The Black Box

26

Bosch left in darkness Monday morning. It was at least a five-hour drive to Modesto, and he didn’t want to waste the day just getting there. He had rented a Crown Victoria from Hertz at the airport in Burbank the night before because LAPD regulations didn’t allow him to use his department car while on vacation. Normally that would be one of the rules Bosch would bend, but with O’Toole checking his every move these days, he decided to play it safe. He did, however, bring the mobile strobe light from the work car and transfer his equipment boxes from trunk to trunk. There were no regulations about that, as far as he knew. With the rented Crown Vic he would look the part if he needed to.

Modesto was pretty much a straight shot north from Los Angeles. Bosch took I-5 out of the city and up over the Grapevine before splitting off on California 99, which would take him through Bakersfield and Fresno on the way. As he drove, he continued through the catalog of Art Pepper’s music that Maddie had given him. He was now up to volume five, which was a concert that happened to be recorded in Stuttgart in 1981. It contained a kick-ass version of Pepper’s signature song “Straight Life,” but it was the soulful “Over the Rainbow” that made Bosch hit the replay button on the dash.

He got to Bakersfield during the morning rush hour and dropped below sixty miles per hour for the first time. He decided to wait out the traffic and pulled over for breakfast at a place called the Knotty Pine Cafe. He knew of it because it was just a few blocks from the Kern County Sheriff’s Office, where he had had business on occasion over the years.

After he ordered eggs, bacon, and coffee, he unfolded the map he had printed Saturday on two sheets of paper and then taped together. The map showed the forty-mile stretch of the Central Valley that had become important to the Anneke Jespersen case. All the points he had marked hugged CA-99, beginning with Modesto at the south end and moving north through Ripon, Manteca, then Stockton.

What was noteworthy to Bosch was that the map he had taped together stretched across two counties, Stanislaus to the south and San Joaquin to the north. Modesto and Salida were in Stanislaus County, where Sheriff Drummond held power and jurisdiction. But Manteca and Stockton fell under the jurisdiction of the sheriff of San Joaquin County. To Bosch it seemed no wonder that Reggie Banks, who lived in Manteca, preferred to do his drinking down in Modesto. Same, too, with Francis Dowler.

Bosch circled the locations he wanted to check out before the day was over. The John Deere dealership where Reggie Banks worked, the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department, Cosgrove Ag’s operation center in Manteca, as well as the homes of the men he was coming to observe. His plan for the day was to immerse himself as much as possible in the world where these men now lived. From there he would map out his next move—if there was a move to be made.

Once he was back on CA-99 and moving north again, he propped a printout of a Sunday night email from Dave Chu on his right thigh. Chu had searched for Beau Bentley and Charlotte Jackson, the two soldiers quoted in Anneke Jespersen’s story on the Saudi Princess.

Bentley was a quick dead end. Chu found a 2003 obituary for a Brian “Beau” Bentley, Gulf War veteran, in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that stated that he had succumbed to cancer at the age of thirty-four.

Chu had only modestly better luck with the other soldier. Using the age parameters Bosch had given him, he had come up with seven Charlotte Jacksons living in Georgia. Five of them were listed in Atlanta and its suburbs. Using the department’s TLO account and other various Internet databases, Chu had managed to come up with telephone numbers for six of the seven women. As Bosch drove, he started calling.

It was early afternoon in Georgia. He connected on his first two calls. They were answered by a Charlotte Jackson, but neither woman was the Charlotte Jackson he was trying to reach. The third and fourth calls went unanswered, and he left voice mails stating that he was an LAPD detective working on a murder case and urgently needed a return call.

He got through on the next two calls but neither woman he talked to was the Charlotte Jackson who served her country during the first Gulf War.

Bosch disconnected the last call, reminding himself that pursuing Charlotte Jackson was probably not the best use of his time. It was a common name and twenty-one years had passed. There was no guarantee that she was still in Atlanta or Georgia or that she was even still alive. She also could have gotten married and changed her name. He knew he could go to the U.S. military records archive in St. Louis and request a search, but as with all things steeped in bureaucracy, getting answers could take forever.

