Page 98 of Resurrection Walk

“I’m sorry, Mr. Haller, it doesn’t work that way,” Coelho said. “It pains me, but the objection is sustained. The witness’s presentation and testimony is stricken and will have no bearing on the court’s eventual ruling on this matter.”

“Shame on us,” Haller said. “That we can’t bring ourselves to do the right thing when it’s there in front of us.”

“Mr. Haller, you are now on thin ice with this court,” Coelho said.

Haller put his hands down on the table and bowed his head. Bosch felt a deep hollow open up in his chest. Haller turned and looked at Morris, who was staring straight ahead.

“And you, Morris,” Haller said. “How doyousleep at night? You’re supposed to be a guardian, you’re supposed to look for the truth, but you hide behind —”

“Mr. Haller!”the judge barked. “You are out of order. Sit down.Now!”

Haller threw up his hands in a gesture of giving up and sat down. He turned to Lucinda and whispered to her. Bosch could not remember ever seeing an attorney seem so upset by a judge’s ruling. He wondered how much was performance and how much was true anger.

Coelho poured water from a pitcher into a glass. She took her time with it, perhaps believing that moving slowly would restore calm to the courtroom.

“Now,” she finally said, “would you like to call another witness, Mr. Haller?”

Haller did not acknowledge the question. He kept whispering to Lucinda, apparently trying to explain what had just happened to her hopes of freedom.

“Mr. Haller?” the judge prompted. “Do you have another witness?”

Haller broke away from the huddle with Lucinda and stood up. When he spoke, his voice sounded strangled.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “The petitioner calls Harry Bosch.”

With the tension in the room still as thick as the marine layer on the Santa Monica bight, Bosch got up and moved forward through the gate. He was sworn in by the clerk and took the seat on the witness stand. He watched Haller move slowly to the lectern, still reeling from the loss of Arslanian’s testimony. He started with basic questions about Bosch’s pedigree.

“Mr. Bosch, how are you currently employed?” he asked.

“I work part-time as an investigator for you,” Bosch said.

“And what is your experience in investigating criminal matters?”

“I was a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department for forty years, most of them working homicides. After I retired, I worked for a few years as a volunteer cold-case investigator with the town of San Fernando and later back with the LAPD.”

“You know your way around a murder, I guess you could say.”

“You could say that, yes. I’ve worked on more than three hundred homicides as either lead or backup investigator.”

“Is it safe to say you have put a lot of bad people — killers — in prison?”

“Yes.”

“Yet here you are, working to free a person who the State says is a killer. Why is that?”

This was the only question Haller and Bosch had rehearsed. After this, they would be winging it.

“Because I don’t think she did it,” Bosch said. “In reviewing the case, I found inconsistencies in the investigation, contradictions. That’s why I brought it to you.”

“I remember that,” Haller said. “Now, as part of your investigation, did there come a time when you served a subpoena on a company called AT and T?”

“Yes, I did that last week.”

“And what —”

Before Haller could get the question out, Morris interrupted with an objection.

“Your Honor,” he said. “If Mr. Haller is going to ask about cellular data collection, then, again, we are going to have a discovery issue.”

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