Page 121 of Resurrection Walk

“I believed him.”

“Why?”

“Because he gave me something. Something I can use against Sanger.”

“What?”

“I can’t say at the moment. I have to figure a few things out and then I’ll tell you.”

Bosch looked at me as though I had just said I didn’t trust him.

“Look, I’ll bring you into the loop as soon as I can. I need to get back to court now, and you need to find Second-Place Silver.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

He got up and turned to the door.

“And I’m sorry, Harry,” I said. “About what Maggie pulled in there.”

“It’s not on you, Mick,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I have Silver ready to go.”

In the hall, he went one way and I went the other, toward the courtroom. Before I got there, Maggie hit me back with a text.

A lawyer once said that all was fair on the proving ground of the courtroom. Oh, yeah, I think that lawyer was you.

I decided not to respond. Instead, I called Shami Arslanian.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We just got results,” she said. “I’m looking at them now.”

I braced myself. This was the case.

“And?” I prompted.

“There was DNA on the swab,” she said. “It’s not Lucinda’s.”

I suddenly, almost involuntarily, moved to one of the marble benches lining the hall and sat down, the phone pressed against my ear. In that moment, I felt that we would win, that Lucinda Sanz would walk free.

“Mickey, are you there?” Arslanian said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I’m just… this is incredible.”

“There is a complication.”

“What’s that?”

“The DNA that’s there comes from two other people. One is unknown. But we already matched the other because it belongs to a former lab tech at Applied Forensics. They always run matching to their own personnel to guard against contamination.”

“What does this mean, Shami?”

“The lab tech it matches has not worked here in four years. It means that at some point when the evidence was brought here, it got mishandled and contaminated with his DNA. Again, we’re talking about touch DNA, which at the time they didn’t have a protocol for.”

I closed my eyes.

“Jesus Christ. Every time I think we’ve grabbed the brass ring, something goes wrong and we’ve got shit.”

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