Page 42 of Resurrection Walk

Bosch had decided to do the deep dive into Coldwell’s case solely on the basis of the letter the convicted murderer had sent to Haller. The majority of requests for Haller’s legal expertise came with repeated claims of innocence and allegations of prosecutorial abuse and evidence missed or improperly dismissed. Coldwell’s letter had its fair share of that but it also contained what seemed to be a sincere plea to reveal the real killer and stop him from killing someone else. Bosch had not seen that in the other requests he’d reviewed and it struck a chord. In his forty-plus-year career of working murder cases, he had been motivated in part by the same sentiment — that if he could catch the killer, he would save another victim and another family from destruction down the line.

The case had been handled by the Los Angeles Police Department. The lead detective had been a solid investigator named Gusto Garcia, whom Bosch knew and respected. He was one of the old bulls in the Homicide Special Unit who had been there before Bosch joined the unit and was still there when he left. When Bosch saw Garcia’s name on the author line of the first case summary, he almost stopped his review there. He didn’t think Garcia would have blown the case — that is, sent an innocent man to prison for a murder he didn’t commit. But the file was all he had brought with him to read and he probably had a half hour or more before he’d be released by the research team.

So he kept reading. Garcia had kept a neat and lengthy chronological record of the investigation and that made it an enjoyable read for someone of Bosch’s experience. But page after page, he saw nothing amiss. No lead unfollowed, no step not taken, no interview skipped. In Coldwell’s initial letter to Mickey Haller, he’d claimed he’d been set up to take the fall for the murder of Spiro Apodaca, the man whose Silver Lake restaurant Coldwell had invested in. According to the reports and evidence Bosch had already gotten through, the two had a falling-out over what Apodaca had done with that investment and it had led to murder. Coldwell had been convicted largely on the strength of testimony from the hit man he had allegedly contracted to kill Apodaca. The killer for hire, John Mullin, had been identified and arrested thanks to Garcia’s good work and he’d elected to make a deal with prosecutors to testify against the man who’d hired him for the hit in exchange for leniency on his sentence.

As far as Bosch could see, the only possible way that Coldwell could be innocent was if Mullin had lied about who hired him to kill Apodaca. The file Bosch had had copied in the archives contained a transcript of Mullin’s trial testimony. Bosch had yet to do an exhaustive look but he’d skimmed it and seen that Mullin was battered during questioning by Coldwell’s defense attorney but did not change his story: Coldwell had reached out to him through an intermediary and hired him to kill Apodaca for $25,000 in cash up front and an equal amount upon completion of the job. In testimony, Mullin said Coldwell stiffed him on the second payment, which explained his readiness to testify against him.

Bosch was engrossed in a lengthy entry in the chrono about Garcia and his partner running down how Coldwell accumulated the cash he’d allegedly paid to Mullin. It involved cashing checks and making ATM withdrawals in small amounts over several weeks until it finally added up to $25,000. The amounts were listed in a column in the chrono entry. Bosch was going over the math, so he didn’t look up when the door to his room was opened. He assumed it was the NMT coming to check his IV bag.

“Hi, Dad.”

Bosch looked up and saw his daughter. She was in tight-fitting workout clothes and Nikes.

“Mads, how’d you get in here?” he said. “I don’t think it’s safe.”

“They told me it was fine,” Maddie said. “Said I could just walk back.”

“You sure? The NMT said that?”

“The nurse up front. What is an NMT?”

“Nuclear medicine technician. She’s the one who sticks the needle in, hangs the bag, starts the process. But I think she wears a lead vest when she comes in here,” Bosch said.

“Probably because she’s exposed all the time,” Maddie said. “Or she wants to have babies.”

“She’s at least sixty years old.”

“Oh. Well, I’m not going to stay that long. I just wanted to come at least one time to see what they’re doing to you. And to drive you home.”

“I can take an Uber. That’s what I usually do. I still don’t think you should be in here. And we shouldn’t share a car. You might want to have babies someday.”

“Dad, let me do this, okay?”

“Okay, okay. Thank you for coming. We’ll ask the doctor if it’s all right.”

“Fine. Whatever.”

She pointed to the IV bag.

“So that’s the stuff,” she said. “What exactly is in it?”

“That’s just saline,” Bosch said. “It goes from there to the radio-active isotope, which then goes into me. Supposedly they put enough in to kill the cancer but not enough to kill the patient — me. That’s the trick.”

Maddie seemed hesitant in her response, but then she blurted out the key question.

“Do they know if it’s working?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Bosch said. “This is my last dose and then in a couple months they’ll run some tests and see what’s going on.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, to make you go through this. I know you didn’t… really want to.”

“No, it was my call. And look, if I can stick around a little longer, I get to watch you become the cop you will be, and I may even get some good work done too.”

He gestured to the side table and the file he had been reading.

“Is that one of the innocence-project cases?” she asked.

“Yes,” Bosch said. “But you can’t call it that or the real Innocence Project may take offense.”

---