The Black Box (19 page)

Bosch gestured to the rest of the squad room. Jackson was obviously listening to the conversation and he stared at O’Toole with unblinking judgment.

“We do the work, we clear the cases, and you ride up the elevator to get the pat on the back.”

Bosch stood up, coming face-to-face with O’Toole.

“That’s why I don’t have time for you or your bullshit.”

He walked away, heading to the door Chu had gone through, while O’Toole headed to the door leading to the elevator alcove.

Bosch pushed through the door and into the hallway. One side was a wall of glass, affording a view of the front plaza and off toward the heart of the civic center. Chu was standing at the glass, looking toward the familiar spire of City Hall.

“Chu, what’s going on?”

Chu was startled by his sudden appearance.

“Hey, Harry, sorry, I forgot something and . . . then I . . . uh . . .”

“What, you forget to wipe your ass? I’ve been waiting. What happened with the DOJ?”

“Yeah, no hits, Harry. Sorry.”

“No hits? Did you run all ten possibles?”

“I did, but no California transactions. The gun wasn’t sold in the state. Somebody brought it here and it was never registered.”

Bosch put his hand on the railing and leaned his forehead on the glass. He could see City Hall reflected in the long wall of glass running on the perpendicular hallway. He was resigned that his luck couldn’t get any worse.

“You got anybody at ATF?” he asked.

“Not really,” Chu said. “Don’t you?”

“Not really. Nobody who can expedite. I waited four months just for them to run the casing through their computer.”

Bosch didn’t mention that he also had a checkered history of interactions with federal law enforcement agencies. He
couldn’t count on anyone doing him a favor at the ATF or anywhere else. He knew if he went through standard procedure and filled out the forms, he might hear something back in six weeks minimum.

He had one shot he could try. He stepped away from the glass wall and headed back to the squad room door.

“Harry, where are you going?” Chu asked.

“Back to work.”

Chu started following him.

“I wanted to talk to you about one of my cases. We have to do a pickup in Minnesota.”

Bosch stopped at the door to the squad room. A “pickup” was what they called going to another state to confront and arrest a suspect in a cold case. Usually, the suspect had been connected to an old murder through DNA or fingerprint evidence. There was a map on the wall in the squad room with red pins marking all the pickup locations the squad had been to in the ten years since it was established. Dozens of pins were scattered across the map.

“Which case?” Bosch asked.

“Stilwell. I finally located him in Minneapolis. When can you go?”

“Talk about a cold case. We’re going to freeze our butts off up there.”

“I know. What do you think? I have to put in the travel request.”

“I have to see where Jespersen takes me for the next few days. And then there’s the Professional Standards thing—I could be on suspension.”

Chu nodded but Bosch could tell his partner had hoped
for more enthusiasm for picking up Stilwell. And something more definitive about when they would do it. Nobody in the squad liked waiting around once they had a suspect IDed and located.

“Look, O’Toole probably isn’t going to approve any travel for me for a while. You might want to see if somebody else can go. Ask Trish the Dish. That way you’ll get your own room.”

Department travel regulations required that detectives book only double-occupancy rooms so that the partners could share one room and save the department money. This was the downside of the travel because nobody wanted to share a bathroom, and invariably one partner or the other snored. Tim Marcia once had to tape-record his partner’s window-shaking snoring in order to persuade command staff to let him get his own room. But the easy exception was when partners were of the opposite sex. Trish Allmand was a highly sought-after partner in Open-Unsolved. Not only was she attractive—hence the nickname—and a skilled investigator, but work travel with her meant her partner got a room to himself.

“But it’s
our
case, Harry,” Chu complained.

“All right, then you’re going to have to wait. There’s nothing I can do.”

Bosch went through the door and moved into their cubicle. He grabbed his phone and his notebook, which he had left on the desk. He thought about the call he was going to make and decided not to use either his cell or his desk phone.

