Two Kinds of Truth (A Harry Bosch Novel)

by Michael Connelly

  “That’s not fair and you know it.”

  “And one other thing? I’d never sell out a partner. Even a dead one.”

  He disconnected. He felt a pang of guilt. He was being heavy-handed with Soto but felt he needed to push her toward giving him what he needed.

  Since he had finished his career with the LAPD working cold cases, it had been many years since he had worked a live murder scene. With the return of crime scene instincts came the tug of old habits. He felt a deep need for a cigarette. He looked around to see if there was anyone he could borrow a smoke from and saw Lourdes approaching from the short end of the block. She had a troubled look on her face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I came out to talk to the photographer, and got signaled up to the tape. Mrs. Esquivel, the wife and mother of our victims, was stopped at the tape and she was hysterical. I just put her in a car and they’re taking her to the station.”

  Bosch nodded. Keeping her away from the crime scene was the right move.

  “You up for talking with her?” he asked. “We can’t leave her over there too long.”

  “I don’t know,” Lourdes said. “I just ruined her life. Everything that’s important to her is suddenly gone. Husband and her only child.”

  “I know, but you have to establish rapport. You never know, this case could go on for years. She’s going to need to trust the person carrying it. You’ve got Spanish and a lot of years ahead of you here. I don’t.”

  “Okay, I can do it.”

  “Focus on the son. His friends, what he did when he wasn’t working, enemies, all of that stuff. Find out where he lived, whether he had a girlfriend. And ask the mother if José Sr. was having any problems with him at work. The son is going to be the key to this.”

  “You get all that from a shot up the ass?”

  Bosch nodded.

  “I’ve seen it before. On a case where we talked to a profiler. It’s an angry shot. It has payback written all over it.”

  “He knew the shooters?”

  “No doubt. Either he knew them or they knew him. Or both.”

  5

  Bosch didn’t get to his home until after midnight. He was beat from a long day working the crime scene and coordinating the efforts of the other detectives as well as the patrol division. He had also been drawn into briefing Chief Valdez on where the investigation stood before the chief faced the cameras and reporters that had gathered on the mall. The update was concise: no suspects, no arrests.

  The assessment for the media was accurate but the investigators of the farmacia murders were not without leads. The murders and subsequent looting of the store’s supplies of prescription drugs had indeed been captured on three cameras inside the drugstore, and the full-color videos gave insight into the cold calculation of the crime. There had been two gunmen wearing black ski masks and carrying revolvers. They cut down José Esquivel Sr. and his son with a coldness that implied planning, precision, and intention. Bosch’s first thought after seeing the videos was that they were hit men there to do a job. Stealing pills was simply a cover for the true motive for the crime. Sadly, initial viewings of the video revealed few usable identifiers of either shooter. When one of the men extended his arm to shoot José Sr., his sleeve pulled back to reveal white skin. But nothing else stood out.

  After parking in the carport, Bosch skipped the side-door entrance to the house and walked out front so he could check his mailbox. He saw that the top of the box attached to the house was held open by a thick manila envelope. He pulled it out and held it under the porch light to see where it had come from.

  There was no return address and no postage on the envelope. Even his own address was missing. The envelope had only his name written on it. Bosch unlocked the door and carried it inside. He put the envelope and the mail he had received down on the kitchen counter while he opened the refrigerator to grab a beer.

  After his first draw on the amber bottle, he tore open the envelope. He slid out a one-inch-thick sheaf of documents. He recognized the top report right away. It was a copy of the initial incident report relating to Danielle Skyler’s murder in 1987. Bosch riffled through the stack of documents and quickly determined that he had a copy of the current investigative file.

  Lucia Soto had come through.

  Bosch was dead tired but he knew that he would not be going to sleep anytime soon. He dumped the rest of the beer down the drain, then brewed a cup of coffee on the Keurig his daughter had given him for Christmas. He grabbed the stack of documents and went to work.

  After his daughter had left for college, and family dinners became a rare occurrence, Bosch turned the dining room of the small house into a workspace. The table became a desk wide enough to spread investigative reports across—reports from cases he was pulling out of the jail cell at San Fernando or that he had taken on privately. He had also installed shelving on the two walls of the alcove and these were lined with more files and books on legal procedure and the California penal code as well as stacks of CDs and a Bose player for use when his vinyl collection and phonograph didn’t cover his musical needs.

  Bosch slotted a disc called Chemistry in the Bose and put the volume at midrange. It was an album of duets between Houston Person on tenor sax and Ron Carter on double bass. It was part of an ongoing musical conversation, their fifth and most recent collaboration, and Bosch had the earlier recordings on vinyl. It was perfect for midnight work. He took his usual spot at the table, with his back to the shelves and the music, and started going through the cache of documents.

  Initially he divided the documents along lines of old and new. Reports from the original investigation of Danielle Skyler’s murder—many of which he had written himself thirty years before—went into one pile, while the newer reports, prepared during the current reinvestigation, went into a second stack.

