The Black Box (36 page)

Drummond went to a center column that helped support the hayloft and pushed against it to test its strength. It felt solid.

“Here,” he said. “Bring him over.”

Banks pushed Bosch forward and Drummond grabbed him by the arm again and turned him, so his back came to the column. He brought the gun up and pointed it at Bosch’s face.

“Hold still,” Drummond commanded. “Reggie, cuff him to the beam.”

Banks pulled the keys out of his pocket and unlocked one of Bosch’s cuffs, then locked his arms around the column. Bosch realized that this meant they were not going to kill him. Not yet, at least. They needed him alive for some reason.

Once Bosch was secured, Cosgrove got brave and came up close to him.

“You know what I should’ve done? I should’ve unloaded my sixteen on you back in that alley. It would have saved me all of this. But I guess I aimed too high.”

“Carl, enough,” Drummond said. “Why don’t you go back to the house and wait for Frank. We’ll take care of this and I’ll be right behind you.”

Cosgrove gave Bosch a long look that ended with an evil smile.

“Have a seat,” he said.

He then kicked Bosch’s left foot out from beneath him and shoved him down by the shoulder. Bosch slid down the column to the ground, landing hard on his tailbone.

“Carl! Come on, man, let us handle it.”

Cosgrove finally backed away at the same time Bosch realized what he had meant about aiming high. Cosgrove had been the soldier who had opened fire that night at the crime scene, the gunfire that sent everyone to the ground for cover. And now Bosch knew that he had not seen anyone on a roof. He had only wanted to set nerves on edge and cause a distraction from the investigation of the crime he had committed.

“I’ll be in the car,” Cosgrove said.

“No, we leave the car up here. I don’t want Frank to see it
when he’s coming in. It might make him nervous. His wife told him about Bosch driving by.”

“Whatever. I’ll walk back.”

Cosgrove left the barn, and Drummond stood in front of Bosch and looked down on him in the dim light. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the gun he had taken away from Bosch.

“Hey, Drummer,” Banks said nervously. “What did you mean about Frank not seeing the car? Why is Frank—”

“Reggie, I told you not to call me that.”

Drummond raised his arm and put the muzzle of Bosch’s gun to the side of Reggie Banks’s head. He was still looking down at Bosch when he pulled the trigger. The sound was deafening and Bosch was hit by the blowback of blood and brain matter a split second before Banks’s body dropped to the hay-strewn floor next to him.

Drummond looked down at the body. The heart’s last few contractions sent blood gushing from the bullet entrance point into the dirty straw. Drummond pocketed Bosch’s gun again and then reached down to the gun he had given Banks earlier. He picked it up.

“Back in the car, when you were alone with him, you told him to use it on me, didn’t you?”

Bosch didn’t answer and Drummond didn’t wait long before moving on.

“You’d think he would’ve checked to see if it was loaded.”

He popped out the magazine and wiggled it empty in front of Bosch.

“You were right, Detective,” he said. “You attacked the weak link and Reggie was the weakest link. Bravo on that.”

Bosch realized he had been wrong. This was the end. He brought his knees up and pressed his back against the beam. He braced himself.

He then dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. He conjured up an image of his daughter. It was from a memory of a good day. It was a Sunday and he had taken her to the empty parking lot of a nearby high school for a driving lesson. It had started rough with her foot heavy on the brake. But by the time they were finished, she was operating the car smoothly and with more skill than most drivers Bosch encountered on the real streets of L.A. He was proud of her, and more important, she was proud of herself. At the end of the lesson, when they had switched seats and Bosch was driving them home, she told him she wanted to be a cop, that she wanted to carry on his mission. It had come out of the blue, just something that had developed out of their closeness that day.

Bosch thought about that now and felt a calmness overtake him. It would be his last memory, what he took with him into the black box.

“Don’t go anywhere, Detective. I’m going to need you later.”

