Defense attorney Mickey Haller is back, taking the long-shot cases, where the chances of winning are one in a million. After getting a wrongfully convicted man out of prison, he is inundated with pleas from incarcerated people claiming innocence. He brings on board his half brother, retired LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, to weed through the letters, knowing most claims will be false.Bosch pulls a needle from the haystack: a woman in prison for five years for killing her husband, a sheriff's deputy, though all along, she has maintained that she didn't do it. Bosch reviews the case and sees elements that don't add up, and a sheriff's department intent on bringing quick justice in the killing of one of its own.Now Haller has an uphill battle in court, a David fighting Goliaths to vindicate his client. The path for both lawyer and investigator is fraught with danger from those who don't want the case reopened and will stop at nothing to keep the Haller-Bosch dream team from finding the truth. Packed with intrigue and courtroom drama, Resurrection Walk shows once again that Michael Connelly is "the most consistently superior living crime fiction author" (South Florida Sun Sentinel).
The family gathered in the visitor lot. Jorge Ochoa’s mother and brother and me. Mrs. Ochoa looked as if she were going to church in a pale yellow dress with white cuffs and collar, her hands wrapped in rosary beads. Oscar Ochoa was in full cholo regalia: baggy low-slung jeans cuffed over black Doc Martens, wallet chain, white T-shirt, and black Ray-Bans. His neck was wrapped in blue ink, complete with his Vineland Boyz moniker “Double O” prominently on display.
And me, I was in my Italian three-piece, looking good for the cameras, wrapped in the majesty of the law.
The sun was dropping in the sky and coming at a nearly flat angle through the prison’s twenty-foot exterior fence line, casting us all in the chiaroscuro light of a Caravaggio painting. I looked up at the guard tower and through the smoked glass thought I could see the silhouettes of men with long guns.
This was a rare moment. Corcoran State wasn’t a prison where men often left on their own two feet. It was an LWOP facility, for men serving life without parole. You checked in but you never checked out. This was where Charlie Manson died of old age. But many inmates didn’t make it to old age. Homicides in the cells were common. Jorge Ochoa was just two steel doors down from an inmate who had been beheaded and dismembered in his cell a few years back. His avowed Satanist cellmate had strung together his ears and fingers to make a necklace. That was Corcoran State.
But somehow Jorge Ochoa had survived fourteen years here for a murder he did not commit. And now this was his day. His life sentence had been vacated after a court finding of actual innocence. He was rising up, coming back to the land of the living. We had driven up from Los Angeles in my Lincoln, two media vans trailing us, to be at the gate to welcome him.
Promptly at 5 p.m. a series of horn blasts echoed across the prison and drew our attention. The cameramen from the two L.A. news stations hoisted their equipment to their shoulders while the reporters readied their microphones and checked their hair.
A door opened at the guardhouse at the bottom of the tower and a uniformed guard stepped out. He was followed by Jorge Ochoa.
It was a moment she’d never seen coming. That nobody had seen coming. Until I took the case.
The guard unlocked a gate in the fence and Jorge was allowed to walk through. I noted that the clothes I had bought him for his release were a perfect fit. A black polo and tan chinos, white Nikes. I didn’t want him looking anything like his younger brother for the cameras. There was a wrongful-conviction lawsuit coming and it was never too early to engage in messaging the Los Angeles County jury pool.
Jorge walked toward us and at the last moment started to run. He bent down and grabbed his diminutive mother, lifted her off the ground at first and then gently put her down. They held each other for a solid three minutes while the cameras captured from all angles the tears they shed. Then it was Double O’s moment for hugging and manly back-pounding.
And then it was my turn. I put out my hand but Jorge pulled me into an embrace.
“Mr. Haller, I don’t know what to say,” he said. “But thank you.”
“It’s Mickey,” I said.
“You saved me, Mickey.”
“Welcome back to the world.”
Over his shoulder I saw the cameras recording our embrace. But in that moment I suddenly didn’t care about any of that. I felt the hollow I had carried inside for a long time start to close. I had resurrected this man from the dead. And with that came a fulfillment I had never known in the practice of law or in life.
Bosch had the letter propped on the steering wheel. He noted that the printing was legible and the margins were clean. It was in English but not perfect English. There were misspellings and some words were misused.
It was the last line of that paragraph that held his attention:
Bosch turned the page over to see if there was anything written on the back. There was a number stamped at the top, which meant someone in the intel unit at Chino had at least scanned the letter before it was approved and sent out.
Bosch carefully cleared his throat. It was raw from the latest treatment and he didn’t want to make things worse. He read the letter again.