He looked around the vast Robbery-Homicide Division floor. Open-Unsolved was at the southern end of a room the length of a football field. Because of a departmental freeze on promotions and hiring, there were several uninhabited cubicles
in each of the individual squad areas. Bosch walked over to an empty desk in Homicide Special and sat down to use the landline. He got the number he needed out of his cell and punched it in. It was answered right away.

“Tactical.”

He thought he recognized the voice but he wasn’t sure after so long.

“Rachel?”

There was a pause.

“Hello, Harry. How are you?”

“I’m doing fine. How are you?”

“I can’t complain. Is this a new number for you?”

“No, I’m just borrowing a desk. How’s Jack?”

He quickly tried to move past the fact that he had used a phone other than his own because he thought she might not answer if his name came up on her caller ID. He and FBI agent Rachel Walling had a long history, not all of it good.

“Jack is Jack. He’s good. But I doubt you called on a phone other than your own to ask me about Jack.”

Bosch nodded even though she couldn’t see this.

“Right, well, as you probably know, I need a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“I have this case. This woman from Denmark named Anneke. She was amazingly courageous. She was a war correspondent and she went into some of the—”

“Harry, you don’t have to sell me your victim, as if that will make me want to do you this favor, whatever it is. Just tell me what you want.”

He nodded again. Rachel Walling could always make him nervous. They had been lovers once, but the emotional connection
didn’t end well. It was a long time ago, but whenever he talked to her, he still felt pangs of what could have been.

“Okay, okay, here it is. I have a partial serial number off a Beretta model ninety-two used to kill this woman twenty years ago during the riots. We just recovered the weapon and got the partial. We’re missing only one number, so that means there are ten possibles. We ran all ten through the California DOJ box and got nothing. I need somebody in—”

“ATF. That’s their jurisdiction.”

“I know that. But I don’t have anybody over there, and if I just go through straight protocol, I’ll get my answer back in two or three months and I can’t wait that long, Rachel.”

“You haven’t changed. Always ‘Hurry-Up Harry.’ So you want to know if I have somebody at ATF I use to streamline things.”

“Yes, that’s about it.”

There was a long pause. Bosch didn’t know if something had distracted Rachel or if she was hesitating about helping him. He filled the space with one more lobbying effort.

“I’d share full credit with them when we make the arrest. I figure they could use the mention. They already provided the initial lead on the case. Matched a shell from the scene to two other murders. This could look good for them for a change.”

The ATF was mostly in the news these days for the agency’s sponsorship of an undercover operation that completely backfired and placed hundreds of guns into the hands of narco-terrorists. The outrage reached the point that the fiasco became fodder in the presidential campaign season.

“I know what you mean,” Walling agreed. “Well, I have a friend over there. I could talk to her. I think the way I would
want to do it is for you to give me the serial number and for me to give it to her. Just giving you her cell number isn’t going to work.”

“No problem,” Bosch said quickly. “Whatever works best. She can probably punch it in and get the transaction record in ten minutes.”

“It’s not that easy. Access to these sorts of searches are monitored and assigned case numbers. She’ll still need to get supervisor approval to do this.”

“Damn. Too bad they weren’t so tight with those guns they let cross the border last year.”

“Very funny, Harry. I’ll tell her you said that.”

“Uh, I think it might be better if you didn’t.”

Walling then asked for the Beretta’s serial number and he read it out to her, noting that the eighth digit was missing. She said that either she would get back to him or her friend Agent Suzanne Wingo would contact him directly. She ended the call with a personal question.

“So Harry, how long are you going to do this?”

“Do what?” he asked, even though he had a good idea what she meant.

“Do the badge-and-gun thing. I thought you’d be retired by now, voluntarily or not.”

He smiled.

“As long as they let me, Rachel. Which, according to my DROP contract, is about four more years.”

“Well, hopefully we’ll cross paths again before your time is up.”

“Yeah, I hope so.”

“Take care.”

“Thanks for doing this.”

“Well, let me make sure it will get done before you start thanking me.”

Bosch put the phone back in its cradle. As soon as he stood to go back to his own cubicle, his cell phone buzzed. The ID was blocked but he answered, just in case it was Rachel trying to call him back.

