Table of Contents 6 страница

“I’m on it,” Jennifer said. “This makes me so fucking mad.”

“Don’t let your emotions into it,” I cautioned. “Let’s not go in mad, let’s make the judge mad. I saw some of that today when we played the tape. I know it took her back to when she was a defense attorney. If the D.A. is doing this just to fuck with me, then Warfield will see it before we say it.”

Both Jennifer and Bosch responded with nods.

“Fucking cowards,” Cisco said. “Afraid to go straight up with you, boss.”

I liked that my team seemed angrier about the prosecution’s end run than I was. It would help keep them sharp in the days and weeks running up to trial.

I returned my attention to Bosch. I realized more than the others what an incredibly good break it was to have him in our court. I had taken his side the year before and now he was taking mine. But the moral support paled in comparison with what he brought as an investigator.

“Harry, did you ever work with Drucker and Lopes?” I asked.

Kent Drucker and Rafael Lopes were the LAPD leads on the case. They worked out of the elite Robbery-Homicide Division, where Bosch had worked until the end of his LAPD career.

“Never directly on a case,” Bosch said. “They were in the squad but there wasn’t a lot of crossover on things. They were good detectives, though. You don’t get to RHD if you’re not. The question becomes, What do you do when you get there?—rest on your laurels or keep chopping wood? The fact that they were assigned this case answers that one.”

I nodded. Bosch looked hesitant. I wondered whether he had heard more, something he didn’t realize was valuable or was holding back until he could fill it out.

“What?” I asked. “You have something else?”

“Sort of,” he said.

“Might as well get it out so we can discuss it,” I said.

“Well, one of my last cases at RHD, I had an investigation where there was a financial fraud involved,” Bosch said. “A guy was embezzling funds, got found out, killed the guy who found out to shut him up. Pretty clean but we couldn’t find the money. His lifestyle showed nothing. He wasn’t spending it, he was hiding it, so we hired a financial forensics analyst to follow the money. Help us find it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Did it work?”

“Yeah, we found the money offshore and made the case,” Bosch said. “I bring it up now because my partner from back then is still on the job in RHD. She told me that Drucker came to her and asked for the contact info for the financial forensics guy.”

“We should look into getting our own,” Jennifer added.

She wrote a note down on a small pad on the table in front of her.

“Let’s look again through our files on Sam’s past cases,” I said. “Maybe there’s something in them with info on how he moved and hid cash. Harry, anything else?”

I looked over my shoulder for Arturo. It wasn’t that I was starving, but I couldn’t wait to have a real meal for the first time in six weeks.

“Just on the discovery file,” Bosch said. “I’ve been through the photos and the autopsy. It was all pretty self-explanatory, no surprises. But then I saw this.”

He was looking through his copy of the discovery and pulled out two documents and a crime scene photo. He handed them around the table and waited a moment until everyone had a look and they came back to him.

“The autopsy report stated that the victim’s fingernails were scraped for samples of what looked like dirt or grease,” he said. “Then the lab report came in, identifying the substance as a combination of vegetable oil, chicken fat, and some sugarcane—cooking grease, according to the report.”

“I saw that in the discovery,” I said. “Why is it significant?”

“Well, when you look at the crime scene photos, you see that all of this guy’s fingernails were dirty with this stuff,” Bosch said.

“I’m still not following,” I said. “If it was blood or something, I could—”

“I looked at this guy’s rap sheet,” Bosch interjected. “He was strictly white-collar cons. Internet mostly. And now he’s got grease under his nails.”

“So, what does it mean?” I pressed.

“Maybe he was working as a fucking dishwasher,” Cisco said.

“I think it means he was into something completely new,” Bosch said. “What that means to the case, I don’t know. But I think you should request a sample of the fingernail grease for your own testing.”

“Okay,” I said. “We can do that. Jennifer?”

“Got it,” she said.

She wrote it down. I was about to pass the baton to Lorna to see what she had come up with on the review of my past cases. But Arturo brought the steaks to the table at that moment and I kept my mouth closed until we were all served. I then started devouring my strip like a man who has eaten only apples and baloney sandwiches for a month and a half.

