The Black Box (23 page)

“Are you sure? I mean, are you sure I should talk to her? She said I didn’t have to.”

“You can talk to her but just tell her the truth. Don’t tell her what you think might help me. Tell her only the truth as far as what you know. Okay, Hannah? It’s not a big deal.”

“But what about Shawn?”

“What about him?”

“Can she do anything to him?”

“No, Hannah, there’s nothing like that. This is about me, not Shawn. So bring her into the office and answer her questions only with the truth. Okay?”

“If you say it’s all right.”

“I do. It is. No worries. I’ll tell you what, call me back after she leaves.”

“I can’t. I have appointments. They’re going to stack up because I have to talk to her.”

“Then make it quick with her and then call me when you catch up on your clients.”

“Why don’t we just have dinner tonight?”

“Okay, that sounds good. Call me or I’ll call you and we’ll figure out where to meet.”

“Okay, Harry. I feel better.”

“Good, Hannah. I’ll talk to you.”

He disconnected and went back to the murder book. Chu interrupted from behind, having heard Bosch’s half of the conversation with Hannah.

“So they aren’t letting up on that,” he said.

“Not yet. Has Mendenhall scheduled you for an interview?”

“Nope, haven’t heard from her.”

“Don’t worry, you will. If anything, she seems like a pretty thorough investigator.”

Bosch went to the front of the murder book to find and reread the statement from Francis John Dowler, the California National Guard soldier who found Anneke Jespersen’s body in the alley off Crenshaw. The report was a transcript of a telephone interview conducted by Gary Harrod of the Riot Crimes Task Force. Bosch and Edgar had never gotten the chance to interview Dowler the first night of the investigation. Harrod caught up with him by phone five weeks after the murder. By then he had returned to civilian life in a town called Manteca.

The witness report and statement said Dowler was twenty-seven years old and worked as a big-rig driver. It said he had been in the California National Guard for six years and was assigned to the 237th Transportation Company based in Modesto.

A blast of adrenaline drilled through Bosch’s body. Modesto.
Someone calling himself Alex White had called from Modesto ten years after the murder.

Bosch swiveled in his chair and communicated the information about the 237th to Chu, who said he had already established in his Internet search that the 237th was one of three National Guard troops that sent people to both Desert Storm and the Los Angeles riots.

Reading from his screen, Chu said, “You have the two thirty-seventh barracks in Modesto and the twenty-six sixty-eighth from Fresno. Both were transpo companies—truck drivers basically. The third was the two seventieth from Sacramento. They were military police.”

Bosch wasn’t listening much past
truck drivers
. He was thinking about the trucks that hauled all the captured weapons out into the Saudi desert for disposal.

“Let’s focus on the two thirty-seventh. The guy who found the body was with the two thirty-seventh. What else you got on them?”

“Not a lot so far. It says they served for twelve days in Los Angeles. Only one injury reported—one guy spent a night in a hospital with a concussion when somebody hit him with a bottle.”

“What about Desert Storm?”

Chu pointed to his screen.

“I have that here. I’ll read you the description of their outing during Desert Storm. ‘The soldiers of the two thirty-seventh were mobilized on September twenty, nineteen ninety, with sixty-two personnel. The unit arrived in Saudi Arabia the following November three. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations, the unit transported
twenty-one thousand tons of cargo, moved fifteen thousand personnel and prisoners of war, and drove eight hundred thirty-seven thousand accident-free miles. The unit returned to Modesto without a single casualty on April twenty-three, nineteen ninety-one.’ See what I mean? These guys were truck drivers and bus drivers.”

Bosch contemplated the information and statistics for a few moments.

“We’ve got to get those sixty-two names,” he said.

“I’m working on it. You were right. Each unit has an amateur website and an archive. You know, newspaper stories and whatnot. But I haven’t found any lists of names from ’ninety-one or ’ninety-two. Just mentions of different people here and there. Like one guy from back then is the sheriff of Stanislaus County now. And he’s also running for Congress.”

