“We didn’t need DNA,” Bosch said. “We found the victim’s property hidden in Borders’s apartment.”
Kennedy nodded to Soto.
“We went to property and pulled the box,” she said. “You know the routine. We took clothing collected from the victim to the lab and they put it through the serology protocol.”
“They did a protocol thirty years ago,” Bosch said. “But back then, they looked for ABO genetic markers instead of DNA. And they found nothing. You’re going to tell me that—”
“They found semen,” Kennedy said. “It was a minute amount, but this time they found it. The process has obviously gotten more sophisticated since this killing. And what they found didn’t come from Borders.”
Bosch shook his head.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “Whose was it?”
“A rapist named Lucas John Olmer,” Soto said.
Bosch had never heard of Olmer. His mind went to work, looking for the scam, the fix, but not considering that he had been wrong when he closed the cuffs around Borders’s wrists.
“Olmer’s in San Quentin, right?” he said. “This whole thing is a—”
“No, he’s not,” Tapscott said. “He’s dead.”
“Give us a little credit, Harry,” Soto added. “It’s not like we went looking for it to be this way. Olmer was never in San Quentin. He died in Corcoran back in twenty fifteen and he never knew Borders.”
“We’ve checked it six ways from Sunday,” Tapscott said. “The prisons are three hundred miles apart and they did not know or communicate with each other. It’s not there.”
There was a certain gotcha smugness in the way Tapscott spoke. It gave Bosch the urge to backhand him across the mouth. Soto knew her old partner’s triggers and reached over to put a hand on Bosch’s arm.
“Harry, this is not your fault,” she said. “This is on the lab. The reports are all there. You’re right — they found nothing. They missed it back then.”
Bosch looked at her and pulled his arm back.
“You really believe that?” he said. “Because I don’t. This is Borders. He’s behind this — somehow. I know it.”
“How, Harry? We’ve looked for the fix in this.”
“Who’s been in the box since the trial?”
“No one. In fact, the last one in that box was you. The original seals were intact with your signature and the date right across the top. Show him the video.”
She nodded to Tapscott, who pulled his phone and opened up a video. He turned the screen to Bosch.
“This is at Piper Tech,” he said.
Piper Tech was a massive complex in downtown where the LAPD’s Property Control Unit was located, along with the fingerprint unit and the aero squadron — using the football field — size roof as a heliport. Bosch knew that the integrity protocol in the archival unit was high. Sworn officers had to provide departmental ID and fingerprints to pull evidence from any case. The boxes were opened in an examination area under twenty-four-hour video surveillance. But this was Tapscott’s own video, recorded on his phone.
“This was not our first go-round with CIU, so we have our own protocol,” Tapscott said. “One of us opens the box, the other person records the whole thing. Doesn’t matter that they have their own cameras down there. And as you can see, no seal is broken, no tampering.”
The video showed Soto displaying the box to the camera, turning it over so that all sides and seams could be seen as intact. The seams had been sealed with the old labels used back in the eighties. For at least the past couple of decades, the department had been using red evidence tape that cracked and peeled if tampered with. Back in 1988, white rectangular stickers with LAPD ANALYZED EVIDENCE printed on them along with a signature and date line were used to seal evidence boxes. Soto manipulated the box in a bored manner and Bosch read that as her thinking they were wasting their time on this one. At least up until that point, Bosch still had her in his court.
Tapscott came in close on the seals used on the top seam of the box. Bosch could see his signature on the top center sticker along with the date September 9, 1988. He knew the date would have placed the sealing of the box at the end of the trial. Bosch had returned the evidence, sealed the box, and then stored it in property control in case an appeal overturned the verdict and they had to go to trial again. That never happened with Borders, and the box had presumably stayed on a shelf in property control, avoiding any intermittent clear-outs of old evidence, because he had also clearly marked on the box “187” — the California penal code for murder — which in the evidence room meant “Don’t throw away.”
As Tapscott moved the camera, Bosch recognized his own routine of using evidence seals on all seams of the box, including the bottom. He had always done it that way, till they moved on to the red evidence tape.
“Go back,” Bosch said. “Let me just look at the signature again.”
Tapscott pulled the phone back, manipulated the video, and then froze the image on the close-up of the seal Bosch had signed. He held the screen out to Bosch, who leaned in to study it. The signature was faded and hard to read but it looked legit.
“Okay,” Bosch said.
Tapscott restarted the video. On the screen Soto used a box cutter attached by a wire to an examination table to slice through the labels and open the box. As she started removing items from the box, including the victim’s clothing and an envelope containing her fingernail clippings, she called each piece of property out so it would be duly recorded. Among the items she mentioned was a sea-horse pendant, which had been the key piece of evidence against Borders.
Before the video was over, Tapscott impatiently pulled the phone back and killed the playback. He then put the phone away.
“On and on like that,” he said. “Nobody fucked with the box, Harry. What was in it had been there since the day you sealed it after the trial.”
Bosch was annoyed that he didn’t get a chance to watch the video in its entirety. Something about Tapscott — a stranger — using his first name also bothered Bosch. He put that annoyance aside and was silent for a long moment as he considered for the first time that his thirty-year belief that he had put a sadistic killer away for good was bogus.
“Where’d they find it?” he finally asked.
“Find what?” Kennedy asked.
“The DNA,” Bosch said.
“One microdot on the victim’s pajama bottoms,” Kennedy said.
“Easy to have missed back in ’eighty-seven,” Soto said. “They were probably just using black lights then.”
Bosch nodded.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
Soto looked at Kennedy. The question was his to answer.
“There’s a hearing on a habeas motion scheduled in Department one-oh-seven a week from Wednesday,” the prosecutor said. “We’ll be joining Borders’s attorneys and asking Judge Houghton to vacate the sentence and release him from death row.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bosch said.
“His lawyer has also notified the city that he’ll be filing a claim,” Kennedy continued. “We’ve been in contact with the City Attorney’s Office and they hope to negotiate a settlement. We’re probably talking well into seven figures.”
Bosch looked down at the table. He couldn’t hold anyone’s eyes.
“And I have to warn you,” Kennedy said. “If a settlement is not reached and he files a claim in federal court, he can go after you personally.”
Bosch nodded. He knew that already. A civil rights claim filed by Borders would leave Bosch personally responsible for damages if the city chose not to cover him. Since two years ago Bosch had sued the city to reinstate his full pension, it was unlikely that he would find a single soul in the City Attorney’s Office interested in indemnifying him against damages collected by Borders. The one thought that pushed through this reality was of his daughter. He could be left with nothing but an insurance policy going to her after he was gone.