I soon became aware that I was being watched by the others. I spoke without looking up at them.

“What, you never seen a guy eat a steak before?” I asked.

“Just never seen one eat it so fast,” Lorna replied.

“Well, stand back, I might order another,” I said. “I need to get back to my fighting weight. Since you take so much time between bites, Lorna, why don’t you tell us where we stand on my enemies list.”

Before she could answer, I glanced over at Bosch to offer an explanation.

“Lorna has been going through the old case files and drawing up a list of enemies, people who might have wanted to do this to me,” I said. “Lorna?”

“Well, the list so far is short,” Lorna said. “You’ve had your problem clients and there have been some threats, but very few who we think have the skills, smarts, and general wherewithal to pull together a frame like this.”

“It’s a sophisticated frame,” Cisco added. “Your run-of-the-mill client could not do this.”

“So, who could?” I asked. “Who’s on your list?”

“I’ve been through everything twice and came up with only one name,” Lorna said.

“One name?” I said. “That’s it? Who?”

“Louis Opparizio,” she said.

“Wait, what?” I said. “Louis Opparizio …?”

The name rang a loud bell in my memory but I needed a moment to place it. I was sure I’d never had a client named Louis Opparizio. Then I remembered. Opparizio wasn’t a client. He was a witness. A man from a mob-connected family who straddled the line between criminal enterprise and legitimate business. I had used him. I had cornered him on the witness stand and made him look like the guilty party. It drew the jury’s attention away from my client and on to Opparizio. Compared to him, my client looked like an angel.

I remembered an encounter I’d had with Opparizio in a courthouse restroom. I remembered the anger, the hate. He was a bull of a man, built like a fireplug, and his arms hung away from his body like he was ready to use them to tear me apart. He’d backed me into a corner and had wanted to kill me right there.

“Who is Opparizio?” Bosch asked.

“He’s somebody I pinned a murder on once in court,” I said.

“He was mobbed up,” Cisco added. “From Vegas.”

“And did he do it?” Bosch asked.

“No, but I made it look like he did,” I said. “My client got the NG and walked.”

“And was your client really guilty?”

I hesitated but then answered truthfully.

“Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

Bosch nodded and I took it as a judgment, as though I had just confirmed why people hate lawyers.

“So,” he said then. “Would Opparizio wanting to return the favor and pin a murder on you be out of the question?”

“No, not at all,” I said. “What happened in court back then, it caused him a lot of problems and cost him a lot of money. He was a sleeper. He was trying to move mob money into legitimate fields and I sort of blew that up when I had him on the stand.”

Bosch thought about that for a few moments and nobody interrupted.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Let me take Opparizio. Find out what he’s up to. And Cisco, you stay with Sam Scales. Maybe we cross paths somewhere and then we know why this whole thing went down.”

It sounded like a plan to me but I was going to let Cisco decide. It seemed we were all looking at him, waiting, when he nodded his approval.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

I got home late and parked on the street. I didn’t want to park in the garage and wasn’t sure I ever would again. I entered to find the house completely dark. In that moment, I thought Kendall was gone. That she had realized, now that I was out, that she didn’t want to live here with me again. But then I saw movement in the darkened hallway and she appeared. She was wearing just a robe.

“You’re home,” she said.

“Yeah, it went late,” I said. “A lot to discuss. You’ve been waiting in the dark?”

“Actually, I’ve been asleep since earlier. We never turned on any lights when we got here. We just went straight to the bed.”

I nodded that I understood. My eyes started adjusting to the shadows and the dark.

“So you didn’t eat?” I said. “You must be hungry.”

“No, I’m fine,” she said. “You must be tired.”

“Sort of. Yeah.”

“But still excited about being free?”

“Yeah.”

I had woken that day in a jail cell. I was now about to sleep in my own bed for the first time in six weeks. My back on a thick mattress and my head on a soft pillow. And if that wasn’t enough, my ex-girlfriend had come back and was standing in front of me with her robe open and nothing on underneath. I was still accused of murder but it was amazing how my fortunes had changed in a single day. As I stood there, I felt that nobody could ever touch me. I was golden. I was free.

