The Black Box (33 page)

Inside the room, he hit the light switch, kicked the door closed behind him, and walked Banks to the chair at the table that positioned him facing the lights.

“You can’t do this,” he protested. “You have to book me and give me a lawyer.”

Bosch still said nothing. He moved behind Banks, uncuffed one of his wrists, and looped the cuff and chain through the two bars that supported the back of the chair. He then put the cuff back on Banks’s wrist, securing him to the chair.

“You are going to be so fucked,” Banks said. “I don’t care which county this is, you crossed a line, you fuck! Take the cuffs off!”

Bosch didn’t answer. He walked into the kitchenette and filled a plastic cup with water from the sink. He then went to the table and sat down. He drank some of the water and put the cup on the table.

“Are you fuckin’ listening to me? I know people. Powerful people in this Valley and you have so fucked yourself.”

Bosch stared at him without speaking. The seconds went by. Banks tensed his muscles and Bosch heard the cuffs rattling against the chair’s support bars. But the effort failed. Banks leaned forward in defeat.

“Are you going to say something or not?” he yelled.

Bosch took out his phone and put it down on the table. He took another drink of water and then cleared his throat. He finally spoke in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. He used a variation on the opener he’d used the week before with Rufus Coleman.

“This moment is the most important moment of your life. The choice you are about to make is the most important choice of your life.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. You know all about it. And if you want to save yourself, you will tell me everything. That is the choice, whether to save yourself or not.”

Banks shook his head like he was trying to clear a dream.

“Oh, man . . . this is so fuckin’ crazy. You’re not a cop, are you? That’s it. You’re some kind of nut goin’ around doing this. If you’re a cop, show me your badge. Let me see it, asshole.”

Bosch didn’t move, except to take another drink of water. He waited. Car lights from the parking lot raked across the front window and Banks started yelling.

“Hey! Help! I’m in—”

Bosch grabbed the cup and threw the rest of the water in Banks’s face to shut him up. He moved quickly into the bathroom and grabbed a towel. When he came out, Banks was
coughing and sputtering, and Bosch used the towel to gag him, and then tied it behind his head. Grabbing his hair and jerking his head at an angle, he said into Banks’s ear, “You yell again and I won’t be so gentle.”

Bosch walked to the window and split the blinds with a finger. He could only see the two cars that were already in the lot when they arrived. Whoever had just driven into the lot had apparently turned around and then driven out. He turned back to check on Banks, then took his jacket off and threw it on the bed, exposing the pistol holstered on his hip. He sat back down across from Banks.

“Okay, where were we? Right, the choice. You have a choice to make tonight, Reggie. The immediate choice is whether to speak to me or not. But that decision has great implications for you. It’s really a choice between spending the rest of your life in prison, or ameliorating your situation with your cooperation. You know what
ameliorate
means? It means ‘make better.’”

Banks shook his head, but not to say no. It was more of an I-can’t-believe-what-is-happening-to-me shake of the head.

“Now I’m going to take the gag off, and if you try to yell out again, then . . . well, then there are going to be consequences. But before I do that, I want you to concentrate on what I tell you here for the next few minutes because I want you to really understand the position you’re in. You understand?”

Banks dutifully nodded and even tried to voice his agreement through the gag, but it came out as an unintelligible sound.

“Good,” Bosch said. “Here’s the deal. You are part of a conspiracy that has lasted more than twenty years. It is a conspiracy
that started on a boat called the
Saudi Princess
and it has lasted until this very moment.”

Bosch watched Banks’s eyes grow large and fearful as he processed what was said. There was now a growing look of terror in them.

“You’re either going to prison for a very long time or you are going to cooperate and help us break open the conspiracy. If you cooperate, then you have a shot at some leniency, a chance to avoid spending the rest of your life in a prison. Can I take the gag away now?”

Banks nodded vigorously. Bosch reached across the table and roughly pulled the towel off his head.

“There,” he said.

