Chapters (64)
- PART ONE
- One
- Two
- Three
- PART TWO
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- PART THREE
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- PART FOUR
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- PART FIVE
- Forty-seven
- Forty-eight
- Forty-nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-one
- Fifty-two
- Fifty-three
- PART SIX
- Fifty-four
- Fifty-five
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- ALSO BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
Golantz and I nodded our heads. I couldn’t help but wonder if either the judge or the prosecutor was the recipient of the bribe. Was I sitting with the man who would turn the case my client’s way? If so, he had done nothing to give himself away. I finished the meeting thinking that Bosch had it all wrong. There was no bribe. There was a hundred-thousand-dollar boat somewhere in a harbor in San Diego or Cabo and it had Jerry Vincent’s name on the title.
“Okay, then,” the judge said. “We’ll get this going next week. We can talk about ground rules Thursday morning. But I want to make it clear right now, I’m going to run this trial like a well-oiled machine. No surprises, no shenanigans, no funny stuff. Again, are we clear?”
Golantz and I both agreed once more that we were clear. But the judge swiveled his chair and looked directly at me. He squinted his eyes in suspicion.
“I’m going to hold you to that,” he said.
It seemed to be a message intended only for me, a message that would never show on the stenographer’s record.
How come, I wondered, it’s always the defense attorney who gets the judicial squint?
Twenty-five
Twenty-five
I got to Joanne Giorgetti’s office shortly before the noon break. I knew that getting there a minute after twelve would be too late. The DA’s Offices literally empty during the lunch hour, the inhabitants seeking sunlight, fresh air and sustenance outside the CCB. I told the receptionist I had an appointment with Giorgetti and she made a call. Then she buzzed the door lock and told me to go back.
Giorgetti had a small, windowless office with most of the floor space taken up by cardboard file boxes. It was the same way in every prosecutor’s office I had ever been in, big or small. She was at her desk but was hidden behind a wall of stacked motions and files. I carefully reached over the wall to shake her hand.
“How’s it going, Joanne?”
“Not bad, Mickey. How about you?”
“I’m doing okay.”
“You just got a lot of cases, I hear.”
“Yeah, quite a few.”
The conversation was stilted. I knew she and Maggie were tight, and there was no telling whether my ex-wife had opened up to her about my difficulties in the past year.
“So you’re here for Wyms?”
“That’s right. I didn’t even know I had the case till this morning.”
She handed me a file with an inch-thick stack of documents in it.
“What do you think happened to Jerry’s file?” she asked.
“I think maybe the killer took it.”
She made a cringing face.
“Weird. Why would the killer take this file?”
“Probably unintended. The file was in Jerry’s briefcase along with his laptop, and the killer just took the whole thing.”
“Hmmm.”