Mulholland Dive: Three Stories
Date: 2012-09-04 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Mystery; Short Stories; Crime; Thriller; Mystery Thriller; Detective; Suspense; Action
Description: Three never-before-collected short stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly In "Cahoots," a backroom poker game turns deadly when a cheater is exposed. In "Mulholland Dive," a man who deciphers the hidden codes of accident scenes investigates a fatality off L.A.'s most fabled roadway. In "Two-Bagger," an obsessed cop tails an ex-con he believes is about to carry out a contract killing. Together these gripping, unforgettable stories show that Michael Connelly "knows the workings of the LAPD and the streets of the City of Angels like he knows his own name" ( Boston Glob

Mulholland Dive

Three Stories

Michael Connelly

Little, Brown and Company

New York  Boston  London

Begin Reading

“Cahoots”

“Mulholland Dive”

“Two-Bagger”

A Preview of The Black Box

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

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Cahoots

McMillan has the deal. The game is five-card stud, nothing wild. And McMillan, the bastard in the porkpie hat, is cheating us. There are six of us at the table. There’s him, then Swain, then Harrington, then Anderson, then me, and then, most of the time, Boyd. I don’t know if that’s a first or last name. He’s just Boyd. And at the moment he’s in the back room with the woman who makes the coffee and serves the whiskey. The bedroom. Her name is Vera Sims. Only McMillan keeps calling her Vera Similitude and he laughs uproariously when he says it. I don’t know what this name means but his high horse laugh is getting to me. That and the cheating.

This is a journal. I write it in what my partner who read it up to now calls present tense. Like it is happening right now. But everything I write down here has already happened. It’s too late. It’s the past written in the present tense. You know what I mean? I’m saying you can’t change it. It’s done.

You play long enough and you pick up the patterns and then you look for the tells. I am a man of principle. My principle is, if you cheat me, you are taking something from me. You are stealing. Maybe not my money but the chance for me to make my money. Yes, and if I let you take from me what is mine, then I am a fool. I am letting you think of me and treat me as a fool.

I don’t allow that. My principle is, if you take from me, then I will take right back from you. Only I will take more from you than you took from me. One time I took a man’s finger off when I caught him turning his ring inside to use as a shiner. One time I took a man’s woman. It’s a rule I have. I never break it. Even if it is the man with the plan.

We have been playing for four hours. McMillan has been slowly telling us his plan for what he calls the greatest heist of all time, all at the same time that he’s cheating us and taking our money. Maybe the others know this and they look at it as the price they pay for the plan, to be a part of it. This is not how I look at it. In four hours I have lost a lot. Almost enough to pay rent in one of these Bunker Hill boardinghouses for a month. I need that money back. I need to take from McMillan and his partner what they have taken from me.

McMillan has this habit I’ve been watching. He has his silver halves in a neat stack on the table in front of him. He keeps raising the stack with two fingers and then letting all the coins drop back down to the table. Ching, ching, ching, like that. I’m watching and counting the sounds and counting his coins. Every time he deals, there is one less coin in the stack.

“Hey, Boyd!” McMillan yells to the back room. “You in or out?”

“I’m in,” says the voice from the back room.

Boyd comes out quick, notching his belt just so we can see if we care to look.

“Deal it,” he says.

McMillan smiles.

“Gettin’ yourself a little Vera Similitude, eh?”

And then that laugh again. That lazy horse laugh that’s getting to me. Boyd puts a silver dollar into the center of the table with the others and says he is in. I’m starting to see McMillan with a hole the size of a silver dollar in his forehead.

McMillan starts to deal and I watch his hands while I light a Camel. I lean my head back and blow the blue smoke toward the yellowed ceiling. I see the butterfly moving on the ceiling, winking at me. Nobody else has seen it. Everybody else thinks that to catch a cheater you have to keep your eyes on the cards.

Everybody picks up their cards and my hand’s a stiff. I throw in right away but everybody else stays for the ride. I ask McMillan about his grand plan. Just to keep him thinking, to see how he handles two things at once.

“How are you going to know where they’ll be and when we can go in?” I ask.

“I have a guy,” he says. “You don’t have to worry about that part. I have a guy. The medals will be in a safe. A small safe that they can move around. At a certain point they will take the safe over to the Coliseum for the track-and-field events. It will be there. That’s when we’ll go.”

He eyes me over his cards to see if I’m satisfied. The first round of betting goes by and Swain and Boyd bet large. Swain takes no cards, which raises eyebrows. Harrington takes three, then Anderson does likewise. Boyd takes only one and McMillan goes with three.

I want to ask more questions about the plan but decide to watch and confirm my suspicions. The betting begins and Swain goes big again. He’s got the gleam in his eye, like a man who knows he can’t lose. Except I know he’s already lost. Harrington folds. Anderson folds. Boyd raises big. McMillan drops another raise on that and it’s back to Swain.

