The Black Box hb-18 Read online

  Bosch gauged Washburn for a reaction but didn’t register a change.

  “Like the one we’re going to talk about.”

  “I don’t know nothing about no homicide. You got the wrong motherfucker there.”

  “Yeah? Really? That’s not what I heard. I guess some people have been talking some shit about you, then.”

  “That’s right. So, take that shit outta here.”

  Bosch leaned back as if maybe he was considering following Washburn’s order, but then he shook his head once.

  “No, I can’t do that. I got a witness, Charles. Actually, an ear witness—you know what that is?”

  Washburn looked away when he answered.

  “The only thing I know is that you’re full of shit.”

  “I got a witness who heard you cop to the crime, man. She said you told her. You were acting like a big man and told her how you put the white bitch against the wall and popped her. She said you were real proud of it because it was going to grease you right into the Sixties.”

  Washburn tried to stand up but his bindings pulled him right back into his seat.

  “White bitch? Man, what the fuck you talking? Was that Latitia you talking about? She’s full a shit. She’s just trying to cause me trouble on account I ain’t paid her in four months. Her lyin’ ass will say anything.”

  Bosch leaned his elbows down on the table and moved closer to Washburn.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t name informants, Charles. But I can tell you that you’ve got a big problem here, because I did some checking based on what I was told, and it turns out that in nineteen ninety-two, a white woman was murdered in the alley right behind your house. So this isn’t no made-up shit.”

  Washburn’s eyes lit with recognition.

  “You mean that reporter bitch during the riots? You ain’t putting that on me, man. I’m clean on that and you can tell your ear witness that she keep lyin’ and she’s going to get fucked up.”

  “Charles, I am not sure you want to be threatening witnesses in front of two law enforcement officers. Now you see if something were to happen to Latitia, whether or not she was a witness, you are going to be the first person we come after, you understand?”

  Washburn said nothing and Bosch pressed on.

  “Actually, I have more than one witness, Charles. I’ve got another person from the neighborhood who said you had a gun back then. A Beretta, as a matter of fact, and that’s just the kind of gun used to kill the woman in the alley.”

  “That gun? I found that gun in my backyard, man!”

  There. Washburn had made an admission. But he also had given a plausible explanation. It seemed too genuine and extemporaneous to be made up. Bosch had to go with it.

  “Your yard? You want me to believe you just found it in your backyard?”

  “Look, man, I was sixteen years old. My moms wouldn’t even let me go outside during the riot. She had a lock on my bedroom door from the outside and bars on the window. She put me in there and locked me in, man. You go check with her on it.”

  “So, when did you find this gun?”

  “When it was over, man. All over. I went out back and there it was in the grass when I was mowin’ the lawn. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn’t even know about that killin’ till my moms told me some police came ’n’ knocked on the door.”

  “Did you tell your moms about the gun?”

  “No. Fuck, no, I wasn’t going to tell her about no gun. And by then I didn’t even have it no more.”

  Bosch made a furtive glance over his shoulder to Gant. Harry was moving out of his zone here. Washburn’s story had the desperation and detail of truth. Whoever had shot Jespersen could’ve tossed the murder weapon over the fence to get rid of it.

  Gant picked up on the glance and stood up. He pulled his chair over next to Bosch’s. He was an equal player now.

  “Charles, you’ve got a serious thing here,” he said in a tone that imparted that seriousness perfectly. “You have to know that we know more about this than you ever could. You can dig yourself out of a hole here if you don’t bullshit us. If you lie, we’re going to know it.”

  “Okay,” Washburn said meekly. “What I gotta say?”

  “You gotta tell us what you did with that gun twenty years ago.”

  “I gave it away. First I hid it, then I gave it away.”

  “To who?”

  “A guy I knew but he’s gone now.”

  “I’m not going to ask you again. Who?”

  “His name was Trumond but I never knew if that was his real name or not. On the street they called him True Story.”

  “Is that a nickname? What was his last name?”

  Gant was following standard interview technique in asking some questions he already knew the answers to. It helped gauge the interview subject’s veracity and sometimes provided a strategic advantage when the subject thought the interviewer knew less than he actually did.

  “I don’t know, man,” Washburn said. “But he’s dead now. He got clipped a few years back.”

  “Who clipped him?”

  “I don’t know. He was street. Somebody jus’ took ’m down, you know? It happens.”

  Gant leaned back in his chair, and this was a signal to Bosch to take the lead back if he wanted it.

  He did.

  “Tell me about the gun.”

  “Like you said, a Beretta. It was black.”

  “Where exactly did you find it in your yard?”

  “I don’t know, by the swing set. It was just there in the grass, man. I didn’t see it and ran over it with the lawn mower, put a big fucking scratch on the metal.”

  “Where was the scratch?”

  “Right down the side of the barrel.”

  Bosch knew the scratch could be an identifier if the gun was ever found. More important, the scratch would help confirm Washburn’s story.

  “Did the weapon still work?”

  “Oh, yeah, it worked. Worked fine. I fired it right there, put a slug in one of the fence posts. Surprised me, I was hardly pullin’ the trigger.”