“Well,” Kendall said, smiling. “I hope not too tired.”

“I think I can manage,” I said.

She turned and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway leading to the bedroom.

And I followed.

PART TWO

FOLLOW THE HONEY

Thursday, January 9

I had no illusions about my innocence. I knew it was something only I could know for sure. And I knew that it wasn’t a perfect shield against injustice. It was no guarantee of anything. The clouds were not going to open for some sort of divine light of intervention.

I was on my own.

Innocence is not a legal term. No one is ever found innocent in a court of law. No one is ever exonerated by the verdict of a jury. The justice system can only deliver a verdict of guilty or not guilty. Nothing else, nothing more.

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. In the law of physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

That was my plan. To go further than a jury verdict. To expose the guilty and make my innocence clear. It was my only way out.

To that end, December proceeded with preparations for trial as well as prep for the anticipated move by the prosecution to recharge me and remand me back to a solo cell at Twin Towers. As the days until Christmas counted down, my paranoia rose incrementally. I expected the cruelest of moves by Death Row Dana as payback for the humiliation I had brought her in the last hearing—a Christmas Day arrest with courts closed for the holidays and me left unable to put our ready arguments before Judge Warfield until the calendar turned to the new year.

There was no evasive action that I could take. My current bail restriction forbade me to leave the county, and the ankle-mounted monitor broadcast my location to authorities twenty-four hours a day. If they wanted me, they could surely find me. There was no escape.

But no one came knocking. No one came looking for me.

I spent Christmas Eve with my daughter and she went to her mother’s on Christmas Day. And I got an early dinner with her a week later before she went off with friends to celebrate the changing of the year. Kendall was with me the whole time and even told me on New Year’s Eve that she was having all her belongings shipped back from Hawaii.

All in all, it was a great month of freedom and work in preparation for the trial that lay ahead of me. But it would have been better if I hadn’t been looking over my shoulder the whole time. I began to think that I had been played, that Harry Bosch had been fed the false narrative of my re-arrest as the real payback. Dana Berg had made sure I would not be able to rest easy in my newfound freedom, and so she had the last laugh.

As far as the investigation into eavesdropping on privileged conversations at Twin Towers that Judge Warfield had promised, Berg escaped unscathed. The illegal activity was laid squarely at the door of the jail intelligence unit. A report that was leaked to the Los Angeles Times during the news-starved week after Christmas resulted in a New Year’s Day exclusive on the front page that concluded that deputies had been listening for years to privileged conversations, the contents of which were then used to create tip sheets from nonexistent jailhouse informants. These were then turned over to police and prosecutors. It was one more black eye for the sheriff’s jail division, which in the prior decade had been the target of multiple federal investigations. Horror stories had abounded of jail deputies staging gladiator fights, putting inmates in cells with enemies, using gang members to carry out punishment beatings and rapes of other prisoners. Indictments had come and heads had rolled. The elected sheriff at the time and his second-in-command had even gone to prison for turning a blind eye to the corruption.

Now the eavesdropping scandal promised more scrutiny and disgrace. Most likely the feds would be back in play and the new year was sure to bring a free-for-all for defense attorneys looking to overturn convictions in cases affected by the illegal activity.

This caused me to double down on my resolve not to be returned to Twin Towers. Every deputy in the jail would know that the latest scandal that had befallen them was caused by me. I could clearly imagine the retribution that would be awaiting me if I went back.

I finally got a call from Harry Bosch. I had not heard from him since well before Christmas despite leaving messages of holiday greetings and requests for updates on his part of the investigation. I knew that nothing had happened to him—my daughter had reported seeing him at his house when she visited her cousin Maddie over the break. And now, finally, he called. He appeared not to be aware of my efforts to contact him over the past weeks. He simply said he had something he wanted me to see. I was still at home, having a second cup of coffee with Kendall, and he agreed to swing by and pick me up.