Instead, it was Detective Mendenhall from the PSB.

“Detective Bosch, we need to schedule an interview. What does your schedule look like?”

Bosch started back over to the Open-Unsolved squad. Mendenhall’s voice did not sound threatening. She was even and matter-of-fact. Maybe she already knew the complaint from O’Toole was bullshit. Harry decided to confront the internal investigation head-on.

“Mendenhall, this is a bullshit beef. I want it taken care of quickly. So how about tomorrow morning, first thing?”

If she was surprised that Bosch wanted to come in sooner rather than later, she didn’t show it in her voice.

“I have eight o’clock open. Will that work?”

“Sure, your place or mine?”

“I would prefer that you come here, unless that’s a problem.”

She was talking about the Bradbury Building, where most of PSB was located.

“No problem, Mendenhall. I’ll be there with a rep.”

“Very good. We’ll see if we can get this handled. I ask one last thing, Detective.”

“What’s that?”

“That you refer to me as Detective or Detective Mendenhall.
It is disrespectful to call me by just my last name. I would rather our relationship be professional and respectful from the start.”

Bosch had just gotten to his cubicle and saw Chu at his station. He realized he never called Chu by his first name or his rank. Was he being disrespectful all this time?

“You got it, Detective,” he said. “I’ll see you at eight.”

He disconnected the call. Before sitting down, he leaned over the partition into Rick Jackson’s cubicle.

“I have an interview over at the Bradbury tomorrow at eight. Shouldn’t take too long. The League hasn’t called me back yet. You want to come be my rep?”

While the League provided defense reps for PSB interviews, any officer could act as a defense rep as long as he or she didn’t have a part in the investigation at hand.

He chose Jackson because he had been around and he had a natural take-no-shit quality about his face. It was always an intimidating force during an interrogation of a suspect. On occasion Bosch had used him to sit in during an interview. Jackson’s silent stare often unnerved the suspect. Bosch thought Jackson might give him an advantage when he sat down across from Detective Mendenhall.

“Sure, I’m in,” Jackson said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Let’s meet at seven at the Dining Car. We’ll eat and I’ll go over everything.”

“You got it.”

Bosch sat down in his seat and realized he might have just insulted Chu by not asking him to stand as his rep. He turned in his seat to address his partner.

“Hey, uh, Chu—uh, David.”

Chu turned around.

“I can’t use you as my rep because Mendenhall is probably going to have to talk to you about the case. You’ll be a witness.”

Chu nodded.

“You understand?”

“Sure, Harry. I understand.”

“And me calling you by your last name all the time, that was no disrespect. It’s just what I do with people.”

Now Chu seemed confused by Bosch’s half-assed apology.

“Sure, Harry,” he said again.

“So, we’re good?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

“Good.”

Part Two

WORDS AND PICTURES

16

B
osch had begun making his way through the Art Pepper recordings his daughter had given him for his birthday. He was on volume three and listening to a stunning version of “Patricia” recorded three decades earlier at a club in Croydon, England. It was during Pepper’s comeback period after the years of drug addiction and incarceration. On this night in 1981 he had everything working. On this one song, Bosch believed he was proving that no one would ever play better. Harry wasn’t exactly sure what the word
ethereal
meant, but it was the word that came to mind. The song was perfect, the saxophone was perfect, the interplay and communication between Pepper and his three band mates was as perfect and orchestrated as the movement of four fingers on a hand. There were a lot of words used to describe jazz music. Bosch had read them over the years in the magazines and in the liner notes of records. He didn’t always understand them. He just knew what he liked, and this was it. Powerful and relentless, and sometimes sad.

He found it hard to concentrate on the computer screen as the song played, the band going on almost twenty minutes
with it. He had “Patricia” on other records and CDs. It was one of Pepper’s signatures. But he had never heard it played with the same sinewy passion. He looked at his daughter, who was lying on the couch reading a book. Another school assignment. This one was called
The Fault in Our Stars
.