Michael Connelly (105 page)

“So?”

“Donovan’s mixing plaster. He’s going to make a mold of the face. On the hand — we only got the left, the right side crumbled
when we dug in. Donovan’s going to try using rubber silicone. He says it’s the best chance of pulling out a mold with prints.”

Bosch nodded. For a few moments he watched Pounds talking to the reporters and saw the first thing worth smiling about all
day. Pounds was on camera but apparently none of the reporters had told him about the dirt smeared across his forehead. He
lit a cigarette and turned his attention back to Edgar.

“So, this area here was all storage rooms for rent?” he asked.

“That’s right. The owner of the property was here a little while ago. Said that all this area back in here was partitioned
storage. Individual rooms. The Dollmaker — er, the killer, whoever the fuck it was — could’ve had one of the rooms and had
his privacy to do what he wanted. The only problem would be the noise he made breaking up the original flooring. But it could’ve
been night work. Owner said most people didn’t come back into the storage area at night. People who rented the rooms got a
key to an exterior door off the alley. The perp could’ve come in and done the whole job in one night.”

The next question was obvious, so Edgar answered before Bosch asked.

“The owner can’t give us the name of the renter. Not for sure, at least. The records went up in the fire. His insurance company
made settlements with most people that filed claims and we’ll get those names. But he said there were a few who never made
a claim after the riots. He just never heard from them again. He can’t remember all the names, but if one was our guy then
it was probably an alias anyway. Leastwise, if I was going to rent a room and dig through the floor to bury a body, you wouldn’t
find me giving no real name.”

Bosch nodded and looked at his watch. He had to get going soon. He realized that he was hungry but probably wouldn’t get the
chance to eat. Bosch looked down at the excavation and noticed the delineation of color between the old and newer concrete.
The old slab was almost white. The concrete the woman had been encased in was a dark gray. He noticed a small piece of red
paper protruding from a gray chunk at the bottom of the trench. He dropped down into the excavation and picked the chunk up.
It was about the size of a softball. He pounded it on the old slab until it broke apart in his hand. The paper was part of
a crumpled and empty Marlboro cigarette package. Edgar pulled a plastic evidence bag from his suit pocket and held it open
for Bosch to drop the discovery in.

“It’s got to’ve been put in with the body,” he said. “Good catch.”

Bosch climbed out of the trench and looked at his watch again. It was time to go.

“Let me know if you get the ID,” he said to Edgar.

He dumped his jumpsuit back in the trunk and lit a fresh cigarette. He stood next to his Caprice and watched Pounds, who was
wrapping up his skillfully planned impromptu press conference. Harry could tell by the cameras and the expensive clothes that
most of the reporters were from TV. He saw Bremmer, the
Times
guy, standing at the edge of the pack. Bosch hadn’t seen him in a while and noticed he had put on weight and a beard. Bosch
knew that Bremmer was standing on the periphery of the circle waiting for the TV questions to end so he could hit Pounds with
something solid that would take some thought to answer.

Bosch smoked and waited for five minutes before Pounds was done. He was risking being late for court but he wanted to see
the note. When Pounds was finally done with the reporters he signaled Bosch to follow him to his car. Bosch got in the passenger
side and Pounds handed him a photocopy.

Harry studied the note for a long time. It was written in the recognizable printed scrawl. The analyst in Suspicious Documents
had called the printing

Philadelphia block style and had concluded that its right-to-left slant was the result of its being the work of an untrained
hand; possibly a left-handed person printing with his right hand.

Newspaper says the trial’s just begun

A verdict to return on the Dollmaker’s run

A bullet from Bosch fired straight and true

But the dolls should know me work’s not through

On Western is the spot where my heart doth sings

When I think o the dolly laid beneath at Bing’s

Too bad, good Bosch, a bullet of bad aim

Years gone past, and I’m still in the game

Bosch knew style could be copied but something about the poem ground into him. It was like the others. The same bad schoolboy
rhymes, the same semiliterate attempt at high-flown language. He felt confusion and a tugging in his chest.

