“What are we talking about here?” he asked.
“DNA,” Kennedy said. “It wasn’t part of the original case in ’eighty-eight. The case was prosecuted before DNA was allowed into use in criminal cases in California. It wasn’t introduced and accepted by a court up in Ventura for another year. In L.A. County it was a year after that.”
Kennedy nodded to Soto.
“We went to property and pulled the box,” she said. “You know the routine. We took clothing collected from the victim to the lab and they put it through the serology protocol.”
“They did a protocol twenty-nine years ago,” Bosch said. “But back then, they looked for ABO markers instead of DNA. And they found nothing. You’re going to tell me that—”
“They found semen,” Kennedy said. “It was a minute amount, but this time they found it. The process has obviously gotten more sophisticated in thirty years. And it didn’t come from Borders.”
Bosch shook his head.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “Whose was it?”
“A rapist named Lucas John Olmer,” Soto said.
Bosch had never heard of Olmer. His mind went to work, looking for the scam, the fix, but not considering that he had been wrong when he closed the cuffs around Borders’s wrists.
“Olmer’s in San Quentin, right?” he said. “This whole thing is a—”
“No, he’s not,” Tapscott said. “He’s dead.”
“Give us a little credit, Harry,” Soto added. “It’s not like we went looking for it to be this way. Olmer was never in San Quentin. He died in Corcoran four years ago and he never knew Borders.”
“Big surprise there,” Tapscott said. “Those prisons are only three hundred miles apart.”
His misplaced sarcasm gave Bosch the urge to backhand him across the mouth. Soto knew her old partner’s triggers and reached over to put a hand on Bosch’s arm.
“Harry, this is not your fault,” she said. “This is on the lab. The reports are all there. You are right—they found nothing. They missed it back then.”
Bosch looked at her and pulled his arm back.
“You really believe that?” he said. “Because I don’t. This is Borders. He’s behind this—somehow. I know it.”
“How, Harry? We’ve looked for the fix in this.”
“Who’s been in the box since then?”
“The last person to pull the box was you. Eleven years ago, when you were working with Allingwood on Borders’s final appeal. Show him the video.”
She nodded to Tapscott, who pulled his phone and opened up a video. He turned the screen to Bosch.
“This is at Piper Tech,” he said.
Piper Tech was where the LAPD’s records and evidence property archives were located, along with the fingerprint unit. The aero squadron had the roof. Bosch knew that the integrity protocol in the archival unit was high. Sworn officers had to provide departmental ID and fingerprints to pull a case. The boxes were opened in an examination area under twenty-four-hour video surveillance. But this was Tapscott’s own video, recorded on his phone.
“This was not our first go-round with CIU, so we have our own protocol,” Tapscott said. “This is us opening the box. We video the whole thing. Doesn’t matter that they have their own cameras down there. And as you can see, no seal is broken, no tampering.”
The video showed Soto displaying the box to the camera, turning it over so that all sides and seams could be seen as intact, as well as the red tape that sealed it and was wrapped twice around it for good measure—a habit Bosch had employed for decades when archiving evidence. Soto manipulated the box in a bored manner and Bosch read that as her thinking they were wasting their time on this one. At least up until that point, Bosch still had her in his court.
Soto then used a box cutter attached by a wire to an examination table to slice through the evidence tape and open the box. As she started removing items from the box, including the victim’s clothing and an envelope containing her fingernail clippings, she called each piece of property out so it would be duly recorded.
Before the video was over, Tapscott pulled the phone back and killed the playback. He then put the phone away.
“On and on like that,” he said. “Nobody fucked with the box. What was in it had been there from day one.”
Bosch was silent for a long moment as he considered for the first time that his thirty-year belief that he had put a sadistic killer away for good was bogus.
“Where’d they find it?” he finally asked.
“Find what?” Kennedy asked.
“The DNA,” Bosch said.
“One microdot on the victim’s underwear,” Kennedy said.
“Easy to have missed back in ’eighty-eight,” Soto said. “They were probably just using black lights then.”
Bosch nodded.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
Soto looked at Kennedy. The question was his to answer.
“There’s a hearing scheduled in department one-sixteen next Wednesday,” the prosecutor said. “We’ll be asking Judge Houghton to vacate the sentence and release Borders from death row.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bosch said.
“He has a lawyer and he’ll be filing a claim against the city,” Kennedy continued. “We’ve been in contact with the City Attorney’s Office. We’re probably talking about a settlement well into seven figures.”
Bosch looked down at the table. He couldn’t hold anyone’s eyes.
“And I have to warn you,” Kennedy said. “If a settlement is not reached and he files a claim in federal court, he can go after you personally.”
Bosch nodded. He knew that already. A civil rights claim filed by Borders would leave Bosch personally responsible for damages if the city chose not to cover him. Since two years ago Bosch had sued the city to reinstate his full pension, it was unlikely that he would find a single soul in the City Attorney’s Office interested in indemnifying him against damages collected by Borders. The one thought that pushed through this reality to him was of his daughter. He could have nothing but an insurance policy to leave her.
“I’m sorry,” Soto said. “If there were any other …”
She didn’t finish and he slowly brought his eyes up to hers.
“Nine days,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“The hearing’s in nine days. I have until then to figure out how he did it.”
“Harry, we’ve been working this for five weeks. There’s nothing. This was before Olmer was on anybody’s radar. All we know is he wasn’t in jail at the time and he was in L.A.—we found work records. But the DNA is the DNA. On her clothing, DNA from a man later convicted of multiple abduction-rapes. Similar to Skyler without the death. I mean, no D.A. in the world would touch this or go any other way with it.”
Kennedy cleared his throat.
“We came here today out of respect for you, Detective, and all the cases you’ve cleared over time. We don’t want to get into an adversarial position on this.”