Michael Connelly - The Reversal

A LSO BY M ICHAEL C ONNELLY

Fiction

The Black Echo

The Black Ice

The Concrete Blonde

The Last Coyote

The Poet

Trunk Music

Blood Work

Angels Flight

Void Moon

A Darkness More than Night

City of Bones

Chasing the Dime

Lost Light

The Narrows

The Closers

The Lincoln Lawyer

Echo Park

The Overlook

The Brass Verdict

The Scarecrow

Nine Dragons

Nonfiction

Crime Beat

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010 by Hieronymus, Inc.

Al rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

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First eBook Edition: October 2010

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-06946-5

To Shannon Byrne

with many thanks

Contents

Also by Michael Connel y

Copyright

PART ONE: The Perp Walk

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

PART TWO: The Labyrinth

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

PART THREE: To Seek a True and Just Verdict

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

PART FOUR: The Silent Witness

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

PART FIVE: The Takedown

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

PART SIX: Al That Remains

Forty-five

--The Perp Walk

One

Tuesday, February 9, 1:43 P.M.

The last time I'd eaten at the Water Gril I sat across the table from a client who had coldly and calculatedly murdered his wife and her lover, shooting both of them in the face. He had engaged my services to not only defend him at trial but ful y exonerate him and restore his good name in the public eye. This time I was sitting with someone with whom I needed to be even more careful. I was dining with Gabriel Wil iams, the district attorney of Los Angeles County.

It was a crisp afternoon in midwinter. I sat with Wil iams and his trusted chief of staff--read political advisor--Joe Ridel . The meal had been set for 1:30

P.M., when most courthouse lawyers would be safely back in the CCB, and the DA would not be advertising his dal iance with a member of the dark side.

Meaning me, Mickey Hal er, defender of the damned.

The Water Gril was a nice place for a downtown lunch. Good food and atmosphere, good separation between tables for private conversation, and a wine list hard to top in al of downtown. It was the kind of place where you kept your suit jacket on and the waiter put a black napkin across your lap so you needn't be bothered with doing it yourself. The prosecution team ordered martinis at the county taxpayers' expense and I stuck with the free water the restaurant was pouring. It took Wil iams two gulps of gin and one olive before he got to the reason we were hiding in plain sight.

"Mickey, I have a proposition for you."

I nodded. Ridel had already said as much when he had cal ed that morning to set up the lunch. I had agreed to the meet and then had gone to work on the phone myself, trying to gather any inside information I could on what the proposition would be. Not even my first ex-wife, who worked in the district attorney's employ, knew what was up.

"I'm al ears," I said. "It's not every day that the DA himself wants to give you a proposition. I know it can't be in regard to any of my clients--they wouldn't merit much attention from the guy at the top. And at the moment I'm only carrying a few cases anyway. Times are slow."

"Wel , you're right," Wil iams said. "This is not about any of your clients. I have a case I would like you to take on."

I nodded again. I understood now. They al hate the defense attorney until they need the defense attorney. I didn't know if Wil iams had any children but he would have known through due diligence that I didn't do juvy work. So I was guessing it had to be his wife. Probably a shoplifting grab or a DUI he was trying to keep under wraps.

"Who got popped?" I asked.

Wil iams looked at Ridel and they shared a smile.

"No, nothing like that," Wil iams said. "My proposition is this. I would like to hire you, Mickey. I want you to come work at the DA's office."

Of al the ideas that had been rattling around in my head since I had taken Ridel 's cal , being hired as a prosecutor wasn't one of them. I'd been a card-carrying member of the criminal defense bar for more than twenty years. During that time I'd grown a suspicion and distrust of prosecutors and police that might not have equaled that of the gangbangers down in Nickerson Gardens but was at least at a level that would seem to exclude me from ever joining their ranks. Plain and simple, they wouldn't want me and I wouldn't want them. Except for that ex-wife I mentioned and a half brother who was an LAPD

detective, I wouldn't turn my back on any of them. Especial y Wil iams. He was a politician first and a prosecutor second. That made him even more dangerous. Though briefly a prosecutor early in his legal career, he spent two decades as a civil rights attorney before running for the DA post as an outsider and riding into office on a tide of anti-police and -prosecutor sentiment. I was employing ful caution at the fancy lunch from the moment the napkin went across my lap.

"Work for you?" I asked. "Doing what exactly?"

"As a special prosecutor. A onetime deal. I want you to handle the Jason Jessup case."

I looked at him for a long moment. First I thought I would laugh out loud. This was some sort of cleverly orchestrated joke. But then I understood that couldn't be the case. They don't take you out to the Water Gril just to make a joke.

"You want me to prosecute Jessup? From what I hear there's nothing to prosecute. That case is a duck without wings. The only thing left to do is shoot it and eat it."

Wil iams shook his head in a manner that seemed intended to convince himself of something, not me.

"Next Tuesday is the anniversary of the murder," he said. "I'm going to announce that we intend to retry Jessup. And I would like you standing next to me at the press conference."

I leaned back in my seat and looked at them. I've spent a good part of my adult life looking across courtrooms and trying to read juries, judges, witnesses and prosecutors. I think I've gotten pretty good at it. But at that table I couldn't read Wil iams or his sidekick sitting three feet away from me.