I send him a mental message. Call. Just call the hand and accept your losses. But mental messages don’t work. He goes big again and it goes around the maximum three circles and in the end Swain has pushed just about everything he’s got into the pot.

Finally, it’s showtime. Swain has a natural flush, nine of hearts on top. Boyd squeals like a pig in mud. He turns his cards and shows a flush with the queen of spades smiling up at Swain.

“Forget it, I lose,” McMillan says, throwing his hand into the discard pile without turning his cards over.

Boyd smiles and rakes the pot toward his chest. Swain watches the money go away like it’s his wife and kids leaving for good. The moment is tense, nobody likes losing, even if they might think it was on the up and up.

“What about guards?” Harrington asks.

McMillan quickly answers. He’s probably hoping to distract Swain from thoughts of the lost money and whether maybe he’s been cheated.

“Of course, there will be guards,” he says. “Why do you think you are all here? If I just needed a box man, I’d go myself. But I’m gonna need muscles and guns with me.”

Harrington nods.

“There will be full-time armed security on the box,” McMillan says. “Two men around the clock.”

“Are you sure these medals they give out are real gold and real silver?” Anderson asks. “I mean, all the way through?”

“What, you think it’s like a Baby Ruth bar?” McMillan counters. “Chocolate on the outside, bullshit on the inside? This is the Olympics, fellas. We are talking about medals made of pure gold and pure silver. Through and through, three ounces apiece. Like big fucking lollipops.”

“How do we sell them?” I ask, my eyes deadpan at McMillan. “They’re going to be hot, they probably say Nineteen Thirty-two Olympics or something right on them. We can’t just—”

“We don’t sell them,” McMillan says with proper outrage. “Boyd, you tell him.”

Boyd turns to me and smiles.

“He’s right. We don’t sell them. We melt them down and we make little bricks. That’s what we sell.”

I see the others nod their approval but I’m not so sure about this plan. I’m not even sure there is a plan.

I win the next deal with jacks trips but the pot is barely more than the ante. Only Swain and Anderson stay in and I only get in two raises before being called. I need someone like McMillan to help it along like he did with Boyd but I’m not the one he’s in cahoots with.

Swain recoups on the next deal and then Anderson wins his own deal. That might have raised eyebrows but the pot was threadbare. Nothing to get excited by. And nobody looked sideways at Anderson.

I’m halfway through my deal when Boyd yells to Vera to bring him a shot of whiskey. I knew he would do this. Whiskey or coffee. I knew he’d ask for something.

Wearing a bathrobe that needs a quick visit to the washer, Vera comes out of the back room and goes into the kitchen for the bottle. She brings it over to the table and grabs Boyd’s empty shot glass. She holds it out away from the table and fills it until the dark amber liquid laps over the side of the glass and drips to the floor.

“Jesus, what are you doing?” Boyd yells. “You’re wasting good whiskey, you stupid cunt.”

“Sorry.”

But I see through this. It is part of the cheat. He is not angry and she is not sorry. I think it is clever that he called her a cunt. It helps sell it.

Boyd puts the shot glass down in front of his money. He glances at me while picking up his cards, then he looks at what he’s been dealt. McMillan holds his cards with one hand while he’s playing with his stack of halves. Ching, ching, ching.

Swain wins again on my deal. Two pairs, kings over tens. But it’s another small pot and he’s still way down, the wife and kids haven’t come back home yet.

Now it’s Boyd’s deal. He shuffles and shuffles again, making a show of it. He puts the deck down in front of me and I cut it from the middle. He starts to deal, holding his hands chest high so he can deal over his money and his booze. I have a pair of tens. Not bad so I stay in through the first round and draw three. No help. I bail out and just watch. Anderson is out, everybody else is still in.

McMillan opens the second round big and Swain and Harrington call. But Boyd raises and McMillan raises again. Swain calls and Harrington folds rather than meet the price. It goes around the final time. Boyd, McMillan, and Swain. Then it is time to show.

Ching, ching, ching.

Swain has aces over deuces, a solid hand. Boyd shoves his cards into the pile, acknowledging defeat. McMillan puts his best look of I-can’t-believe-it surprise on his face and turns over three fives. Swain throws his cards down on the table. He’s had a bad go of it.

“I just can’t win this fucking game.”

I look at him. That is our signal. Now is the time to make the play.

“Of course, you can’t,” I say. “Not with them cheating you all the time.”

“Cheating? Who, goddamnit?”

I turn and nod toward McMillan and Boyd.

Everything happens real quick after that. Neither one bothers with the Who, me? look. They both start to rise at the same time that their hands drop below the table. But I’m ahead of their game and so is Swain.

I take McMillan, and Swain has Boyd. Swain gets off two shots from his revolver before Boyd has his gun out of his pants. I hit McMillan with one shot neat in the forehead and he goes over his chair and right down the wall.

Harrington and Anderson jump up at the same time Vera screams from the kitchen. Gunpowder burns in the air.