  While he clearly remembered the original investigation, he knew that many of the small details of the case had receded in his memory and that it was prudent for him to start with the old before reviewing the new. He was first drawn to the chronological record, which was always the starting point for reviewing a case. It was essentially a case diary—a string of brief dated and timed entries describing the investigative moves made by Bosch and his partner, Frankie Sheehan. Many of the entries would be expanded upon in summary reports but the chrono was the place to start for a step-by-step overview of the investigation.

  There was not a single computer in the Robbery-Homicide Division in 1987. Reports were either handwritten or typed out on IBM Selectrics. Most of the time chronos were handwritten. They were on lined paper in section 1 of the murder book. Each investigator, including those filling in or handling ancillary case tasks, would follow their own entries in the log with their initials, even though the different handwriting styles made the identity of the author obvious in most cases.

  Bosch was looking at photocopies of the original case chrono and recognized his handwriting as well as Sheehan’s. He also recognized the two different report-writing styles he and Sheehan employed. Sheehan, who was the more experienced of their team, used fewer words and often wrote in incomplete sentences. Bosch was more verbose, a characteristic of his report writing that would change over time as he learned what Sheehan already knew: less is more, meaning the less time you spent on paperwork, the more time you had to follow the leads of the case. And fewer words on the page also meant fewer words for a defense attorney to twist into his own interpretation in court.

  Bosch had gotten his detective’s badge in 1977 and spent five years working in various divisions and crime units before he was promoted to homicide detective and posted first at Hollywood Division and then eventually the elite Robbery-Homicide Division working out of Parker Center, downtown. At RHD he was paired with Sheehan, and the Skyler case was one of the first murders they handled as lead investigators.

  Danielle Skyler’s story was the universal story of Los Angeles, with an added irony of origin. Raised by a single mo
ther who worked as a motel maid in Hollywood, Florida, she filled the holes in her life with applause that came with success in beauty pageants and on the high school stage. Armed with her beauty and fragile confidence, she crossed the three thousand miles from Hollywood to Hollywood at age twenty. She found, as most do, that there was one of her from every small town in America. The paying jobs were few and she was often taken advantage of by the leeches who were part of the entertainment industry. But she persevered. She waited on tables, took acting classes, and went to an endless string of auditions for parts that usually didn’t have character names or many lines.

  She also built a community—young men and women engaged in the same struggle for success and fame. She saw many of them at the same auditions and casting offices. They traded tips on jobs both in entertainment and hospitality—meaning the restaurant business. By the time she was five years into the struggle, she had managed to amass a handful of movie and TV credits where she was primarily cast as eye candy. She had also given numerous showcase performances in small playhouses across the Valley and had finally transitioned out of restaurant work to a part-time job as a receptionist for a freelance casting agent.

  The five years in Los Angeles were also marked by several apartment moves, several roommate changes, and several relationships with different men ranging in age from five years younger than her to twenty-two years older. When she was found raped and strangled in the empty second bedroom of her Toluca Lake apartment, Bosch and Sheehan were faced with filling out a victim history that would take several weeks to complete.

  As Bosch read through the case chronology, several details about Skyler and the moves he and Sheehan had made came back to him, and the case seemed as fresh to him as the killings in La Farmacia Familia that morning. He remembered the faces of the friends and associates interviewed and listed in the chrono. He remembered how sure he and his partner were when they zeroed in on Preston Borders.

  Borders was also an actor who was struggling for a foothold in Hollywood. But he wasn’t doing it without a net. Unlike Danielle Skyler and thousands of other would-be artists who roll into L.A. each year with the certainty of the tide on Venice Beach, Borders didn’t have to work in hospitality or in phone sales or anywhere else. Borders was from a suburb of Boston and was staked by his parents in his efforts to become a movie star. His rent and car were paid for and his credit-card bills were sent to Boston. This allowed him to fill his days auditioning for film and TV roles and his nights moving through a seemingly endless rotation of clubs, where there were always numerous women like Skyler hoping for someone to clear their bar tab in exchange for a smile and conversation and maybe something more intimate if the feeling was right.

  According to the chrono, Bosch and Sheehan connected Borders to Skyler on November 1, 1987, the ninth day of the investigation. That was when they knocked on the door of a Skyler acquaintance named Amanda Margot. At the time, Margot was another ingenue actress. Thirty years later she could count herself among the lucky ones. She’d had a solid career in the film and television arenas, appearing in small roles in several films and as a lead in a long-running show where she played a no-holds-barred homicide detective. Bosch had read interviews with her in which she said that she drew her TV character’s sympathy for victims from the real-life murder of a close friend.

  Bosch remembered the initial interview with Margot like it was yesterday. At the time, the young actress had none of the trappings of success in her small Studio City apartment. Bosch and Sheehan sat on a threadbare couch from a secondhand store, and Margot sat on a chair she pulled into the living room from the kitchen.

  The two detectives had been interviewing four or five friends and associates of the victim a day and Margot was high on their list, but she had secured a week’s work at an auto show in Detroit presenting cars and had left town shortly after the murder. The appointment was set up for when she returned.

