The Law of Innocence Page 10

  I finally got a call from Harry Bosch. I had not heard from him since well before Christmas despite leaving messages of holiday greetings and requests for updates on his part of the investigation. I knew that nothing had happened to him—my daughter had reported seeing him at his house when she visited her cousin Maddie over the break. And now, finally, he called. He appeared not to be aware of my efforts to contact him over the past weeks. He simply said he had something he wanted me to see. I was still at home, having a second cup of coffee with Kendall, and he agreed to swing by and pick me up.

  We drove south in his old Jeep Cherokee, the one with the squared-off design and the twenty-five-year-old suspension. Shake, rattle, and roll: the car shook every time its tires hit a seam in the asphalt, rattled with every pothole, and threatened to roll on every left turn as the aging springs compressed and the car tilted to the right.

  He kept KNX news on and had the uncanny ability to engage in conversation while still keeping an ear on the radio and from time to time throwing comments on the news of the day into the conversation. Even when I turned the volume knob down to respond, he would then turn it back up.

  “So,” I said, once we were down out of the hills. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s something I want you to see first,” Bosch said.

  “It’s about Opparizio, I hope. I mean, you were working on him and then you disappear for like a month.”

  “I didn’t disappear. I was working the case. I told you you’d hear from me when I had something and now I think I do.”

  “Well, I hope it’s a connection to Sam Scales and the case. Otherwise you’ve been chasing a pipe dream.”

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  “Can you at least tell me how far we’re going? So I can tell Lorna when I’ll be back.”

  “T.I.”

  “What? They’re not going to let me in with this thing on my ankle.”

  “We’re not going to the prison. I just want to show you something.”

  “And a photo wouldn’t do?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We drove in silence for a while after that. Bosch took the 101 south into downtown and then jumped onto the 110, which would be a straight shot down to Terminal Island at the Port of Los Angeles. There was nothing awkward or uncomfortable about the stall in the conversation. We were half brothers and comfortable with the silences. Bosch listened to the news and I tuned it out with thoughts about the case. We were going to trial in under six weeks and I still had no grounds for a defense. Bosch may have gone silent but at least he had something he wanted me to see. My other investigator, Cisco, had been staying in close contact, but his efforts to background Sam Scales had so far been fruitless. I figured I was a week away from doing the unthinkable: throwing aside my right to a speedy trial and asking for time, for a continuance. But I worried that such a request would reveal too much. It would show desperation, panic, and maybe even signal guilt—I would be acting like someone delaying the inevitable.

  “Where the hell is Wuhan?” Bosch said.

  His words rescued me from the downward spiral of my thoughts.

  “Who?” I asked.

  He pointed to the radio.

  “Not who,” he said. “It’s a place somewhere in China. Were you listening?”

  “No, I was thinking,” I said. “What was it?”

  “They’ve got a mystery virus over there, killing people.”

  “Well, at least it’s there and not here.”

  “Yeah, for how long?”

  “You ever been over there, China?”

  “Just to Hong Kong.”

  “Oh, right…Maddie’s mom. Sorry I brought it up.”

  “Long time ago.”

  I attempted to change the subject.

  “So, what’s Opparizio like?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Bosch responded.

  “Well, I just remember, when I had him on the stand nine years ago, he was restrained at first but then out came the animal. He wanted to jump out of that chair and tear my throat out or something. He seemed more Tony Soprano than Michael Corleone, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well, so far I haven’t laid eyes on the guy. That’s not what I’ve been doing.”

  I looked out the window and tried to blunt my shock and upset. I then turned back to engage.

  “Harry, then what have you been doing?” I asked. “You had Opparizio, remember? You should’ve—”

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said. “I know I have Opparizio but it wasn’t about putting eyes on him. This isn’t a surveillance job. It’s about finding out what he was doing and whether or not it somehow connects to Scales and you. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”

  “Okay, then stop with the whole mystery trip thing. Where are we going?”

  “Just take it easy. We’re almost there and you’ll be enlightened.”

  “Really? ‘Enlightened’? Like divine intervention or something?”

  “Not quite. But I think you’ll like it.”

  He was right about one thing. We were almost there. I looked around to get my bearings and saw that we had crossed the 405 and were just a few miles from the end of the Harbor Freeway at Terminal Island. Through the windshield and to the left I could see the giant gantry cranes that loaded containers on and off cargo ships.

  We were in San Pedro now. Once a small fishing village, it was now part of the giant Port of Los Angeles complex, serving as a bedroom community for many of those who worked on the docks and in the shipping and oil industries. It had once had a full courthouse where I appeared regularly on behalf of clients accused of crimes. But the justice complex was shuttered by the county in a cost-cutting move and the cases moved up to a courthouse by the airport. The San Pedro courthouse had now stood abandoned for well over a decade.

  “I used to come down to Pedro a lot on cases,” I said.

  “I used to come down when I was a teenager,” Bosch said. “Sneak out of whatever place they put me, come down to the docks. I got tattooed down here once.”