He folded the printout and put it back inside his coat pocket.

The land opened up after Fresno. The climate was arid from the beating sun and dusty from the dry fields. The highway, too, was rough. Its asphalt was thin and the concrete seams had become disjointed by time and disrepair. The surfaces were crumbling and the Crown Vic’s tires banged hard, sometimes making the music inside jump. It wasn’t how Art Pepper would have wanted it.

The state was sixteen billion in debt, and the news always talked about the deficit’s effect on the infrastructure. Out in the middle of the state the theory was a fact.

Bosch got to Modesto by midday. First on his agenda was a cursory drive by the Public Safety Center, where Sheriff J.J. Drummond held sway. It looked like a fairly new building, with the attendant jail next door. Out front, there was a statue of a police dog fallen in the line of duty, and Bosch wondered why there was apparently no human deserving of the same treatment.

Normally when Bosch followed a case out of Los Angeles, he checked in at the Police or Sheriff’s Department at his destination. It was a courtesy, but it was also like leaving bread crumbs behind should anything go wrong. But not this time. He didn’t know if Sheriff J.J. Drummond had been involved in any way with Anneke Jespersen’s death. But there was too much smoke and there were too many coincidences and connections for Bosch to take the chance of alerting Drummond to the investigation.

As if to underline those coincidences, he found Cosgrove Tractor, the John Deere dealership where Reginald Banks worked, only five blocks away from the sheriff’s complex. Bosch cruised it, made a U-turn, and came back to it, stopping at a curb along the front sidewalk.

There was a line of green tractors arranged small to large in front of the dealership. Behind them was a single-row parking lot and then the dealership with floor-to-ceiling glass windows running along the entire face of the building. Bosch hopped out of his car and grabbed a pair of small but powerful binoculars from one of the equipment boxes in the trunk. Returning to the front seat, he used the binos to look into the dealership. At each front corner was a desk with a salesman behind it. Between them ran another line of tractors and ATVs, all of them grass-green and shining.

Bosch opened his file and checked the DMV photo of Banks that Chu had provided. Looking back at the dealership, he easily identified Banks as the balding man with a drooping mustache at the desk in the corner closest to Bosch. He watched the man, studying him in profile because of the angle of the desk. While Banks looked like he was studiously engaged with something on his computer screen, Bosch could tell he was playing solitaire. He had angled the screen so that it could not be seen from within the showroom, most likely by his boss.

After a while Bosch got bored watching Banks, started the car, and pulled away from the curb. As he did so, he checked the rearview and saw a blue compact pulling away from the curb five parked cars back. He made his way on Crows Landing Road back to the 99, intermittently checking the mirror and seeing the car trailing in traffic behind him. It didn’t concern him. He was on a major traffic artery, and lots of cars were going the way he was going. But when he eased up on the accelerator and started letting cars go by him, the blue car slowed to match his speed and continued to hang back. Finally, Bosch pulled to the curb in front of an auto parts store and watched his mirror. Half a block back, the blue car turned right and disappeared, leaving Bosch to wonder if he was being followed or not.

Bosch pulled back into traffic and continued to check his mirror as he headed to the CA-99 entrance. Along the way, he passed what seemed like an unending parade of Mexican food joints and used-car lots, the visual only broken up by the tire stores and auto repair and parts shops. The street was almost like one-stop shopping: buy a junker here and get it fixed up over there. Grab a fish taco at the mariscos truck while you’re waiting. It depressed Bosch to think about all the road dust on those tacos.

Just as he spotted the entrance ramp to CA-99, he also saw his first “Drummond for Congress” sign. It was 4 × 6 and posted on a safety fence that crossed the overpass. The sign, which had Drummond’s smiling face on it, could be seen by all who headed north on the freeway below. Bosch noticed that someone had drawn a Hitler mustache on the candidate’s upper lip.

