The Black Box hb-18 Read online

  “So, what you’re saying,” Bosch said, “is that we don’t know who Trumont Story was working for back then or where he got the gun that he gave to Coleman to take out Regis.”

  “Most of that’s right. Except the gun part. My guess is that Tru always had that gun and he gave it out to people he wanted to use it. See, we know lots more now than we knew then. So taking today’s knowledge and applying it to back then, it would work like this. We start with a guy at the top or near the top of the pyramid called the Rolling Sixties street gang. This guy is like a captain. He wants a guy named Walter ‘Wide Right’ Regis dead because he’s been selling where he shouldn’t be selling. So the captain goes to his trusted sergeant at arms named Trumont Story and whispers in his ear that he wants Regis taken care of. At that point, it is Story’s job and he has to get it done to maintain his position in the organization. So he goes to one of the trusted guys on his crew, Rufus Coleman, gives him a gun, and says the target is Regis and this is the club where he likes to hang. While Coleman goes off to do the job, Story goes and gets himself an alibi because he’s the keeper of that gun. Just a little safeguard in case he and the gun are ever connected. That’s how they do it now, so I’m saying that’s probably how they did it back then—only we didn’t exactly know it.”

  Bosch nodded. He was getting the sense of the fruitlessness of his search. Trumont Story was dead and the connection to the gun was gone with him. He was really no closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen than he was on the night twenty years ago when he stared down at her body and apologized. He was nowhere.

  Gant identified his disappointment.

  “Sorry, Harry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “It probably saves you a bunch of trouble anyway.”

  “Yeah, how so?”

  “Oh, you know, all those unsolved cases from back then. What if the only one we closed was the white girl’s? That probably wouldn’t go over too well in the community, know what I mean?”

  Bosch looked at Gant, who was black. He hadn’t really considered the racial issues in the case. He was just trying to solve a murder that had stuck with him for twenty years.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  They sat in silence for a long moment before Bosch asked a question.

  “So, what do you think, could it happen again?”

  “What, you mean the riots?”

  Bosch nodded. Gant had spent his whole career in South L.A. He would know the answer better than most.

  “Sure, anything can happen down here,” Gant answered. “Are things better between the people and the department? Sure, way better. We got some of the people actually trusting us now. The murder count’s way down. Hell, crime in general is way down and the bangers don’t run the streets with impunity. We got control, the people have control.”

  He stopped there and Bosch waited but that was it.

  “But . . .,” Bosch prompted.

  Gant shrugged.

  “Lotta people without jobs, lotta stores and businesses closed up. Not a lotta opportunities out there, Harry. You know where that goes. Frustration, agitation, desperation. That’s why I say anything could happen. History runs in a cycle. It repeats itself. It could happen again, sure.”

  Bosch nodded. Gant’s take on things was not far from his own.

  “Can I keep these files awhile?” he asked.

  “As long as you bring them back,” Gant said. “I’ll also loan you the black box.”

  He reached behind him and grabbed the card box. When he turned back, Bosch was smiling.

  “What? You don’t want it?”

  “No, no, I want it. I’m just thinking of a partner I had once. This was way back. His name was Frankie Sheehan, and he—”

  “I knew Frankie. A shame what happened.”

  “Yeah, but before that, when we were partners, he always had this saying about working homicide. He said, you have to find the black box. That’s the first thing, find the black box.”

  Gant had a confused look on his face.

  “You mean like on a plane?”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Yeah, like in a plane crash, they have to find the black box, which records all the flight data. They find the black box and they’ll know what happened. Frankie said it was the same with a murder scene or a murder case. There will be one thing that brings it all together and makes sense of things. You find it and you’re gold. It’s like finding the black box. And now here you are, giving me a black box.”

  “Well, don’t expect too much outta this one. We call them CRASH boxes. It’s just the shake cards from back then.”

  Before the advent of the MDT—the mobile data terminal installed in every patrol car—officers carried FI cards in their back pockets. These were merely 3 × 5 cards for writing down notes from field interviews. They included the date, time, and location of the interview, as well as the name, age, address, aliases, tattoos, and gang affiliation of the individual questioned. There was also a section for the officer’s comments, which was primarily used to record any other observations worth noting about the individual.

  The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had long decried the department’s practice of conducting field interviews, calling them unwarranted and unconstitutional, likening them to shakedowns. Undaunted, the department continued the practice, and the FI cards became known across its ranks as shake cards.

  Bosch was handed the box, and opening it he found it full of well-worn cards.

  “How did this survive the purging?” he asked.

  Gant knew he meant the department’s shift toward digital data storage. Across the board, hard files were being turned into digital files to make way for an electronic future.

  “Man, we knew that if they archived these on computers, they would miss all kinds of stuff. These are handwritten, Harry. Sometimes you can’t figure out the writing to save your life. We knew most of the info on these cards wouldn’t make it across, know what I mean? So we held on to as many of those black boxes as we could. You were lucky, Harry, we still had the Sixties in a box. Hope there’s something in there that helps.”

  Bosch pushed back his chair to get up.

  “I’ll make sure you get it back.”

  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.”