The Black Box (14 page)

Bosch realized that Larry Gandle, a former Open-Unsolved Unit lieutenant, had spent time in Devonshire in the nineties and might know who the Danish-speaking patrol officer was. Bosch called Gandle’s office. He was now the captain in charge of RHD.

Bosch’s call was put through without delay. Harry explained what and who he was looking for, and Gandle gave him the bad news.

“Yeah, you’re talking about Magnus Vestergaard, but he’s dead at least ten years now. Motorcycle accident.”

“Damn.”

“What did you need him for?”

“He did some Danish translation work on a case I’m looking
at. I wanted to see what he remembered that’s not in the book.”

“Sorry about that, Harry.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

As soon as Bosch put down the phone, it rang while still in his hand. It was Lieutenant O’Toole.

“Detective, can you come into my office for a moment?”

“Sure thing.”

Bosch killed his computer screen and got up. A summons to O’Toole’s office was not a good thing. He felt several eyes in the squad room following him as he made his way to the corner office. It was bright inside. The blinds over the windows that looked out on the squad were open as well as the exterior windows that had a view of the Los Angeles Times Building. The previous lieutenant always kept these closed out of fear that the reporters were watching.

“What’s up, L-T?” Bosch asked.

“I’ve got something I want you to run with.”

“What do you mean?”

“A case. I got a call from an analyst named Pran in the Death Squad. He linked an open case from ’oh-six with a case from ’ninety-nine. I want you to handle it. It sounded good. Here’s his direct.”

O’Toole proffered a yellow Post-it with a phone number jotted on it. The Death Squad was the unofficial acronym of the new Data Evaluation and Theory Unit. It was part of a new form of cold case investigating called data synthesizing.

For the prior three years, the Death Squad had been digitizing archived murder books, creating a massive database of
easily accessible and comparable information about unsolved killings. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions—any and all of the myriad details of crime scenes and investigations—were constantly churning through the squad’s telephone booth–size IBM computer. It had provided a whole new line of investigation of cold cases.

Bosch didn’t reach out for the Post-it but his curiosity got the better of him.

“What’s the connection between the cases?”

“A witness. Same witness happened to see the shooter running away. Two contract hits, one in the Valley, one downtown, no seeming connection but the same witness both times. Sounds to me like this witness needs to be looked at from a whole new angle. Take the number.”

Bosch didn’t.

“What going on, Lieutenant? I’ve got momentum going on the Jespersen case. Why are you giving me this?”

“You told me yesterday that Jespersen was stalled.”

“I didn’t say it was stalled. I said it wasn’t a CBO case.”

Bosch suddenly realized what was going on. Something Jordy Gant had said connected with what O’Toole was trying to do. Plus he knew that the afternoon before, O’Toole had attended the weekly command staff meeting on the tenth floor. He turned and headed out of the office.

“Harry, don’t walk out, where are you going?”

Bosch spoke without turning back to look.

“Give it to Jackson. He needs a case.”

“I’m giving it to you. Hey!”

Bosch strode down the center aisle and out the door to the elevator lobby. O’Toole didn’t follow him, and that was a good
thing. The two things Bosch had the least patience for were politics and bureaucracy. And he believed O’Toole was engaged in both—but not necessarily by his own choice.

He rode the elevator to the tenth floor and then strode through the open door of the chief of police’s suite. There were four desks in the front room. Uniformed officers sat behind three of them. Behind the fourth was Alta Rose, who was arguably the most powerful civilian working in the police department. She had been guarding the entrance to the chief of police’s office for nearly three decades. She was part pit bull and part sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Anybody who dismissed her as simply a secretary was mistaken. She kept the chief’s schedule and more often than not told him where to be and when.

Bosch had been summoned to the chief’s office enough times over the years that Rose recognized him on sight. She smiled sweetly at him as he approached her desk.

“Detective Bosch, how are you?” she asked.

“I’m fine, Ms. Rose. How are things up here?”

“I’m not sure they could be any better. But I am sorry, I don’t have you on the chief’s calendar today. Have I made a mistake?”

