The Crossing (7 page)

Cornell’s focus was on the Lynwood/Harrick angle and backgrounding Foster, while Schmidt worked the sexual predator angle. Schmidt’s task was the more difficult to investigate and prove because it relied upon the happenstance of Lexi Parks somehow, somewhere crossing the radar of a sexual sadist on the hunt. Bosch, like Cornell and Schmidt, had already read and seen enough to know the murder was not a crime of opportunity. There was more than enough evidence that the victim was stalked and the crime planned. The
BEWARE OF DOG
sign was the starting point of this supposition. According to the discovery, there was no dog in the house, and the killer seemed to know it. That suggested that the house on Orlando had been cased. Other factors such as the alarm system not being engaged and the husband working a midnight shift also added to the theory.

Schmidt carefully documented the victim’s activities in the six weeks prior to her death, trying to find the place where Foster and Parks crossed paths. She looked at hundreds of hours of video taken from cameras along Lexi’s path but she never found Foster in one digital frame. Bosch knew that this was the juncture where cases could go wrong. They had a suspect in custody and a DNA match. Some would already call that a slam-dunk case. But the investigators were being thorough. They were looking for more and in doing so they were sliding into the tunnel. The tunnel was the place where vision narrows and the investigator sees only the bird in hand. Bosch had to wonder if Schmidt had been looking for any other faces on those videos besides Foster’s.

Bosch made another note on the outside of the file, a reminder to tell Haller he should make a discovery request to be allowed access to all of the videos Schmidt had studied.

The chrono had an oblique reference to a witness interviewed by Cornell and identified only as AW—which Bosch recognized as shorthand for
alibi witness
. It was not uncommon to use coded abbreviations in reports to safeguard witnesses who were not officially given confidential informant status. Bosch also knew that AW could be a witness fortifying or knocking down a suspect’s alibi. In this case the chrono said that Cornell met with the AW seven days after Foster’s arrest and that the meeting lasted an hour.

Bosch skimmed through the remaining pages of the chrono and nothing else caught his eye. There were routine entries on preparations for the case to move toward trial. Cornell and Schmidt found nothing that directly tied Foster to the victim but they had his DNA, and apart from the O. J. Simpson case twenty years before, DNA was as good as it got when it came to closing out a case. Cornell, Schmidt, and the prosecutor assigned to the case were locked and loaded. They sailed through a four-hour preliminary hearing in April and were now ready for trial.

The prosecutor was a woman—always a good edge to have when it was a sex crime. Her name was Ellen Tasker and Bosch had worked with her on some big cases early in her career. She was good and lived up to her name when it came to making sure cases were ready for trial. She was a lifer in the D.A.’s Office, a prosecutor who kept her head below the level of office politics and just did her job. And she did it well. Bosch could not recall Tasker ever losing a case.

Before moving on, he called Haller.

“You said that your client had an alibi but you just couldn’t prove it.”

“That’s right. He was in the studio painting. He did that a lot—worked all night. But he worked alone. How am I going to prove that?”

“Did he have a cell phone?”

“No, no cell so no pinging record. Just the landline in the studio. Why?”

“There is a reference in the Chronological Log to one of the detectives meeting with an alibi witness. You know anything about that?”

“No, and if they found somebody who supports DQ’s alibi, they have to bring them forward.”

“DQ?”

“Da’Quan. He signs his paintings DQ. By the way, you know that’s how I’m getting paid, right? In paintings. I figure we get an acquittal and the value will go way up.”

Bosch didn’t care how Haller was getting paid.

“Listen to me. I’m not saying this witness supports his alibi. It’s probably the opposite. It was referenced in the chrono and I just wanted to know if you were aware.”

“No, I didn’t see that.”

“It was coded and brief—which makes me think it might be significant. I’ll look through the witness reports and see if I can find anything.”

“If you don’t find it, then that’s trouble for them. Violation of discovery.”

