Resurrection Walk

“Well, we were interested in knowing Roberto Sanz’s movements on the day he was murdered,” Bosch said. “We knew he carried a cell phone and we got the number from Lucinda Sanz’s phone records. She had called him several times on the evening he was killed. So from there, I went to a website where you plug in a cell number and it tells you which company is the carrier.”

“For the record, what website was that?” Haller asked.

“It’s called FreeCarrierLookup-dot-com. I put in Roberto’s number and it determined that his carrier was AT and T. From there you prepared a subpoena for all data on all of AT and T’s cell towers in the Antelope Valley for the day of the murder.”

Haller whistled.

“That must have been a lot of data,” he said.

“It was,” Bosch said. “The printout was almost two thousand pages, single-spaced.”

“In layman’s terms, can you tell us what kind of data it was?”

“Well, every company has its own cell towers. Some geographic areas have more than others and that’s why you see in the TV ads for these companies how they talk about the best coverage and so forth. If you have a cell phone, it is constantly in contact with all the towers in your area, and as you move, the connections move.”

“Sort of like Tarzan swinging on vines from tree to tree, your connection moves from tower to tower?”

“Uh, I never thought about it that way, but yes, I guess it’s like that.”

“So you were able to find Roberto Sanz’s number in these two thousand pages.”

“I was. And I got a map of AT and T’s cell-tower locations throughout the AV and—”

“‘AV’?”

“Sorry, Antelope Valley.”

“And how did that help you?”

“Like I said, a cell phone is connected to many of its carrier’s towers at once, but the connection is strongest to the tower nearest the phone. And the data transmitted from the phone to the tower includes decibel strength based on proximity and GPS coordinates. That’s why when you use a mapping app like Waze or Google Maps, you see your exact location on the screen.”

“Are you saying that this data you collected with the subpoena showed exactly where Roberto Sanz was located throughout the day of his death?”

“Correct. And I was able to chart it on a map.”

“Do you have that map with you?”

“Yes.”

Haller turned his attention to the judge and asked if Bosch could step off the witness stand and display the map on a courtroom easel so that he could better explain his findings. With no objection from Morris, Coelho allowed it and the court clerk retrieved the easel from an equipment closet. Five minutes later, Bosch’s unfolded map was clipped to the easel. There were three lines — red, blue, and green — charted on the map. Bosch had carefully drawn the lines with the map spread across his dining room table. He hoped his conclusions would be clear and understandable to the judge.

“Okay, so what do we have here, Detective Bosch?” Haller asked.

Before Bosch could answer, Morris objected.

“He is no longer a police officer or a detective,” he said. “He should not be referred to as ‘Detective.’”

“Sustained,” Coelho said.

Haller threw a look at Morris that clearly said that was a chickenshit objection, then moved back to his direct examination of Bosch.

“I see three lines on your map,” he said. “Which is Roberto Sanz?”

“This one,” Bosch said. “The green.”

“I’m sure we will get to the others soon enough, but let’s stick with the green. What did you find that was significant about Roberto Sanz’s movements in the hours before his death?”

Bosch pointed to a spot on the green track.

“This place right here in Lancaster,” he said. “The data showed that he was here for nearly two hours.”

“And what is significant about that?” Haller asked.

“Well, two things. One is that this location is a hamburger place called Flip’s and this was where Roberto Sanz had gotten into a shoot-out with four gang members the year before. The second is that it was established in the original investigation that Roberto was two hours late bringing his son home to Lucinda, and he told her he had had a work meeting. But it was determined that there had been no meeting involving his sheriff’s unit. So this is new information placing him at this business during those two hours — the place where he had been in a shoot-out the year before.”

“And now, looking at your map, I see the red line intersects Roberto Sanz’s green line at that location. Am I reading that correctly?”

“Yes. Those two phones were there almost the same amount of time. The red phone was actually there first, arriving six minutes before the green. Then they both left an hour and forty-one minutes later.”

“And what did you take from that?”

Morris objected, stating that Bosch’s answer would be speculation and not fact. The judge sustained the objection and Haller started another path toward the answer he wanted.

“How did you come up with the red line?” he asked.