The Black Box (29 page)

As soon as he got back on the northbound 99 he passed the sign announcing his welcome to San Joaquin County. The next
three exits were for the town of Ripon, and Bosch saw a sign for a motel poking above the thick pink-and-white-flowered bushes that lined the freeway. He took the next exit and worked his way back to the Blu-Lite Motel and Liquor Market. It was an old ranch-style motel right out of the 1950s. Bosch wanted a place that was private, where people would not be around to see his comings and goings. Bosch thought it would be perfect because he saw only one car parked in front of its many rooms.

He paid for the room at the counter in the liquor store. He went big, paying the top-of-the-line $49 rate for a room with a kitchenette.

“You don’t have Wi-Fi here by any chance, do you?” he asked the clerk.

“Not officially,” the clerk said. “But if you give me five bucks, I’ll give you the password on the Wi-Fi from the house behind the motel. You’ll pick up the signal in your efficiency.”

“Who gets the five bucks?”

“I split it with the guy who lives back there.”

Bosch thought about it for a moment.

“It’s private and secure,” the clerk offered.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll take it.”

He drove over to room 7 and parked in front of the door. Bringing his overnight bag inside, he put it on the bed and looked around. There was a small table in the kitchenette with two chairs. The room would work.

Before leaving, Bosch changed his shirt, hanging the blue button-down in the closet in case he stayed through Wednesday and needed to wear it again. He opened his bag and selected a black pullover shirt. He got dressed, then locked the
place up and went back to his car. “Over the Rainbow” was playing again as he pulled back out on the road.

Bosch’s next stop was Manteca, and long before he got there, he could see the water tower that said “Cosgrove Ag” on it. The Cosgrove business enterprise was located on a frontage road running parallel to the freeway. It consisted of an office structure as well as a vast produce storage and trucking facility where dozens of carriers and tank trucks were lined up and ready for transport. Flanking the complex were what seemed to Bosch to be miles and miles of grapevines covering the landscape until it rolled upward toward the ash-colored mountains to the west. Out on the horizon the natural landscape was broken only by the steel giants that were coming down the slopes like invaders from another world. The towering wind turbines that Carl Cosgrove had brought to the Valley.

After being duly impressed by the expanse of the Cosgrove empire, Bosch went slumming. Following the maps he had printed Saturday, he went to the addresses the DMV held for Francis John Dowler and Reginald Banks. Neither place impressed Bosch beyond the fact that they appeared to be on Cosgrove land.

Banks lived in a small free-standing home that backed up to the almond groves off Brunswick Road. Checking his map and noting the lack of dedicated roads between Brunswick to the north and Hammett to the south, Bosch believed that it might be possible to enter the grove on foot behind Banks’s home and come out on Hammett—many hours later.

Banks’s home needed a paint job and its windows needed cleaning. If he was living there with his family, there were no indications of it. The yard was strewn with beer bottles, all
within easy throwing distance of a porch with an old seam-split couch on it. Banks had not cleaned up after his weekend.

The last stop before dinner was Dowler’s double-wide mobile home with the TV dish mounted on the roof’s crest line. It was located in a trailer park off the frontage road, and each home had a parking pad equal in length to the home itself for parking the long hauler. The park was where Cosgrove drivers lived.

While Bosch sat in his rental car looking at the Dowler residence, a door opened on the side under the carport and a woman stepped out and looked suspiciously at him. Bosch waved like he was an old friend, disarming her a bit. She stepped down the driveway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was what Bosch’s old partner Jerry Edgar would have called a 50/50—fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight.

“You looking for somebody?” she asked.

“Well, I was hoping to find Frank at home. But I see his truck is gone.”

Bosch waved toward the empty parking pad.

“He coming back anytime soon?”

“He had to take a load of juice up to American Canyon. He might have to wait up there until they have something for him to bring back down. He should be back tomorrow night prob’ly. Who are you?”

“Just a friend passing through. I knew him twenty years ago in the Gulf. Will you tell him John Bagnall said hello?”

“I’ll do that.”

