The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [182]
“Mr. Haller?” Rojas asked. “You’re running for DA?”
“Yeah. You have a problem with that, Rojas?”
“No, Boss. But do you still need a driver?”
“Sure, Rojas, your job is safe.”
I called the office and Lorna answered.
“Where is everybody?”
“They’re here. Jennifer is using your office for a new client interview. A foreclosure. And Dennis is doing something on the computer. Where have you been?”
“Downtown. But I’m heading back. Make sure nobody leaves. I want to have a staff meeting.”
“Okay, I’ll tell them.”
“Good. See you in about thirty.”
I closed the phone. We were coming up the ramp onto the 101. All six lanes were clogged with metal, moving at a steady but slow pace. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. This was my city and this was the way it was supposed to run. At Rojas’s command, the black Lincoln cut through the lanes and around the traffic, carrying me toward a new destiny.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank several people for their help during the writing of this novel. They include Asya Muchnick, Bill Massey, Terrill Lee Lankford, Jane Davis and Heather Rizzo. Special thanks also go to Susanna Brougham, Tracy Roe, Daniel Daly, Roger Mills, Jay Stein, Rick Jackson, Tim Marcia, Mike Roche, Greg Stout, John Houghton, Dennis Wojciechowski, Charles Hounchell and last but not least, Linda Connelly.
This is a novel. Any errors of fact, geography or legal canon and procedure are purely the fault of the author.
And for more Michael Connelly…
Please turn this page for a preview of The Drop, available in October 2011.
One
Christmas came once a month in the Open-Unsolved Unit. That was when, like Santa Claus, the lieutenant made her way around the squad room, parceling out yellow envelopes like presents to the squad’s six detective teams. They contained cold hits, the lifeblood of the unit. The teams didn’t wait for callouts and fresh kills in Open-Unsolved. They waited for cold hits.
The Open-Unsolved Unit investigated unsolved murders going back fifty years in Los Angeles. There were six thousand of them. The unit consisted of twelve detectives, a secretary, a squad room supervisor known as the whip, and the lieutenant. The first five teams of detectives had each been randomly assigned ten of those fifty years. Their task was to pull from archives all the unsolved homicide cases, evaluate them and submit long-stored, long-forgotten evidence for reanalysis using contemporary technology. All DNA submissions were handled by the new regional lab at Cal State. A match between DNA from an old case and that of an individual whose genetic profile was carried in any of the nation’s DNA databases was called a cold hit. The lab put cold-hit notices into the mail at the end of every month. They would arrive a day or two later at the Police Administration Building in downtown Los Angeles. Usually by 8 A.M. that day, the lieutenant would open the door of her private office and enter the squad room. She carried the envelopes in her hand. Each hit sheet was mailed individually in a yellow business envelope. Typically, an envelope was handed to the pair of detectives who had submitted the related DNA evidence to the lab. But sometimes there were too many cold hits for one team to handle at once. Sometimes detectives were in court or on vacation or leave. And sometimes the cold hits revealed circumstances that required the utmost finesse and experience. That was where the sixth team came in. Detectives Harry Bosch and David Chu were the sixth team. They were floaters. They handled overflow cases and special investigations.
On Monday morning, October 3, Lieutenant Gail Duvall stepped out of her office and into the squad room carrying only three yellow envelopes. Harry Bosch almost sighed when he saw this paltry return on the squad’s DNA submissions. He knew that with so few envelopes he would not be getting a new case to work.
Bosch had been back in the unit for almost a year, following a two-year reassignment to Homicide Special. Now on his second tour