“Whatever. I’ll call you later.”

Clicking off, Bosch realized he needed to be more guarded with Haller and not just throw things out to him that he might tee up and take into court, dragging Bosch along with him.

Bosch looked through the printouts until he found the stack of witness statements. He started paging through them, checking the summaries for who they were and what they said. The great majority were witnesses from the Lexi Parks side of the investigation: friends, co-workers, professional acquaintances who were interviewed as the investigation took shape. There were also statements from her husband and several Sheriff’s deputies who knew Parks through him. The second half of the stack contained interviews from people who knew Da’Quan Foster. Many of these were LAPD officers who knew of him from his active gang days. There were also statements from former parole officers, neighbors, fellow shopkeepers, and the suspect’s wife, Marta.

Bosch found what he was looking for on a twofer—a report page that had statements from two witnesses summarized on it. It was an old discovery trick. Turn over reams of paper as a way of hiding the one thing you don’t want the defense attorney to notice. The prosecution had not violated the rules of discovery but had made finding the important piece of information a needle in the haystack.

The top half of the witness report contained the summary of an interview with a neighbor of Da’Quan Foster’s who said he did not see Foster’s car parked in front of his house on the night of the murder. It was a relatively harmless comment because Foster was not claiming that he was at home. He was claiming he spent the night painting in his studio.

But just a line below the neighbor’s statement was the start of another statement from someone identified only as M. White. This statement said M. White stopped by Foster’s studio on the night of the murder to see Foster but the painter was not there. That was all that was included in the report but it was enough for Bosch to know that Cornell and Schmidt had found someone who could counter Foster’s claim that he had spent the entire night in the studio painting.

The subterfuge employed by the detectives to hide the identity and value of the witness known as M. White didn’t really bother Bosch. He assumed that “M. White” was not the witness’s name but rather his gender and race. He knew all Haller would have to do is file a motion citing insufficient discovery and the sheriffs would have to cough up the real identity. It was all part of the game and he had pulled the haystack move himself on occasion as a cop. What troubled him was the fact that now there was an alibi issue added to the DNA match that put Foster at the crime scene.

It was enough to make him want to drop the review of the case right there and then.

Harry thought about it for a little bit while he finished his coffee and gave his eyes a rest. He took off his reading glasses and looked out through the window at the busy intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica. He knew he still had the autopsy and the crime scene photos to go through to complete his review of the murder file. He had saved the photos for last because they would be the most difficult to look at—and were not something he would risk doing in a public place like a coffee shop.

His eyes suddenly caught on a familiar face across the intersection. Mickey Haller smiling from the back of a bus moving south on Fairfax. The advertisement carried a slogan that made Bosch want to dump the whole file in the trash can.

Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Fee.
Call the Lincoln Lawyer.

Bosch got up from the table and went to the trash can. He dropped his empty cup in and headed out the door.

E
ntering his house, Bosch looked at the empty dining room table and was tempted to sit down and spread out the printouts and photos from the case. But he knew his daughter would be getting home at any time and he didn’t want to risk her stumbling onto a bad scene. He went down the hallway to his bedroom, closed the door, and started spreading things out on his bed—right after he made it and smoothed the top covers.

What he spread out were the 8 × 10 color copies of the crime scene photos from Lexi Parks’s house. These included several dozen of the victim’s body as it had been found on her bed. They were shots taken from many angles and from many different distances ranging from full room shots to extreme close-ups of specific wounds and parts of the body.

There were also photos taken from many angles of all the other rooms in the house, and his plan was to look at them second.

The crime scene photos created a grisly tableau on the bed. The murder of Lexi Parks had been excessively violent and the harshness of it was not buffered by the one-step-removed process of viewing the scene through photos. There was a stark quality to the shots that Bosch was familiar with. Police photographers were not artists. Their job was to unflinchingly reveal all, and the photographer on the Parks case did just that.