It was Drummond. Bosch opened his eyes and looked up. Drummond nodded and started heading back toward the door. Bosch saw him slide the gun he had given Banks under his jacket and into his back waistband. The ease with which he had put Banks down and the practiced motion of slipping the gun behind his back suddenly made things click into place for Bosch. You didn’t coldly dispatch someone like that unless you had done it before. And of the five conspirators, only one
had a job in 1992 in which a throw-down gun—one without a serial number—might be useful. To Drummond, his IRG gun wasn’t a souvenir of Desert Storm. It was a working gun. That was why he brought it to L.A.

“It was you,” Bosch said.

Drummond stopped and looked back at him.

“Did you say something?”

Bosch stared at him.

“I said I know it was you. Not Cosgrove. You killed her.”

Drummond stepped back toward Bosch. His eyes roamed the dark edges of the barn and then he shrugged. He knew he held all the cards. He was talking to a dead man and dead men tell no tales.

“Well,” he said. “She was becoming a nuisance.”

He smirked and seemed delighted to share confirmation of his crime with Bosch after twenty years. Bosch worked it.

“How did you get her into the alley?” he asked.

“That was the easy part. I went right up to her and told her I knew who and what she was looking for. I said I was on the boat and I heard about it. I said I would be her source but I was scared and couldn’t talk. I told her I’d meet her at oh-five-hundred in the alley. And she was dumb enough to be there.”

He nodded as if to say done deal.

“What about her cameras?”

“Same as the gun. I threw all that stuff over the fences back there. I took the film out first, of course.”

Bosch envisioned it. A camera landing in somebody’s backyard and being kept or pawned instead of turned in to police.

“Anything else, Detective?” asked Drummond, clearly relishing his chance to flaunt his cleverness to Bosch.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “If it was you who did it, how did you keep Cosgrove and the others in line for twenty years?”

“That was easy. Carl Junior would’ve been disowned if the old man had learned of his involvement in any of this. The others just followed along and got put down if they didn’t.”

With that he turned and headed toward the door. He pushed it open but then hesitated. He looked back at Bosch with a grim smile as he reached over and turned out the overhead light.

“Get some sleep, Detective.”

He then stepped out and closed the door behind him. Bosch heard the steel slide bar strike home as Drummond locked him in.

Bosch was left in a perfect darkness. But he was alive—for now.

33

B
osch had been left in darkness before. And many of those times he was scared and knew that death was near. He also knew that if he waited, somehow he would see, that there was lost light in all places of darkness, and if he found it, it would save him.

He knew he had to try to understand what had just happened and why. He shouldn’t be alive. All his theories ended with him in a box. With Drummond putting a bullet in his head in the same callous manner he had executed Reggie Banks. Drummond was the ultimate fixer, the cleaner, and Bosch was part of the mess. It made no sense that he was spared, even temporarily. Bosch had to figure that out if he was to survive.

The first step was to free himself. He put all of the case questions aside and concentrated on escape. He brought his ankles in underneath him and pushed up, slowly rising into a standing position so that he could better assess his surroundings and possibilities.

He started with the column. It was a 6 × 6 solid piece of timber. Hitting it with his back caused no shudder or shimmy. It
only caused him pain. The beam wasn’t going anywhere, so he had to work with it as a given.

He looked up into the darkness and could just make out the shapes and forms of tie beams overhead. He knew from before the light went out that there was no way for him to reach the top, no way for him to climb up to free himself.

He looked down but his feet were obscured in the dark. He knew the floor was straw on dirt and he kicked at the bottom of the beam with his heel. It felt solidly anchored but he could not tell how.

He knew he had a choice: wait for Drummond to come back or make an effort to escape. He remembered the image he had conjured up earlier of his daughter and decided he would not go easily. He would fight with his last strength. He used his feet to sweep the straw away and then started kicking at the dirt with his heel, slowly digging down beneath the surface.

Knowing it was a last desperate effort, he kicked with ferocity, as if he were kicking back at anyone and anything that had ever held him back. His heels were damaged by the effort and screaming in pain. His wrists were pulled tight into the cuffs to the point that he could feel numbness taking his fingers. But he didn’t care. He wanted to kick at everything that had ever stopped him in life.

