“We’re wasting a lot of time standing around, Harry,” Rider whispered to him. “You want me to go pick up Harris and have a talk with him about last night?”

Bosch almost nodded his approval but then hesitated as he considered the possible consequences.

Michael Harris was suing fifteen members of the Robbery-Homicide Division in a highly publicized case set to begin trial on Monday. Harris, a car-wash employee with a record of burglary and assault convictions, was seeking $10 million in damages for his claims that members of the RHD had planted evidence against him in the kidnapping and murder of a twelve-year-old girl who was a member of a well-known and wealthy family. Harris claimed the detectives had abducted, held and tortured him over a three-day period in hopes of drawing a confession from him as well as learning the location of the missing girl. The lawsuit alleged that the detectives, frustrated by Harris’s unwillingness to admit his part in the crime or lead them to the missing girl, pulled plastic bags over Harris’s head and threatened to suffocate him. He further claimed that one detective pushed a sharp instrument — a Black Warrior No. 2 pencil — into his ear, puncturing the ear drum. But Harris never confessed and on the fourth day of the interrogation the girl’s body was found decomposing in a vacant lot just one block from his apartment. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

The murder became one more in a long line of crimes that gripped public attention in Los Angeles. The victim was a beautiful blond, blue-eyed girl named Stacey Kincaid. She had been spirited from her bed while she slept in her family’s large and seemingly safe Brentwood home. It was the kind of crime that sent a chilling message across the city: Nobody is safe.

As horrible as it was in itself, the murder of the little girl was exponentially magnified by the media. Initially, this was because of who the victim was and where she came from. She was the stepdaughter of Sam Kincaid, scion of a family that owned more automobile dealerships in Los Angeles County than it was possible to count on two hands. Sam was the son of Jackson Kincaid, the original “car czar,” who had built the family business from a single Ford dealership his father had passed on to him after World War II. Like Howard Elias after him, Jack Kincaid had seen the merit in local television marketing and in the 1960s became a fixture of late-night TV advertising. On camera, he showed a folksy charm, exuding honesty and friendship. He seemed as reliable and trustworthy as Johnny Carson and he was in the living rooms and bedrooms of Los Angeles just as often. If Los Angeles was seen as an “autotopia” then Jack Kincaid was certainly seen as its unofficial mayor.