Authors: Michael Connelly
“And the Santa Monica Pier?”
“Already covered. Got a couple teams on the beach and nobody’s gone in or out of that location.”
Wright went on the SIS band on the radio and started redeploying his men. As Bosch listened he paced the room, trying to figure Jessup out. After a while he stepped back out to the hallway so as not to disturb Wright’s radio choreography and called Larry Gandle, his boss at RHD.
“It’s Bosch. Just checking in.”
“You still at the hotel?”
“Yeah, but we’re about to clear and head to the beach. I guess you heard they found the car.”
“Yeah, I was just there.”
Bosch was surprised. With four victims at Royce’s office, he thought Gandle would still be at the murder scene.
“The car’s clean,” Gandle said. “Jessup still has the weapon.”
“Where are you now?” Bosch asked.
“On Speedway,” Gandle said. “We just hit the room Jessup was using. Took a while to get the search warrant.”
“Anything there?”
“Not so far. This fucking guy, you see him in court wearing a suit and you think… I don’t know what you think, but the reality was, he was living like an animal.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are empty cans all over the place, food still rotting in them. Food rotting on the counter, trash everywhere. He hung blankets over the windows to black it out like a cave. He made it like a prison cell. He was even writing on the walls.”
All at once it hit him. Bosch knew who Jessup had prepared the dungeon under the pier for.
“What kind of food?” he asked.
“What?” Gandle asked.
“The canned food. What kind of food?”
“I don’t know, fruits and peaches—all kinds of stuff you can get fresh in any store you walk into. But he had it in cans. Like prison.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
Bosch closed the phone and walked quickly back into the office. Wright was off the radio now.
“Did your people go under the pier and check the storage room or just set up surveillance?”
“It’s a loose surveillance.”
“Meaning they didn’t check it out?”
“They checked the perimeter. There was no sign that anybody went under the wall. So they backed out and set up.”
“Jessup’s there. They missed him.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. Let’s go.”
Thursday, April 8, 6:35
P.M
.
I
stood at the picture window at the end of my living room and looked out at the city with the sun dropping behind it. Jessup was out there someplace. Like a rabid animal he would be hunted, cornered and, I had no doubt, put down. It was the inevitable conclusion to his play.
Jessup was legally to blame but I couldn’t help but think about my own culpability in these dark matters. Not in any legal sense, but in a private, internal sense. I had to question whether consciously or not I had set all of this in motion on the day I sat with Gabriel Williams and agreed to cross a line in the courtroom as well as within myself. Maybe by allowing Jessup his freedom I had determined his fate as well as that of Royce and the others. I was a defense attorney, not a prosecutor. I stood for the underdog, not for the state. Maybe I had taken the steps and made the maneuvers so that there would never be a verdict and I would not have to live with it on my record and conscience.
Such were the musings of a guilty man. But they didn’t last long. My phone buzzed and I pulled it from my pocket without looking away from my view of the city.
“Haller.”
“It’s me. I thought you were coming up here.”
Maggie McFierce.
“Soon. I’m just finishing up here. Everything all right?”
“For me, yes. But probably not for Jessup. Are you watching the TV news?”
“No, what are they showing?”
“They’ve evacuated the Santa Monica Pier. Channel Five has a chopper over it. They’re not confirming that it’s related to Jessup but they said that LAPD’s SIS unit sought an okay from SMPD to conduct a fugitive apprehension. They’re on the beach moving in.”
“The dungeon? Did Jessup grab somebody?”
“If he did, they’re not saying.”
“Did you call Harry?”
“I just tried but he didn’t pick up. I think he’s probably down there on the beach.”
I broke away from the window and grabbed the television remote off the coffee table. I snapped on the TV and punched in Channel 5.
“I have it on here,” I told Maggie.
On the screen was an aerial view of the pier and the surrounding beach. It looked like there were men on the beach and they were advancing on the pier’s underside from both the north and south.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “It’s gotta be him. The dungeon he made down there was actually for himself. Like a safe house he could run to.”
“Like the prison cell he was used to. I wonder if he knows they’re coming in on him. Maybe he hears the helicopters.”
“Harry said the waves under there are so loud you couldn’t even hear a gunshot.”
“Well, we might be about to find that out.”
We watched in silence for a few moments before I spoke.
“Maggie, are the girls watching this?”
“God, no! They’re playing video games in the other room.”
“Good.”
They watched in silence. The newscaster’s voice echoing over the line as he inanely described what was on the screen. After a while Maggie asked the question that had probably been on her mind all afternoon.
“Did you think it would come to this, Haller?”
“No, did you?”
“No, never. I guess I thought everything would sort of be contained in the courtroom. Like it always is.”
“Yeah.”
“At least Jessup saved us the indignity of the verdict.”
“What do you mean? We had him and he knew it.”
“You didn’t watch any of the juror interviews, did you?”