His effort was futile. He finally dug down to what he believed was the concrete mooring the column had been set in. The connection was solid. It wasn’t going anywhere and neither was he. He finally stopped his efforts and leaned forward, head down. He was exhausted and feeling close to defeated.

He settled into the knowledge that his only shot, his only
chance, would be to make his move when Drummond came back. If Bosch could come up with a reason for Drummond to uncuff him, he would have a fighting chance. He could go for the gun or he could make a run for it. Either way, it would be his only shot.

But what did he have, what could he say to make Drummond give up his one strategic advantage? Bosch straightened up against the beam. He had to be alert. He had to be ready for all possibilities. He started reviewing what Banks had told him back in the motel room, looking for a piece of the story that Bosch could use. He needed something he could threaten Drummond with, something hidden and that only Bosch could lead him to.

He held fast to his conviction that he could not give up the email he had sent to Chu. He could not put his partner in potential danger, nor could he allow Drummond to erase the solution to the case. Banks’s confession was too important to barter with.

Bosch had no doubt that Drummond had already examined his phone, but it was password protected. The phone was set to lock after three failed attempts to enter the code. If Drummond kept trying after that he would eventually trigger a data purge. That gave Bosch high confidence in the recording safely getting to Chu without Drummond knowing. Harry decided that he must do nothing that would change that.

He needed something else now. He needed a play, a script, something that he could work with.

What?

His mind grew desperate. There had to be something. He started with the fact that Drummond had shot Banks because
he knew he had talked to Bosch. Working it from there, Bosch could say Banks showed him something, some kind of evidence that he kept hidden as his ace in the hole. Something with which he could turn the tables on Cosgrove and Drummond, if he ever had the chance.

What?

Bosch suddenly thought he had something. The gun again.
Follow the gun
. It had been the rule of the entire investigation. There was no reason to change it now. Banks had said he was the National Guard company’s inventory officer. He was the one who packed the souvenir guns in the bottom of the equipment cartons for shipping back to the States. He was the fox guarding the henhouse. Bosch would tell Drummond that the fox had made a list. Banks had kept a list of serial numbers to the weapons and it contained the names of who got which gun. That list included the name of the soldier who got the gun that killed Anneke Jespersen. That list was hidden, but with Banks dead, it would soon come to light. Only Bosch could lead Drummond to it.

Bosch grew excited with hope. He actually thought the play could work. It wasn’t completely there yet, but it could work. It needed embellishment. It needed a reason to create genuine concern in Drummond, a legitimate fear that the list would come out and expose him now that Banks was dead.

Bosch began to believe he had a chance. He just needed to wrap the basic story in more detail and believability. He just needed—

He stopped his thought processes. There was a light. He realized he’d had his eyes open the whole time he was working out the play with Drummond. But now he was drawn to a
small greenish-white glow he saw down near his feet. It was a blurred circle of dots no bigger than a half dollar. There was movement within the circle, too. A tiny speck of light like a distant star moved along the circumference of the circle, touching dot to dot to dot.

Bosch realized he was looking at Reggie Banks’s watch. And all in a moment he knew how he could escape.

A plan quickly formed in Bosch’s mind. He slid down the beam to the point where he was in a sitting position without a chair beneath him. Despite soreness in his thighs and hamstrings from the plod through the almond grove the night before, he used his right leg to brace his back against the column and hold his position, then reached out with his left foot. Using his heel, he attempted to hook the dead man’s wrist and pull it toward him. It took several tries before he was able to find purchase and move the arm. Once he had moved it as far as he could with his foot, he stood back up and rotated 180 degrees around the column. He slid all the way to the ground this time and reached back with his hand for Banks’s hand. He was barely able to reach it.

Holding the dead man’s hand in both of his, Bosch leaned forward as far as he could to drag the body even closer. Once he accomplished that, he reached for the wrist and unbuckled the watch. Holding it in his left hand, he flipped the buckle back so the prong extended free. He then twisted his wrist so he could work the small steel pin into the keyhole on the right handcuff.