Bosch couldn’t remember if Dowler’s wife’s name was in the material Chu had put together. If he’d had the name, he would have used it as he said good-bye. She turned and
headed back to the door she had left open. Bosch noticed a motorcycle with a gas tank painted like a bluebottle fly parked under one of the double-wide’s awnings. He guessed that when Dowler wasn’t running grape juice in a big rig, he liked gliding on a Harley.

Bosch drove out of the park, hoping he had not caused enough suspicion to warrant anything more than curiosity on the woman’s part. And he hoped Dowler wasn’t the sort of husband who called home every night when he was on the road.

Bosch’s second-to-last stop on his tour of the Central Valley took him to Stockton, where he pulled into the lot of the Steers, the steakhouse where Christopher Henderson met his end in the walk-in cooler.

But Bosch had to admit to himself that he was doing more than observing the place as a part of the case. He was famished and had been thinking about eating a good steak all day long. It would be hard to beat the steak he had gotten at Craig’s on Saturday night, but he was hungry enough to try.

Never one to be self-conscious about eating in a restaurant alone, he told the young woman at the greeting station that he’d prefer a table over a seat at the bar. He was led to a two-top next to the glass-paneled wine cooler, and he chose the seat that gave him a full view of the restaurant. It was his habit to do this for safety, but he also always tried to prepare to be lucky. Maybe the man himself, Carl Cosgrove, might enter his own restaurant to eat.

For the next two hours Bosch saw no one he recognized enter the establishment, but all was not for naught. He had a New York strip with mashed potatoes, and all of it was delicious.
He also sipped a glass of Cosgrove merlot that went nicely with the beef.

The only rub came when Bosch’s phone sounded loudly in the dining room. He had set the ringer to the loudest position so he would be sure to hear it while driving. He had forgotten to lower it to the usual nonintrusive buzz. His fellow diners frowned at him. One woman went so far as to shake her head in disgust, apparently pegging him as an arrogant bigcity jerk.

Arrogant or not, Bosch took the call because he saw on the ID that it was a 404 area code—Atlanta. As expected, the caller was one of the Charlotte Jacksons he had left a message for. It took him only a few questions to determine that she was the wrong Charlotte Jackson. He thanked her and hung up. He smiled and nodded at the lady who had shaken her head at his rudeness.

He opened the file he had brought into the restaurant and crossed out Charlotte Jackson number four. He was now down to two possibilities—numbers three and seven—and one of them he did not even have a number for.

By the time Harry returned to the parking lot, it was dark out and he was tired from the long day on the road. He thought about sitting in his car and taking a nap for an hour but then dismissed the idea. He had to keep moving.

Standing by the car’s trunk, he looked up into the sky. It was a cloudless and moonless night, but the stars were out in force over the Central Valley. Bosch didn’t like that. He needed it darker. He popped the trunk.

27

B
osch turned the car’s lights off as he cruised past the gated entrance to the Cosgrove estate. There was not another car on Hammett Road. He went another two hundred yards to where the road curved slightly right and then pulled off onto the dirt shoulder.

He had already turned off the interior convenience light, so the car remained dark when he opened the door. He stepped out into the cool air and looked and listened. The night was silent. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded square of paper. He clipped it under the wind-shield. Earlier he had written a note on it. It said:

OUT OF GAS—WILL RETURN SOON

Bosch was wearing the mud boots he had retrieved from one of the boxes in the trunk. He carried a small Mag-Lite that he hoped not to have to use. He stepped down the three-foot embankment and gingerly moved into the water, sending a shimmering ripple across the floor of the almond grove.

Bosch’s plan was to proceed at an angle and make his way back to the entrance road. He would then move parallel to it until he got to the Cosgrove home. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or looking for. He was following his instincts, and they told him Cosgrove, with his money and power, was at the center of things. He felt the need to move in closer to him, to see where and how he lived.

The water was only a few inches deep but the mud sucked at Bosch’s boots and made his progress slow. Several times the wet earth refused to let go of its grip and he almost pulled his foot right out of its boot.