  “Your mother hear the shot?”

  “Yeah, she came out but I’d put it in my pants under my shirt. I told her it was the lawn mower backfiring.”

  Bosch wondered about the slug in the fence post. If it was still there, it would further corroborate the story. He moved on.

  “All right, so you said your mother had you locked up in your room during the riots, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, so when did you find the gun? The riots pretty much ended after three days. May first was the last night. Do you remember when you found the gun?”

  Washburn shook his head like he was annoyed.

  “That’s too far back, man. I can’t remember what day. I just remember I found the gun is all.”

  “Why did you give it to Tru Story?”

  “’Cause he was the street boss. I give it to him.”

  “You mean he was a boss in the Rolling Sixties Crips, correct?”

  “Yes, correct!”

  He said it in a mocking white man’s voice. It was clear he wanted to talk to Gant and not Bosch. Harry glanced toward Gant and he took the lead back.

  “You said Trumond. You mean Trumont, right? Trumont Story?”

  “I guess, man. I didn’t know him that well.”

  “Why’d you give him the gun, then?”

  “Because I wanted to know him. I wanted to move up the ladder, you know?”

  “And did you?”

  “Not really. I took a bust and got sent to JD up in Sylmar. I was there for almost two years. After that I sort of missed my chance.”

  One of the largest juvenile detention centers was in Sylmar in the northern suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. The juvy courts often sent underage criminals to centers far from their home neighborhoods in an effort to break their connection to gangs.

  “Did you ever see that weapon again?” Gant asked.

  “
Nope, never did,” Washburn answered.

  “What about Tru Story?” Bosch asked. “Did you see him again?”

  “I’d see him on the street but we never were together. We never spoke.”

  Bosch waited a moment to see if he would say more. He didn’t.

  “Okay, sit tight, Two Small,” he said.

  He tapped Gant on the shoulder as he stood up. The detectives left the interrogation room, closed the door, and huddled together outside. Gant shrugged his shoulders and spoke first.

  “It hangs together,” he said.

  Bosch nodded reluctantly. Washburn’s story did have the ring of truth. But the ring didn’t matter. He had admitted finding a gun in his backyard. It was most likely the gun Bosch was looking for, but there wasn’t any evidence of that, just as there wasn’t any evidence that 2 Small Washburn’s involvement in Anneke Jespersen’s murder was anything more than what he had admitted to.

  “What do you want to do with him?” Gant asked.

  “I’m done with him. Book ’im on the warrant and the weed, but let him know that it wasn’t Latitia or anybody else who talked to us.”

  “Will do. Sorry it didn’t work out, Harry.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking . . .”

  “Thinking what?”

  “Trumont Story. What if he wasn’t whacked with his own gun?”

  Gant cupped his elbow in one hand and rubbed his chin with the other.

  “That was almost three years ago.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a long shot. But there was a five-year stretch in there when Story was up in Pelican Bay and nobody used the gun. It stayed hidden.”

  Gant nodded.

  “He lived on Seventy-third. About a year ago I had occasion to be in that neighborhood on a community relations thing we were running. I knocked on that door and his baby mama was still living in the house.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “The team that caught his killing, you know if they ever checked the house?”

  Gant shook his head.

  “I don’t know, Harry, but I’m thinking probably not too closely. Not with a warrant, I mean. I can check.”

  Bosch nodded and started toward the squad room door.

  “Let me know,” he said. “If they didn’t go through that place, then maybe I will.”

  “It might be worth a shot,” Gant said. “But you should know, Story’s baby mama was a hard-core gang girl. Hell, she’d probably be on top of the pyramid if she had the right plumbing. She’s tough.”

  Bosch thought about that for a moment.

  “We might be able to make that work for us. I don’t know if there is going to be enough here to get paper.”

  He was talking about the necessary probable cause to get a search warrant for Trumont Story’s former home almost three years after he was dead. The best way in would be without having to get a warrant signed by a judge. The best way would be to be invited. And given the right play, sometimes the least likely invitation can be offered by the least likely individual.

  “I’ll work on a script, Harry,” Gant offered.

  “Okay. Let me know.”

  10

  Chu was at his computer working on a Word document when Bosch got back to the squad room.

  “What’s that?”

  “Parole letter on the Clancy case.”

  Bosch nodded. He was glad Chu was getting the letter done. The department was notified whenever a murderer convicted in one of its cases was coming up for a parole hearing. It was not required but the investigators who worked the case were invited to send letters of objection or recommendation to the parole board. The workload often prevented this from getting done but Bosch was usually a stickler about it. He liked to write letters that described the brutality of the murder in detail, hoping that the horror of the crimes would help sway the board to deny parole. He was attempting to pass this practice on to his partner and had given Chu the task of writing the letter on the Clancy murder, a particularly heinous sexually motivated stabbing.

  “I should have something for you to read tomorrow.”

  “Good,” Bosch said. “Did you run those names I gave you?”

  “Yeah, not much there. Jimenez was totally clean and Banks just has a DUI conviction.”

  “You sure?”

  “That’s all I found, Harry. Sorry.”

