“I get the feeling that’s what they want me to do.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. It’s their plan, not mine. But I don’t have time to deal with a police investigation that won’t lead to anything. They want to distract me.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“I don’t know. The Cucos? The FBI? It could be anybody at this point. We’ve obviously poked the hornet’s nest.”
I scanned the entire room, surveying the damage.
“I need to figure out what they took,” I said. “And go to the Apple Store.”
With a foot, I shoved the laptop a few feet across the floor. It left a trail of maple syrup.
“This one is done,” I said. “But I’ve got everything on the cloud. I’ll be back in business as soon as I pick up a new one.”
“What makes you think they took something?” Bosch asked.
I spread my hands to take in the whole ransacked room.
“They were covering something up by trashing the place,” I said. “Something they found.”
Bosch didn’t respond.
“You don’t think so?” I asked.
“Not sure,” he said. “Could’ve been a lot of things. First of all, we don’t know this has anything to do with the Sanz case. I’m sure you’ve made your fair share of enemies over the years. It could be unrelated to Sanz.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Bosch. We’ve both had break-ins just days apart. What’s the connection? Sanz. This is them. Believe me. And it’s not going to stop us. Fuck them. This will just make it taste all the better when we take them down and Lucinda does the resurrection walk.”
“Resurrection walk?”
“When she is raised from the dead.”
“Okay.”
He looked a little baffled by the term.
“You gotta make sure you’re there for that, Harry,” I said. “That will be something.”
“You get her out, I’ll be there,” he said.
Part Five
October — Final Prep
21
Bosch was lying chest down, his left cheek on the dry scrub grass that had sprouted in the yard after the torrential rains of last winter. It was now October and the grass had dried to a yellow-brown over the summer months. Each blade was crisp and felt like a knife’s edge against his skin. He heard the woman’s voice from behind him.
“Okay, both hands at your sides, palms up,” she said. “There was no effort to break his fall. He was essentially dead before he hit the ground.”
Bosch adjusted his hands accordingly.
“Like that?” he asked.
“Uh, move your right about four inches farther out from your body,” she said. “No, left. Sorry, I meant your left hand four inches farther out.”
Bosch adjusted.
“Perfect,” she said.
She was Shami Arslanian, a forensics expert Mickey Haller had brought out from New York. The hearing on the Lucinda Sanz habeas petition was a week away and Arslanian had come out to prep for her presentation and testimony. Bosch had brought her to the scene of the crime, the front lawn where Roberto Sanz had been fatally shot twice in the back. She had determined that Bosch was within an inch of Sanz’s height and twenty pounds of his weight, so Bosch would be Sanz’s stand-in — actually, his lie-in. She set up a camera with a laser focus on a tripod.
“Okay,” she said. “Almost done.”
“No worries,” Bosch said. “Just glad we aren’t doing this in the summer.”
His breath kicked up a puff of desert dust.
“Okay, got it,” she said. “We’re good.”
Bosch rolled to his side and started to get up.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Actually, stay like that, on your knees,” she said. “Let me capture that while we’re here. Just turn to your left about forty-five degrees.”
Moving on his knees, Bosch turned. Arslanian tweaked his position slightly and then told him to drop his hands limply to his sides. He did so and she told him to hold still.
“Okay,” she said. “Do you need help getting all the way up?”
“No, I’m good,” he said.
He got to one knee and pushed himself up. He started brushing the dust and loose scrub grass off his clothes. He was wearing jeans and a patterned shirt with the tails out.
“Sorry about your clothes,” Arslanian said.
“Don’t be,” Bosch said. “Part of the job. I had a feeling I would get dirty out here.”
“But I’m sure your job description doesn’t include playing dead.”
“You’d be surprised. Driver, investigator, subpoena service. I’ve worked for Haller for nine months or so and there’s always a new job within the job, you know?”
“I do. This is my third case with him. I never know what to expect when he calls me.”
Bosch walked over to where she was taking the camera and laser mount off the tripod. She, too, was wearing blue jeans and a work shirt, which had several pens in a breast pocket. She was short and compact, her body shape largely hidden beneath the baggy shirt she wore untucked. And she was newly blond, which Bosch had learned when he picked her up at the airport the day before. Initially he’d looked around baggage claim for a woman whom Haller had described as a redhead.
“So, with all of this, you’re going to make a re-creation of the shooting?” he asked.
“Exactly,” Arslanian said. “We’ll be able to show the murder as close to the way it happened as possible.”
“Amazing.”
“It’s a program that I was involved in developing. It can be tweaked according to height, distance, all physical parameters. What I call the forensic physics of a case.”
Bosch wasn’t sure what all of that meant, though he did know artificial intelligence was a controversial subject, depending on the application. It reminded him of when people first started talking about DNA in law enforcement. It took a while for the technology to be accepted, but now it was considered, wrongly or rightly, to be the easy solve for violent crimes.
“I like what I do,” Arslanian said. “It’s fun to figure out exactly how something happened and why.”
“I get that,” Bosch said.
“How long were you a cop?”
“About forty years.”
“Wow. And military before that? Do you know what the high-ready gun stance is?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what we’re going to show. When Lucinda was married to Roberto, he taught her to shoot. He took her to the range and there are photos of her in high-ready stance. That’s what I’ll base this on.”
“Okay.”
Bosch had seen the photos in the discovery material Haller got after filing the habeas petition, and he knew that at first glance they weren’t helpful to the case for Lucinda Sanz’s innocence. He wasn’t sure how Arslanian’s re-creation would work, but he knew that Haller had full trust in her. And he remembered Haller talking about taking adverse evidence and finding ways to own it, make it work for you rather than against you. The photos of Lucinda at the range had seemed damning. But maybe now, not so much.
“I’m going out to Chino tomorrow to show Lucinda some photos,” Bosch said. “Do you need me to ask her anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Arslanian said. “I think we’re covered. And I’ve got what I need here. We can head back to the city and I’ll get to work on it.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Bosch said. “I’m just going to tell the owners we’re done.”
Bosch walked up the stoop to the front door and knocked. A woman quickly answered, and Bosch got the idea that she had been watching them through a window.
“Mrs. Perez, we’re all done here,” Bosch said. “Thanks for letting us use the front yard.”