The Reversal

decade.
    “Turner was discredited in the newspaper investigation. It said he used a private investigator on the outside to gather information on crimes and then to feed it to him. As you may remember, it changed how we used information that comes to us through the jails.”
    “Not enough,” Haller said. “It didn’t end the entire use of jailhouse snitches and it should have.”
    “Can we just focus on our case here?” McPherson said, obviously tired of Haller’s posturing.
    “Sure,” Haller said. “Let’s focus.”
    “Okay, well, by the time the Times came out with all of this, Jessup had long been convicted and was sitting in San Quentin. He of course launched an appeal citing police and prosecutorial misconduct. It went nowhere fast, with every appellate panel agreeing that while the use of Turner as a witness was egregious, his impact on the jury was not enough to have changed the verdict. The rest of the evidence was more than enough to convict.”
    “And that was that,” Haller said. “They rubber-stamped it.”
    “An interesting note is that Felix Turner was found murdered in West Hollywood a year after the Times exposé,” McPherson said. “The case was never solved.”
    “Had it coming as far as I’m concerned,” Haller added.
    That brought a pause to the discussion. Bosch used it to steer the meeting back to the evidence and to step in with some questions he had been considering.
    “Is the hair evidence still available?”
    It took McPherson a moment to drop Felix Turner and go back to the evidence.
    “Yes, we still have it,” she said. “This case is twenty-four years old but it was always under challenge. That’s where Jessup and his jailhouse lawyering actually helped us. He was constantly filing writs and appeals. So the trial evidence was never destroyed. Of course, that eventually allowed him to get the DNA analysis off the swatch cut from the dress, but we still have all trial evidence and will be able to use it. He has claimed since day one that the hair in the truck was planted by the police.”
    “I don’t think his defense at retrial will be much different from what was presented at his first trial and in his appeals,” Haller said. “The girl made the wrong ID in a prejudicial setting, and from then on it was a rush to judgment. Facing a monumental lack of physical evidence, the police planted hair from the victim in his tow truck. It didn’t play so well before a jury in ’eighty-six, but that was before Rodney King and the riots in ’ninety-two, the O.J. Simpson case, the Rampart scandal and all the other controversies that have engulfed the police department since. It’s probably going to play really well now.”
    “So then, what are our chances?” Bosch asked.
    Haller looked across the table at McPherson before answering.
    “Based on what we know so far,” he said, “I think I’d have a better chance if I were on the other side of the aisle on this one.”
    Bosch saw McPherson’s eyes grow dark.
    “Well then, maybe you should cross back over.”
    Haller shook his head.
    “No, I made a deal. It may have been a bad deal but I’m sticking to it. Besides, it’s not often I get to be on the side of might and right. I could get used to that—even in a losing cause.”
    He smiled at his ex-wife but she didn’t return the sentiment.
    “What about the sister?” Bosch asked.
    McPherson swung her gaze toward him.
    “The witness? That’s our second problem. If she’s alive, then she’s thirty-seven now. Finding her is the problem. No help from the parents. Her real father died when she was seven. Her mother committed suicide on her sister’s grave three years after the murder. And the stepfather drank himself into liver failure and died while waiting for a transplant six years ago. I had one of the investigators here do a quick rundown on her on the computer and Sarah Landy’s trail drops off in San Francisco about the same time her stepfather died. That same year she also cleared a probation tail for a controlled substance conviction. Records show she’s been married and divorced twice, arrested multiple times for drugs and petty crimes. And then, like I said, she dropped off the grid. She either died or cleaned up her act. Even if she changed names, her prints would have left a trail if she’d been popped again in the past six years. But there’s nothing.”
    “I don’t think we have much of a case if we don’t have her,” Haller said.