The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(10)

“None of it. But we’ll see. She’s good but I don’t know if she’s good enough.”

“And she’s really coming in from New York?”

“I told you, none of it was bullshit.”

“So what’s she going to do? Attack the lab? Say they blew it?”

Bosch was tired of that defense. It may have worked for O. J. Simpson but that was a long time ago and there were so many other factors involved in that case. Big factors. The science of DNA was too good. A match was a match. If you wanted to knock it down you needed something other than to attack the science.

“I don’t know what she’s going to say,” Haller said. “That’s our deal. She’ll never shill. She calls them like she sees them.”

“Well, like I told you, I’ve been following the case,” Bosch said. “Knocking down the confession is one thing. But DNA’s another. You need to do something. You have the case file with you?”

“Most of it—all the trial prep. It’s in the trunk. Why?”

“I was thinking I could take a look at it for you. If you want, I mean. No promises. Just that something didn’t seem right in there when I was watching. Something was poking at me.”

“With the testimony? What?”

“I don’t know. Something that doesn’t add up.”

“Well, I’ve got tomorrow and then that’s it. No other witnesses. If you’re going to look, I need it today.”

“No problem. Right after lunch.”

“Fine. Knock yourself out. How’s the knee, by the way?”

“Good. Better every day.”

“Pain?”

“No pain.”

“You didn’t call because you’ve got a malpractice case, did you?”

“No, not that.”

“Then what?”

Bosch looked at the driver’s eyes in the rearview. She couldn’t help overhearing things. He didn’t want to talk in front of her.

“Wait till we sit down,” he said.

“Sure,” Haller said.

The Little Jewel was in Chinatown but it didn’t serve Chinese food. It was pure Cajun. They ordered at the counter and then got a table in a reasonably quiet corner. Bosch had gone with a shrimp po’boy sandwich. Haller had ordered the fried oyster po’boy and paid for both.

“So, new driver?” Bosch asked.

“Been with me three months,” Haller said. “No, four. She’s good.”

“She a client?”

“Actually, the mother of a client. Her son’s in county for a year on possession. We beat an intent-to-sell package, which wasn’t bad at all on my part. Mom said she’d work off the fees driving.”

“You’re all heart.”

“Man’s gotta pay the bills. We’re not all happy-go-lucky pensioners like you.”

“Yeah, that’s me all right.”

Haller smiled. He had successfully represented Bosch a few years earlier when the city tried to pull his pension.

“And this case,” Bosch said. “Herstadt. How’d you end up being appointed? I thought you didn’t handle murder cases anymore.”

“I don’t but the judge assigned it to me,” Haller said. “One day I was in his courtroom minding my own business on another case and he tags me with it. I’m like, ‘I don’t do murder cases, Judge, especially high-profile cases like this,’ and he’s, ‘You do now, Mr. Haller.’ So here I am with a fucking unwinnable case and getting paid hamburger when I usually get steak.”

“How come the PD didn’t take it?”

“Conflict of interest. The victim, Judge Montgomery, was formerly the Public Defender, remember?”

“Right, right. I forgot.”

Their numbers were called and Bosch went up to the counter to get their sandwiches and drinks. After he delivered the food to the table, Haller got down to the business of their meeting.

“So, you call me up in the middle of a trial and say you need to talk. So talk. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No, nothing like that.”

Bosch thought a moment before continuing. He had set up the meeting and now he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He decided to start at the beginning.

“About twelve years ago I caught a case,” he said. “A guy up on the overlook above the Mulholland Dam. Two in the back of the head, execution style. Turned out he was a doctor. A medical physicist. He specialized in gynecological cancers. And it turned out that he had gone up to St. Agatha’s in the Valley and cleared out all the cesium they use for treatment from a lead safe. It was missing.”

“I remember something about this,” Haller said. “The FBI jumped all over it, thinking it was a terrorist thing. Maybe a dirty bomb or something.”

“Right. But it wasn’t. It was something else. I worked it and we got the cesium back, but not before I got dosed pretty good with it. I was treated and then had five years of checkups—chest X-rays, the whole thing. I was clean every time and after the five years they said I was in the clear.”

Haller nodded in a way that seemed to indicate he knew which way this was going.

“So, all is well and I go in last month to get my knee done and they take blood,” Bosch said. “Routine stuff, except tests on it come back and I have something called CML—chronic myeloid leukemia.”