The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  Now, for the first time, we would be on the same team in court, sitting side by side at the same table. But what had seemed like such a good idea—not to mention such a positive potential payoff for Maggie—was already manifesting itself as something jagged and rusty. Maggie was having issues with being second chair. And for good reason. She was a professional prosecutor. From drug dealers and petty thieves to rapists and murderers, she had put dozens of criminals behind bars. I had appeared in dozens of trials myself but never as a prosecutor. Maggie would have to play backup to a novice and that realization wasn’t sitting well with her.

  We sat in conference room A with the case files spread out before us on the big table. Though Williams had said I could run the case from my own independent office, the truth was, that wasn’t practical at the moment. I didn’t have an office outside my home. I primarily used the backseat of my Lincoln Town Car as my office and that wouldn’t do for The People versus Jason Jessup. I had my case manager setting up a temporary office in downtown but we were at least a few days away from that. So temporarily there we sat, eyes down and tensions up.

  “Maggie,” I said, “when it comes to prosecuting bad guys, I will readily admit that I couldn’t carry your lunch. But the thing is, when it comes to politics and prosecuting bad guys, the powers that be have put me in the first chair. That’s the way it is and we can either accept it or not. I took this job and asked for you. If you don’t think we—”

  “I just don’t like the idea of carrying your briefcase through this whole thing,” Maggie said.

  “You won’t be. Look, press conferences and outward appearances are one thing, but I fully assume that we’ll be working as a tag team. You’ll be conducting just as much of the investigation as I will be, probably more. The trial should be no different. We’ll come up with a strategy and choreograph it together. But you have to give me a little credit. I know my way around a courtroom. I’ll just be sitting at the other table this time.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Mickey. On the defense side you have a responsibility to one person. Your client. When you are a prosecutor, you represent the people and that is a lot more responsibility. That’s why they call it the burden of proof.”

  “Whatever. If you’re saying I shouldn’t be doing this, then I’m not the guy you should be complaining to. Go down the hall and talk to your boss. But if he kicks me off the case, you get kicked as well, and then you go back to Van Nuys for the rest of your career. Is that what you want?”

  She didn’t answer and that was an answer in itself.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s just try to get through this without pulling each other’s hair out, okay? Remember, I’m not here to count convictions and advance my career. For me, it’s one and done. So we both want the same thing. Yes, you will have to help me. But you will also be helping—”

  My phone started vibrating. I had left it out on the table. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen but took the call, just to get away from the conversation with Maggie.

  “Haller.”

  “Hey, Mick, how’d I do?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Sticks.”

  Sticks was a freelance videographer who fed footage to the local news channels and sometimes even the bigs. I had known him so long I didn’t even remember his real name.

  “How’d you do at what, Sticks? I’m busy here.”

  “At the press conference. I set you up, man.”

  I realized that it had been Sticks behind the lights, throwing the questions to me.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, you did good. Thanks for that.”

  “Now you’re going to take care of me on the case, right? Give me the heads-up if there’s something for me, right? Something exclusive.”

  “Yeah, no need to worry, Sticks. I got you covered. But I gotta go.”

  I ended the call and put the phone back on the table. Maggie was typing something into her laptop. It looked like the momentary discontent had passed and I was hesitant to touch it again.

  “That was a guy who works for the news stations. He might be useful to us at some point.”

  “We don’t want to do anything underhanded. The prosecution is held to a much higher standard of ethics than the defense.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t win.

  “That’s bullshit and I am not talking about doing anything un—”

  The door opened and Harry Bosch stepped in, pushing the door with his back because he was carrying two large boxes in his hands.

  “Sorry, I’m late,” he said.

  He put the boxes down on the table. I could tell the larger one was a carton from evidence archives. I guessed that the smaller one contained the police file on the original investigation.

  “It took them three days to find the murder box. It was on the ’eighty-five aisle instead of ’eighty-six.”

  He looked at me and then at Maggie and then back at me.

  “So what’d I miss? War break out in the war room?”

  “We were talking about prosecutorial tactics and it turns out we have opposing views.”

  “Imagine that.”

  He took the chair at the end of the table. I could tell he was going to have more to say. He lifted the top off the murder box and pulled out three accordion files and put them on the table. He then moved the box to the floor.

  “You know, Mick, while we’re airing out our differences… I think before you pulled me into this little soap opera, you should’ve told me a few things up front.”

  “Like what, Harry?”

  “Like that this whole goddamn thing is about money and not murder.”

  “What are you talking about? What money?”

  Bosch just stared at me without responding.

  “You’re talking about Jessup’s lawsuit?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I had an interesting discussion with Jessup today on the drive down. Got me thinking and it crossed my mind that if we jam this guy into a deal, the lawsuit against the city and county goes away because a guy who admits to murder isn’t going to be able to sue and claim he was railroaded. So I guess what I want to know is what we’re really doing here. Are we trying to put a murder suspect on trial or are we just trying to save the city and county a few million bucks?”

