The Crossing by Michael Connelly Read Free Book Online Page A

on all doors. The killer had gained entrance through the window of a home office, removing a screen and leaving it leaning against the back wall of the house, then jimmying the lock on the window. The victim apparently had not set the alarm system and her husband said that she rarely did so despite his often-repeated request that she set it when he was working at night and she was home alone.
    All of this and other details added up to the profile of a suspect who was opportunistic and relentless as a predator. Parks had gone to the Pavilions supermarket on Santa Monica Boulevard on the evening of her murder. For several days the investigators scoured security video from the store and shopping plaza where it was located, tracking Parks’s visit and hoping to find the point of intersection between victim and predator. But nothing came of it. In the store, Parks saw and acknowledged several acquaintances whom she knew socially or from her government work. But all of them were checked out and eventually cleared, either through voluntary DNA comparison or otherwise.
    It all added up to spinning wheels, but they were wheels that needed to be spun. Bosch’s review of the first eighty pages of the chrono left him with the belief that Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt had conducted a very thorough investigation—one that he would be proud to have put his name on himself.
    And all of it was for naught. That is, until the twenty-seventh day of the investigation when they received a letter from the California Department of Justice informing them that the DNA sample they had submitted to the state’s CODIS database had been matched to a convicted offender named Da’Quan Foster.
    Until that moment, neither Cornell nor Schmidt had ever heard of Da’Quan Foster in regard to Parks or any other case. But they started planning for when they would eventually meet him. He was placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance to see if he made any moves that could be useful in his prosecution or threatened to harm another woman. Meanwhile, he was backgrounded and the investigation proceeded under the tightest security so that no word would leak to the media or to the husband of the victim.
    Eleven days after the DNA match came in from the state, the two lead investigators entered the artist’s studio where Foster was alone, having just finished teaching a small class of children about primary colors. Leimert Park was in the City of Los Angeles. The investigators were accompanied by two uniformed LAPD officers from the South Bureau Gang Unit. Cornell and Schmidt asked Foster if he would accompany them to the Homicide Unit, where they wanted to ask him questions.
    Da’Quan Foster agreed.
     
    Bosch looked up and realized he had worked through the lunch rush in the restaurant. His check was sitting on the edge of the table and he had not noticed it. Feeling sheepish about not turning the table over during lunch, he put thirty dollars down on the table for the ten-dollar check, then gathered the reports back together and headed out. He cursed his luck when he found a parking ticket under the Cherokee’s windshield wiper. He had paid for two hours on the meter but had been in the restaurant for two and a half. He took the ticket from beneath the rubber blade and shoved it into his pocket. He never had to worry about parking tickets when he was driving a city car, when he carried a badge. It was another reminder of how his life had changed in the last six months. He used to feel like an outsider with an insider’s job. From now on he would be a full-time outsider.
    For some reason Bosch didn’t want to go home to finish reading the chrono and the rest of the discovery reports. He felt as though reviewing the case at the dining room table where he had worked on so many cases as an LAPD homicide detective would be some kind of betrayal. He took Third Street out of downtown and out to West Hollywood. Before reading further into the chrono log, he wanted to