A Darkness More Than Night - Michael Connelly [97]
“Goddamnit!” he said out loud in the car.
A few minutes after one he watched Jaye Winston come out of El Cochinito. McCaleb was hoping for the chance to corner her and talk to her alone, maybe tell her about Lockridge. But Twilley and Friedman followed her out and all three got into the same car. A bureau car.
McCaleb watched them pull out into traffic and drive off in the direction of downtown. He got out of the Cherokee and went back into the restaurant. He was starved. There were no tables available so he made an order to go. He’d eat in the Cherokee.
The old woman who took his order looked up at him with sad brown eyes. She said it had been a busy week and the kitchen had just run out of lechon asada.
27
John Reason surprised the spectators, the jurors and probably most of the media when he reserved his cross-examination of Bosch until the defense’s case began, but it had been anticipated by the prosecution team. If the defense strategy was to shoot the messenger, that messenger was Bosch and the best place from which to take the shot was during the presentation of the defense’s side. That way, Fowkkes’s attack on Bosch could be part of an orchestrated attack on the entire case against David Storey.
Following a lunch break during which Bosch and the prosecutors were relentlessly pursued by the media with questions about Bosch’s testimony, the prosecution began to move quickly with the momentum gained in the morning’s session. Kretzler and Langwiser took turns examining a series of witnesses with short stays on the stand.
The first of these was Teresa Corazón, chief of the medical examiner’s office. Under Kretzler’s questioning, she testified to her findings during the autopsy and put Jody Krementz’s time of death at some point between midnight and 2 A.M. on Friday, October 13 . She also gave corroborating testimony on the rarity of autoerotic deaths involving female victims.
Once more Fowkkes reserved the right to question the witness during the defense phase of the trial. Corazón was dismissed after less than a half hour on the stand.
Now that his own testimony was completed — as far as the prosecution’s case went — it was not vital for Bosch to be in the courtroom for every moment of the trial. While Langwiser called the next witness — a lab tech who would identify the hair samples gathered from the victim’s body as belonging to Storey — Bosch walked Corazón to her car. They had been lovers many years before in what current culture would term a casual relationship. But while there may not have been any love involved, there had been nothing casual about it to Bosch. In his view it had been two people who looked at death every day pushing it away with the ultimate life-affirming act.
Corazón had broken it off after she was named to the top slot in the coroner’s office. Their relationship since that point had been strictly professional, though Corazón’s new position reduced her time in the autopsy suites and Bosch did not see her often. The Jody Krementz case was different. Corazón had instinctively known it might become a case that drew the bead of the media horde and had taken the autopsy herself. It had paid off. Her testimony would be seen across the nation and probably around the globe. She was attractive, smart, skilled and thorough. That half hour on the stand would be like a half-hour commercial for lucrative jobs as an independent examiner or commentator. Bosch knew one thing about her from his time with her: Teresa Corazón always had her eye on the next step.
She was parked in the garage next to the state parole office on the back side of the justice complex. They spoke of banalities — the weather, Harry’s attempts to stop smoking — until Corazón brought the case up.
“It seems to be going well.”
“So far.”
“It’d be nice if we won one of these big ones for a change.”
“It would.”
“I watched you testify this morning. In my office I