  I noticed Maggie’s posture straighten as she considered the same thing.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” she said. “If that—”

  “Hold on, hold on,” I interjected. “Let’s be cool about this. I don’t think that’s the case here, okay? It’s not that I haven’t thought about it but Williams didn’t say one word about going for a dispo on this case. He told me to take it to trial. In fact, he assumes it will go to trial for the same reason you just mentioned. Jessup will never take a dispo for time served or anything else because there is no pot of gold in that. No book, no movie, no payout from the city. If he wants the money, he’s got to go to trial and win.”

  Maggie nodded slowly as if weighing a valid supposition. Bosch didn’t seem appeased at all.

  “But how would you know what Williams is up to?” he asked. “You’re an outsider. They could’ve brought you in, wound you up and pointed you in the right direction and then sat back to watch you go.”

  “He’s right,” Maggie added. “Jessup doesn’t even have a defense attorney. As soon as he does he’ll start talking deal.”

  I raised my hands in a calming gesture.

  “Look, at the press conference today. I threw out that we were going for the death penalty. I just did that to see how Williams would react. He didn’t expect it and afterward he pressed me in the hallway. He told me that it wasn’t a decision I got to make. I told him it was just strategy, that I wanted Jessup to start thinking about a deal. And it gave Williams pause. He didn’t see it. If he was thinking of a deal just to blow up the civil action, I would have been able to read it. I’m good at reading people.”

  I could tell I still hadn’t quite won Bosc
h over.

  “Remember last year, with the two men from Hong Kong who wanted your ass on the next plane to China? I read them right and I played them right.”

  In his eyes I saw Bosch relent. That China story was a reminder that he owed me one and I was collecting.

  “Okay,” he said. “So what do we do?”

  “We assume Jessup’s going to go to trial. As soon as he lawyers up, we’ll know for sure. But we start preparing for it now, because if I was going to represent him, I would refuse to waive speedy trial. I would try to jam the prosecution on time to prepare and make the people put up or shut up.”

  I checked the date on my watch.

  “If I’m right, that gives us forty-eight days till trial. We’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then.”

  We looked at one another and sat in silence for a few moments before I threw the lead to Maggie.

  “Maggie has spent the better part of the last week with the prosecution file on this. Harry, I know what you just brought in will have a lot of overlap. But why don’t we start here by having Mags go through the case as presented at trial in ’eighty-six? I think that will give us a good starting point of looking at what we need to do this time out.”

  Bosch nodded his approval and I signaled for Maggie to begin. She pulled her laptop over in front of her.

  “Okay, a couple of basics first. Because it was a death penalty case, jury selection was the longest part of the trial. Almost three weeks. The trial itself lasted seven days and then there were three days of deliberation on the initial verdicts, then the death penalty phase went another two weeks. But seven days of testimony and arguments—that to me is fast for a capital murder case. It was pretty cut-and-dried. And the defense… well, there wasn’t much of a defense.”

  She looked at me as if I were responsible for the poor defense of the accused, even though I hadn’t even gotten out of law school by ’eighty-six.

  “Who was his lawyer?” I asked.

  “Charles Barnard,” she said. “I checked with the California bar. He won’t be handling the retrial. He’s listed as deceased as of ’ninety-four. The prosecutor, Gary Lintz, is also long gone.”

  “Don’t remember either of them. Who was the judge?”

  “Walter Sackville. He’s long retired but I do remember him. He was tough.”

  “I had a few cases with him,” Bosch added. “He wouldn’t take any shit from either side.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Okay, so the prosecution’s story was this. The Landy family—that was our victim, Melissa, who was twelve, her thirteen-year-old sister, Sarah, mother, Regina, and stepfather, Kensington—lived on Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park. The home was about a block north of Wilshire and in the vicinity of the Trinity United Church of God, which on Sundays back then drew about six thousand people to its two morning services. People parked their cars all over Hancock Park to go to the church. That is, until the residents there got tired of their neighborhood being overrun every Sunday with traffic and parking issues and went to City Hall about it. They got the neighborhood turned into a residential parking zone during weekend hours. You had to have a sticker to park on the streets, including Windsor. This opened the door to city-contracted tow truck operators patrolling the neighborhood like sharks on Sunday morning. Any cars without the proper resident sticker on the windshield were fair game. They got towed. Which finally brings us to Jason Jessup, our suspect.”

  “He drove a tow truck,” I said.

  “Exactly. He was a driver for a city contractor named Aardvark Towing. Cute name, got them to the front of the listings in the phone book back when people still used phone books.”

  I glanced at Bosch and could tell by his reaction that he was somebody who still used the phone book instead of the Internet. Maggie didn’t notice and continued.