We drove south in his old Jeep Cherokee, the one with the squared-off design and the twenty-five-year-old suspension. Shake, rattle, and roll: the car shook every time its tires hit a seam in the asphalt, rattled with every pothole, and threatened to roll on every left turn as the aging springs compressed and the car tilted to the right.

He kept KNX news on and had the uncanny ability to engage in conversation while still keeping an ear on the radio and from time to time throwing comments on the news of the day into the conversation. Even when I turned the volume knob down to respond, he would then turn it back up.

“So,” I said, once we were down out of the hills. “Where are we going?”

“It’s something I want you to see first,” Bosch said.

“It’s about Opparizio, I hope. I mean, you were working on him and then you disappear for like a month.”

“I didn’t disappear. I was working the case. I told you you’d hear from me when I had something and now I think I do.”

“Well, I hope it’s a connection to Sam Scales and the case. Otherwise you’ve been chasing a pipe dream.”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

“Can you at least tell me how far we’re going? So I can tell Lorna when I’ll be back.”

“T.I.”

“What? They’re not going to let me in with this thing on my ankle.”

“We’re not going to the prison. I just want to show you something.”

“And a photo wouldn’t do?”

“I don’t think so.”

We drove in silence for a while after that. Bosch took the 101 south into downtown and then jumped onto the 110, which would be a straight shot down to Terminal Island at the Port of Los Angeles. There was nothing awkward or uncomfortable about the stall in the conversation. We were half brothers and comfortable with the silences. Bosch listened to the news and I tuned it out with thoughts about the case. We were going to trial in under six weeks and I still had no grounds for a defense. Bosch may have gone silent but at least he had something he wanted me to see. My other investigator, Cisco, had been staying in close contact, but his efforts to background Sam Scales had so far been fruitless. I figured I was a week away from doing the unthinkable: throwing aside my right to a speedy trial and asking for time, for a continuance. But I worried that such a request would reveal too much. It would show desperation, panic, and maybe even signal guilt—I would be acting like someone delaying the inevitable.

“Where the hell is Wuhan?” Bosch said.

His words rescued me from the downward spiral of my thoughts.

“Who?” I asked.

He pointed to the radio.

“Not who,” he said. “It’s a place somewhere in China. Were you listening?”

“No, I was thinking,” I said. “What was it?”

“They’ve got a mystery virus over there, killing people.”

“Well, at least it’s there and not here.”

“Yeah, for how long?”

“You ever been over there, China?”

“Just to Hong Kong.”

“Oh, right … Maddie’s mom. Sorry I brought it up.”

“Long time ago.”

I attempted to change the subject.

“So, what’s Opparizio like?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Bosch responded.

“Well, I just remember, when I had him on the stand nine years ago, he was restrained at first but then out came the animal. He wanted to jump out of that chair and tear my throat out or something. He seemed more Tony Soprano than Michael Corleone, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, so far I haven’t laid eyes on the guy. That’s not what I’ve been doing.”

I looked out the window and tried to blunt my shock and upset. I then turned back to engage.

“Harry, then what have you been doing?” I asked. “You had Opparizio, remember? You should’ve—”

“Hold on, hold on,” he said. “I know I have Opparizio but it wasn’t about putting eyes on him. This isn’t a surveillance job. It’s about finding out what he was doing and whether or not it somehow connects to Scales and you. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“Okay, then stop with the whole mystery trip thing. Where are we going?”

“Just take it easy. We’re almost there and you’ll be enlightened.”

“Really? ‘Enlightened’? Like divine intervention or something?”

“Not quite. But I think you’ll like it.”

He was right about one thing. We were almost there. I looked around to get my bearings and saw that we had crossed the 405 and were just a few miles from the end of the Harbor Freeway at Terminal Island. Through the windshield and to the left I could see the giant gantry cranes that loaded containers on and off cargo ships.

We were in San Pedro now. Once a small fishing village, it was now part of the giant Port of Los Angeles complex, serving as a bedroom community for many of those who worked on the docks and in the shipping and oil industries. It had once had a full courthouse where I appeared regularly on behalf of clients accused of crimes. But the justice complex was shuttered by the county in a cost-cutting move and the cases moved up to a courthouse by the airport. The San Pedro courthouse had now stood abandoned for well over a decade.

