear, without giving away the store, what I would present and what I would prove. It needed to do more than shake cages in the sheriff’s department. It had to be compelling enough to make a U.S. district court judge sit up in his or her comfortable chambers and say, “I want to hear more.” I had at least two solid things going for me at this point that were not hearsay or otherwise dismissible. One was the revelation that Roberto Sanz was in a sheriff’s clique, which brought a clear implication of organized corruption. The other was the meeting between Sanz and an FBI agent just an hour before his murder. That was new evidence that pointed to a wide range of suspects other than Lucinda Sanz. I believed that these could get me through the habeas door. But I knew I would need more — much more — once I got through.
I told Bosch to take me home. He had his own assignment: Identify the other members of Roberto Sanz’s unit, especially any female deputies. He needed to put a name to Lady X.
Bosch pulled to the curb on Fareholm by the stairs to my front door.
“So, I’m around if you need me,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I have the crew names put together.”
“You know where to find me,” I said. “I cleared my schedule to write—”
I stopped mid-sentence when I looked up the stairs to the front door.
“What is it?” Bosch asked.
“My front door’s open,” I said. “Those bastards...”
We both got out and proceeded cautiously up the steps to the deck.
“I don’t have a weapon,” Bosch announced.
“Good,” I said. “I don’t want another shooting in here.”
More than fifteen years earlier, I had exchanged fire in my home with a woman intent on killing me. It was the one and only gunfight I’d ever been in. I had won it and I wasn’t interested in risking a perfect record.
“Besides, I doubt there’s anyone inside,” I added. “Like at your place, they’re just sending a message: ‘We know about you, we’re watching you.’”
“Whoever ‘they’ are,” Bosch said.
I entered first and found the front room empty and undisturbed. It was a small house with a big view, on the other side of the hills from Bosch’s place. Living room, dining room, and kitchen were in the front, and two bedrooms and an office were in the back. The backyard was barely big enough for a deck and the hot tub I never used.
As we moved through, I saw no signs of a break-in. We saw nothing out of place until we moved down the hallway and reached the office.
The intruders had left the room in shambles: drawers pulled out of the desk and overturned on the floor, couch upholstery slashed with a blade, lawbooks knocked off shelves. The coup de grâce came from a bottle of maple syrup I’d brought back from a trip to Montreal with my daughter the year before. I had left it on a shelf as a reminder of the fun we’d had. Now it was shattered on the floor, its contents having been poured onto the keyboard of the laptop lying open next to the shards of glass.
“With you, they only made you think there was a break-in, right?” I asked.
“That or made me think I was losing my mind,” Bosch said.
“Well, I would rather have had that than this.”
“Yeah. Will you call it in?”
“Did you?”
“I made a report. You told me to. But nothing’s going to come of it.”