The water floor reflected the starscape above and made Bosch feel as though he was completely exposed in his trespass. Every twenty yards or so he would move in under a tree for cover and so that he could rest for a moment and listen. The grove was deathly quiet, with not even the occasional buzz of insects in the air. The only sound was in the distance, and Bosch didn’t know what was making it. It was a steady
whooshing
and he thought it might be some sort of irrigation pump keeping water in the grove.

After a while the grove began to feel like a maze to him. The fully mature trees stood thirty feet high and appeared to be exact duplicates of one another. The trees had been planted along astonishingly straight lines. This made every direction in which Bosch looked appear to be the same. He began to fear that he would become lost and wished he had brought something with him to mark the trail.

Finally, after a half hour, he made it to the entrance road. He already felt exhausted, as though his boots were made of concrete. But he decided not to abandon the mission. He proceeded
along a parallel, moving from tree to tree in the first row next to the road.

Almost an hour later, Bosch saw the lights of the mansion up ahead through the branches of the last few rows of trees. He plodded on, noting that the whooshing sound was growing louder as he got nearer and nearer to the lights.

When he got to the end of the grove, he crouched on the side of the embankment and studied what lay before him. The mansion was an exotic take on a French château. It was only two stories high but had steeply pitched roof angles and turreted corners. Something about it reminded Bosch of a smaller version of the Château Marmont back in L.A.

The house was lit from the outside by floodlights angled up from the ground. There was a large turnaround at the front and a tributary drive that wrapped around behind the main structure. Bosch assumed the garage was in the back. There were no vehicles anywhere in sight, and Bosch realized that all of the lights that he had seen through the grove were exterior. The house itself was dark. It looked like nobody was home.

Bosch stood up and climbed the embankment. He started toward the house and soon found himself on a raised concrete pad. The H design painted in the center indicated that it was a helicopter pad. He continued on, moving directly toward the house, when a deviation in his peripheral vision distracted him. He looked to his left toward a slight rise in the landscape.

At first he didn’t see anything. The house was so brightly lit that the stars above were barely visible and the area around the mansion seemed pitch-black. But then he saw the movement again, high up over the hill. He suddenly realized that
he was seeing the dark blades of a wind turbine cutting through the air, momentarily blocking the dim light of the stars and rearranging the sky.

The whooshing sound he had been listening to as he moved through the grove was coming from the wind turbine. Cosgrove so believed in the power of the wind that he had built one of his iron giants in his own backyard. Bosch guessed that the lights that bathed the exterior of the château were powered by the winds that tirelessly moved across the Valley.

Bosch refocused his attention on the lighted mansion, and almost immediately he was struck with a feeling of hesitation, a second-guessing of his actions. The man who lived inside the walls in front of him was smart enough and powerful enough to harness the wind. He lived behind a wall of money and a phalanx—no, make that an army—of trees. He did not need to run a fence along the edges of his vast property, because he knew the grove would intimidate any intruder who dared to cross it. He lived in a castle with a surrounding moat, and who was Bosch to think he could take him down? Bosch didn’t even know the exact nature of the crime. Anneke Jespersen was dead and Bosch was chasing a hunch. He had no evidence of anything. He had a twenty-year-old coincidence and nothing else.

Suddenly, a wave of mechanical sound and wind broke over him as a helicopter came in over the grove and hovered above. Bosch broke and ran back toward the grove, sliding down the embankment into the mud and water. He looked back and watched the helicopter—a black silhouette against the dark sky—maneuver into position over the landing pad. A spotlight on the craft’s underside came on and lit the targeted H on
the pad. Bosch ducked down lower and watched as the craft seemed to struggle against the wind to hold the line of its landing rails. As the helicopter slowly came down and gently met the pad, the light cut off and the high-pitched turbine was shut down.

The rotors free spun for a while and then came to a halt. The pilot’s-side door opened and a figure climbed out. Bosch was at least a hundred feet away and could only see the shape of the person, whom he identified as a male. The pilot moved to the back door and opened it. Bosch expected another person to alight from the rear cabin, but it was a dog that leaped out. The pilot reached in for a backpack, closed the door, and started toward the house.