The Black Box

It was 7 P.M. in Copenhagen when Bosch made the call. It was picked up promptly by Henrik Jespersen at his home.

“Henrik, it’s Harry Bosch in L.A.”

“Detective Bosch, how are you? Do you have news on Anneke?”

Bosch paused. It seemed like an odd phrasing for the question. Henrik seemed breathless, as if he knew this was the call he had been waiting twenty years for. Bosch didn’t make him wait any longer.

“Henrik, there has been an arrest in your sister’s murder. We have the killer and I wanted—”

“Endelig!”

Bosch did not know what the Danish word meant but it sounded like an exclamation of both surprise and relief. There was then a long silence, and Bosch guessed that the man on the other end of the line half a world away had possibly started to cry. Bosch had seen the behavior before when he had delivered such news in person. In this case he had asked to go to Denmark to personally brief Henrik Jespersen, but the request was denied by Lieutenant O’Toole, who was still smarting from the denial of his 128 complaint against Bosch by Mendenhall and the PSB.

“I am sorry, Detective,” Henrik said. “I am very emotional, you see. Who is the killer of my sister?”

“A man named John James Drummond. She didn’t know him.”

There was no immediate response, so Bosch filled the space.

“Henrik, you may start hearing from some journalists about the arrest. I made a deal with a reporter at the BT there in Copenhagen. He helped me with the investigation. I need to call him next.”

Again there was no response.

“Henrik, are you—”

“This man Drummond, why did he kill her?”

“Because he believed it would bring him favor with a very powerful man and family. It helped them cover up another crime against your sister.”

“Is he in jail now?”

“Not yet. He’s in a hospital, but they will be moving him soon to the jail ward.”

“In hospital? Did you shoot him?”

Bosch nodded. He understood the emotion behind the question. The hopefulness in it.

“No, Henrik. He was trying to get away. In a helicopter. And he crashed. He’ll never walk again. His spine was crushed. They think he is paralyzed from the neck down.”

“I think this is good. Do you?”

Bosch didn’t hesitate.

“Yes, Henrik, I do.”

“You say killing Anneke brought him power. How?”

Bosch spent the next fifteen minutes summarizing the history from the standpoint of the men in the conspiracy. Who they were and what they did. The war crime Anneke had made reference to. He ended the story with the latest turn of the investigation, the deaths of Banks, Dowler, and Cosgrove, and the execution of search warrants on two properties and a storage facility owned or leased by Drummond in Stanislaus County.

“We found a journal that your sister kept of her investigation. Like a notebook. Drummond had it translated a long time ago. It looks like he used different translators for different parts so no one would know the whole story. He was a cop and he probably said it was for a case he was working. We have that translation and it goes all the way back to what happened—at least what she remembered—on the ship. We think it was in her hotel room and we believe Drummond went there and stole it after he killed her. It was one of the things he used to control the other men from the ship.”

“Can I have this journal?”

“Not yet, Henrik, but I will make a copy for you and send it. It’s going to be part of our evidence when we go to trial. That’s one of the reasons I’m calling. I’m going to need handwriting samples so we can authenticate the journal. Do you have any letters from your sister or anything else with her handwriting on it?”

“Yes, I have some letters. Can I send copies? These are very important to me. It’s all I have of my sister. And her photographs.”

This was why Bosch had wanted to go in person. To deal directly with Henrik. O’Toole had called his request a boondoggle, an effort by Bosch to take a vacation at taxpayers’ expense.

“Henrik, I’m going to ask you to trust me with the originals. We need them because the analyst also makes the comparison based on how hard the writer presses down on some letters and punctuation, things like that. Will that be okay? I promise to get it all back to you undamaged.”

“Yes, this is fine. I trust you, Detective.”

“Thank you, Henrik. I’m going to need you to send them as soon as you can. There will be what is called a grand jury first, and we’ll want to authenticate before we present the journal. Also, Henrik, we got a good prosecutor assigned to the case, and he wanted me to ask if you would be willing to come to L.A. for the trial.”

There was a long pause before Henrik answered.

“I must come, Detective. For my sister.”

“I thought you would say that.”

“When should I come?”

“It probably won’t be for a long while. As I said, we have the grand jury first and then there are always delays.”

“How long?”

“Well, Drummond’s medical condition will probably delay things a bit and then his lawyer. . . . Guilty people are given a lot of opportunities to delay the inevitable in our system over here. I’m sorry, Henrik. I know you’ve waited a long time. I will keep you informed about—”

“I wish you had shot him. I wish he had died.”

Bosch nodded.

“I understand.”

“He should be dead like the others.”

Bosch thought about the chance he’d had on the hillside, when Mendenhall had left him alone with Drummond.

“I understand,” he said again.

There was only silence in response.

“Henrik? You there?”

“I am sorry. Please hold.”

The line went dead without Bosch being able to respond. Again, he wished he could be in person with this man who had lost so much. O’Toole had reminded Bosch that Anneke Jespersen had been dead twenty years. He said people had moved on and there was no reason to support his traveling all the way to Copenhagen just to give the personal touch to the notification of arrest to her next of kin.

As he waited for Henrik to come back, Bosch raised his eyes over the edge of the cubicle wall like a soldier peeking out of a foxhole. O’Toole happened to be standing in the doorway of his office, surveying the squad room like a land baron watching over his fiefdom. He thought it was about numbers and statistics. He had no clue as to what they were really doing here. He had no idea about the mission.

O’Toole’s eyes eventually came to Bosch’s and they held each other’s stare for a moment. But then the weaker man looked away. O’Toole stepped back into his office and closed the door.

When they had been on the hill, waiting for the first responders, Mendenhall had quietly opened up to Bosch about her investigation. She’d told him things that surprised and hurt him. O’Toole had merely seized on an opportunity to put heat on Bosch but the complaint hadn’t originated with him. It had been Shawn Stone who filed it from San Quentin, claiming that Bosch had endangered him by having him brought to a law enforcement interview room, putting him at risk of being tagged as a snitch. Mendenhall said her conclusion after interviewing all parties was that Stone was more concerned about losing his mother’s attention to Bosch than with getting hit with a snitch jacket. He was hoping that his complaint would damage the relationship between Hannah and Harry.

Bosch had yet to bring the matter up with Hannah and wasn’t sure when he would. He feared that in the long run her son might have been successful with his plan.

The one thing Mendenhall refused to give up was her own motivation. She would not tell Bosch why she had followed him off the reservation. He had to be content with being grateful that she did.

“Detective Bosch?”

“I’m here, Henrik.”

There was a long moment of silence as Henrik gathered his thoughts after coming back on the line.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I thought this would be different, you know?”

His voice was tight with emotion.

“How so?”

There was another pause.

“I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away.”

“What is the other, Henrik?”

Though he knew the answer.

“Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch.”

Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke Jespersen to some of the others. The ones he had not yet spoken for.

“So am I, Henrik,” he said. “So am I.”