  “On the morning in question Jessup was working the Hancock Park patrol. At the Landy house, the family happened to be putting a pool in the backyard. Kensington Landy was a musician who scored films and was doing quite well at the time. So they were putting in a pool and there was a large open hole and giant piles of dirt in the backyard. The parents didn’t want the girls playing back there. Thought it was dangerous, plus on this morning the girls were in their church dresses. The house has a large front yard. The stepfather told the girls to play outside for a few minutes before the family was planning to go off to church themselves. The older one, Sarah, was told to watch over Melissa.”

  “Did they go to Trinity United?” I asked.

  “No, they went to Sacred Heart in Beverly Hills. Anyway, the kids were only out there about fifteen minutes. Mother was still upstairs getting ready and the stepfather, who was also supposed to be keeping an eye on the girls, was watching television inside. An overnight sports report on ESPN or whatever they had back then. He forgot about the girls.”

  Bosch shook his head, and I knew exactly how he felt. It was not in judgment of the father but in understanding of how it could have happened and in the dread of any parent who knows how a small mistake could be so costly.

  “At some point, he heard screaming,” Maggie continued. “He ran out the front door and found the older girl, Sarah, in the yard. She was screaming that a man took Melissa. The stepfather ran up the street looking for her but there was no sign. Like that, she was gone.”

  My ex-wife stopped there for a moment to compose herself. Everyone in the room had a young daughter and could understand the shearing of life that happened at that moment for every person in the Landy family.

  “Police were called and the response was quick,” she continued. “This was Hancock Park, after all. The first bulletins were out in a matter of minutes. Detectives were dispatched right away.”

  “So this whole thing went down in broad daylight?” Bosch asked.

  Maggie nodded.

  “It happened about ten-forty. The Landys were going to an eleven o’clock service.”

  “And nobody else saw this?”

  “You gotta remember, this was Hancock Park. A lot of tall hedges, a lot of walls, a lot of privacy. People there are good at keeping the world out. Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything until Sarah started screaming, and by then it was too late.”

  “Was there a wall or a hedge at the Landy house?”

  “Six-foot hedges down the north and south property lines but not on the street side. It was theorized at the time that Jessup drove by in his tow truck and saw the girl alone in the yard. Then he acted impulsively.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments as we thought about the wrenching serendipity of fate. A tow truck goes by a house. The driver sees a girl, alone and vulnerable. All in a moment he figures he can grab her and get away with it.

  “So,” Bosch finally said, “how did they get him?”

  “The responding detectives were on the scene in less than an hour. The lead was named Doral Kloster and his partner was Chad Steiner. I checked. Steiner is dead and Kloster is retired and has late-stage Alzheimer’s. He’s no use to us now.”

  “Damn,” Bosch said.

  “Anyway, they got there quickly and moved quickly. They interviewed Sarah and she described the abductor as being dressed like a garbage man. Further questioning revealed this to mean that he was wearing dirty coveralls like the city garbage crews used. She said she heard the garbage truck in the street but couldn’t see it through a bush where she had hidden from her sister during a game of hide-and-seek. Problem is that it was a Sunday. There was no garbage pickup on Sundays. But the stepfather hears this and puts it together, mentions the tow trucks that run up and down the street on Sunday mornings. That becomes their best lead. The detectives get the list of city contractors and they start visiting tow yards.

  “There were three contractors who worked the Wilshire corridor. One of them is Aardvark, where they go and are told they have three trucks working in the field. The drivers are called in and Jessup is one of them. The other two guys are named Derek Wilbern a
nd William Clinton—really. They’re separated and questioned but nothing comes up suspicious. They run ’em through the box and Jessup and Clinton are clean but Wilbern has an arrest but no conviction on an attempted rape two years before. That would be good enough to get him a ride downtown for a lineup, but the girl is still missing and there’s no time for formalities, no time to put together a lineup.”

  “They probably took him back to the house,” Bosch said. “They had no choice. They had to keep things moving.”

  “That’s right. But Kloster knew he was on thin ice. He might get the girl to ID Wilbern but then he’d lose it in court for being unduly suggestive—you know, ‘Is this the guy?’ So he did the next best thing he could. He took all three drivers in their overalls back to the Landy house. Each was a white man in his twenties. They all wore the company overalls. Kloster broke procedure for the sake of speed, hoping to have a chance to find the girl alive. Sarah Landy’s bedroom was on the second floor in the front of the house. Kloster takes the girl up to her room and has her look out the window to the street. Through the venetian blinds. He radios his partner, who has the three guys get out of two patrol cars and stand in the street. But Sarah doesn’t ID Wilbern. She points to Jessup and says that’s the guy.”

  Maggie looked through the documents in front of her and checked an investigative chronology before continuing.

  “The ID is made at one o’clock. That is really quick work. The girl’s only been gone a little over two hours. They start sweating Jessup but he doesn’t give up a thing. Denies it all. They are working on him and getting nowhere when the call comes in. A girl’s body has been found in a Dumpster behind the El Rey Theatre on Wilshire. That was about ten blocks from Windsor and the Landy house. Cause of death would later be determined to be manual strangulation. She was not raped and there was no semen in the mouth or throat.”