Bosch and Banks stared at each other for a long moment. Then Banks spoke with unadulterated desperation in his voice.

“Please, mister, I don’t know what the hell you are talking about with conspiracies and shit. I sell tractors. You know that. You saw me, man. That’s what I do. If you want to ask me questions about a John—”

Bosch slammed his palm down hard on the table.

“Enough!”

Banks held quiet and Bosch got up. He went to the case file that was in his backpack and brought it back to the table. He had stacked the deck that morning, preparing the file so that it could be opened and photos and documents could be presented in a sequence of his choosing. Bosch opened it, and there was one of the photos of Anneke Jespersen on the ground in the alley. He slid it across the table so that it was right in front of Banks.

“There is the woman you five killed and then you covered it up.”

“You’re crazy. This is so—”

Bosch slid the next photo across—a shot of the murder weapon.

“And there’s the Iraqi Army pistol she was killed with. One of the weapons you told me earlier you smuggled back from the Gulf.”

Banks shrugged.

“So? What are they going to do to me? Take away my VFW card? Big fucking deal. Get these pictures out of my face.”

Bosch slid the next one across. Banks, Dowler, Cosgrove, and Henderson on the pool deck of the
Saudi Princess
.

“And there you four are together on the
Princess
, the night before you all got drunk and raped Anneke Jespersen.”

Banks shook his head, but Bosch could tell the last photo had hit its target. Banks was scared because even he knew that he was the weak link. Dowler might be right there with him, but Dowler wasn’t handcuffed to a chair. He was.

All the fear and worry boiled up inside and Banks made a colossal mistake.

“The statute of limitations on a rape is seven years and you’ve got nothing on me. I didn’t have a fucking thing to do with any of the other shit.”

It was a major concession on his part. All Bosch had was a conspiracy theory with no evidence to back it up. The play with Banks had only one purpose. To turn him against the others. To make him the evidence against them.

But Banks didn’t appear to understand what he had said, what he had given. Bosch rolled with it.

“Is that what Henderson said, that you all were in the clear on the rape? Is that why he made a move on Cosgrove, wanted money for his own restaurant?”

Banks didn’t answer. He seemed stunned by Bosch’s knowledge of things. Bosch had been reaching, but not without confidence in how all things between the men who had been on the boat were linked.

“Only that move sort of backfired on him, huh?”

Bosch nodded as if confirming his own statement. He saw some sort of realization come into Banks’s eyes. It was what he was waiting for.

“That’s right,” Bosch said. “We’ve got Dowler. And he doesn’t want to go away for the rest of his life. So he’s been cooperating.”

Banks shook his head.

“That’s impossible. I just talked to him. On the phone. Right after you left the post.”

That was the trouble with improvising. You never knew when your story would bump into irrefutable facts. Bosch tried to cover by smiling slyly and nodding.

“Of course you did. He was with us when you called him. He said exactly what we told him to say to you. And then he went back to telling us stories about you and Cosgrove and Drummond . . . Drummer, as you guys called him back then.”

Bosch saw belief enter Banks’s eyes. He knew someone had to have told Bosch about Drummer. He couldn’t just make it up.

Bosch made a show of looking at the file in front of him, as if to check whether he had forgotten something.

“I don’t know, Reg. When this all goes down with the grand
jury and you guys all get charged with murder, rape, and conspiracy, et cetera, et cetera, who do you think Cosgrove and Drummond will come up with for lawyers? Who will you be able to get? And when they decide to throw you under the bus and say it was you and Dowler and Henderson that formed the conspiracy, who do you think the jury is going to believe? Them or you?”

His arms pinned behind the chair, Banks tried to lean forward but could only move a few inches. So he just hung his head forward in bitter fear and disappointment.

“That statute of limitations is over,” he said. “I can’t be charged with the boat, and that’s all I did.”

Bosch shook his head slowly. The criminal mind always amazed him in its ability to distance itself from crimes and to rationalize them.

