The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(111)

“Harry,” she said. “You need to listen.”





2

Bosch felt like the walls of the war room were closing in on him. In his mind and in reality, he had put Borders away for good. He didn’t count on the sadistic sex murderer ever getting the needle, but death row was its own particular hell, one that was still harsher than any sentence that put a man in general population. The isolation of it was what Borders deserved. He went up to San Quentin as a twenty-six-yearold man. That meant fifty-plus years of solitary confinement. Less if he got lucky. More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California.

“It’s not as simple as you think,” Kennedy said.

“Really?” Bosch said. “Tell me why.”

“The obligation of the Conviction Integrity Unit is to consider all legitimate petitions that come to it. Our review process is the first stage, and that happens in-house before they go to the LAPD or other law enforcement. When a case meets a certain threshold of concern, we go to the next step and call in law enforcement to carry out a due diligence investigation.”

“And of course everyone is sworn to secrecy at that point.”

Bosch looked at Soto as he said it. She looked away.

“Absolutely,” Kennedy said.

“I don’t know what evidence Borders or his lawyer brought to you, but it’s bullshit,” Bosch said. “He murdered Danielle Skyler and everything else is a scam.”

Kennedy didn’t respond but from his look Bosch could tell he was surprised he still remembered the victim’s name.

“Yeah, thirty years later I remember her name,” Bosch said. “I also remember Donna Timmons and Vicki Novotney, the two victims we couldn’t make cases on. Were they part of this due diligence you conducted?”

“Harry,” Soto said, trying to calm him.

“Borders didn’t bring any new evidence,” Kennedy said. “It was already there.”

That hit Bosch like a punch. He knew Kennedy was talking about the physical evidence from the case. The implication was that there was evidence from the crime scene or that had been collected elsewhere by Bosch that cleared Borders of the crime. The greater implication was incompetence or, worse, malfeasance—that he had missed the evidence or intentionally withheld it.

“What are we talking about here?” he asked.

“DNA,” Kennedy said. “It wasn’t part of the original case in ’eighty-eight. The case was prosecuted before DNA was allowed into use in criminal cases in California. It wasn’t introduced and accepted by a court up in Ventura for another year. In L.A. County it was a year after that.”

Kennedy nodded to Soto.

“We went to property and pulled the box,” she said. “You know the routine. We took clothing collected from the victim to the lab and they put it through the serology protocol.”

“They did a protocol twenty-nine years ago,” Bosch said. “But back then, they looked for ABO markers instead of DNA. And they found nothing. You’re going to tell me that—”

“They found semen,” Kennedy said. “It was a minute amount, but this time they found it. The process has obviously gotten more sophisticated in thirty years. And it didn’t come from Borders.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “Whose was it?”

“A rapist named Lucas John Olmer,” Soto said.

Bosch had never heard of Olmer. His mind went to work, looking for the scam, the fix, but not considering that he had been wrong when he closed the cuffs around Borders’s wrists.

“Olmer’s in San Quentin, right?” he said. “This whole thing is a—”

“No, he’s not,” Tapscott said. “He’s dead.”

“Give us a little credit, Harry,” Soto added. “It’s not like we went looking for it to be this way. Olmer was never in San Quentin. He died in Corcoran four years ago and he never knew Borders.”

“Big surprise there,” Tapscott said. “Those prisons are only three hundred miles apart.”

His misplaced sarcasm gave Bosch the urge to backhand him across the mouth. Soto knew her old partner’s triggers and reached over to put a hand on Bosch’s arm.

“Harry, this is not your fault,” she said. “This is on the lab. The reports are all there. You are right—they found nothing. They missed it back then.”

Bosch looked at her and pulled his arm back.

“You really believe that?” he said. “Because I don’t. This is Borders. He’s behind this—somehow. I know it.”

“How, Harry? We’ve looked for the fix in this.”

“Who’s been in the box since then?”

“The last person to pull the box was you. Eleven years ago, when you were working with Allingwood on Borders’s final appeal. Show him the video.”

She nodded to Tapscott, who pulled his phone and opened up a video. He turned the screen to Bosch.

“This is at Piper Tech,” he said.

Piper Tech was where the LAPD’s records and evidence property archives were located, along with the fingerprint unit. The aero squadron had the roof. Bosch knew that the integrity protocol in the archival unit was high. Sworn officers had to provide departmental ID and fingerprints to pull a case. The boxes were opened in an examination area under twenty-four-hour video surveillance. But this was Tapscott’s own video, recorded on his phone.