The Brass Verdict Read online

  Extraordinary acclaim for

  MICHAEL CONNELLY AND

  THE BRASS VERDICT

  The #1 New York Times Bestseller

  Selected as One of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly

  “A masterful writer… I’d be willing to bet that in the long run, Bosch ends up as a permanent part of the American literary pantheon, right up there with Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby and Philip Marlowe.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “[The] praise is unanimous… But what really rocks this story is not the plot, which is solid and compelling, nor the writing, which, as always, is fresh and clean and stripped of artifice. It’s the character studies of Haller and Bosch that give gold luster to THE BRASS VERDICT.”

  —USA Today

  “Mickey Haller is pumped, and, take my word for it, you will be too.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Michael Connelly is the most talented of crime writers.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Chandler had no great command of plot; Connelly is a master of it, teasing out the lines of THE BRASS VERDICT in a seemingly effortless way… a thoughtful writer [who has] kept his work fresh and his readers on their toes… Haller is a mixture of light and dark, a flesh-and-blood guy who, as with Harry Bosch, we’ll look forward to meeting again.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Michael Connelly is one of America’s finest writers, in any genre… the final twist will make you shake your head in wonder.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The wait for Haller’s return is over, and Connelly once again hits it out of the park in the tightly written, fast-paced, and sharply imagined THE BRASS VERDICT… breathtaking twists… Connelly continues to demonstrate his strengths. His characters are fully formed, his dialogue is sharp, and he captures L.A. with élan… a more perfect end to the maze he has drawn is difficult to imagine.”

  —Denver Post

  “Filled with inside-courthouse lore and intriguing revelations about Bosch and Haller alike.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “A peachy legal thriller… there’s rich promise here for future collaborations.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Connelly’s my man!”

  —JANET EVANOVICH, People

  “Connelly is a superb storyteller, solid but unflashy, letting out information the way you’d lay out fishing line, then reeling you in, another pleased reader.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A splendid book.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Riveting.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Connelly is, quite simply, the best of the best.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A well-paced, complex plot… Connelly has all the right stuff for another bestseller.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “[Bosch is] one of the most compelling heroes of modern crime fiction.”

  —Associated Press

  “Suspenseful and fast-paced.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The tale spins off at dizzying speed, with Connelly artfully turning the steering wheel every which way.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “An engrossing and tightly knit plot… The author is incapable of writing a mediocre story, but sometimes he writes one even better than the last.”

  —Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “Terrific plot twists.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Riveting… Connelly’s skills at melding plot, character, and scenery into a cohesive unit shine in this book. THE BRASS VERDICT is gold.”

  —Orlando Sun-Sentinel

  “Fascinating… a fiendishly clever thriller.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Beautifully executed.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A certified page-turner that will suck you in from page one, and not let you go until the final sentence… When it comes to series mysteries, there’s everybody else, and then there’s Michael Connelly. Is he really that good, you ask? Oh yeah, he’s really that good.”

  —BookPage

  “Haller’s relationship with Bosch is satisfyingly resourceful—by turns wary, competitive, complementary, cooperative, and mutually predatory… Connelly brings his two sleuths together in a way that honors them both.”

  —Kirkus Review

  “Connelly can be counted on for rock-solid, hugely entertaining mysteries… this is his best yet.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “The best mystery writer in the world.”

  —GQ

  “Connelly has the pop novelist’s virtue of dependability. You can spend a few years without reading him and then pick up a new book, confident you’re going to be entertained by his smooth storytelling.”

  — Bloomberg.com

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CONNELLY

  The Harry Bosch Novels

  The Black Echo

  The Black Ice

  The Concrete Blonde

  The Last Coyote

  Trunk Music

  Angels Flight

  A Darkness More than Night

  City of Bones

  Lost Light

  The Narrows

  The Closers

  Echo Park

  The Overlook

  Other Novels

  The Poet

  Blood Work

  Void Moon

  Chasing the Dime

  The Lincoln Lawyer

  The Scarecrow

  Anthologies

  Mystery Writers of America Presents Blue Religion:

  New Stories about Cops, Criminals, and the Chase

  Nonfiction

  Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers

  Copyright

  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.

