Page 61 of Resurrection Walk

“You’ll subpoena her as a witness?”

“Not with what we know now. Too many things that aren’t clear. It would be too dangerous to bring her in. No telling what she’d say on the stand.”

We pushed through the heavy doors onto Temple Street and headed back to the Lincoln.

20

I WANTED TOget home so I could start writing the real petition that I would file on behalf of Lucinda Sanz. No more props, no more games. It was time to put together the narrative that would make the case for my client’s actual innocence. As I had told Lucinda, the world was turned upside down. She was now considered guilty until proven innocent. The initial document I would write in the next few days needed to make clear, without giving away the store, what I would present and what I would prove. It needed to do more than shake cages in the sheriff’s department. It had to be compelling enough to make a U.S. district court judge sit up in his or her comfortable chambers and say, “I want to hear more.” I had at least two solid things going for me at this point that were not hearsay or otherwise dismissible. One was the revelation that Roberto Sanz was in a sheriff’s clique, which brought a clear implication of organized corruption. The other was the meeting between Sanz and an FBI agent just an hour before his murder. That was new evidence that pointed to a wide range of suspects other than Lucinda Sanz. I believed that these could get me through the habeas door. But I knew I would need more — much more — once I got through.

I told Bosch to take me home. He had his own assignment: Identify the other members of Roberto Sanz’s unit, especially any female deputies. He needed to put a name to Lady X.

Bosch pulled to the curb on Fareholm by the stairs to my front door.

“So, I’m around if you need me,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I have the crew names put together.”

“You know where to find me,” I said. “I cleared my schedule to write —”

I stopped mid-sentence when I looked up the stairs to the front door.

“What is it?” Bosch asked.

“My front door’s open,” I said. “Those bastards…”

We both got out and proceeded cautiously up the steps to the deck.

“I don’t have a weapon,” Bosch announced.

“Good,” I said. “I don’t want another shooting in here.”

More than fifteen years earlier, I had exchanged fire in my home with a woman intent on killing me. It was the one and only gunfight I’d ever been in. I had won it and I wasn’t interested in risking a perfect record.

“Besides, I doubt there’s anyone inside,” I added. “Like at your place, they’re just sending a message: ‘We know about you, we’re watching you.’”

“Whoever ‘they’ are,” Bosch said.

I entered first and found the front room empty and undisturbed. It was a small house with a big view, on the other side of the hills from Bosch’s place. Living room, dining room, and kitchen were in the front, and two bedrooms and an office were in the back. The backyard was barely big enough for a deck and the hot tub I never used.

As we moved through, I saw no signs of a break-in. We saw nothing out of place until we moved down the hallway and reached the office.

The intruders had left the room in shambles: drawers pulled out of the desk and overturned on the floor, couch upholstery slashed with a blade, lawbooks knocked off shelves. The coup de grâce came from a bottle of maple syrup I’d brought back from a trip to Montreal with my daughter the year before. I had left it on a shelf as a reminder of the fun we’d had. Now it was shattered on the floor, its contents having been poured onto the keyboard of the laptop lying open next to the shards of glass.

“With you, they only made you think there was a break-in, right?” I asked.

“That or made me think I was losing my mind,” Bosch said.

“Well, I would rather have had that than this.”

“Yeah. Will you call it in?”

“Did you?”

“I made a report. You told me to. But nothing’s going to come of it.”

“I get the feeling that’s what they want me to do.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. It’s their plan, not mine. But I don’t have time to deal with a police investigation that won’t lead to anything. They want to distract me.”

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