The Reversal

I put the paper down on the table.

“No, Williams sent her back to Van Nuys. Her part in the case is over.”

“Why isn’t Williams moving her downtown?”

“The deal was that we had to get a conviction for her to get downtown. We didn’t.”

I gestured to the newspaper.

“And we weren’t going to get one. This one holdout juror is telling anybody who’ll listen that he would’ve voted not guilty. So I guess you can say Gabriel Williams is a man who keeps his word. Maggie’s going nowhere fast.”

That’s how it worked in the nexus of politics and jurisprudence. And that’s why I couldn’t wait to go back to defending the damned.

We sat in silence for a while after that and I thought about my ex-wife and how my efforts to help her and promote her had failed so miserably. I wondered if she would begrudge me the effort. I surely hoped not. It would be hard for me to live in a world where Maggie McFierce despised me.

“They found something,” Bosch said.

I looked up from my thoughts and focused. One of the diggers was using a pair of tweezers to put something from the dirt into a plastic evidence bag. Soon she stood up and headed toward us with the bag. She was Kathy Kohl, the ME’s forensic archaeologist.

She handed Bosch the bag and he held it up to look. I could see that it contained a silver bracelet.

“No bones,” Kohl said. “Just that. We’re at thirty-two inches down and it’s rare that you find a murder interment much further down than that. So this one’s looking like the other two. You want us to keep digging?”

Bosch glanced at the bracelet in the bag and looked up at Kohl.

“How about another foot? That going to be a problem?”

“A day in the field beats a day in the lab anytime. You want us to keep digging, we’ll keep digging.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“You got it.”

She went back to the excavation pit and Bosch handed the evidence bag to me to examine. It contained a charm bracelet. There were clots of dirt in the links and its charms. I could make out a tennis racket and an airplane.

“Do you recognize it?” I asked. “From one of the missing girls?”

He gestured to the stack of files on the table.

“No. I don’t remember anything about a charm bracelet in the lists.”

“It could’ve just been lost up here by somebody.”

“Thirty-two inches down in the dirt?”

“So you think Jessup buried it, then?”

“Maybe. I’d hate to come away from this empty-handed. The guy had to have come up here for a reason. If he didn’t bury them here, then maybe this was the kill spot. I don’t know.”

I handed the bag back to him.

“I think you’re being too optimistic, Harry. That’s not like you.”

“Well, then what the hell do you think Jessup was doing up here all those nights?”

“I think he and Royce were playing us.”

“Royce? What are you talking about?”

“We were had, Harry. Face it.”

Bosch held the evidence bag up again and shook it to loosen the dirt.

“It was a classic misdirection,” I said. “The first rule of a good defense is a good offense. You attack your own case before you ever get to court. You find its weaknesses and if you can’t fix them, then you find ways of deflecting attention away from them.”

“Okay.”

“The biggest weakness to the defense’s case was Eddie Roman. Royce was going to put a liar and a drug addict on the stand. He knew that given enough time, you would either find Roman or find out things about him or both. He needed to deflect. Keep you occupied with things outside the case at hand.”

“You’re saying he knew we were following Jessup?”

“He could’ve easily guessed it. I put up no real opposition to his request for an OR release. That was unusual and probably got Royce thinking. So he sent Jessup out at night to see if there was a tail. As we already considered before, he probably even sent Jessup to your house to see if he would engage a response and confirm surveillance. When it didn’t, when it got no response, Royce probably thought he was wrong and dropped it. After that, Jessup stopped coming up here at night.”

“And he probably thought he was in the clear to go build his dungeon under the pier.”

“It makes sense. Doesn’t it?”

Bosch took a long time to answer. He put his hand on top of the stack of files.

“So what about all these missing girls?” he asked. “It’s all just coincidence?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We may never know now. All we know is that they’re still missing and if Jessup was involved, then that secret probably died with him yesterday.”

Bosch stood up, a troubled look on his face. He was still holding the evidence bag.

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“Where do you go from here?”

Bosch shrugged.

“The next case. My name goes back into the rotation. What about you?”

I splayed my hands and smiled.

“You know what I do.”

“You sure about that? You made a damn good prosecutor.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for that, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Besides, they’d never let me back on that side of the aisle. Not after this.”

“What do you mean?”