  Copyright © 2008 by Hieronymus, Inc.

  An excerpt from Nine Dragons copyright © 2009 by Hieronymus, Inc.

  All 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.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/grandcentral

  First eBook Edition: October 2008

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04016-7

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Michael Connelly

  PART ONE: —Rope a Dope 1992

  One

  Two

  Three

  PART TWO: —Suitcase City 2007

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Th
irty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  PART THREE: —To Speak the Truth

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  PART FOUR: —Fillet of Soul

  Walking in a Dead Man’s Shoes

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  PART FIVE: —Take the Nickel

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  PART SIX: —The Last Verdict

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Preview of Nine Dragons

  Part One

  In memory of Terry Hansen

  and Frank Morgan

  PART ONE

  —Rope a Dope

  1992

  One

  Everybody lies.

  Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie.

  A trial is a contest of lies. And everybody in the courtroom knows this. The judge knows this. Even the jury knows this. They come into the building knowing they will be lied to. They take their seats in the box and agree to be lied to.

  The trick if you are sitting at the defense table is to be patient. To wait. Not for just any lie. But for the one you can grab on to and forge like hot iron into a sharpened blade. You then use that blade to rip the case open and spill its guts out on the floor.

  That’s my job, to forge the blade. To sharpen it. To use it without mercy or conscience. To be the truth in a place where everybody lies.

  Two

  I was in the fourth day of trial in Department 109 in the downtown Criminal Courts Building when I got the lie that became the blade that ripped the case open. My client, Barnett Woodson, was riding two murder charges all the way to the steel-gray room in San Quentin where they serve you Jesus juice direct through the arm.

  Woodson, a twenty-seven-year-old drug dealer from Compton, was accused of robbing and killing two college students from Westwood. They had wanted to buy cocaine from him. He decided instead to take their money and kill them both with a sawed-off shotgun. Or so the prosecution said. It was a black-on-white crime and that made things bad enough for Woodson—especially coming just four months after the riots that had torn the city apart. But what made his situation even worse was that the killer had attempted to hide the crime by weighing down the two bodies and dropping them into the Hollywood Reservoir. They stayed down for four days before popping to the surface like apples in a barrel. Rotten apples. The idea of dead bodies moldering in the reservoir that was a primary source of the city’s drinking water caused a collective twist in the community’s guts. When Woodson was linked by phone records to the dead men and arrested, the public outrage directed toward him was almost palpable. The District Attorney’s Office promptly announced it would seek the death penalty.

  The case against Woodson, however, wasn’t all that palpable. It was constructed largely of circumstantial evidence—the phone records—and the testimony of witnesses who were criminals themselves. And state’s witness Ronald Torrance sat front and center in this group. He claimed that Woodson confessed the killings to him.

  Torrance had been housed on the same floor of the Men’s Central Jail as Woodson. Both men were kept in a high-power module that contained sixteen single-prisoner cells on two tiers that opened onto a dayroom. At the time, all sixteen prisoners in the module were black, following the routine but questionable jail procedure of “segregating for safety,” which entailed dividing prisoners according to race and gang affiliation to avoid confrontations and violence. Torrance was awaiting trial on robbery and aggravated assault charges stemming from his involvement in looting during the riots. High-power detainees had six a.m. to six p.m. access to the dayroom, where they ate and played cards at tables and otherwise interacted under the watchful eyes of guards in an overhead glass booth. According to Torrance, it was at one of these tables that my client had confessed to killing the two Westside boys.

  The prosecution went out of its way to make Torrance presentable and believable to the jury, which had only three black members. He was given a shave, his hair was taken out of cornrows and trimmed short and he was dressed in a pale blue suit with no tie when he arrived in court on the fourth day of Woodson’s trial. In direct testimony elicited by Jerry Vincent, the prosecutor, Torrance described the conversation he allegedly had with Woodson one morning at one of the picnic tables. Woodson not only confessed to the killings, he said, but furnished Torrance with many of the telling details of the murders. The point made clear to the jury was that these were details that only the true killer would know.

