Page 124 of Resurrection Walk

“Fine.”

When we got to the door to the courtroom, he looked cautiously over his shoulder at me. But I made no move to pin him against the wall as I had done before. And he made no comment that spurred me to do so. But the moment made me realize something. I reached forward and put my hand on the door, preventing him from opening it.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Are you going to attack me again?”

“You knew, didn’t you?” I said.

“Knew what?”

“About my ex-wife. You brought her in here to stir things up, knock me off my game, because you knew about us.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I had no idea you two had been married.”

“Yes, you did. You knew. Who’s the grand master of smoke now, Morris?”

I took my hand off the door and he opened it and went through without another word to me.

42

TEAM SANZ HADa long working lunch at Drago Centro during which I reported on the in camera hearing and we planned the endgame of the case, which would depend on how the judge ruled. If the lab results were admitted, the strategy was obvious: I’d use Silver and Arslanian to introduce the timeline and evidence and then I’d bring it all home by calling Sanger back to the stand and confronting her with solid evidence that the GSR pads she had turned in had not been wiped over Lucinda Sanz’s hands. But if Coelho ruled the lab results inadmissible, I was left with only Sanger and not a lot to back up any sort of confrontational examination. Agent MacIsaac had given me a tip, but it was nothing more than innuendo. Sanger might be able to bat it away like it was a fly buzzing around her face.

“If you were betting, which way do you think she’ll go?” Bosch asked at one point.

“First of all, I wouldn’t bet,” I said. “It’s too close to call. It’s going to come down to whether she makes the legal call or the moral call. What does the law tell her to do? What does her gut tell her is the right thing to do?”

“Shit,” Cisco said. “Then you’ll have nothing to go after Sanger with. Game over.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “I had a visitor to my house last night, Agent MacIsaac. He was there to let me know that he would never testify in this case and the U.S. attorney was ready to back him on that and even defy a subpoena from a federal judge. But he didn’t come empty-handed. He told me why Roberto Sanz had gone to the Bureau and volunteered to wear a wire. It was about Sanger…”

I gave the intel that MacIsaac had given me and we spent the rest of the meal brainstorming ways of getting it into court. It was clear it would come down to my questioning of Sanger and finding the opportunity to confront her — easier said than done.

After our pasta, we bundled into the Navigator, and Bosch took us back to the courthouse. As we came out of the elevator and approached Coelho’s courtroom, I saw Sergeant Sanger waiting on a bench in the hall. She stared unflinchingly at me as we passed by, as if daring me to challenge her. I knew then that, one way or the other, I would do everything I could to take her down after the judge made her rulings.

I sat at the petitioner’s table and waited for Lucinda to be brought to the courtroom and for the judge to follow. I didn’t unpack my briefcase. I wanted to know which way I was going first. I looked up at the angry eagle, composed myself, and waited.

The questions came fast and furious from Lucinda once she was brought from lockup to the table.

“Mickey, what’s going on?” she asked. “I didn’t know what was happening and I was waiting so long in there.”

“I’m sorry about that, Cindi,” I said. “We’re going to get answers very soon. We went into the judge’s office and I presented evidence that showed that the gunshot-residue test was wrong. Was a setup, actually.”

“Who set me up?”

“Somebody in your ex-husband’s unit. Probably Sanger, since she’s the one who did the test on you.”

“Does that mean she killed Robbie?”

“I don’t know that, Cindi, but put it this way: If I need to convince the judge that it was somebody other than you, I’m going to point at her. She’s smack-dab in the middle of this, and if it wasn’t her, then she knows who it was.”

Lucinda’s face grew dark with anger. She had served five years for somebody else’s crime, and now she might have a name and face to focus that anger and blame on. I understood her.

“But listen,” I said. “There are complications with the evidence we uncovered, and we have to see if the judge is going to let it be part of what she considers. That’s why everything’s been delayed. The judge has been back there in chambers working on it.”

“Okay,” Lucinda said. “I hope she does the right thing.”

“Me too.”

I went quiet and thought about how I would react to each of the judge’s possible rulings. This led me to a plan I thought might help me salvage the case should the ruling not go my way. I quickly fired off a series of texts with instructions to Harry Bosch and Shami Arslanian. Bosch was in the hall watching Frank Silver in case he decided to hightail it before testifying. Arslanian was out there too, waiting to see if she would be called back to the witness stand.

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