The internal gears were working all the way back to my house. Patrick had been a quick study of my nuances and seemed to know that it was not the time to interrupt with small talk. He let me work.

I sat leaning against the door, my eyes gazing out the window but not seeing the neon world go by. I was thinking about Jerry Vincent and the deal he had made with a party unknown. It wasn’t hard to figure out how it was done. The question of who did it was another matter.

I knew that the jury system relied on random selection on multiple levels. This helped ensure the integrity and cross-social composition of juries. The initial pool of hundreds of citizens summoned to jury duty each week was drawn randomly from voter registrations as well as property and public utility records. Jurors culled from this larger group for the jury selection process in a specific trial were again chosen randomly – this time by a courthouse computer. The list of those prospective jurors was given to the judge presiding over the trial, and the first twelve names or code numbers on the list were called to take the seats in the box for the initial round of voir dire. Again, the order of names or numbers on the list was determined by computer-generated random selection.

Elliot told me that after a trial date had been set in his case, Jerry Vincent was approached by an unknown party and told that a sleeper could be placed on the jury. The catch was that there could be no delays. If the trial moved, the sleeper couldn’t move with it. All of this told me that this unknown party had full access to all levels of the random processes of the jury system: the initial summons to show for jury duty at a specific courthouse on a specific week; the random selection of the venire for the trial; and the random selection of the first twelve jurors to go into the box.

Once the sleeper was in the box, it was up to him to stay there. The defense would know not to oust him with a preemptory strike, and by appearing to be pro-prosecution he would avoid being challenged by the prosecution. It was simple enough, as long as the trial’s date didn’t change.

Stepping it out this way gave me a better understanding of the manipulation involved and who might have engineered it. It also gave me a better understanding of the ethical predicament I was in. Elliot had admitted several crimes to me over dinner. But I was his lawyer and these admissions would remain confidential under the bonds of the attorney-client relationship. The exception to this rule was if I were endangered by my knowledge or had knowledge of a crime that was planned but had not yet occurred. I knew that someone had been bribed by Vincent. That crime had already occurred. But the crime of jury tampering had not yet occurred. That crime wouldn’t take place until deliberations began, so I was duty-bound to report it. Elliot apparently didn’t know of this exception to the rules of client confidentiality or was convinced that the threat of my meeting the same end as Jerry Vincent would keep me in check.

I thought about all of this and realized there was one more exception to consider. I would not have to report the intended jury tampering if I were to stop the crime from happening.

I straightened up and looked around. We were on Sunset coming into West Hollywood. I looked ahead and saw a familiar sign.

“Patrick, pull over up here in front of Book Soup. I want to run in for a minute.”

Patrick pulled the Lincoln to the curb in front of the bookstore. I told him to wait in front and I jumped out. I went in the store’s front door and back into the stacks. Although I loved the store, I wasn’t there to shop. I needed to make a phone call and I didn’t want Patrick to hear it.

The mystery aisle was too crowded with customers. I went further back and found an empty alcove where big coffee-table books were stacked heavily on the shelves and tables. I pulled my phone and called my investigator.

“Cisco, it’s me. Where are you?”

“At home. What’s up?”

“Lorna there?”

“No, she went to a movie with her sister. She should be back in-”

“That’s all right. I wanted to talk to you. I want you to do something and you may not want to do it. If you don’t, I understand. Either way, I don’t want you to talk about it with anybody. Including Lorna.”

There was a hesitation before he answered.

“Who do I kill?”

We both started to laugh and it relieved some of the tension that had been building through the night.

“We can talk about that later but this might be just as dicey. I want you to shadow somebody for me and find out everything you can about him. The catch is, if you get caught, we’ll both probably get our tickets pulled.”

“Who is it?”

“Juror number seven.”

Forty-three

As soon as I got back in the Lincoln, I started to regret what I was doing. I was walking a fine gray line that could lead me into big trouble. On the one hand, it is perfectly reasonable for an attorney to investigate a report of jury misconduct and tampering. But on the other hand, that investigation could be viewed as tampering in itself. Judge Stanton had taken steps to ensure the anonymity of the jury. I had just asked my investigator to subvert that. If it blew up in our faces, Stanton would be more than upset and would do more than give me the squint. This wasn’t a Make-A-Wish infraction. Stanton would complain to the bar, the chief judge and all the way up the line to the Supreme Court if he could get them to listen. He would see to it that the Elliot trial was my last.

Patrick drove up Fareholm and pulled the car into the garage below my house. We walked out and then up the stairs to the front deck. It was almost ten o’clock and I was beat after a fourteen-hour day. But my adrenaline kicked in when I saw a man sitting in one of the deck chairs, his face in silhouette with the lights of the city behind him. I put my arm out to stop Patrick from advancing, the way a parent would stop a child from stepping blindly into the street.

“Hello, Counselor.”

Bosch. I recognized the voice and the greeting. I relaxed and let Patrick continue. We stepped up onto the porch and I unlocked the door to let Patrick go in. I then closed the door and turned to Bosch.

“Nice view,” he said. “Defending scumbags got you this place?”

I was too tired to do the dance with him.

“What are you doing here, Detective?”

“I figured you might be heading home after the bookstore,” he said. “So I just went on ahead and waited for you up here.”

“Well, I’m done for the night. You can give your team the word, if there really is a team.”

“What makes you think there’s not?”

“I don’t know. I just haven’t seen anybody. I hope you weren’t bullshitting me, Bosch. I’ve got my ass way out in the wind on this.”

“After court you had dinner with your client at Water Grill. You both had the fillet of sole and both of you raised your voices at times. Your client drank liberally, which resulted in you driving him home in his car. On your way back from there you stopped into Book Soup and made a phone call you obviously didn’t want your driver to hear.”

I was impressed.

“Okay, then, never mind that. I get it. They’re out there. What do you want, Bosch? What’s going on?”

Bosch stood up and approached me.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said. “What was Walter Elliot so hot and bothered about tonight at dinner? And who’d you call in the back of the bookstore?”

“First of all, Elliot’s my client and I’m not telling you what we talked about. I’m not crossing that line with you. And as far as the call in the bookstore goes, I was ordering pizza because, as you and your colleagues might have noticed, I didn’t eat my dinner tonight. Stick around if you want a slice.”

Bosch looked at me with that half smile of his, the knowing look with his flat dead eyes.