“What, on TV?”
“Yeah, juror number ten is on every channel saying he would’ve voted not guilty.”
“You mean Kirns?”
“Yeah, the alternate that got moved into the box. Everybody else interviewed said guilty, guilty, guilty. But Kirns said not guilty, that we hadn’t convinced him. He would’ve hung the jury, Haller, and you know Williams wouldn’t have signed on for round two. Jessup would’ve walked.”
I considered this and could only shake my head. Everything was for nothing. All it took was one juror with a grudge against society, and Jessup would’ve walked. I looked up from the TV screen and out toward the western horizon to the distance, where I knew Santa Monica hugged the edge of the Pacific. I thought I could see the media choppers circling.
“I wonder if Jessup will ever know that,” I said.
Thursday, April 8, 6:55
P.M
.
T
he sun was dropping low over the Pacific and burning a brilliant green path across the surface. Bosch stood close to Wright on the beach, a hundred yards south of the pier. They were both looking down at the 5 × 5 video screen contained in a front pack strapped to Wright’s chest. He was commanding the SIS takedown of Jason Jessup. On the screen was a murky image of the dimly lit storage facility under the pier. Bosch had been given ears but no mike. He could hear the operation’s communications but could not contribute to them. Anything he had to say would have to go through Wright.
The voices over the com were hard to hear because of the background sound of waves crashing beneath the pier.
“This is Five, we’re in.”
“Steady the visual,” Wright commanded.
The focus on the video tightened and Bosch could see that the camera was aimed at the individual storage rooms at the rear of the pier facility.
“This one.”
He pointed to the door he had seen Jessup go through.
“Okay,” Wright said. “Our target is the second door from the right. Repeat, second door from the right. Move in and take positions.”
The video moved in a herky-jerky fashion to a new position. Now the camera was even closer.
“Three and Four are—”
The rest was wiped out by the sound of a crashing wave.
“Three and Four, say again,” Wright said.
“Three, Four in position.”
“Hold until my go. Topside, you ready?”
“Topside ready.”
On the upper level of the evacuated pier there was another team, which had placed small explosives at the corners of the trapdoor above the storage corral where they believed Jessup was holed up. On Wright’s command the SIS teams would blow the trapdoor and move in from above and below.
Wright wrapped his hand around the mike that ran along his jawline and looked at Bosch.
“You ready for this?”
“Ready.”
Wright released his grip and gave the command to his teams.
“Okay, let’s give him a chance,” he said. “Three, you have the speaker up?”
“That’s a go on the speaker. You’re hot in three, two… one.”
Wright spoke, trying to convince a man hidden in a dark room a hundred yards away to give himself up.
“Jason Jessup. This is Lieutenant Stephen Wright of the Los Angeles Police Department. Your position is surrounded top and bottom. Step out with your hands behind your head, fingers laced. Move forward to the waiting officers. If you deviate from this order you will be shot.”
Bosch pulled his earplugs out and listened. He could hear the muffled sound of Wright’s words coming from under the pier. There was no doubt that Jessup could hear the order if he was under there.
“You have one minute,” Wright said as his final communication to Jessup.
The lieutenant checked his watch and they waited. At the thirty-second mark Wright checked with his men under the pier.
“Anything?”
“This is Three. I got nothing.”
“Four, clear.”
Wright gave Bosch a wishful look, like he had hoped it wouldn’t come to this.
“Okay, on my mark we go. Keep tight and no crossfire. Topside, if you shoot, you make sure you know who you—”
There was movement on the video screen. A door to one of the storage corrals flung open, but not the door they were focused on. The camera made a jerking motion left as it redirected its aim. Bosch saw Jessup emerge from the darkness behind the open door. His arms came up and together as he dropped into a combat pose.
“Gun!” Wright yelled.
The barrage of gunfire that followed lasted no more than ten seconds. But in that time at least four officers under the pier emptied their weapons. The crescendo was punctuated by the unneeded detonation from the topside. By then Bosch had already seen Jessup go down in the gunfire. Like a man in front of a firing squad, his body seemed at first to be held upright by the force of multiple impacts from multiple angles. Then gravity set in and he fell to the sand.
After a few moments of silence, Wright was back on the com.
“Everybody safe? Count off.”
All officers under and on top of the pier reported in safe.
“Check the suspect.”
In the video Bosch saw two officers approach Jessup’s body. One checked for a pulse while the other held his aim on the dead man.
“He’s ten-seven.”
“Secure the weapon.”
“Got it.”
Wright killed the video and looked at Bosch.
“And that’s that,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t get your answers.”
“Me, too.”
They started walking up the beach to the pier. Wright checked his watch and went on the com, announcing the official time of the shooting as 7:18
P.M.
Bosch looked off across the ocean to his left. The sun was now gone.
PART SIX
—All That Remains
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?