should have just done what he knew he had to do and dealt with the consequences later.
“Here.”
He opened his briefcase and handed her his cell phone. He listened as she called the DA’s office switchboard and asked to be connected to a prosecutor named David Sheiman, who Bosch knew was the supervisor of the major crimes unit. After she had Sheiman on the line she began summarizing the situation and Bosch continued to listen to make sure she had the details right.
“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.
Off camera, the car czar was a calculating businessman who always played both sides of politics and mercilessly drove competitors out of business or at least away from his dealerships. His dynasty grew rapidly, his car lots spreading across the southern California landscape. By the 1980s Jack Kincaid’s reign was done and the moniker of car czar was turned over to his son. But the old man remained a force, though a mostly unseen one. And this was never more clear than when Stacey Kincaid disappeared and old Jack returned to TV, this time to appear on newscasts and put up a million-dollar reward for her safe return. It was another surrealistic episode in Los Angeles murder lore. The old man everyone had grown up with on TV was back on once again and tearfully begging for his granddaughter’s life.
It was all for naught. The reward and the old man’s tears became moot when the girl was found dead by passersby in the vacant lot close to Michael Harris’s apartment.
The case went to trial based solely on evidence consisting of Harris’s fingerprints being found in the bedroom from which the girl had been abducted and the proximity of the body’s disposal to his apartment. The case held the city rapt, playing live every day on Court TV and local news programs. Harris’s attorney, John Penny, a lawyer as skilled as Elias when it came to manipulating juries, mounted a defense that attacked the body’s disposal location as coincidental and the fingerprints – found on one of the girl’s schoolbooks – as simply being planted by the LAPD.
All the power and money the Kincaids had amassed over generations was no match against the tide of anti- police sentiment and the racial underpinnings of the case. Harris was black, the Kincaids and the police and prosecutors on the case were white. The case against Harris was tainted beyond repair when Penny elicited what many perceived as a racist comment from Jack Kincaid during testimony about his many dealerships. After Kincaid detailed his many holdings, Penny asked why not one of the dealerships was in South Central Los Angeles. Without hesitation and before the prosecutor could object to the irrelevant question, Kincaid said he would never place a business in an area where the inhabitants had a propensity to riot. He said he made the decision after the Watts riots of 1965 and it was confirmed after the more recent riots of 1992.
The question and answer had little if anything to do with the murder of a twelve-year-old girl but proved to be the pivotal point in the trial. In later interviews jurors said Kincaid’s answer was emblematic of the city’s deep racial gulf. With that one answer sympathy swayed from the Kincaid family to Harris. The prosecution was doomed.
The jury acquitted Harris in four hours. Penny then turned the case over to his colleague, Howard Elias, for civil proceedings and Harris took his place next to Rodney King in the pantheon of civil rights victims and heroes in South L.A. Most of them deserved such honored status, but some were the creations of lawyers and the media. Whichever Harris was, he was now seeking his payday – acivil rights trial in which $10 million would be just the opening bid.
Despite the verdict and all the attached rhetoric, Bosch didn’t believe Harris’s claims of innocence or police brutality. One of the detectives Harris specifically accused of brutality was Bosch’s former partner, Frankie Sheehan, and Bosch knew Sheehan to be a total professional when dealing with suspects and prisoners. So Bosch simply thought of Harris as a liar and murderer who had walked away from his crime. He would have no qualms about rousting him and taking him downtown for questioning about Howard Elias’s murder. But Bosch also knew as he stood there with Rider that if he now brought Harris in, he would run the risk of compounding the alleged wrongs already done to him – at least in the eyes of much of the public and the media. It was a political decision as much as a police decision that he had to make.
“Let me think about this for a second,” he said.
He walked off by himself through the atrium. The case was even more perilous than he had realized. Any misstep could result in disaster – to the case, to the department, to careers. He wondered if Irving had realized all of this when he had chosen Bosch’s team for the case. Perhaps, he thought, Irving’s compliments were just a front for a real motive – leaving Bosch and his team dangling in the wind. Bosch knew he was now venturing into paranoia. It was unlikely that the deputy chief could have come up with such a plan so quickly. Or that he would even care about Bosch’s team with so much else at stake.
Bosch looked up and saw the sky was much brighter now. It would be a sunny and hot day.
“Harry?”
He turned. It was Rider.
“She’s off.”
He walked back to the group and Langwiser handed him his phone.
“You’re not going to like this,” she said. “Dave Sheiman wants to bring in a special master to look at the files before you do.”
“Special master?” Dellacroce asked. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s an attorney,” Langwiser said. “An independent attorney appointed by a judge who will oversee the files. He will be hired to protect the rights of those clients while still giving you people what you need. Hopefully.”
“Shit,” Bosch said, his frustration finally getting the better of him. “Why don’t we just stop the whole thing now and drop the damn case? If the DA’s office doesn’t care about us clearing it then we won’t care either.”
“Detective Bosch, you know it’s not like that. Of course we care. We just want to be safe. The warrant you have is still good for searching the office. Sheiman said you can even go through completed case files – which I am sure you need to look at as well. But the special master will have to come in and look at all pending files first. Remember, this person is not an adversary to you. He will give you everything you are entitled to see.”
“And when will that be? Next week? Next month?”
“No. Sheiman is going to go to work on that this morning. He’ll call Judge Houghton, apprise him of the