  Disappointed, Bosch pulled his chair out and sat down at his desk. It wasn’t that he expected the Alex White mystery to be solved on the spot, but he had been hoping for something more than a drunk driving conviction. Something he could chew on.

  “You’re welcome,” Chu said.

  Bosch looked back at him and turned his disappointment into annoyance.

  “If you want to be thanked all the time for just doing your job, then you picked the wrong career.”

  Chu didn’t respond. Bosch fired up his computer and was greeted with an email from Mikkel Bonn of the Berlingske Tidende. It had come in almost an hour earlier.

  Detective Bosch: I have inquired further. Jannik Frej was the editor who worked with Anneke Jespersen because he was in charge of freelance projects. Mr. Frej did not speak directly to Los Angeles investigators and reporters in 1992 because his English skills were considered poor. Arne Haagan spoke at the time because his English skills were very high and he was editor of the newspaper.

  I have made contact with Mr. Frej and his English is not good. I offer my services as go-between if you have questions for him. If this is of help to you I am happy to do this. Please just let me know your answer.

  Bosch considered the offer. He knew there was an unspoken quid pro quo in Bonn’s seemingly innocent offer to help. He was a newspaperman and he was always looking for the story. Plus Bosch’s use of him as a go-between would give Bonn information that might be vital to the investigation. It was not a good place to be but Bosch felt the need to keep momentum going. He started typing a reply.

  Mr. Bonn, I would like to take you up on your offer if you can promise me that the information Mr. Frej provides will be kept confidential until I tell you it is okay to use in a newspaper story. If you can agree to that, here is what I would like to ask:

  Do you know if Anneke Jespersen flew to the United States to pursue a story?

  If yes, what was the story about? What was she doing here?

  What can you tell me about her destinations in the United States? She went to Atlanta and San Francisco before coming to L.A. Why? Do you know if she went to any other cities in the USA?

  Before her U.S. trip she went to Stuttgart, Germany, and stayed in a hotel near the U.S. military base. Do you know why?

  I think this is a good start and I would appreciate any information you can get in regard to Anneke’s trip here. Thank you for your help and once again please keep this information confidential.

  Bosch reread the email before sending it. He tapped the send button and immediately felt a sense of regret about involving Bonn, a journalist he had never met and had had only one conversation with.

  He turned away from the computer screen and checked the wall clock. It was almost four, which made it almost seven in Tampa. Bosch opened the murder book and got the number he had written on the inside cover for Gary Harrod, the now-retired detective who had run the Jespersen case for the Riot Crimes Task Force back in 1992. He had talked to Harrod when he had reopened the case. There had not been much to ask then but now there was.

  Bosch wasn’t sure if the number he had for Harrod was a home, cell, or work phone. He had retired as a young man at twenty years in, moved to Florida, where his wife was from, and now ran a successful real-estate firm.

  “This is Gary.”

  “Uh, hey, Gary, this is Harry Bosch in L.A. Remember we talked about the Jespersen case last month?”

  “Sure, Bosch, yes, of course.”

  “Do you have a couple minutes to talk or are you eating dinner?”

  “Dinner’s not for a half hour. Until then I’m all yours. Don’t tell me you solved t
he Snow White case already.”

  Bosch had told him in their first call that Anneke had been nicknamed Snow White by his partner on the night of the murder.

  “Not quite. I’m still fishing around on things. But a couple things have come up that I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Go ahead, shoot.”

  “Okay, the first thing is, the paper Jespersen worked for. Were you the one who made contact with the people in Denmark?”

  There was a long pause as Harrod probed his memory of the case. Bosch had never worked directly with Harrod but he knew of him back when he was with the department. He had a reputation as a solid investigator. It was the reason Bosch had chosen to contact him out of all of the investigators who’d had a piece of the case in those early years. He knew Harrod would help if he could and that he wouldn’t hold back information.

  Bosch always made the effort to touch base with the original investigators on cold cases. It was surprising how many were still infected with professional pride, reluctant to help another investigator solve a case they were unable to close themselves.

  Not so with Harrod. In their very first conversation, he revealed his guilt over not closing out the Jespersen case and many of the other riot murders he was assigned to. He said the task force was overwhelmed by too many cases with too little evidence to pursue. Like the Jespersen case, most RCTF investigations were based on incomplete or almost nonexistent crime scene investigations. The lack of forensic evidence was crippling.

  “Most cases, we didn’t know where to start,” Harrod had told Bosch. “We were running around in the dark. So we put up billboards and offered rewards and primarily that’s what we worked off of. But we didn’t get much, and at the end of the day we didn’t break any new ground. I don’t remember a single case that we closed. So frustrating. It was one of the reasons I pulled the pin at twenty. I had to get away from L.A.”

  Bosch couldn’t help but think that the city and the department had lost a good man. His hope was that if he was able to close out the Jespersen case, then Harrod would find a measure of solace in that.

  “I remember talking to somebody over there,” Harrod said. “It wasn’t her direct boss, because that person couldn’t speak English. So it was more of a general supervisor and I just got general info. I remember there was a uniform up in Devonshire who spoke the language—Danish—and we used him to make some calls over there.”