  I just nodded. It looked like he was reliving the memory and I didn’t want to intrude. I knew very little about Bosch’s early life beyond what I had read once in an unauthorized profile in the Times. I remembered foster homes and an early enlistment in the army, with Vietnam as the destination. This was decades before we learned of our blood connection.

  We crossed the Vincent Thomas, the tall green suicide bridge that connected to Terminal Island. The entire island was dedicated to port and industrial operations, with the exception of the federal prison at the far end. Bosch exited the freeway and used surface streets to get us moving along the northern edge of the island and next to one of the deep port channels.

  “Taking a wild guess,” I said. “Opparizio has some kind of smuggling operation here. Stuff coming in on cargo containers. Drugs? Humans? What?”

  “Not that I know of,” Bosch said. “I’m going to show you something else. You see this area?”

  He pointed through the windshield toward a vast parking lot filled with plastic-wrapped cars fresh off the boats from Japan.

  “There used to be a Ford Motor plant here,” Bosch said. “It was called Long Beach Assembly and they made the Model A. My mother’s father supposedly worked there in the thirties on the Model A line.”

  “What was he like?” I asked.

  “I never met him. Only heard the story.”

  “And now it’s Toyotas.”

  I gestured toward the vast parking lot of new cars ready to be disseminated to dealers across the West.

  Bosch turned onto a crushed-shell road that ran alongside a rock jetty lining the channel. A black-and-white oil tanker the length of a football field, including the end zones, was slowly making its way down the channel to the port. Bosch pulled to a stop by what looked like an abandoned railroad spur and killed the engine.

  “Let’s walk up to the jetty,” he said. “I’ll show you what we’ve got as soon as
this tanker goes by.”

  We followed an uphill walk to the top of a berm that ran behind the jetty as a barrier against high tides. By standing on top of it we got a solid view across the channel of the various petroleum refining and storage facilities vital to the operations of the port.

  “Okay, so this is the Cerritos Channel right here and we are looking north,” Bosch said. “That’s Wilmington directly across the water and Long Beach to the right.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What exactly are we looking at?”

  “The center of the California oil business. You’ve got the Marathon, Valero, Tesoro refineries right there. Chevron is farther up. The oil comes in here from all over—even Alaska. Comes to port by supertanker, barge, rail, pipeline, you name it. Then it goes over there to the refineries and it gets processed and from there into distribution. Into tanker trucks and out to your local gas station and then into your own gas tank.”

  “What’s it all got to do with the case?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. You see that refinery at the end there with the catwalks around the tanks?”

  He pointed to the right and at a small refinery with a single stack billowing a white plume of smoke into the sky. An American flag was draped around the upper section of the stack. There were two side-by-side storage tanks that looked to be at least four stories tall and were surrounded by multiple catwalks.

  “I see it,” I said.

  “That’s BioGreen Industries,” Bosch said. “You won’t find Louis Opparizio’s name attached to any of the ownership documents but he holds the controlling interest in BioGreen. No doubt about it.”

  Bosch had my undivided attention now.

  “How did you find that out?” I asked.

  “I followed the honey,” Bosch said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, nine years ago you were able to drag Opparizio through the legal wood chipper at the trial for your client Lisa Trammel. I pulled the transcript and read his testimony. He—”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I was there, remember?”

  Another tanker was coming down the channel. It was so wide, it had little margin for error as it navigated between the jagged rocks that lined both sides.

  “I know you were there,” Bosch said. “But what you might not know is that Louis Opparizio learned a lot from getting pounded by you that day on the stand. Number one, he learned never again to be connected by legal documentation to any of his companies—legit or not. He currently owns nothing in his name and is connected to no company, board, or reported investment to anything. He uses people as fronts.”

  “I’m damn proud I was able to teach him how to be a better criminal. How did you get around it?”

  “The Internet is still a pretty useful tool. Social media, newspaper archives. Opparizio’s father died four years ago. There was a service in New Jersey and a virtual visitation book. Friends and family signed in, and damn if the funeral home’s website doesn’t still have it online.”

  “More like hot damn. You got lots of names.”

  “Names and connections. I started tracing, looking for stuff out here. Three Opparizio associates are vested owners of BioGreen and make up a majority interest. He controls it through them. One of them is named Jeannie Ferrigno, who in the last seven years has risen from a Vegas stripper with a couple of possession pops on her record to part owner of a variety of businesses from there to here and back again. I think Jeannie is Opparizio’s sidepiece.”

  “Follow the honey.”

  “Right to BioGreen.”

  “This is getting good, Bosch.”

  I pointed down the channel to the refinery.

  “But if Opparizio has a secret ownership in businesses from here to Vegas, why are we looking at this one?”