“You can’t even say it, can you? You call it ‘the boat.’ It was rape, you guys raped her. And you don’t know the law either. A criminal conspiracy surrounding the cover-up of the crime continues that crime. You can still be charged, Banks, and you’re going to be.”

Bosch was winging it, selling the play, even if he was making it up as he went.

He had to, because there was only one outcome that would work here. He had to turn Banks, make him talk and make him willing to give testimony and evidence against the others. All the threats about prosecution and prison were ultimately hollow. Bosch had the thinnest veil of circumstantial evidence tying Banks and the others to Anneke Jespersen’s murder. He had no witnesses and no physical evidence that linked them. He had the murder weapon but could not put it in any of his
suspects’ hands. Yes, he could put victim and suspects in close proximity in the Persian Gulf and then a year later in South L.A. But that did not prove murder. Bosch knew it wasn’t enough and that not even the greenest deputy district attorney in L.A. would touch it. Bosch had only one shot here and that was turning an insider out. By a trick or a play or by any means necessary, he had to get Banks to break down and give up the story.

Now Banks shook his head, but it was as if he was trying to ward off some thought or image. As though he thought if he kept his head moving, the reality of what he was facing couldn’t get in.

“No, no, man, you can’t—you gotta help me,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything but you have to help me. You have to promise.”

“I can’t promise you anything, Reggie. But I can go to bat for you with the District Attorney’s Office, and I do know this: prosecutors always take care of their key witnesses. If you want that, then you have to open up and tell me everything. Everything. And you can’t tell me any lies. One lie and it all goes away. And you go away for the rest of your life.”

He let him sit with that for a long moment before continuing. Bosch would make the case against the others here, or the chance would be gone and he would never make it.

“So, you ready to talk to me?” he finally asked.

Banks nodded hesitantly.

“Yes,” Banks said. “I’ll talk.”

31

B
osch plugged the password into his phone and turned on the recording app. He then began the interview. He identified himself and the case the interview was concerning and then identified Reginald Banks, including his age and address. He read Banks his rights from a card he kept in his badge wallet, and Banks said he understood his rights and was willing to cooperate, clearly stating that he did not want to confer with a lawyer first.

From there Banks told a twenty-year story in ninety minutes, beginning with the
Saudi Princess
. He never used the word
rape
, but he acknowledged that four of them—Banks, Dowler, Henderson, and Cosgrove—had sex with Anneke Jespersen in a stateroom on the ship while she was incapacitated by alcohol and a drug Cosgrove had slipped into her drink. Banks said Cosgrove called the drug “romp and stomp,” but Banks didn’t know why. He said it was something given to cattle to calm them down before they were trans-ported.

Bosch guessed he was talking about a veterinary sedative called Rompun. It had come up in other cases he had worked.

Banks continued, saying that Jespersen had been specifically targeted by Cosgrove, who told the others she was probably a natural blond and that he had never been with a woman like that before.

When Bosch asked if J.J. Drummond was in the stateroom during the attack, Banks emphatically said no. He said afterward that Drummond knew what happened but that he was not part of it. He said the five men were not the only men from 237th Company on leave on the ship at that time but that no one else was involved.

Banks cried as he told the story, often saying how sorry he was to have been a part of what happened in the stateroom.

“It was the war, man. It just did something to you.”

Bosch had heard that excuse before—the idea that the life-and-death pressures and fears of war should give someone a free pass on despicable and criminal actions they would never commit or even contemplate back home. It was used to excuse everything from killing villages full of people to gang-raping an incapacitated woman. Bosch didn’t buy it and thought Anneke Jespersen had had it right. These were war crimes and they weren’t excusable. He believed that war brought out the true character in a person, good or bad. He had no sympathy for Banks or the others.

“Is that why Cosgrove brought the romp and stomp overseas with him? In case the war did something to him? How many other women did he use it on over there? And what about before? What about in high school? You all went to school together, I bet. Something tells me you guys didn’t just try it out for the first time on that boat.”