Page 113 of Resurrection Walk

“He agreed to wear a wire. That day we met, he said he would do it. We were going to take down the whole unit. And then an hour later, it was over.”

“Because Sanger saw you two.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Obviously. Let me ask you something: Did he come to you or did you go to him?”

“He came to us. He wanted to clear his conscience, try to make things right. The clique he was in was taking things too far.”

“Just tell me this. He got killed right after you met with him, so how could you think it was his ex-wife?”

MacIsaac seemed to consider the question for the first time.

“Arrogance,” he finally said. “We’re the FBI. We don’t make mistakes like that. I thought the meeting was clean. I had a backup and they didn’t see anybody shadowing him. And then when I read about the evidence against your client, the GSR and all of that, I guess I believed what I wanted to believe. We shut down the investigation and moved on to the next one.”

“And an innocent woman has been sitting in a cell for five years. Great story. Our tax dollars at work. But you need to give me something, MacIsaac, or this is all going to come out. With or without you on the stand, I’ll get it out there. I’ve already started. And if I get the judge to compel your testimony and it blows your cover, I don’t really care. Lucinda Sanz is not going back to that cell. You understand that?”

“I understand. And I have something for you. That’s why I’m here. I want to trade. Sanz told me things in that meeting. The clique was just a ground team. They were working for something bigger.”

“Who?”

“More likewhat. But we go inside to talk about it.”

“What is the obsession with going inside my house?”

“We’re exposed out here.”

I knew not to trust this man inside or outside my house. But I had to know what he knew.

I realized that my left hand was still balled into a fist, with the teeth of my house key protruding between my fingers. I released my grip and the key fell into my palm.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go in.

PART NINE

TRUE BELIEVER

38

BOSCH WAS WORRIED.The rehearsal the day before had gone well. Posing as assistant attorney general Hayden Morris, Mickey Haller had cross-examined him intensely, hitting him most harshly on his lack of experience in using cellular data in homicide investigations. Bosch had held up well, by his own and Haller’s estimation, and he’d thought he was ready for whatever Morris threw at him on Monday morning. But now, sitting on the witness stand and waiting for the judge to convene court, Bosch was worried because Morris was not alone at the AG’s table. Next to him was a woman Bosch recognized as a former county prosecutor. She was good and tough and had been known in those days as Maggie McFierce. She was also Mickey Haller’s ex-wife and the mother of his only child.

Maggie McPherson had taken a leave of absence from the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office to aid her ex-husband when he was wrongly accused of murder. Haller was eventually cleared, and McPherson had gone back to Ventura, where she was in charge of the Major Crimes Unit at the DA’s office. But that intel was obviously old, as it was now clear to Bosch that she worked for the AG. She was huddled with Morris at the opposing counsel’s table in a whispered conversation. On the table in front of her was the thick stack of printouts of cell-tower data Haller had turned over in discovery. Morris had pulled in a ringer. Bosch knew that McPherson would handle his cross-examination.

Bosch looked over at the petitioner’s table to see if Haller was exhibiting any concern or giving any indication of how he was going to play this. But Haller was preoccupied with the arrival of Lucinda Sanz from the courtroom holding cell. When she was finally seated and shackled to the table ring by the marshals, Haller looked around the courtroom. He noticed the journalist he had told Bosch about, gave her a nod, and continued his scan. Bosch caught his eye. Haller made a hand gesture — a flat palm down — that told Bosch to stay calm.

Bosch assumed that Haller was as surprised about Maggie McPherson’s appearance as he was, but the Lincoln Lawyer looked cool, calm, and collected. Bosch took his cue from that.

Testifying in criminal cases was nothing new to Bosch. He had been in the witness box hundreds of times. When he had thought about it over the weekend, he realized that the first time he’d been called to testify was in a drug case in 1973. He had been in patrol then, a P-1 stripe on the sleeve of his uniform. He had found an ounce of marijuana during the pat-down of a man loitering near Dorsey High School. All these years later, Bosch clearly remembered the suspect he had arrested. His legal name was Junior Teodoro. He was twenty years old and a dropout from Dorsey. The alert had gone out in that morning’s roll call about a dealer setting up near the school. Bosch and his partner at the time had spotted Teodoro, did a stop-and-hop so fast he couldn’t run away, and caught him with the goods during the pat-down.

Bosch’s testimony came at a preliminary hearing on the case. After Teodoro was bound over for trial, he and his attorney negotiated a plea agreement. Bosch remembered it so well because Junior Teodoro pleaded guilty and got a term of five to seven years in prison for something that fifty years later was no longer a crime. Bosch had often considered how time changed something that was righteous back in the day into something far from it today. He thought about how that bust and the harsh sentence that followed had changed the course of Teodoro’s life. When Bosch was still with the LAPD, he kept tabs on him through the California law enforcement tracking system, running his name from time to time. The prison gate became a revolving door for Teodoro. Whenever Bosch looked him up, he was either back in prison or recently released and on parole. Fifty years later, Bosch was still haunted by his part in setting Junior Teodoro on that path. And that was his worry now — that his testimony under cross-examination might somehow contribute to Lucinda Sanz losing her bid for freedom and that it would haunt him for the rest of his days.

McPherson and Morris finished their whispered conference and McPherson reached down to a slim briefcase on the floor and withdrew a legal pad. She wrote a few notes on it and then placed it on top of the printouts, ready to take it all with her to the lectern. She glanced over at Bosch and caught him staring at her. Possibly sensing his alarm, she smiled. Of all his cases over the years, none had landed on her desk for prosecution, yet he knew she was a courtroom killer. So Bosch understood that her smile carried no warmth for him. It was the kind of smile a cat might offer a cornered mouse.

There was finally a call to rise from the courtroom marshal, and Judge Coelho took the bench. She noticed Bosch on the witness stand.

“Please be seated,” she said. “I see Detective Bosch is already in place, but before we begin cross-examination, we have some business to attend to.”

Rather than sitting down, Bosch turned to step out of the witness stand.

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