Resurrection Walk

“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.