Page 115 of Resurrection Walk

Coelho paused and looked at Haller. Bosch knew she was expecting him to announce that he had new discovery material to give to the AG. But there were no results yet from the DNA analysis begun the week before. This meant that Haller wouldn’t know until he heard from Shami Arslanian, who was stationed at Applied Forensics monitoring the work, whether or not he had new evidence to help Lucinda Sanz’s case.

“Very well,” the judge said again. “Then let’s proceed.

Ms. McPherson, your witness.”

39

FOR BOSCH, ITwas a reminder of how far he had gone off mission. Maggie McFierce was a true believer, a career prosecutor who had never been lured away from the pursuit of justice to join the high-paid private sector. She had stayed on mission, and though jobs and agencies changed, she’d never wavered from the cause. And here was Bosch, heretofore a true believer, about to be pounded on the witness stand the way he had seen so many witnesses for criminal defendants get pounded in the past.

McPherson would be out to prove that Bosch was a gun for hire who would also lie for hire, who would cut corners and look only for the thing that would obscure the truth or hide it completely. She had no doubt done her homework on Bosch and knew his vulnerabilities. She attempted to exploit them right out of the gate.

“Mr. Bosch, how long have you worked as a defense investigator?” she asked.

“Uh, actually, I never have,” Bosch said.

“You are working for Mr. Haller, are you not?”

“I am working on a specific project for him that doesn’t involve defense work.”

“Did you not work for Mr. Haller’s own defense when he was accused of a crime?”

“I was more of an adviser. Like you were. Do you believe you have never worked for the defense?”

“I’m not the one answering questions here.”

“Sorry.”

“So what you’re telling the court is that you don’t consider working for Lucinda Sanz, an admitted and convicted killer, defense work?”

“Mr. Haller hired me to go through cases involving convicted people who claimed they were innocent. He wanted me to review them to see if any seemed plausible or worth another look. Lucinda Sanz’s case was one of them and —”

“Thank you, Mr. Bosch, I didn’t ask for the whole history of the case. But you would say that working on the Lucinda Sanz case is not defense work.”

“Correct. It’s not defense work. It’s truth work.”

“That’s clever, Mr. Bosch. What happens in your so-called truth work if you come across evidence that someone is guilty of the crime they were convicted of?”

“I tell Mr. Haller that’s it’s a no-go and we move on. I look into the next case.”

“And has that scenario ever occurred as you just outlined?”

“Uh, yes. Happened just a couple months ago.”

“Tell the court about that.”

“Well, it was this guy named Coldwell who was convicted of hiring a killer to murder his partner in a business investment. He was convicted largely on the testimony of the contract killer, who was also charged but was cooperating with the prosecution. He testified that he was paid twenty-five thousand dollars in cash to do the hit. The other evidence included Coldwell’s bank records. The prosecution was able to show that exactly twenty-five thousand had been accumulated through ATM withdrawals and personal checks Coldwell wrote to friends who cashed them and gave him the money.”

“What made you think he was innocent?”

“I didn’t. I thought that his case might be worth another look. I interviewed him and he said that he could account for the twenty-five thousand and give information he picked up in prison that would impeach the contract killer. I’ll spare you the full history on it, but I determined that Coldwell was guilty and we dropped it.”

“No, please, don’t spare us the details. What made him guilty — in your eyes?”

“He told me he had given the money to a mistress and that he couldn’t bring that up at his trial because he was still married then and his wife’s money was paying his trial lawyer. If they’d brought forth the mistress, Coldwell’s wife would have cut him off financially. As it turned out, his wife divorced him a couple years after he was convicted, so now he was ready to use the mistress. He also told me that an inmate who had been transferred from the prison where the hit man ended up — Soledad — said the hit man was bragging up there about setting up Coldwell for the murder.”

“Okay, let’s stop there. I think we need to move to the case at hand.”

Haller stood up and objected.

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