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to him, Bosch took a table in the corner where his back would be to the wall and no one would be able to look over his shoulder at what he was reading. He didn’t want anyone losing their appetite.
    Bosch ordered without looking at the menu. He then took the rubber bands off the file and opened it on the table. For more than two decades he had put together discovery packages for attorneys defending the men and women he had arrested for murder. He knew every trick there was when it came to planting obfuscation and misdirection in a murder book. He could write a how-to manual on the art of turning the discovery process into a nightmare for a defense attorney. It had been his routine practice back in the day to redact words in reports without rhyme or reason, to intermittently remove the toner cartridge from the squad room photocopier so that pages and pages of the documents he was turning over were printed so lightly they were impossible or at least headache-inducing to read.
    He now had to use all he knew in assessing this murder book. And experience dictated that his first job here was to put the book in the proper order. It was routine to shuffle the stacks of reports like a deck of cards, throw in a takeout menu or two, just to say
fuck you
to the defense attorney and his investigator. Each page turned over in discovery was stamped with a page number and date. This was done so that in court the attorneys from each side of the aisle could refer to the same page by a uniform number. So it didn’t matter if Bosch reordered the pages. He could put his own system in place. All Haller would have to do is use the stamped page number if he wanted to refer to one of the documents in court.
    There was not a lot of difference between the reports filed by Sheriff’s investigators and the reports Bosch had authored for the LAPD. Some headings were different, a few report numbers as well. But Bosch easily had the book reshuffled and in correct order by the time his plate of thin-sliced pork chops arrived. He kept the stack of records front and center and the plate to the side so he could continue to work as he ate.
    On top of the reordered stack was the Incident Report, which was always the first page of a murder book after the table of contents. But there was no table of contents—another
fuck you
from prosecution to defense—so the IR was on top. Bosch glanced at it but was not expecting to learn anything. It was all first-day information. If it wasn’t wrong, then it was incomplete.
    The pork chops were thin and crispy, piled on top of fried rice on his plate. Bosch was using his fingers to eat them like potato chips. He now wiped his hands on the paper napkin so he could turn the pages on the stack without soiling them. He quickly went through several ancillary and meaningless reports until he got to the Chronological Log. This was the murder bible, the heart of any homicide investigation. It would detail all the moves of the lead detectives on the case. It would be where case theory would emerge. It would be where Bosch would be convinced of Da’Quan Foster’s guilt or find the same doubt that had crept into Mickey Haller’s gut.
    Most detective pairings had a division of labor that was worked out over several cases. Usually one member of the detective team was charged with keeping reports and the murder book intact and up to date. The Chronological Log was the exception. It was kept on computer as a digital file and routinely accessed by both detectives so each could enter his or her movements on a case. It was periodically printed out on three-hole paper and clipped into a binder, or in this case added to a defense discovery package. But the most active version was always a digital file and it was a living document, growing and changing all the time.
    The printout of the chrono in the discovery file was 129 pages long and was authored by Sheriff’s investigators Lazlo Cornell and Tara Schmidt. Though over the years Bosch