Bosch rolled his chair over so he could look at what Chu had on his screen. There was a photo of a man in a sheriff’s green uniform, holding up a sign that said “Drummond for Congress!”

“That’s the two thirty-seventh’s website?”

“Yeah. It says this guy served from ’ninety to ’ninety-eight. So he would’ve—”

“Wait a minute . . . Drummond, I know that name.”

Bosch tried to place it, casting his thoughts back to the night in the alley. So many soldiers standing and watching. He snapped his fingers as a fleeting glimpse of a face and a name came through.

“Drummer. That’s the guy they called Drummer. He was there that night.”

“Well, J.J. Drummond’s sheriff up there now,” Chu said. “Maybe he’ll help us with the names.”

Bosch nodded.

“He might, but let’s hold off on that until we have a better lay of the land.”

21

B
osch went to his computer and pulled up a map of Modesto so he could get a better geographic understanding of where Manteca, Francis Dowler’s hometown, was in relation to Modesto.

Both were in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, which was better known as the Central Valley and the food basket of the state. Livestock, fruit, nuts, vegetables—everything that was put down on the kitchen or restaurant table in Los Angeles and most parts of California came from the Central Valley. And that included some of the wine on those tables as well.

Modesto was the anchor city of Stanislaus County, while Manteca was just across the northern border and part of San Joaquin County. The county seat there was Stockton, the largest city in the Valley.

Bosch did not know these places. He had spent little time in the Valley except to pass through on trips to San Francisco and Oakland. But he knew that on Interstate 5 you could smell the stockyards outside Stockton long before you got to them. You could also pull off at almost any exit on California 99 and quickly find a fruit or vegetable stand with produce that
reaffirmed your belief that you were living in the right place. The Central Valley was a big part of what had made California the Golden State.

Bosch went back to Francis Dowler’s statement. Though he had already read it at least twice since reopening the case, he now read it again, looking for any detail that he might have missed.

I, the undersigned, Francis John Dowler (7/21/64), was on duty with California National Guard, 237th Company, on Friday, May 1, 1992, in Los Angeles. My unit’s responsibilities were to secure and maintain major traffic arteries during the civil unrest that occurred following the verdicts in the Rodney King police beating trial. On the evening of May 1 my unit was stationed along Crenshaw Boulevard from Florence Avenue north to Slauson Avenue. We had arrived in the area late the night before after it had already been hit extensively by looters and arsonists. My position was at Crenshaw and Sixty-seventh Street. At approximately 10
P.M
. I retreated to a nearby alley next to the tire store to relieve myself. At this time I noticed the body of a woman lying near the wall of a burned-out structure. I did not see anyone else in the alley at this time and did not recognize the dead woman. It appeared to me that she had been shot. I confirmed that she was deceased by checking for a pulse on her arm and then proceeded out of the alley. I went to radioman Arthur Fogle and told him to contact our supervisor, Sgt. Eugene Burstin, and tell him that we
had a dead body in the alley. Sgt. Burstin came and inspected the alley and the body and then LAPD homicide was informed by radio communication. I returned to post and later was moved down to Florence Avenue when crowd control was needed because of angry residents at that intersection. This is a complete, truthful, and accurate account of my activities on the night of Friday, May 1, 1992. So attested by my signature below.

Bosch wrote the names Francis Dowler, Arthur Fogle, and Eugene Burstin on a page in his notebook under the name J.J. Drummond. At least he had the names of four of the sixty-two soldiers on the 1992 roll of 237th Company. Bosch stared at Dowler’s statement as he considered what his next move should be.

That was when he noticed the printing along the bottom edge of the page. It was a fax tag. Gary Harrod had obviously typed up the statement and faxed it to Dowler for his approval and signature. It had then been faxed back. The fax identification along the bottom of the page gave the phone number and a company name: Cosgrove Agriculture, Manteca, California. Bosch guessed that it was Dowler’s employer.

“Cosgrove,” Bosch said.

The same name was on the John Deere dealership where the Alex White call had come from ten years ago.

“Yeah, I’ve got that,” Chu said from behind him.

Bosch turned around.