“I used to come down to Pedro a lot on cases,” I said.

“I used to come down when I was a teenager,” Bosch said. “Sneak out of whatever place they put me, come down to the docks. I got tattooed down here once.”

I just nodded. It looked like he was reliving the memory and I didn’t want to intrude. I knew very little about Bosch’s early life beyond what I had read once in an unauthorized profile in the Times. I remembered foster homes and an early enlistment in the army, with Vietnam as the destination. This was decades before we learned of our blood connection.

We crossed the Vincent Thomas, the tall green suicide bridge that connected to Terminal Island. The entire island was dedicated to port and industrial operations, with the exception of the federal prison at the far end. Bosch exited the freeway and used surface streets to get us moving along the northern edge of the island and next to one of the deep port channels.

“Taking a wild guess,” I said. “Opparizio has some kind of smuggling operation here. Stuff coming in on cargo containers. Drugs? Humans? What?”

“Not that I know of,” Bosch said. “I’m going to show you something else. You see this area?”

He pointed through the windshield toward a vast parking lot filled with plastic-wrapped cars fresh off the boats from Japan.

“There used to be a Ford Motor plant here,” Bosch said. “It was called Long Beach Assembly and they made the Model A. My mother’s father supposedly worked there in the thirties on the Model A line.”

“What was he like?” I asked.

“I never met him. Only heard the story.”

“And now it’s Toyotas.”

I gestured toward the vast parking lot of new cars ready to be disseminated to dealers across the West.

Bosch turned onto a crushed-shell road that ran alongside a rock jetty lining the channel. A black-and-white oil tanker the length of a football field, including the end zones, was slowly making its way down the channel to the port. Bosch pulled to a stop by what looked like an abandoned railroad spur and killed the engine.

“Let’s walk up to the jetty,” he said. “I’ll show you what we’ve got as soon as this tanker goes by.”

We followed an uphill walk to the top of a berm that ran behind the jetty as a barrier against high tides. By standing on top of it we got a solid view across the channel of the various petroleum refining and storage facilities vital to the operations of the port.

“Okay, so this is the Cerritos Channel right here and we are looking north,” Bosch said. “That’s Wilmington directly across the water and Long Beach to the right.”

“Okay,” I said. “What exactly are we looking at?”

“The center of the California oil business. You’ve got the Marathon, Valero, Tesoro refineries right there. Chevron is farther up. The oil comes in here from all over—even Alaska. Comes to port by supertanker, barge, rail, pipeline, you name it. Then it goes over there to the refineries and it gets processed and from there into distribution. Into tanker trucks and out to your local gas station and then into your own gas tank.”

“What’s it all got to do with the case?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. You see that refinery at the end there with the catwalks around the tanks?”

He pointed to the right and at a small refinery with a single stack billowing a white plume of smoke into the sky. An American flag was draped around the upper section of the stack. There were two side-by-side storage tanks that looked to be at least four stories tall and were surrounded by multiple catwalks.

“I see it,” I said.

“That’s BioGreen Industries,” Bosch said. “You won’t find Louis Opparizio’s name attached to any of the ownership documents but he holds the controlling interest in BioGreen. No doubt about it.”

Bosch had my undivided attention now.

“How did you find that out?” I asked.

“I followed the honey,” Bosch said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, nine years ago you were able to drag Opparizio through the legal wood chipper at the trial for your client Lisa Trammel. I pulled the transcript and read his testimony. He—”

“You don’t have to tell me. I was there, remember?”

Another tanker was coming down the channel. It was so wide, it had little margin for error as it navigated between the jagged rocks that lined both sides.

“I know you were there,” Bosch said. “But what you might not know is that Louis Opparizio learned a lot from getting pounded by you that day on the stand. Number one, he learned never again to be connected by legal documentation to any of his companies—legit or not. He currently owns nothing in his name and is connected to no company, board, or reported investment to anything. He uses people as fronts.”