It’s him, he thought. It’s him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” U.S. District Judge Alva Keyes intoned as he eyed the jury, “we begin the trial with what we call
opening statements by the attorneys. Mind you, these are not to be construed by you as evidence. These are more or less blueprints
— road maps, if you will, of the route each attorney wants to take with his or her case. You do not consider them evidence.
They may make some highfalutin allegations, but just because they say it doesn’t make it true. After all, they’re lawyers.”

This brought a polite titter of laughter from the jury and the rest of courtroom 4. With his southern accent, it sounded as
if the judge had said lieyers, which added to the glee. Even Money Chandler smiled. Bosch looked around from his seat at the
defense table and saw that the public seats in the huge wood-paneled courtroom with twenty-foot ceilings were about half full.
In the front row on the plaintiff’s side were eight people who were Norman Church’s family members and friends, not counting
his widow, who sat up at the plaintiff’s table with Chandler.

There were also about a half dozen courthouse hangers-on, old men with nothing better to do but watch the drama in other people’s
lives. Plus an assortment of law clerks and students who probably wanted to watch the great Honey Chandler do her thing, and
a group of reporters with their pens poised over their pads. Openers always made a story — because, as the judge had said,
the lawyers could say anything they wanted. After today, Bosch knew, the reporters would drop in from time to time but there
probably wouldn’t be many other stories until closing statements and a verdict.

Unless something unusual happened.

Bosch looked directly behind him. There was nobody in the benches back there. He knew Sylvia Moore would not be there. They
had agreed on that before. He didn’t want her seeing this. He had told her it was just a formality, part of the cop’s burden
to be sued for doing his job. He knew the real reason he didn’t want her here was because he had no control over this situation.
He had to sit there at the defense table and let people take their best shots. Anything could come up and probably would.
He didn’t want her watching that.

He wondered now if the jury would see the empty seats behind him in the spectators gallery and think that maybe he was guilty
because no one had come to show support.

When the murmur of laughter died down he looked back at the judge. Judge Keyes was impressive up there on the bench. He was
a big man who wore the black robe well, his thick forearms and big hands folded in front of his barrel chest, giving a sense
of reserved power. His balding and sun-reddened head was large and seemed perfectly round, trimmed around the edges with gray
hair and suggesting the organized storage of a massive amount of legal knowledge and perspective. He was a transplanted southerner
who had specialized in civil rights cases as a lawyer and had made a name for himself by suing the LAPD for its disproportionate
number of cases in which black citizens died after being put in chokeholds by officers. He had been appointed to the federal
bench by President Jimmy Carter, right before he was sent back to Georgia. Judge Keyes had been ruling the roost in courtroom
4 ever since.

Bosch’s lawyer, deputy city attorney Rod Belk, had fought like hell during pretrial stages to have the judge disqualified
on procedural ground and to get another judge assigned to the case. Preferably a judge without a background as a guardian
of civil rights. But he had failed.

However, Bosch was not as upset by this as Belk. He realized that Judge Keyes was cut from the same legal cloth as plaintiff’s
attorney Honey Chandler — suspicious of police, even hateful at times — but Bosch sensed that beyond that he was ultimately
a fair man. And that’s all Bosch thought he needed to come out okay. A fair shot at the system. After all, he knew in his
heart his actions at the apartment in Silverlake were correct. He had done the right thing.

“It will be up to you,” the judge was saying to the jury, “to decide if what the lawyers say is proven during trial. Remember
that. Now, Ms. Chandler, you go first.”

Honey Chandler nodded at him and stood up. She moved to the lectern that stood between the plaintiff’s and the defense tables.
Judge Keyes had set the strict guidelines earlier. In his courtroom, there was no moving about, no approaching the witness
stand or jury box by lawyers. Anything said out loud by a lawyer was said from the lectern between the tables. Knowing the
judge’s strict demand for compliance to his guidelines, Chandler even asked his permission before turning the heavy mahogany
altar at an angle so she would face the jury while speaking. The judge sternly nodded his approval.