  “Because this is where the biggest money is. You see that place? It’s not a typical refinery. It’s a biodiesel plant. Basically, it makes fuel from plants and animal fat. It’s recycling waste into an alternate fuel that costs less and burns cleaner. And right now it’s the apple of the government’s eye because it reduces our national dependence on oil. It’s the future, and Louis Opparizio is riding the wave. The government is propping this business up, paying companies like BioGreen a premium on each barrel just to make it. That’s on top of what they get for then going out and selling that barrel.”

  “And where there’s government subsidy, there is always corruption.”

  “You got that right.”

  I started pacing along the worn footpath on top of the berm. I was trying to see the connections and how this could all work.

  “So, there’s a guy,” Bosch said. “A lieutenant who runs the bureau at Harbor Division. I trained him twenty-five years ago when he came through Hollywood detectives as a D-one.”

  “Can you talk to him?” I asked.

  “Already did. He knows I’m retired, so I told him I was fishing around for a friend who is interested in BioGreen as an investment. I wanted to know if there were any red flags and he told me, yeah, there’s a big red flag, an FBI flag on the place.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning he is supposed to take no action on anything that comes across his plate from BioGreen. He’s supposed to alert the bureau and stand down. You understand what that means?”

  “That the bureau’s working on something there.”

  “Or at least keeping an eye on it.”

  I nodded. This was getting better and better in terms of building a smoke screen for trial. But I knew I needed to do more than provide smoke. This wasn’t work for a client. It was for me.

  “Okay, so all we need is a connection to Sam Scales, and we have something I can tee up in court,” I said. “I’ll call Cisco and see what he—”

  “We already have it,” Bosch said.

  “What are you talking about? Where does he connect?”

  “The autopsy. Remember the fingernails? The scrapings showed vegetable oil, chicken fat, sugarcane. That’s biofuel, Mick. Sam Scales had biofuel under his fingernails.”

  I looked down the channel at the BioGreen refinery. The smoke from the stack billowed ominously upward, helping to feed the dirty cloud that hung over the entire harbor.

  I nodded.

  “I think you found it, Harry,” I said. “The magic bullet.”

  “Just be careful you don’t shoot yourself with it,” he said.

  16

  Sunday, January 12

  Bosch’s discovery of BioGreen and its connection to Louis Opparizio and possibly Sam Scales served to kick-start the defense case by providing a focal point of investigation and strategy. The trip to Terminal Island was followed by an all-hands meeting the following morning at which tasks were delineated and assigned. Establishing a link between Scales and Opparizio was paramount and I wanted that to be the main focus of my investigators.

  Locating Opparizio was another. He had insulated himself from direct ownership and control of the refinery operation and we needed to nail that down before trial. With no direct link we worked the secondary link: Jeannie Ferrigno. I told Cisco to put together a surveillance team in hopes that Jeannie would lead us to Opparizio, and then we would jump the surveillance to him. I wanted to be able to document for the jury that this man who held an undeniable grudge against me had an association with the man I was accused of killing. If we could make that connection, then I believed we had our frame.

  The meeting ended with a lot of excitement. But for me the adrenaline ebbed quickly. While the investigators got the thrill of working in the field, I focused through the weekend on what many lawyers abhor: reviewing the case files. The paper trail of a case is a living thing that grows and changes. Documents and evidence reviewed at one point could look different or take on new significance when reviewed through the prism of time.

  It was important to know the case inside and out, but I could only accomplish that through repeated reviews of the case files. It had now been more than two months since
my arrest and the files had thickened by the week with the dissemination of discovery material. I had read and reviewed it all as it came in but it was also important to take it all in as a whole.

  By Sunday morning I had filled several pages of a legal pad with notes, lists, and questions. One page was a list of what was missing from the case. At the top was Sam Scales’s wallet. It was not on the property report that described the clothing found on the body and the contents of its pockets.

  No wallet. It was assumed that the killer—meaning me—had taken and disposed of it. This missing wallet was important to me because in the variety of scams for which I had defended Sam, he had never used his real name. It was the con man’s way. Each con required a new personality so that he could avoid being traced after the victims woke up to the fact that they had been had. To this end, I knew that Sam was gifted at reinventing himself. I only represented him the times he got caught. It was unknown how many cons he had pulled off without detection.

  The missing wallet in this case was important because after a month of diligent work, Cisco Wojciechowski had come up empty in his efforts to background Scales. It was a black hole. We had found no digital record of his whereabouts in the two previous years. The wallet would help if it contained the identification of his current persona. It also would help connect him to BioGreen. If he was working there or involved in some kind of scheme with Opparizio, his current identity would be key to tracing it.

  It was only when I reviewed the case file for a third time on Sunday evening that I noticed a discrepancy that appeared to flip the case over and give me one more grievance to take to Judge Warfield.

  After strategizing next moves, I called Jennifer Aronson and spoiled her dinner plans. I told her to draw up an emergency motion to compel discovery from the prosecution. I told her that the request should clearly state that the prosecution had been withholding vital evidence from the defense since the start of the case and that the evidence in question was the victim’s wallet and its contents.