“I’m damn proud I was able to teach him how to be a better criminal. How did you get around it?”

“The Internet is still a pretty useful tool. Social media, newspaper archives. Opparizio’s father died four years ago. There was a service in New Jersey and a virtual visitation book. Friends and family signed in, and damn if the funeral home’s website doesn’t still have it online.”

“More like hot damn. You got lots of names.”

“Names and connections. I started tracing, looking for stuff out here. Three Opparizio associates are vested owners of BioGreen and make up a majority interest. He controls it through them. One of them is named Jeannie Ferrigno, who in the last seven years has risen from a Vegas stripper with a couple of possession pops on her record to part owner of a variety of businesses from there to here and back again. I think Jeannie is Opparizio’s sidepiece.”

“Follow the honey.”

“Right to BioGreen.”

“This is getting good, Bosch.”

I pointed down the channel to the refinery.

“But if Opparizio has a secret ownership in businesses from here to Vegas, why are we looking at this one?”

“Because this is where the biggest money is. You see that place? It’s not a typical refinery. It’s a biodiesel plant. Basically, it makes fuel from plants and animal fat. It’s recycling waste into an alternate fuel that costs less and burns cleaner. And right now it’s the apple of the government’s eye because it reduces our national dependence on oil. It’s the future, and Louis Opparizio is riding the wave. The government is propping this business up, paying companies like BioGreen a premium on each barrel just to make it. That’s on top of what they get for then going out and selling that barrel.”

“And where there’s government subsidy, there is always corruption.”

“You got that right.”

I started pacing along the worn footpath on top of the berm. I was trying to see the connections and how this could all work.

“So, there’s a guy,” Bosch said. “A lieutenant who runs the bureau at Harbor Division. I trained him twenty-five years ago when he came through Hollywood detectives as a D-one.”

“Can you talk to him?” I asked.

“Already did. He knows I’m retired, so I told him I was fishing around for a friend who is interested in BioGreen as an investment. I wanted to know if there were any red flags and he told me, yeah, there’s a big red flag, an FBI flag on the place.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning he is supposed to take no action on anything that comes across his plate from BioGreen. He’s supposed to alert the bureau and stand down. You understand what that means?”

“That the bureau’s working on something there.”

“Or at least keeping an eye on it.”

I nodded. This was getting better and better in terms of building a smoke screen for trial. But I knew I needed to do more than provide smoke. This wasn’t work for a client. It was for me.

“Okay, so all we need is a connection to Sam Scales, and we have something I can tee up in court,” I said. “I’ll call Cisco and see what he—”

“We already have it,” Bosch said.

“What are you talking about? Where does he connect?”

“The autopsy. Remember the fingernails? The scrapings showed vegetable oil, chicken fat, sugarcane. That’s biofuel, Mick. Sam Scales had biofuel under his fingernails.”

I looked down the channel at the BioGreen refinery. The smoke from the stack billowed ominously upward, helping to feed the dirty cloud that hung over the entire harbor.

I nodded.

“I think you found it, Harry,” I said. “The magic bullet.”

“Just be careful you don’t shoot yourself with it,” he said.

Sunday, January 12

Bosch’s discovery of BioGreen and its connection to Louis Opparizio and possibly Sam Scales served to kick-start the defense case by providing a focal point of investigation and strategy. The trip to Terminal Island was followed by an all-hands meeting the following morning at which tasks were delineated and assigned. Establishing a link between Scales and Opparizio was paramount and I wanted that to be the main focus of my investigators.

Locating Opparizio was another. He had insulated himself from direct ownership and control of the refinery operation and we needed to nail that down before trial. With no direct link we worked the secondary link: Jeannie Ferrigno. I told Cisco to put together a surveillance team in hopes that Jeannie would lead us to Opparizio, and then we would jump the surveillance to him. I wanted to be able to document for the jury that this man who held an undeniable grudge against me had an association with the man I was accused of killing. If we could make that connection, then I believed we had our frame.

⇐ Предыдущая 10 11 12 13 141516 17 18 19 Следующая ⇒