  Margot proved to be a font of information about Skyler. The two had been close, though they had never lived together. At the time of the murder, Skyler’s roommate had just moved out and given up on the dream of stardom. She had returned home to Texas, and Skyler was looking for a new roommate. Margot was in the last months of a lease and planned to move in with her friend right after the new year. Skyler was living by herself until then, though her family had told the investigators that her younger sister, traveling while on a gap year after high school, was planning on arriving for Thanksgiving and using the spare bedroom until both sisters went back to Florida for the Christmas holidays.

  Margot and Danielle had met three years previously in the waiting room of a casting agency where they were auditioning for the same part. Rather than becoming competitors, they had hit it off. Neither of them got the part but they got coffee afterward and a friendship was born. They moved in similar circles both professionally and socially. They tried to look out for each other, tipping one another off to potential jobs and about which casting directors or acting coaches were lecherous.

  Over time, they even dated some of the same men, and this was the point the detectives zeroed in on. Evidence and autopsy results indicated that Danielle Skyler had been brutally abused during the course of the night. She had been raped vaginally and anally and choked repeatedly. There were multiple thin furrow lines around her neck, some cutting through the skin, indicating that her killer had most likely choked her to unconsciousness and then brought her back for more abuse at least six times. It was possible that the garrote had been a necklace worn by the victim.

  The body was also mutilated with a knife that matched others from the kitchen, but at autopsy it was determined that the slashes were postmortem.

  It also appeared that the apartment had been tricked out to look like there had been an intruder. A sliding door on the second-floor balcony off the empty bedroom was left ajar, but there were no indications outside that anyone had climbed up and onto the balcony to pop the door and enter. The balcony’s metal railing had a thick layer of smog dust on it that had not been disturbed at any point on its entire length. This meant an intruder would have had to vault the railing without touching it to get to the sliding door. It was an improbable scenario, which led the investigators to consider the opposite—that Skyler’s killer had entered through the front door and without a struggle. It meant that he had known her on some level and wanted to disguise that fact from investigators.

  Amanda Margot revealed during her interview that one night two weeks before Skyler’s death, the two young women had gotten together in Margot’s apartment to drink cheap wine and order takeout. They were joined by a third actress, named Jamie Henderson, whom they also knew from the audition circuit. At some point during the evening, they started talking about men and learned that they had dated several of the same men, having met them through acting schools, casting agencies, and talent showcases. The women started making a “one-and-done” list of men they agreed should never be dated again.

  High on the list of reasons was that each man mentioned had been demanding and in some cases physically threatening when it came to wanting sex. Margot explained that many of the men they dated expected to have sex after one or two dates. It was the men who didn’t handle rejection well who were put on the one-and-done list.

  Here was where Bosch and Sheehan’s pursuit of this angle paid off. Though the one-and-done list might have come out of an alcohol-fueled girls’-night gossip session, Margot still had the piece of paper torn from a notebook and attached by a bottle-opener magnet to her refrigerator door. She provided it to the detectives and was able to point out the four names that Danielle Skyler had contributed to the list. They weren’t full names, and some, like “Bad Breath Bob,” were just nicknames.

  But number one on her list was the single name Preston. Margot said it was the name of a man only Skyler had dated and she couldn’t remember if it was a first or last name but she did recall the story that went with it. Danielle had said that Preston was a scholarship actor, m
eaning he had some kind of financial support and didn’t have to work a side job, and that he felt entitled to sex after a first date in which he had paid for dinner and drinks. Danielle said that he had grown very angry upon her rejection when she was being dropped off at her apartment and that he later came back to knock on her door and demand to be let in. She refused to open the door but he would not leave until she threatened to call the police.

  Margot reported that the date with Preston had occurred two weeks before the night the three women got together, which made it about four weeks before Skyler’s murder. When pressed for more details about Preston and where he and Skyler may have first met, Margot said it could only have been through some kind of industry nexus, since both Danielle and Preston were actors.

  The chronology revealed that finding Preston became a priority in the investigation. Bosch and Sheehan reworked ground already trodden, going back to those previously interviewed and asking about a man named Preston. They had no luck until they requested the audition logs from the prior three months of casting sessions conducted by the company Skyler had worked for as a receptionist. In the weeks leading up to the gossip session, the company had been casting secondary roles for a television show about people working in a hospital emergency room.

  On the sign-in list for auditions held on September 14, 1987, was the name Preston Borders. That list had been kept on a clipboard at the desk of the agency’s receptionist, Danielle Skyler.

  Bosch and Sheehan had found their one-and-done man.

  6

  The detectives carried out their due diligence and interviewed Jamie Henderson, the third woman involved in drawing up the one-and-done list. She confirmed Amanda Margot’s account of the evening and Danielle Skyler’s contributions to the list. They then identified and interviewed all the men Skyler had discussed, even Bad Breath Bob. But Bosch and Sheehan saved Preston Borders for last, because their instincts told them he could rise from the level of a person of interest to a suspect. A guy who would go back to the apartment of a woman who had rejected him, pound on the door, and demand to be allowed in for sex struck both detectives as behavior indicating the kind of psychosis found in sexual predators.