“No, no mistake, Ms. Rose. I was just hoping to see if Marty—I mean, if the chief—has five minutes for me.”

Her eyes flitted down for a moment to the multiple-line telephone on her desk. One of the line buttons was glowing red.

“Oh, dear, he’s on a call.”

But Bosch knew that line was always lit, just so Alta Rose could turn people away if need be. Harry’s former partner Kiz Rider had spent time working in the chief’s office and had told Bosch the secret.

“He also has an evening appointment he’s going to have to leave for as soon as—”

“Three minutes, Ms. Rose. Just ask him. I think he’s probably even expecting me.”

Alta Rose frowned but got up from her desk and disappeared behind the big door to the inner sanctum. Bosch stood waiting.

Chief Martin Maycock had come up through the ranks. Twenty-five years before, he had been an RHD detective assigned to Homicide Special. So was Bosch. They had never partnered but they had worked task-force cases together, most notably on the Dollmaker investigation, which ended when Bosch shot the infamous serial killer to death in his Silver Lake kill pad. Maycock was handsome and more than competent, and he had a name that was easily if awkwardly remembered. He used the media attention and celebrity from those big cases to launch his rise through the command structure of the department, culminating in his appointment by the police commission as chief.

The rank and file was at first buoyed by the elevation of a homegrown badge to the tenth floor. But three years into his appointment, the honeymoon was over. Maycock presided over a department crippled by a hiring freeze, a devastating budget crunch, and the various and sundry scandals that came along every few months. Crime had plummeted but it wasn’t garnering him any credit or political traction. Worse than that was that the rank and file had begun to view him as a politician more interested in getting on the six-o’clock news than showing up at roll calls and the scenes of cop shootings. An old nickname for the chief—Marty MyCock—had found a
renaissance in the locker rooms, parking lots, and bars where cops gathered on or off duty.

For a long time Bosch had kept the faith, but the year before, he had inadvertently helped the chief win a treacherous political battle with a city councilman who was the department’s top critic. It was a setup in which Bosch had been used by Kiz Rider. She got a promotion out of it—she was now a captain running West Valley Division. But Bosch had not spoken to her or the chief since.

Alta Rose returned through the inner sanctum door and held it open for Bosch.

“You have five minutes with the chief, Detective Bosch.”

“Thank you, Ms. Rose.”

Bosch entered and found Maycock sitting behind a large desk festooned with police and sports tchotchkes and memorabilia. The office was large and included a large private balcony, an adjoining boardroom with a twelve-foot-long meeting table, and a sweeping view of the civic center.

“Harry Bosch, I had a feeling I might hear from you today.”

They shook hands. Bosch stayed standing in front of the great wide desk. He couldn’t deny that he liked his old colleague. He just didn’t like what he was doing and what he had become.

“Then, why did you use O’Toole? Why didn’t you just call me up? You called me up last year on that Irving thing.”

“Yeah, but that got messy. I went with O’Toole and now it’s messy again.”

“What do you want, Marty?”

“Do I have to say it?”

“She was executed, Marty. Put up against a wall and shot
in the eye. And because she was white, you don’t want me to clear it?”

“It’s not like that. Of course I want you to clear it. But it’s a sensitive situation. If it comes out big that the only riot killing we clear during the twentieth-anniversary year is the white girl murdered by some gangbanger, then we’re going to have to deal with some ugly shit. It’s been twenty years but we haven’t come that far, Harry. You never know what could light the match again.”

Bosch turned from the desk and looked out through the glass at City Hall.

“You’re talking about public relations,” he said. “I’m talking about murder. What happened to everybody counting, no matter who they are? Or were. Do you even remember that from Homicide Special?”

“Of course I do and it still stands, Harry. I’m not asking you to drop the case. Just put some space in it. Wait a month, till after the first, clear it then and clear it quietly. And we’ll tell the family and leave it at that. If we’re lucky, the suspect will be dead and we won’t have to worry about a trial. Meantime, O’Toole told me he had a hot shot from the Death Squad that you can run with. Maybe that one will bring us the kind of attention we want.”

