The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,85

who was waiting inside when they entered homes they believed had been vacated by their owners for a showing. The attacks went unsolved but stopped eleven months after the first one was reported. Levin spoke to an LAPD sex crimes expert who worked the cases. He said that his gut instinct had always been that the rapist wasn’t an outsider. The assailant seemed to know how to get into the houses and how to draw the female sales agents to them alone. The investigator was convinced the rapist was in the real estate community, but with no arrest ever made, he never proved his theory.

Added to this branch of his investigation, Levin could find little to confirm that Mary Alice Windsor had been one of the unreported victims of the rapist. She had granted us an interview and agreed to testify about her secret tragedy but only if her testimony was vitally needed. The date of the attack she provided fell within the dates of the documented assaults attributed to the Real Estate Rapist, and Windsor provided an appointment book and other documentation showing she was indeed the realtor on record in regard to the sale of the Bel-Air home where she said she was attacked. But ultimately we only had her word for it. There were no medical or hospital records indicative of treatment for a sexual assault. And no police record.

Still, when Mary Windsor recounted her story, it matched Roulet’s telling of it in almost all details. Afterward, it had struck both Levin and me as odd that Louis had known so much about the attack. If his mother had decided to keep it secret and unreported, then why would she share so many details of her harrowing ordeal with her son? That question led Levin to postulate a theory that was as repulsive as it was intriguing.

“I think he knows all the details because he was there,” Levin had said after the interview and we were by ourselves.

“You mean he watched it without doing anything to stop it?”

“No, I mean I think he was the man in the ski mask and goggles.”

I was silent. I think on a subliminal level I may have been thinking the same thing but the idea was too creepy to have broken through to the surface.

“Oh, man . . . ,” I said.

Levin, thinking I was disagreeing, pressed his case forward.

“This is a very strong woman,” he said. “She built that company from nothing and real estate in this town is cutthroat. She’s a tough lady and I can’t see her not reporting this, not wanting the guy who did it to be caught. I view people two ways. They’re either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people. She’s definitely an eye-for-an-eye person and I can’t see her keeping it quiet unless she was protecting that guy. Unless that guy was our guy. I’m telling you, man, Roulet is evil. I don’t know where it comes from or how he got it, but the more I look at him, the more I see the devil.”

All of this backgrounding was completely sub rosa. It obviously was not the kind of background that would in any way be brought forward as a means of defense. It had to be hidden from discovery, so little of what Levin or I found was put down on paper. But it was still information that I had to know as I made my decisions and set up the trial and the play within it.

At 11:05 my home phone rang as I was standing in front of a mirror and fitting a Dodgers cap onto my head. I checked the caller ID before answering and saw that it was Lorna Taylor.

“Why is your cell phone off?” she asked.

“Because I’m off. I told you, no calls today. I’m going to the ballgame with Mish and I’m supposed to get going to meet him early.”

“Who’s Mish?”

“I mean Raul. Why are you bothering me?”

I said it good-naturedly.

“Because I think you are going to want to be bothered with this. The mail came in a little early today and with it you got a notice from the Second.”

The Second District Court of Appeal reviewed all cases emanating from L.A. County. They were the first appellate hurdle on the way to the Supreme Court. But I didn’t think Lorna would be calling me to tell me I had lost an appeal.

“Which case?”

At any given time I usually have four or five cases on appeal