The Reversal

excavation pit and Bosch handed the evidence bag to me to examine. It contained a charm bracelet. There were clots of dirt in the links and its charms. I could make out a tennis racket and an airplane.
    “Do you recognize it?” I asked. “From one of the missing girls?”
    He gestured to the stack of files on the table.
    “No. I don’t remember anything about a charm bracelet in the lists.”
    “It could’ve just been lost up here by somebody.”
    “Thirty-two inches down in the dirt?”
    “So you think Jessup buried it, then?”
    “Maybe. I’d hate to come away from this empty-handed. The guy had to have come up here for a reason. If he didn’t bury them here, then maybe this was the kill spot. I don’t know.”
    I handed the bag back to him.
    “I think you’re being too optimistic, Harry. That’s not like you.”
    “Well, then what the hell do you think Jessup was doing up here all those nights?”
    “I think he and Royce were playing us.”
    “Royce? What are you talking about?”
    “We were had, Harry. Face it.”
    Bosch held the evidence bag up again and shook it to loosen the dirt.
    “It was a classic misdirection,” I said. “The first rule of a good defense is a good offense. You attack your own case before you ever get to court. You find its weaknesses and if you can’t fix them, then you find ways of deflecting attention away from them.”
    “Okay.”
    “The biggest weakness to the defense’s case was Eddie Roman. Royce was going to put a liar and a drug addict on the stand. He knew that given enough time, you would either find Roman or find out things about him or both. He needed to deflect. Keep you occupied with things outside the case at hand.”
    “You’re saying he knew we were following Jessup?”
    “He could’ve easily guessed it. I put up no real opposition to his request for an OR release. That was unusual and probably got Royce thinking. So he sent Jessup out at night to see if there was a tail. As we already considered before, he probably even sent Jessup to your house to see if he would engage a response and confirm surveillance. When it didn’t, when it got no response, Royce probably thought he was wrong and dropped it. After that, Jessup stopped coming up here at night.”
    “And he probably thought he was in the clear to go build his dungeon under the pier.”
    “It makes sense. Doesn’t it?”
    Bosch took a long time to answer. He put his hand on top of the stack of files.
    “So what about all these missing girls?” he asked. “It’s all just coincidence?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “We may never know now. All we know is that they’re still missing and if Jessup was involved, then that secret probably died with him yesterday.”
    Bosch stood up, a troubled look on his face. He was still holding the evidence bag.
    “I’m sorry, Harry.”
    “Yeah, me, too.”
    “Where do you go from here?”
    Bosch shrugged.
    “The next case. My name goes back into the rotation. What about you?”
    I splayed my hands and smiled.
    “You know what I do.”
    “You sure about that? You made a damn good prosecutor.”
    “Yeah, well, thanks for that, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Besides, they’d never let me back on that side of the aisle. Not after this.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “They’re going to need somebody to blame for all of this and it’s going to be me. I was the one who let Jessup out. You watch. The cops, the Times, even Gabriel Williams will eventually bring it around to me. But that’s okay, as long as they leave Maggie alone. I know my place in the world and I’m going to go back to it.”
    Bosch nodded because there was nothing else to say. He shook the bag with the charm bracelet again and worked it with his fingers, removing more dirt from its surfaces. He then held it up to study closely and I could tell he saw something.
    “What is it?”
    His face changed. He was keying on one of the charms, rubbing dirt off it through the plastic bag. He then handed it to me.
    “Take a look. What is that?”
    The charm was still tarnished and dirty. It was a square piece of silver less than a half inch wide. On one side there was a tiny swivel at center and on the other what looked like a bowl or a cup.
    “Looks like a teacup on a square plate,” I suggested. “I don’t know.”
    “No, turn it over. That’s the bottom.”
    I did and I saw what he saw.
    “It’s one of those… a mortarboard. A graduation cap and this swivel on