The Black Box

4

Bosch was back at the Open-Unsolved Unit before noon. The place was largely deserted, as most detectives came in early and took their lunch break early. There was no sign of David Chu, Harry’s partner, but that wasn’t a concern. Chu could be at lunch or anywhere in the building or the outlying crime labs in the area. Bosch knew that Chu was working on a number of submissions, that is, the early stages of cases in which genetic, fingerprint, or ballistics evidence is prepared and submitted to various labs for analysis and comparison.

Bosch put the files and the black box down on his desk and picked up the phone to see if he had any messages. He was clear. He was just settling in and getting ready to start looking through the material he had received from Gant when the unit’s new lieutenant came by the cubicle. Cliff O’Toole was new not only to the OU but to Robbery-Homicide Division as well. He had been transferred in from Valley Bureau, where he had run the full detective squad in Van Nuys. Bosch hadn’t had a lot of interaction with him yet, but what he had seen and heard from others in the squad wasn’t good. After arriving to take over command of Open-Unsolved, in record time the lieutenant garnered not one but two nicknames with negative connotations.

“Harry, how’d it go up there?” O’Toole asked.

Before authorizing the trip to San Quentin, O’Toole had been fully briefed on the gun connection between the Jespersen case and the Walter Regis murder carried out by Rufus Coleman.

“Good and bad,” Bosch answered. “I got a name from Coleman. One Trumont Story. Coleman said Story supplied the gun he used for the Regis hit and took it back right after. The catch is that I can’t go to Story because Story is now dead—got whacked himself in ’oh-nine. So I spent the morning at South Bureau and did some checking to confirm the timeline and that Story does fit in. I think Coleman was telling me the truth and not just trying to lay it all off on a dead guy. So it wasn’t a wasted trip but I’m not really any closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen.”

He gestured to the files and the shake box on his desk.

O’Toole nodded thoughtfully, folded his arms, and sat on the edge of Dave Chu’s desk, right on the spot where Chu liked to put his coffee. If Chu had been there, he wouldn’t have liked that.

“I hate hitting the travel budget for a bum trip,” he said.

“It wasn’t a bum trip,” Bosch said. “I just told you that I got a name and the name fits.”

“Well, then, maybe we should just put a bow on it and call it a day,” O’Toole said.

“Putting a bow on a case” referred to C-Bow, or CBO, which meant a case was cleared by other means. It was a designation used to formally close a case when the solution is known but does not result in an arrest or prosecution because the suspect is dead or cannot be brought to justice for other reasons. In the Open-Unsolved Unit, cases frequently were “cleared by other” because they were often decades old and matches of fingerprints or DNA led to suspects long deceased. If the follow-up investigation puts the suspect in the time and location of the crime, then the unit supervisor has the authority to clear the case and send it to the District Attorney’s Office for its rubber stamp.

But Bosch wasn’t ready to go there with Jespersen yet.

“No, we don’t have a CBO here,” Bosch said firmly. “I can’t put the gun in Trumont Story’s hands until four years after my case. That gun could have been in a lot of other hands before that.”

“Maybe so,” O’Toole said. “But I don’t want you turning this into a hobby. We’ve got six thousand other cases. Case management comes down to time management.”

He put his wrists together as if to say he was handcuffed by the constraints of the job. It was this officious side of O’Toole that Bosch had so far been unable to warm up to. He was an administrator, not a cop’s cop. That was why “The Tool” was the first nickname he had received.

“I know that, Lieutenant,” Bosch said. “My plan is to work with these materials, and if nothing comes of it, then it will be time to look at the next case. But with what we’ve got now, this isn’t a CBO. So it won’t go toward fattening our stats. It will go back as unsolved.”

Bosch was trying to make it clear with the new man that he wasn’t going to play the statistics game. A case was cleared if Bosch was convinced it was truly cleared. And putting the murder weapon in a gangbanger’s hand four years after the fact was hardly good enough.

“Well, let’s see what you get when you look it all over,” O’Toole said. “I’m not pushing for something that’s not there. But I was brought in here to push the unit. We need to close more cases. To do that we need to work more cases. So, what I’m saying is that if it’s not there on this one, then move on to the next one, because the next one might be the one we can close. No hobby cases, Harry. When I came in here, too many of you guys were working hobby cases. We don’t have the time anymore.”

“Got it,” Bosch said, his voice clipped.

O’Toole started to head back toward his office. Bosch threw a mock salute at his back and noticed the coffee ring on the seat of his pants.