Bosch had spread the photos out in a matrix of eight across and eight down and he stood at the end of the bed, taking in the overall murder mosaic. He then picked up individual photos one by one and studied them. He took a magnifying glass from a drawer in his dresser so that he could see some aspects of the photos even closer up.

It was difficult work. Bosch never got accustomed to viewing crime scenes. He had been to hundreds of them and seen the result of human inhumanity too many times to count. He always thought that if he got used to it, then he had lost something inside that was needed to do the job right. You had to have an emotional response. It was that response that lit the match that started the fire of relentlessness.

What lit the match this time was Lexi Parks’s hands. She had obviously tried to fight her attacker. She had struggled and put her arms up to ward off the assault. But she was quickly overpowered by repeated blows to her face. Her hands fell back on the bed, palms up, almost as if she was raising them in surrender. It touched Bosch. It made him angry, made him want to find and hurt whoever had done this.

How could Haller defend the man who did this?

Harry went into the bathroom to fill a glass with water. He drank it while standing in the doorway and looking at the photos from the side. He worked to calm himself so that he could continue to professionally assess the photos and the crime scene.

He went back to the bed and studied the photos again and soon started drawing conclusions about the crime. He believed that the victim had been asleep in her bed. She was on the right side of a king, having left room for her husband on the left. It appeared to Bosch that the killer had surprised her in her sleep, straddling her and taking immediate control as she awoke. He probably put one hand over her mouth, maybe held a weapon with the other. She got her hands loose to fight and then he started striking her.

And he didn’t stop. Long after her defenses were down and she was incapacitated, she was struck over and over again with a hard object. The face of the victim in the photos bore no resemblance to the face Bosch had seen accompanying the many newspaper stories generated by her murder. The face of the victim in the photos in fact bore no resemblance to any face at all. The nose was literally gone, interred in the pulp of blood and tissue that had been her face. Both eye sockets were crushed and misshapen, pieces of broken teeth and bone shone brightly in the blood. The eyes were half-lidded and the normal singular focus was broken. One stared forward, the other down and to the left.

Bosch sat down on a chair in the corner of the room and looked at the grid of photos from afar. The only thing worse would have been his being at the real scene, which would have added a multisensory dimension to his revulsion. No murder scene ever smelled pleasant. No matter how fresh, no matter how clean the environment.

His eyes kept going to the hands and he noticed from his new position a slight discoloration to the victim’s skin on the left wrist. He got up to go back to the bed. The photo was a wide shot that displayed the entire body in situ. He bent over the photo with the magnifying glass and saw that the woman’s wrist had slight tan lines left by a thick bracelet or, most likely, a watch.

Since he had seen nothing in the summaries or reports about the murder being possibly motivated by robbery, the missing watch was curious to Bosch. Had the victim been wearing it at the time of the attack? Had she taken it off to sleep? Had it fallen or been pulled off during her struggle to live? Had it been taken by her attacker as a souvenir?

Bosch studied the bed table next to the body. There was a bottle of water, a prescription bottle, and a paperback novel, but the watch wasn’t there. He went back to the printouts and looked at the property report. Since the victim was murdered in her own home, the property report dealt primarily with items from the crime scene and the house that were specifically examined by the investigators or forensics team. There was nothing here about the watch. It had apparently not come off in the victim’s struggle. It had not been noted as having been found in the bedding, on the floor, or anywhere else.

Bosch next flipped back into the Chronological Log to check if he had missed a mention of the watch in the early stages of the investigation—before there was a focus on Da’Quan Foster. He found nothing and wrote a note about the watch on the outside of the file below his other notations.

He collected all the photos of the body from the bed and put the stack to the side in case his daughter came home. He then moved to the second stack of photos, which were the shots taken of every room in the victim’s house at the time of the on-site investigation. This was a sign of the thoroughness of the investigation. Bosch knew that the photos from other rooms of the house would have been a call and request made by the lead investigators. It showed they were not cutting corners.