“Okay, what else? Did you tell her about your theory that Dexter shot himself?”
“I did. I thought maybe it would scare her away from trying him as an adult. If they move this to superior court, it will be open court and this will all come out publicly. Juvenile court is closed to the public and press.”
“And what did she say?”
“She sort of laughed it off and said ‘Good try.’ She thought I was bluffing.”
“Who’s the prosecutor?”
“Shay Larkin. She’s younger than me.”
“Well, she’ll find out it’s no bluff. How’s Anthony?”
“He’s scared shitless. I need to get him out but there’s nothing I can do — legally, at least.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I want to hold a press conference. Put this stuff out there about Dexter and put pressure on them to look at him and know that this is no bluff.”
“Won’t that give them a heads-up on your case?”
“Yes, but if it gets Anthony out... I also think it would be better if Mickey does it. The media follows him around like dogs. He would draw attention to this.”
“That’s an idea.”
“And someone like you, with your experience, standing with him would certainly lend credibility to it.”
Bosch closed his eyes and told himself that he should have known better.
“Jennifer, that’s not going to happen,” he said. “We had a deal. I look at the file but then I’m out.”
“I know, I know,” Aronson said. “But it’s my sister’s kid, Harry. I can’t stand seeing him in there when I know he’s innocent.”
“If he’s innocent, you’ll get him out.”
“Eventually, Harry. But what happens in between? He could get hurt in there. Or worse.”
“Then hold your press conference and see what that does. Get Mickey up there, but don’t ask me. I have relationships and a reputation in this town that I’m not about to destroy because of what amounted to less than an hour’s work on this case. You have to find some other way.”
There was silence and when Aronson finally responded, her tone was as cold as winter rain.
“I understand,” she said. “Goodbye.”
She disconnected but Bosch held his phone to his ear for a long time, wondering why he felt like a coward.
He thought about Anthony Marcus up there alone in Sylmar juvie. When Bosch was a kid he had been held in juvenile detention a few times as a runaway from foster homes. He was so slightly built as a teenager that a few years later he was put on an army tunnel crew in Vietnam. His size was an advantage while moving through the dark and narrow tunnels used by the Vietcong. But it had made him an easy target in juvenile detention. Things were done to him, taken from him, and he didn’t like to dwell on the memories. But thinking about Anthony Marcus in Sylmar brought them back now. Despite the position he had taken with Haller and Aronson, Bosch was struck by what Aronson had said about Anthony being bullied. He knew firsthand that it was a dog-eat-dog world inside the children’s jail. He secretly hoped Aronson would be able to rescue her nephew with the help he had just given her.
6
Bosch was back on the Lucinda Sanz case by 9 a.m. the next day, standing at the service window at the archives division of the Los Angeles Superior Court in downtown. The archives were in the basement of the Civic Center, located three floors below the vast green lawns and pink chairs of Grand Park. Few people knew that beneath the park was a windowless concrete bunker where case files and court exhibits from decades of criminal prosecutions were available for public viewing.
But Bosch knew and he was the first person at the counter when the clerk slid back the plexiglass window and opened for business. He had already filled out the request form for all materials in the archives related to California v. Lucinda Sanz, having pulled the case number off the county court system’s public database the night before.
The clerk studied the request form, told Bosch to take a seat, and disappeared into the vast archives.
Bosch wasn’t expecting much because the case had never gone to trial. That meant that there would be no exhibits — photos and documents — that would have been shown to a jury. But what he was hoping for was the presentencing report submitted by the Department of Probation and Parole. It would have been required by the judge before he accepted the plea from Lucinda Sanz and passed sentence. The PSRs Bosch had seen before were usually stocked with case reports and other documents filed in support of the sentencing recommendation. Those reports were what he wanted, and he hoped there would be enough to give him a baseline knowledge of the case.
While he waited, Bosch took out his phone so he could call the cancer center at UCLA to push back his appointment to the afternoon. But being three levels underground and surrounded by reinforced-concrete walls, he had no cell service. He thought about going up topside to make the call but he didn’t want to miss the return of the clerk.
Ten minutes later the clerk emerged from the archives carrying a single manila folder no thicker than a slice of bread. He read Bosch’s reaction.
“All I could find,” he said. “But it was a nolo case. No trial, no exhibits, no transcripts. Lucky there was even a file.”
Bosch took the file and walked it over to a side room where there were individual desk pods for viewing documents and exhibits. He opened the file and found a handwritten list on an index card on the inside cover noting only six documents, ordered by date filed with the court. The top sheet was the most recent. It was the order from Judge Castle sentencing Lucinda Sanz to prison. Behind this were three letters that had been sent to the judge asking for leniency for the defendant. They had come from her mother, her brother, and a man who stated in his opening paragraph that he had been Lucinda’s employer at an onion farm in Lancaster where she had worked for many years in the packing-and-shipping warehouse.
Bosch quickly skimmed these before moving to the next document, which was the agreement signed by Lucinda Sanz pleading nolo contendere to a charge of voluntary manslaughter. The document, also signed by Andrea Fontaine, the deputy district attorney who had handled the case, additionally set out the term range from medium to high, with an enhancement for use of a firearm. It all added up to Sanz going before the judge and receiving a sentence that could be anywhere between seven and thirteen years. It seemed to Bosch to be a good deal for someone who had supposedly killed a law enforcement officer.
The last document was the presentencing report. Bosch fanned it open and saw that it was lengthy and at least half the pages were police and autopsy reports. This was what he had hoped for. Summaries of the investigation that would allow him to understand how the case had been worked.
The report was authored by a state probation officer named Robert Kohut. It was written in narrative form and was essentially a deep dive into Lucinda Sanz’s life with specific sections regarding her childhood, family structure, adolescent legal troubles, education, employment history, residency history, adult law enforcement interactions, and any documented psychological treatment.
Kohut’s report was largely favorable. He described Sanz as a single mother who worked sixty-hour weeks at Desert Pearl Farms in Lancaster in order to provide for herself and her young son. She had no criminal record prior to the homicide charge, though there were two incidents listed in which deputies were called to the house in Quartz Hill to quell domestic disputes. In one case, Lucinda was arrested, but the district attorney did not file a charge against her and the case was dropped. In the second incident, neither Lucinda nor her husband was arrested. Both incidents were pre-divorce and Bosch assumed that Roberto Sanz and his wife had been cut a break because he was a deputy.