As he came down the ramp to the freeway, Bosch checked the rearview and thought he saw the blue compact coming down behind him. Once he merged into traffic, he checked again, but traffic now obscured his view. He dismissed the sighting as paranoia.

He headed north again, and just a few miles outside Modesto, he saw the exit for Hammett Road. He left the freeway again and followed Hammett west and deep into a grove of almond trees planted in perfect lines, their dark trunks rising from the flooded irrigation plain. The water was so still that it looked like the trees were growing out of a vast mirror.

There was no way that he could have missed the entrance to the Cosgrove estate. The turnoff was wide and guarded by a brick wall and black-iron gate. There was an overhead camera and a call box for those who wished to enter. The letters CC were emblazoned on the gate.

Bosch used the wide expanse of asphalt at the entrance to turn the car around as though he were a lost traveler. As he headed back on Hammett in the direction of the 99, he noted that the security was all about the entrance road to the estate. No one could drive on without obtaining permission and having the gate opened. But walking on was another story. There was no wall or fence prohibiting access. Anyone willing to get their feet wet could make their way in by slogging through the almond grove. Unless there were hidden cameras and motion sensors in the grove, it was a classic deficiency in security. All show and no go.

As soon as he got back on the northbound 99 he passed the sign announcing his welcome to San Joaquin County. The next three exits were for the town of Ripon, and Bosch saw a sign for a motel poking above the thick pink-and-white-flowered bushes that lined the freeway. He took the next exit and worked his way back to the Blu-Lite Motel and Liquor Market. It was an old ranch-style motel right out of the 1950s. Bosch wanted a place that was private, where people would not be around to see his comings and goings. Bosch thought it would be perfect because he saw only one car parked in front of its many rooms.

He paid for the room at the counter in the liquor store. He went big, paying the top-of-the-line $49 rate for a room with a kitchenette.

“You don’t have Wi-Fi here by any chance, do you?” he asked the clerk.

“Not officially,” the clerk said. “But if you give me five bucks, I’ll give you the password on the Wi-Fi from the house behind the motel. You’ll pick up the signal in your efficiency.”

“Who gets the five bucks?”

“I split it with the guy who lives back there.”

Bosch thought about it for a moment.

“It’s private and secure,” the clerk offered.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll take it.”

He drove over to room 7 and parked in front of the door. Bringing his overnight bag inside, he put it on the bed and looked around. There was a small table in the kitchenette with two chairs. The room would work.

Before leaving, Bosch changed his shirt, hanging the blue button-down in the closet in case he stayed through Wednesday and needed to wear it again. He opened his bag and selected a black pullover shirt. He got dressed, then locked the place up and went back to his car. “Over the Rainbow” was playing again as he pulled back out on the road.

Bosch’s next stop was Manteca, and long before he got there, he could see the water tower that said “Cosgrove Ag” on it. The Cosgrove business enterprise was located on a frontage road running parallel to the freeway. It consisted of an office structure as well as a vast produce storage and trucking facility where dozens of carriers and tank trucks were lined up and ready for transport. Flanking the complex were what seemed to Bosch to be miles and miles of grapevines covering the landscape until it rolled upward toward the ash-colored mountains to the west. Out on the horizon the natural landscape was broken only by the steel giants that were coming down the slopes like invaders from another world. The towering wind turbines that Carl Cosgrove had brought to the Valley.

After being duly impressed by the expanse of the Cosgrove empire, Bosch went slumming. Following the maps he had printed Saturday, he went to the addresses the DMV held for Francis John Dowler and Reginald Banks. Neither place impressed Bosch beyond the fact that they appeared to be on Cosgrove land.

Banks lived in a small free-standing home that backed up to the almond groves off Brunswick Road. Checking his map and noting the lack of dedicated roads between Brunswick to the north and Hammett to the south, Bosch believed that it might be possible to enter the grove on foot behind Banks’s home and come out on Hammett—many hours later.

