The Night Fire (Harry Bosch #22) - Michael Connelly Page 0,60
ex-girlfriend, who had been abducted and then tortured over a three-day period before perishing from loss of blood. There appeared to be no issue at trial that engaged the judge in any controversial decision against the defense. The suspect, Richard Kirk, had been arrested in possession of the knives and other tools linked forensically to the injuries sustained by the victim. He had also rented the warehouse where the torture-killing had taken place. A month after Kirk was sentenced to prison, the judge received an anonymous letter claiming that he would be eviscerated with a six-inch blade and would “bleed out like a slaughtered pig.” It was unsigned but had the hallmarks of Richard Kirk, who had committed much of his torture with a six-inch blade.
While Montgomery had not been eviscerated, he had been stabbed three times in a concentrated area of his torso under his right arm, suggesting a prison-style shanking—three quick thrusts with a blade.
When the threatening letter came in, a sheriff’s department investigation was opened and a fingerprint on the stamp attached to the anonymous letter was traced to a legal clerk who worked for Kirk’s defense attorney. When confronted, the defense attorney acknowledged taking the letter from Kirk while on a visit with his client to discuss an appeal. He said he never read the letter because it was in a sealed envelope. He simply handed it over to his clerk to mail. The investigation resulted in Kirk being placed in solitary confinement for a year and his attorney being quietly disciplined by the California Bar.
The incident also put Kirk on the radar of the detectives working Montgomery’s killing. Reyes requested a list of any prison associates of Kirk’s who had been released in the prior year, the theory being that Kirk might have somehow paid an inmate about to be paroled to hit Montgomery. The list included only one man who was paroled to Los Angeles a month before the Montgomery slaying. He was interviewed and alibied through cameras at the halfway house he was required to live in. Gustafson took the investigation no further once Herstadt became their primary suspect.
Bosch got up and flipped the record. The band Mingus had put together went into a song called “Perdido.” Bosch picked up the album cover and studied it. There were three photos of Mingus, his big arms around his stand-up bass, but none of the pictures fully revealed his face. In one shot his back was to the camera. It was the first time Bosch had noticed this and it was a curious thing. He went to his record stack and flipped through his other Mingus albums. Almost all of them clearly showed his face, including three where he was lighting or smoking a cigar. He wasn’t shy in life or on other album covers. The Carnegie Hall album photos were a mystery.
Bosch went back to work, moving on to the second threat from the criminal side of Montgomery’s history as a jurist. This one involved a case where a ruling by Montgomery was reversed on appeal and a new trial ordered because of an error the judge had made in his instructions to the jury.
The defendant was Thomas O’Leary, an attorney who had been convicted of two counts of cocaine possession. According to Gustafson’s summary of the case, O’Leary was snared in an undercover operation in which a Sheriff’s Department deputy posed as a drug dealer, engaged O’Leary to defend him, and paid for his services three different times with quantities of cocaine. Cameras in an undercover car recorded O’Leary receiving the drugs. At trial O’Leary conceded that he had received the drugs but put forward an entrapment defense, arguing that he had never previously accepted drugs in payment. He also claimed that the government was targeting him in retribution for his defending high-profile clients in other cases brought by the Sheriff’s narcotics unit. O’Leary’s contention was that he was not predisposed to break the law in such a way until the undercover deputy persuaded him to.
Part of the entrapment instruction Judge Montgomery gave to the jury was that O’Leary could not be convicted if the jury found that he had not been predisposed to commit the crime in the first incident. He erroneously refused to allow an additional instruction requested by the defense that if O’Leary was not convicted in the first incident then he could not be convicted in the following two because they were essentially the fruit of the first offense.