“Good afternoon,” she began. “The judge is quite right when he tells you that this statement is nothing more than a road map.”

Good strategy, Bosch thought from the cellar of cynicism from which he viewed this whole case. Pander to the judge with your
first sentence. He watched Chandler as she referred to the yellow legal pad she had put down on the lectern. Bosch noticed
that over the top button of her blouse was a large pin with a round black onyx stone set in it. It was flat and as dead as
a shark’s eye. She had her hair pulled severely back and braided in a no-nonsense style behind her head. But one tress of
hair had come loose and it helped affect the image of a woman not preoccupied with her looks but totally focused on the law,
on the case, on the heinous miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the defendant. Bosch believed she probably pulled the hair
loose on purpose.

As he watched her start, Bosch remembered the thud he had felt in his chest when he heard she was the lawyer for Church’s
wife. To him, it was far more disturbing than learning Judge Keyes had been assigned the trial. She was that good. That was
why they called her Money.

“I would like to take you down the road a piece,” Chandler said and Bosch wondered if she was even developing a southern accent
now. “I just want to highlight what our case is about and what we believe the evidence will prove. It is a civil rights case.
It involves the fatal shooting of a man named Norman Church at the hands of the police.”

She paused here. Not to look at her yellow pad but for effect, to gather all attention to what she would say next. Bosch looked
over at the jury. Five women and seven men. Three blacks, three Latinos, one Asian and five whites. They were looking at Chandler
with rapt attention.

“This case,” Chandler said, “is about a police officer who wasn’t satisfied with his job and the vast powers it gave him.
This officer also wanted your job. And he wanted Judge Keyes’s job. And he wanted the state’s job of administering the verdicts
and sentences set down by judges and juries. He wanted it all. This case is about Detective Harry Bosch, who you see sitting
at the defendant’s table.”

She pointed at Bosch while drawing out the word dee-fend-ant. Belk immediately stood up and objected.

“Miss Chandler does not need to point my client out to the jury or make sarcastic vocalizations. Yes, we are at the defense
table. That’s because this is a civil case and in this country anybody can sue anybody, even the family of a —”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Chandler shouted. “He is using his objection to further try to destroy the reputation of Mr. Church,
who was never convicted of anything because —”

“Enough!” Judge Keyes thundered. “Objection sustained. Ms. Chandler, we don’t need to point. We all know who we are. We also
do not need inflammatory accent being placed on any words. Words are beautiful and ugly, all on their own. Let them stand
for themselves. As for Mr. Belk, I find it acutely annoying when opposing counsel interrupts opening statements or closing
arguments. You will have your turn, sir. I would suggest that you not object during Ms. Chandler’s statement unless an egregious
trespass on your client has occurred. I do not consider pointing at him worth the objection.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Belk and Chandler said in unison.

“Proceed, Ms. Chandler. As I said in chambers this morning, I want opening statements done by the end of the day and I have
another matter at four.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” she said again. Then, turning back to the jury, she said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we all need our
police. We all look up to our police. Most of them — the vast majority of them — do a thankless job and do it well. The police
department is an indispensable part of our society. What would we do if we could not count on police officers to serve and
protect us? But that is not what this trial is about. I want you to remember that as the trial progresses. This is about what
we would do if one member of that police force broke away from the rules and regulations, the policies that govern that police
force. What we are talking about is called a rogue cop. And the evidence will show that Harry Bosch is a rogue cop, a man
who one night four years ago decided to be judge, jury and executioner. He shot a man that he thought was a killer. A heinous
serial killer, yes, but at the moment the defendant chose to pull out his gun and fire on Mr. Norman Church there was no legal
evidence of that.