Banks’s home needed a paint job and its windows needed cleaning. If he was living there with his family, there were no indications of it. The yard was strewn with beer bottles, all within easy throwing distance of a porch with an old seam-split couch on it. Banks had not cleaned up after his weekend.

The last stop before dinner was Dowler’s double-wide mobile home with the TV dish mounted on the roof’s crest line. It was located in a trailer park off the frontage road, and each home had a parking pad equal in length to the home itself for parking the long hauler. The park was where Cosgrove drivers lived.

While Bosch sat in his rental car looking at the Dowler residence, a door opened on the side under the carport and a woman stepped out and looked suspiciously at him. Bosch waved like he was an old friend, disarming her a bit. She stepped down the driveway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was what Bosch’s old partner Jerry Edgar would have called a 50/50—fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight.

“You looking for somebody?” she asked.

“Well, I was hoping to find Frank at home. But I see his truck is gone.”

Bosch waved toward the empty parking pad.

“He coming back anytime soon?”

“He had to take a load of juice up to American Canyon. He might have to wait up there until they have something for him to bring back down. He should be back tomorrow night prob’ly. Who are you?”

“Just a friend passing through. I knew him twenty years ago in the Gulf. Will you tell him John Bagnall said hello?”

“I’ll do that.”

Bosch couldn’t remember if Dowler’s wife’s name was in the material Chu had put together. If he’d had the name, he would have used it as he said good-bye. She turned and headed back to the door she had left open. Bosch noticed a motorcycle with a gas tank painted like a bluebottle fly parked under one of the double-wide’s awnings. He guessed that when Dowler wasn’t running grape juice in a big rig, he liked gliding on a Harley.

Bosch drove out of the park, hoping he had not caused enough suspicion to warrant anything more than curiosity on the woman’s part. And he hoped Dowler wasn’t the sort of husband who called home every night when he was on the road.

Bosch’s second-to-last stop on his tour of the Central Valley took him to Stockton, where he pulled into the lot of the Steers, the steakhouse where Christopher Henderson met his end in the walk-in cooler.

But Bosch had to admit to himself that he was doing more than observing the place as a part of the case. He was famished and had been thinking about eating a good steak all day long. It would be hard to beat the steak he had gotten at Craig’s on Saturday night, but he was hungry enough to try.

Never one to be self-conscious about eating in a restaurant alone, he told the young woman at the greeting station that he’d prefer a table over a seat at the bar. He was led to a two-top next to the glass-paneled wine cooler, and he chose the seat that gave him a full view of the restaurant. It was his habit to do this for safety, but he also always tried to prepare to be lucky. Maybe the man himself, Carl Cosgrove, might enter his own restaurant to eat.

For the next two hours Bosch saw no one he recognized enter the establishment, but all was not for naught. He had a New York strip with mashed potatoes, and all of it was delicious. He also sipped a glass of Cosgrove merlot that went nicely with the beef.

The only rub came when Bosch’s phone sounded loudly in the dining room. He had set the ringer to the loudest position so he would be sure to hear it while driving. He had forgotten to lower it to the usual nonintrusive buzz. His fellow diners frowned at him. One woman went so far as to shake her head in disgust, apparently pegging him as an arrogant bigcity jerk.

Arrogant or not, Bosch took the call because he saw on the ID that it was a 404 area code—Atlanta. As expected, the caller was one of the Charlotte Jacksons he had left a message for. It took him only a few questions to determine that she was the wrong Charlotte Jackson. He thanked her and hung up. He smiled and nodded at the lady who had shaken her head at his rudeness.

He opened the file he had brought into the restaurant and crossed out Charlotte Jackson number four. He was now down to two possibilities—numbers three and seven—and one of them he did not even have a number for.

By the time Harry returned to the parking lot, it was dark out and he was tired from the long day on the road. He thought about sitting in his car and taking a nap for an hour but then dismissed the idea. He had to keep moving.

Standing by the car’s trunk, he looked up into the sky. It was a cloudless and moonless night, but the stars were out in force over the Central Valley. Bosch didn’t like that. He needed it darker. He popped the trunk.