Bosch shook his head.

“I have a case I’m running with now.”

Maycock was losing patience with Bosch. His ruddy complexion was turning a deeper red.

“Put it on hold and go with the hot shot.”

“Did O’Toole tell you that if I clear this one, I may clear five or six others?”

Maycock nodded but dismissed the news with a wave of the hand.

“Yeah, gangbangers all, and none during the riots.”

“This was your idea, to go into these cases.”

“How was I to know that you’d be the only one to get some traction on a case and it would happen to be Snow White? Jesus Christ, the name alone, Harry. In fact, no matter what happens, stop calling her that.”

Bosch took a few steps around the room. He found an angle where the spire of City Hall was doubled in the reflection of the glass skin of the PAB’s northern wing. Fresh kills or cold cases, the pursuit of killers had to be relentless. It was the only way to go and the only way Bosch knew how to go. But when political and social considerations intruded, his patience always stretched thin.

“Goddamn it, Marty,” he said.

“I know how you feel,” the chief said.

Bosch finally looked back at him.

“No, you don’t. Not anymore.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion.”

“But not to work my case.”

“Again, that is not what I’m saying. You keep putting it in a way that is not—”

“It’s too late, Marty. It’s about to break.”

“Break how?”

“I needed information about my victim. I went to the paper she worked for and traded information. I’m working with a reporter on it. If I blow it off now, he’ll know why and it will be a bigger story for that than for me closing it.”

“You son of a bitch. What paper? In Sweden?”

“Denmark. She was from Denmark. But don’t think it’ll stay in Denmark. The media is global. The story may break over there but it will ping-pong right back here—eventually. And you’ll have to answer to why you killed the investigation.”

Maycock grabbed a baseball off his desk and started working it with his fingers like a pitcher breaking in a new ball.

“You can go now,” he said.

“Okay. And?”

“And just get the hell out. We’re done.”

Bosch paused, then started moving toward the door.

“I will keep all public relations issues in mind as I proceed,” he said.

It was his meager offering.

“Yes, you do that, Detective,” the chief said.

As he left the suite, Bosch thanked Alta Rose for getting him in.

11

I
t was 6
P.M.
when Bosch knocked on the door of the house on 73rd Place. Normally residential search warrants were executed in the morning hours so they drew little notice in the neighborhood. People were at work, at school, sleeping late.

But that wasn’t the plan this time. Bosch didn’t want to wait. The case had momentum and he didn’t want it to stall.

The door was answered after the third knock by a short woman in a housedress and a colorful bandana wrapped around her head. Tattoos rose like a scarf around her neck and up to her jawline. She stood behind a security gate, the kind most of the houses in the neighborhood had.

Bosch stood front and center on the front stoop. This was by design. Behind him were two white officers from the Gang Enforcement Detail. Jordy Gant and David Chu were standing farther back in the front yard and to the left. Bosch wanted to hammer home to the woman of the house that she was in for a major intrusion—uniformed white police officers searching through her home.

“Gail Briscoe? I’m Detective Bosch with the LAPD. I have a document here giving me access to search your home.”

“Search my home? For what?”

“This specifies that we are searching for a Beretta model ninety-two handgun known to have been in the possession of Trumont Story, who resided here until his death on December first, two thousand and nine.”

Bosch held the document out to her but she couldn’t reach for it because of the security door. He was hoping she wouldn’t anyway.

Instead, she went into full outrage.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” the woman said. “You ain’t comin’ in here and searching my place. This is my home, motherfuckers.”

“Ma’am,” Bosch said calmly. “Are you Gail Briscoe?”

“Yes, I am, and this is my motherfucking house.”

“Would you please open the door so you can read the document? It is fully enforceable whether you cooperate with us or not.”

“I don’t want to read a goddamn thing. I know my rights and you can’t just show me a piece of paper and expect me to open my door.”

“Ma’am, you—”