“Got what?”

“Cosgrove. Carl Cosgrove. He was in the unit. I got him
in some of the pictures here. He’s some sort of a bigwig up there.”

Bosch realized that they had stumbled onto a connection.

“Send me that link, will you?”

“Sure thing.”

Bosch turned to his computer and waited for the email to come through.

“This is the two thirty-seventh’s website you’re looking at?” he asked.

“Yeah. They got stuff on here going back to the riots and Desert Storm.”

“What about a list of personnel?”

“No list, but there are some names in these stories and with the pictures. Cosgrove’s one.”

The email came through. Bosch quickly opened it and clicked on the link.

Chu was right. The website looked amateurish, to say the least. At sixteen, his own daughter had created better-looking web pages for school assignments. This one had obviously been started years earlier, when websites were a new cultural phenomenon. No one had bothered to update it with contemporary graphics and design.

The main heading announced the site as the “Home of the Fighting 237th.” Below this were what seemed to be the company’s motto and logo, the words
Keep on Truckin
’ and a variation on comic artist Robert Crumb’s iconic truckin’ man striding forward, one large foot in front of his body. The 237th version had the man in an army uniform, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Beneath that were blocks of information about the current
company’s training outings and recreational activities. There were links for making contact with the site manager or for joining group discussions. There was also one marked “History,” and Bosch clicked on it.

The link brought him to a blog that required him to scroll down through twenty years of reports about the company’s accomplishments. Luckily, the callouts for the Guard had been few and far between and it didn’t take long to get to the early nineties. These reports had obviously been loaded onto the site when it was first constructed in 1996.

There was a short written piece on the call-up for the Los Angeles riots that held no information that Bosch didn’t already know. But it was accompanied by several photos of soldiers from the 237th on station at various positions around South L.A. and included several names that Bosch didn’t have. He copied every name into his notebook and then continued to scroll down.

When he got to the 237th’s exploits during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, his pulse quickened as he viewed several photos similar to those Anneke Jespersen had taken while shooting and writing about the war. The 237th had bivouacked at Dhahran and was in close proximity to the barracks that were bombed by the Iraqi SCUD strike. The transportation company had ferried soldiers, civilians, and prisoners up and down the main roadways between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And there were even photos of members of the 237th on R&R leave on a cruise ship anchored in the Persian Gulf.

There were more names here, and Bosch continued copying them into his notebook, thinking that the chances were good
that the 237th’s personnel did not change much between the Gulf War and the Los Angeles riots. Men listed in the war photos were most likely part of the unit sent to L.A. a year later.

He came to a set of photos that showed several members of the 237th on a ship called the
Saudi Princess
during R&R leave. There were shots of a volleyball team competing in a poolside tournament, but most of the pictures were of obviously drunk men holding up bottles of beer and posing for the camera.

Bosch stopped dead when he read the names under one of the photos. It was a shot of four men on the wood decking surrounding the ship’s swimming pool. They were shirtless, holding up bottles of beer and shooting peace signs at the camera. Their wet bathing suits were cutoff camouflage pants. They looked very drunk and very sunburned. The names listed were Carl Cosgrove, Frank Dowler, Chris Henderson, and Reggie Banks.

Bosch now had another connection. Reggie Banks was the salesman who sold Alex White his tractor mower ten years before. He wrote the new names down on his list and underlined Banks’s name three times.

Bosch expanded the photo on his screen and studied it again. Three of the men—all except Cosgrove—had matching tattoos on their right shoulders. Bosch could tell it was the Keep on Truckin’ man in camouflage—the unit’s logo. Bosch then noticed that behind them and to the right was an overturned trash can that had spilled bottles and cans across the deck. As Bosch stared at the photo, he realized he had seen it before. Same scene, different angle.

Harry quickly opened up a new window on his screen and
went to the Anneke Jespersen memorial site. He then opened the file containing her photos from Desert Storm. He quickly went through them until he got to the portfolio she had taken on the cruise ship. The third shot in the set of six was taken on the pool deck. It showed a ship’s houseman righting an upended trash can.