O’Toole had recently replaced a lieutenant who liked to sit in her office with the blinds closed. Her interactions with the squad were minimal. O’Toole was the opposite. He was hands-on to a sometimes overbearing degree. It didn’t help that he was younger than half the squad, and almost two decades younger than Bosch. His overmanagement of the largely veteran crew of detectives in the unit was unnecessary and Bosch found himself chafing at the collar whenever O’Toole approached.

Added to that, he was clearly a numbers cruncher. He wanted to close cases for the sake of the monthly and yearly reports that he sent up to the tenth floor. It had nothing to do with bringing justice to murder victims long since forgotten. So far, it appeared that O’Toole had no feel for the human content of the job. He had already reprimanded Bosch for spending an afternoon with the son of a murder victim who wanted to be walked through the crime scene twenty-two years after his father had been killed. The lieutenant had said the victim’s son could have found the crime scene on his own and Bosch could have used the half day to work on cases.

The lieutenant suddenly pirouetted and came back toward the cubicle. Bosch wondered if he had seen the sarcastic salute in the reflection of one of the office windows.

“Harry, a couple other things. First, don’t forget to get your expenses in on the trip. They’re really on my ass about timely filing of that stuff and I want to make sure you get anything back that you took out of your own pocket.”

Bosch thought about the money he deposited in the canteen account of the second inmate he had visited.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “There’s nothing. I stopped for a hamburger at the Balboa and that was it.”

The Balboa Bar & Grill in San Francisco was a midway stop between SFO and SQ that was favored by homicide investigators from the LAPD.

“You sure?” O’Toole asked. “I don’t want to shortchange you.”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, then.”

O’Toole began to walk away again when Bosch stopped him.

“What was the other thing? You said a couple things.”

“Oh, yeah. Happy birthday, Harry.”

Bosch leaned his head back, surprised.

“How’d you know?”

“I know everybody’s birthday. Everybody who works for me.”

Bosch nodded. He wished O’Toole had used the word with instead of for.

“Thanks,” he said.

O’Toole finally went away for good and Bosch was glad the squad room was empty and no one had heard that it was his birthday. At his age, that could start a volley of questions about retirement. It was a subject he tried to avoid.

Left alone, Bosch first put together a time chart. He started with the Jespersen murder, placing it on May 1, 1992. Even though time of death was inconclusive and she could have been murdered in the late hours of April 30, he officially went with May 1 because that was the day Jespersen’s body was found and it was most likely when she was killed. From there he charted all the killings leading up to the final murder connected or possibly connected to the Beretta model 92. He also included the two other cases Gant had pulled files on and thought might be related.

Bosch charted the killings on a blank piece of paper rather than on a computer as most of his colleagues would have done. Bosch was set in his ways and he wanted a document. He wanted to be able to hold it, study it, fold it up, and carry it in his pocket. He wanted to live with it.

He left plenty of space around each entry so that he could add notes as he went. This was how he had always worked.

May 1, 1992—Anneke Jespersen—67th and Crenshaw (killer unknown)

Jan. 2, 1996—Walter Regis—63rd and Brynhurst (Rufus Coleman)

Sept. 30, 2003—Eddie Vaughn—68th and East Park (killer unknown)

June 18, 2004—Dante Sparks—11th Ave. and Hyde Park (killer unknown)

July 8, 2007—Byron Beckles—Centinela Park/Stepney Street (killer unknown)

Dec. 1, 2009—Trumont Story—W. 76th Street/Circle Park (killer unknown)

The last three murders listed were the cases Gant had pulled files on where there was no ballistics evidence. Bosch studied the list and noticed the seven-year gap in known uses of the gun between the Regis and Vaughn cases and then referred to the criminal record he had pulled off the National Crime Information Center data bank on Trumont Story. It showed that Story had been in prison from 1997 to 2002 serving a five-year stretch on an aggravated battery conviction. If Story had left the gun in a hiding place that only he knew of, then the gap in use of the weapon was explained.

Bosch next opened his Thomas Bros. map book and used a pencil to chart the murders on the grid work of the city. The first five murders all fit on one page of the thick map book, the killings occurring within the confines of Rolling 60s turf. The last case, the killing of Trumont Story, was on the next map page. His body had been found lying on a sidewalk in Circle Park, which was in the heart of 7-Trey turf.

