The Reversal

off across the ocean to his left. The sun was now gone.

Forty-five
    Friday, April 9, 2:20 P.M .
    H arry Bosch and I sat on opposite sides of a picnic table, watching the ME’s disinterment team dig. They were on the third excavation, working beneath the tree where Jason Jessup had lit a candle in Franklin Canyon.
    I didn’t have to be there but wanted to be. I was hoping for further evidence of Jason Jessup’s villainy, as though that might make it easier to accept what had happened.
    But so far, in three excavations, they had found nothing. The team moved slowly, stripping away the dirt one inch at a time and sifting and analyzing every ounce of soil they removed. We had been here all morning and my hope had waned into a cold cynicism about what Jessup had been doing up here on the nights he was followed.
    A white canvas sheet had been strung from the tree to two poles planted outside the search zone. This shielded the diggers from the sun as well as from the view of the media helicopters above. Someone had leaked word of the search.
    Bosch had the stack of files from the missing persons cases on the table. He was ready to go with records and descriptors of the missing girls should any human remains be found. I had simply come armed with the morning’s newspaper and I read the front-page story now for a second time. The report on the events of the day before was the lead story in the Times and was accompanied by a color photo of two SIS officers pointing their weapons into the open trapdoor on the Santa Monica Pier. The story was also accompanied by a front-page sidebar story on the SIS. Headline: ANOTHER CASE, ANOTHER SHOOTING, SIS’s BLOODY HISTORY.
    I had the feeling this would be a story with legs. So far, no one in the media had found out that the SIS knew Jessup had obtained a gun. When that got out—and I was sure it would—there would no doubt be a firestorm of controversy, further investigations and police commission inquiries. The chief question being: Once it was established that it was likely that this man had a weapon, why was he allowed to remain free?
    It all made me glad I was no longer even temporarily in the employ of the state. In the bureaucratic arena, those kinds of questions and their answers have the tendency to separate people from their jobs.
    I needed not worry about the outcome of such inquiries for my livelihood. I would be returning to my office—the backseat of my Lincoln Town Car. I was going back to being private counsel for the defense. The lines were cleaner there, the mission clearer.
    “Is Maggie McFierce coming?” Bosch asked.
    I put the paper down on the table.
    “No, Williams sent her back to Van Nuys. Her part in the case is over.”
    “Why isn’t Williams moving her downtown?”
    “The deal was that we had to get a conviction for her to get downtown. We didn’t.”
    I gestured to the newspaper.
    “And we weren’t going to get one. This one holdout juror is telling anybody who’ll listen that he would’ve voted not guilty. So I guess you can say Gabriel Williams is a man who keeps his word. Maggie’s going nowhere fast.”
    That’s how it worked in the nexus of politics and jurisprudence. And that’s why I couldn’t wait to go back to defending the damned.
    We sat in silence for a while after that and I thought about my ex-wife and how my efforts to help her and promote her had failed so miserably. I wondered if she would begrudge me the effort. I surely hoped not. It would be hard for me to live in a world where Maggie McFierce despised me.
    “They found something,” Bosch said.
    I looked up from my thoughts and focused. One of the diggers was using a pair of tweezers to put something from the dirt into a plastic evidence bag. Soon she stood up and headed toward us with the bag. She was Kathy Kohl, the ME’s forensic archaeologist.
    She handed Bosch the bag and he held it up to look. I could see that it contained a silver bracelet.
    “No bones,” Kohl said. “Just that. We’re at thirty-two inches down and it’s rare that you find a murder interment much further down than that. So this one’s looking like the other two. You want us to keep digging?”
    Bosch glanced at the bracelet in the bag and looked up at Kohl.
    “How about another foot? That going to be a problem?”
    “A day in the field beats a day in the lab anytime. You want us to keep digging, we’ll keep digging.”
    “Thanks, Doc.”
    “You got it.”
    She went back to the