  During the testimony, Vincent kept Torrance on a tight leash with long questions designed to elicit short answers. The questions were overloaded to the point of being leading but I didn’t bother objecting, even when Judge Companioni looked at me with raised eyebrows, practically begging me to jump in. But I didn’t object, because I wanted the counterpoint. I wanted the jury to see what the prosecution was doing. When it was my turn, I was going to let Torrance run with his answers while I hung back and waited for the blade.

  Vincent finished his direct at eleven a.m. and the judge asked me if I wanted to take an early lunch before I began my cross. I told him no, I didn’t need or want a break. I said it like I was disgusted and couldn’t wait another hour to get at the man on the stand. I stood up and took a big, thick file and a legal pad with me to the lectern.

  “Mr. Torrance, my name is Michael Haller. I work for the Public Defender’s Office and represent Barnett Woodson. Have we met before?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I didn’t think so. But you and the defendant, Mr. Woodson, you two go back a long way, correct?”

  Torrance gave an “aw, shucks” smile. But I had done the due diligence on him and I knew exactly who I was dealing with. He was thirty-two years old and had spent a third of his life in jails and prisons. His schooling had ended in the fourth grade when he stopped going to school and no parent seemed to notice or care. Under the state’s three-strike law, he was facing the lifetime achievement award if convicted of charges he robbed and pistol-whipped the female manager of a coin laundry. The crime had been committed during three days of rioting and looting that ripped through the city after the not-guilty verdicts were announced in the trial of four police officers accused of the excessive beating of Rodney King, a black motorist pulled over for driving erratically. In short, Torrance had good reason to help the state take down Barnett Woodson.

  “Well, we go back a few months is all,” Torrance said. “To high-power.”

  “Did you say ‘higher power’?” I asked, playing dumb. “Are you talking about a church or some sort of religious connection?”

  “No, high-power module. In county.”

  “So you’re talking about jail, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’re telling me that you didn’t know Barnett Woodson before that?”

  I asked the question with surprise in my voice.

  “No, sir. We met for the first time in the jail.”

  I made a note on the legal pad as if this were an important concession.

  “So then, let’s do the math, Mr. Torrance. Barnett Woodson was transferred into the high-power module where you were already residing on the fifth of September earlier this year. Do you remember that?”

  “Yeah, I remember him coming in, yeah.”

  “And why were you there in high-power?”

  Vincent stood and objected, saying I was covering ground he had already trod in direct testimony. I argued that I was looking f
or a fuller explanation of Torrance’s incarceration, and Judge Companioni allowed me the leeway. He told Torrance to answer the question.

  “Like I said, I got a count of assault and one of robbery.”

  “And these alleged crimes took place during the riots, is that correct?”

  With the anti-police climate permeating the city’s minority communities since even before the riots, I had fought during jury selection to get as many blacks and browns on the panel as I could. But here was a chance to work on the five white jurors the prosecution had been able to get by me. I wanted them to know that the man the prosecution was hanging so much of its case on was one of those responsible for the images they saw on their television sets back in May.

  “Yeah, I was out there like everybody else,” Torrance answered. “Cops get away with too much in this town, you ask me.”

  I nodded like I agreed.

  “And your response to the injustice of the verdicts in the Rodney King beating case was to go out and rob a sixty-two-year-old woman and knock her unconscious with a steel trash can? Is that correct, sir?”

  Torrance looked over at the prosecution table and then past Vincent to his own lawyer, sitting in the first row of the gallery. Whether or not they had earlier rehearsed a response to this question, his legal team couldn’t help Torrance now. He was on his own.

  “I didn’t do that,” he finally said.

  “You’re innocent of the crime you are charged with?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about looting? You committed no crimes during the riots?”

  After a pause and another glance at his attorney, Torrance said, “I take the fifth on that.”

  As expected. I then took Torrance through a series of questions designed so that he had no choice but to incriminate himself or refuse to answer under the protections of the Fifth Amendment. Finally, after he took the nickel six times, the judge grew weary of the point being made over and over and prodded me back to the case at hand. I reluctantly complied.

  “All right, enough about you, Mr. Torrance,” I said. “Let’s get back to you and Mr. Woodson. You knew the details of this double-murder case before you even met Mr. Woodson in lockup?”

  “No, sir.”