Bosch studied the map for a long time, flipping the pages back and forth. Considering that Jordy Gant said Story had most likely been dumped in the location where his body was found, Bosch concluded that he was looking at a very small concentration point in the city. Six murders, possibly just one gun used. And it had all started with the one murder that did not fit with those that followed. Anneke Jespersen, photojournalist, murdered in a spot far from home.

“Snow White,” Bosch whispered.

He opened the Jespersen murder book and looked at the photo from her press pass. He could not fathom what she had been doing out there on her own and what had happened.

Harry pulled the black box across the desk. Just as he opened it, his cell phone rang. The caller ID showed it was Hannah Stone, the woman he had been in a relationship with for nearly a year.

“Happy birthday, Harry!”

“Who told you?”

“A little bird.”

His daughter.

“She ought to mind her own business.”

“I think it is her business. I know she probably has you all to herself tonight, so I was calling to see if I could take you out for a birthday lunch.”

Bosch checked his watch. It was already noon.

“Today?”

“Today’s your birthday, isn’t it? I would’ve called earlier but my group session went long. Come on, what do you say? You know we have the best taco trucks in the city up here.”

Bosch knew he needed to talk to her about San Quentin.

“I don’t know about that claim, but if I get good traffic, I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Perfect.”

“See you.”

He disconnected and looked at the black box on his desk. He’d get to it after lunch.

They decided on a sit-down restaurant instead of a taco truck. Upscale wasn’t really a choice in Panorama City, so they drove down to Van Nuys and ate in the basement cafeteria of the courthouse. It wasn’t exactly upscale either but there was an old jazzman who played a baby grand in the corner most days. It was one of the secrets of the city that Bosch knew. Hannah was impressed. They took a table close to the music.

They split a turkey sandwich and each had a bowl of soup. The music smoothed over the quiet spots in the conversation. Bosch was learning to get comfortable with Hannah. He had met her while working a case the year before. She was a therapist who worked with sexual offenders after their release from prison. It was tough work and it gave her some of the same dark knowledge of the world that Bosch carried.

“I haven’t heard from you in a few days,” Hannah said. “What have you been up to?”

“Oh, just a case. Walking a gun.”

“What does that mean?”

“Connecting or walking a gun from case to case to case. We don’t have the weapon itself but ballistics matches link cases. You know, across the years, across geography, victims, like that. A case like this is called a gun walk.”

He offered nothing further and she nodded. She knew he never answered questions about his work in detail.

Bosch listened to the piano man finish “Mood Indigo” and then cleared his throat.

“I met your son yesterday, Hannah,” he said.

He hadn’t been sure how to broach the subject. And so he ended up doing it without finesse. Hannah put her soupspoon down on her plate with a sharpness that made the piano man raise his hands off the keys.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I was up at San Quentin on the case,” he said. “You know, walking the gun, and I had to see someone up there. When I was finished, I had a little bit of time, so I asked to see your son. I only spent ten or fifteen minutes with him. I told him who I was and he said he’d heard of me, that you told him about me.”

Hannah stared into space. Bosch realized he had played it wrong. Her son was not a secret. They had talked about him at length. Bosch knew that he was a sexual offender in prison after pleading guilty to rape. His crime had nearly destroyed his mother but she had found a way to carry on by changing the focus of her work. She moved from family therapy to treating offenders like her own son. And it was that work that had brought her to Bosch. Bosch was thankful that she was in his life and understood the dark serendipity of it. If the son had not committed such a horrendous crime, Bosch would never have met the mother.

“I guess I should’ve told you,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I wasn’t even sure I was going to get the time to try to see him. With the budget cutbacks, they don’t allow overnights up there. You gotta go up and back the same day and so I wasn’t sure.”

“How did he look?”

Spoken with a mother’s fear in her voice.

“I guess he looked all right. I asked him if he was okay and he said he was fine. I didn’t see anything that concerned me, Hannah.”

Her son lived in a place where you were either predator or prey. He wasn’t a big man. His crime had involved drugging his victim, not overpowering her. The tables were turned on him in prison and he was often preyed upon. Hannah had told Bosch all of this.

“Look, we don’t have to talk about it,” Bosch said. “I just wanted you to know. It wasn’t really planned. I had the extra time and I just asked to see him and they set it up for me.”

She didn’t respond at first, but then her words came out with a tone of urgency.

“No, we do have to talk about it. I want to know everything he said, everything you saw. He’s my son, Harry. No matter what he did, he’s my son.”

Bosch nodded.

“He said to tell you he loves you.”