Bosch pointed across the street to the police station they were heading toward.
“Only the women go down to Van Nuys,” Bosch said. “We have a jail here for the men. In the station. State-of-the-art single cells. I’ve even stayed over a few times. Beats the bunk room at the PAB, with everybody snoring.”
She threw him a look as if to say he had changed if he was willing to sleep in a jail cell. He winked at her.
“I can work anywhere,” he said. “I can sleep anywhere.”
When the traffic cleared, they crossed over to the police station and entered through the main lobby. The detective bureau had a direct entrance on the right. Bosch opened it with a key card and held the door as the others stepped in.
The bureau was no bigger than a single-car garage. At its center were three workstations tightly positioned in a single module. These belonged to the unit’s three full-time detectives, Danny Sisto, a recently promoted detective named Oscar Luzon, and Bella Lourdes, just two months back from a lengthy injured-on-duty leave. The walls of the unit were lined with file cabinets, radio chargers, a coffee setup, and a printing station below bulletin boards covered in work schedules and departmental announcements. There were also numerous Wanted and Missing posters, including a variety showing photos of Esme Tavares that had been issued over a period of fifteen years.
Up high on one wall was a poster depicting the iconic Disney ducks Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which were the proud nicknames of the three detectives who worked in the module below. Captain Trevino’s office was to the right and the war room was on the left. A third room was subleased to the Medical Examiner’s Office and used by two coroner’s investigators, who covered the entire San Fernando Valley and points north.
All three of the detectives were at their respective workstations. They had recently cracked a major car-theft ring operating out of the city, and an attorney for one of the suspects had derisively referred to them as Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They took the group nickname as a badge of honor.
Bosch saw Lourdes peeking over a partition from her desk. He gave her a nod of thanks for the heads-up. It was also a sign that so far things were okay.
Bosch led the visitors into the war room. It was a soundproof room with walls lined with whiteboards and flat-screen monitors. At center was a boardroom-style table with eight leather chairs around it. The room was designed to be the command post for major crime investigations, task force operations, and coordinating responses to public emergencies such as earthquakes and riots. The reality was that such incidents were rare and the room was used primarily as a lunchroom, the broad table and comfortable chairs perfect for group lunches. The room carried the distinct odor of Mexican food. The owner of Magaly’s Tamales up on Maclay Avenue routinely dropped off free food for the troops and it was usually devoured in the war room.
“Have a seat,” Bosch said.
Tapscott and Soto sat on one side of the table, while Kennedy went around and sat across from them. Bosch took a chair at one end of the table so he would have angles on all three visitors.
“So, what’s going on?” he said.
“Well, let’s properly introduce ourselves,” Kennedy began. “You, of course, know Detective Soto from your work together in the Open-Unsolved Unit. And now you’ve met Detective Tapscott. They have been working with me on a review of a homicide case you handled almost thirty years ago.”
“Preston Borders,” Bosch said. “How is Preston? Still on death row at the Q last time I checked.”
“He’s still there.”
“So why are you looking at the case?”
Kennedy had pulled his chair close and had his arms folded and his elbows on the table. He drumrolled the fingers of his left hand as if deciding how to answer Bosch’s question, even though it was clear that everything about this surprise visit was rehearsed.
“I am assigned to the Conviction Integrity Unit,” Kennedy said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I have used Detectives Tapscott and Soto on some of the cases I’ve handled because of their skill in working cold cases.”
Bosch knew that the CIU was new and had been put into place after he left the LAPD. Its formation was the fulfillment of a promise made during a heated election campaign in which the policing of the police was a hot-ticket debate issue. The newly elected D.A. — Tak Kobayashi — had promised to create a unit that would respond to the seeming groundswell of cases where new forensic technologies had led to hundreds of exonerations of people imprisoned across the country. Not only was new science leading the way, but old science once thought to be unassailable as evidence was being debunked and swinging open prison doors for the innocent.
As soon as Kennedy mentioned his assignment, Bosch put everything together and knew what was going on. Borders, the man thought to have killed three women but convicted of only one murder, was making a final grab at freedom after nearly thirty years on death row.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?” Bosch said. “Borders? Really? You are seriously looking at that case?”
He looked from Kennedy to his old partner Soto.
He felt totally betrayed.
“Lucia?” he said
“Harry,” she said. “You need to listen.”
2
Bosch felt like the walls of the war room were closing in on him. In his mind and in reality, he had put Borders away for good. He didn’t count on the sadistic sex murderer ever getting the needle, but death row was still its own particular hell, one that was harsher than any sentence that put a man in general population. The isolation of it was what Borders deserved. He went up to San Quentin as a twenty-six-year-old man. To Bosch that meant fifty-plus years of solitary confinement. Less only if he got lucky. More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California.
“It’s not as simple as you think,” Kennedy said.
“Really?” Bosch said. “Tell me why.”
“The obligation of the Conviction Integrity Unit is to consider all legitimate petitions that come to it. Our review process is the first stage, and that happens in-house before the cases go to the LAPD or other law enforcement. When a case meets a certain threshold of concern, we go to the next step and call in law enforcement to carry out a due diligence investigation.”
“And of course everyone is sworn to secrecy at that point.”
Bosch looked at Soto as he said it. She looked away.
“Absolutely,” Kennedy said.
“I don’t know what evidence Borders or his lawyer brought to you, but it’s bullshit,” Bosch said. “He murdered Danielle Skyler and everything else is a scam.”
Kennedy didn’t respond, but from his look Bosch could tell he was surprised he still remembered the victim’s name.
“Yeah, thirty years later I remember her name,” Bosch said. “I also remember Donna Timmons and Vicki Novotney, the two victims your office claimed we didn’t have enough evidence to file on. Were they part of this due diligence you conducted?”
“Harry,” Soto said, trying to calm him.
“Borders didn’t bring any new evidence,” Kennedy said. “It was already there.”
That hit Bosch like a punch. He knew Kennedy was talking about the physical evidence from the case. The implication was that there was evidence from the crime scene or elsewhere that cleared Borders of the crime. The greater implication was incompetence or, worse, malfeasance — that Bosch had missed the evidence or intentionally withheld it.
“What are we talking about here?” he asked.
“DNA,” Kennedy said. “It wasn’t part of the original case in ’eighty-eight. The case was prosecuted before DNA was allowed into use in criminal cases in California. It wasn’t introduced and accepted by a court up in Ventura for another year. In L.A. County it was a year after that.”