I come around the table to check the dead. Boyd is on the floor gurgling, hit twice in the neck. He’s got a few minutes tops. I pull the gun from his pants and put it on the table. I go to McMillan. Somehow he has fallen so that his hat is pushed down over his face, I squat down and lift the hat. His eyes are open and dead calm. The bullet hole is so clean that it doesn’t even bleed. I like that. I check his hands, both are empty. I check his pockets and find his money roll and a little derringer with pearl-inlay grips. It’s a two-shot pussy gun. I shove it back in his pocket. I look at the hat now and notice that it is a nice hat. Silk lining. Expensive. Made in Chicago. I put it on and stand up.

Harrington and Anderson stand with their arms away from their bodies, their hands open.

“Easy now,” I say.

I nod to Swain so that he knows to watch them. I turn my attention to McMillan’s place at the table. I talk as I lean down and spill the stack of half dollars.

“They were cheating. In cahoots. Didn’t you notice that when McMillan dealt, Boyd usually won? Same thing worked in reverse. Boyd deals, McMillan wins.”

I look over at Harrington and Anderson but they shake their heads. They don’t get it.

“How?” Harrington asks.

I turn over the bottom half-dollar from the stack. It’s been sanded and polished as smooth as a spoon. Like a mirror. I hold it in my palm and move it. I look up at the ceiling and see the butterfly again. The glimmer reflection flits across the yellowed plaster.

“He was using a shiner,” I say as I take a card off the table and hold it so I can see the reflection of the 9 on the polished surface of the half. “He knew every card he was dealing. He also knew what was on the bottom of the deck, if he needed it.”

I drop the coin and the card on the table like they’re poison.

“He and Boyd had signals. I think it was McMillan clicking his silver.”

“What about him?” Harrington asks, nodding down at Boyd on the floor.

“The ashtray. He’d put his smoke on different edges.”

“How did he know what he was dealing us?”

I look at Swain and then into the kitchen at Vera.

“You tell him, Vera.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about it.”

“That’s bull. What did he tell you about the bourbon?”

She hesitates but knows she has one hope. To come clean.

“He told me to fill it to the top. Whenever he asked for a shot I was to fill it to the brim and he didn’t care if it poured over the edge.”

I look at them and they look at the table. Anderson comes over, picks up a card, and holds it over the shot glass. Ace of diamonds. Reads it in the dark amber reflection.

“Son of a bitch!” Anderson yells.

He picks up the shot, takes a hit off it, and then pours the rest down on Boyd’s open-eyed face. He then turns to Vera.

“Leave her alone,” Swain says quietly. “She was only doing what she was told.”

I start collecting the money from the table. I tell Anderson and Harrington to take what they had at their places on the table. They want to negotiate for the money they already lost to the cheaters but Swain uses his gun to point them toward the front door. They take the money they are entitled to and leave. At the door Harrington looks back at us.

“What about the plan? The Olympic medals.”

“There was no plan,” I tell him. “He was just keeping you busy, hoping you were thinking about gold and silver and not the cards.”

Harrington nods—he finally gets it—and leaves. Swain closes the door behind him.

I open McMillan’s roll on the table. It’s two hundred and forty dollars. More than I thought he would be carrying. Swain and I split that and then we cut up the ninety-three dollars in cash from the table. Swain keeps the odd dollar because I took the hat. We give Vera all the silver—almost fifty bucks—and she gets to keep McMillan’s shiner. She puts it all in a flour sack that she then hides in a cabinet. If she’s lucky, the cops won’t find it when they come about the bodies.

On our way out the back door, Vera says, “You think those other two will ever figure out that you two kept winning on each other’s deals?”

Swain and I stop and look at her.

“You think they’ll figure out that you gave McMillan the shiner and taught his partner the whiskey trick? You think they’ll figure out that you then told us all about it?”

She has no answers. We go through the door and walk over to Angels Flight and ride it down to Hill Street. We cut through the Grand Central Market. We have a car waiting in the Bradbury Building’s lot. We get in and I drive.

“Where do you want to go?”

“Las Vegas.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“Nevada.”

“There’s nothing there but sand.”

“I know. Good place to lay low. Nobody goes to Las Vegas. They’ve got one sheriff, that’s it. Nobody will even look for us there.”

I start driving east. After a while I remember my ring and turn it so the shiny flat part is facing outward again and not in my palm.

“Hey,” Swain says. “What does Vera Similitude mean anyway?”

I tell him I don’t know.

Mulholland Dive

Burning flares and flashing red and blue lights ripped the night apart. Clewiston counted four black-and-whites pulled halfway off the roadway and as close to the upper embankment as was possible. In front of them was a fire truck and in front of it was a forensics van. There was a P-1 standing in the middle of Mulholland Drive ready to hold up traffic or wave it into the one lane that was open. With a fatality involved they should have closed down both lanes of the road, but that would have meant closing Mulholland from Laurel Canyon on one side all the way to Coldwater Canyon on the other. That was too long a stretch. There would be consequences for that. The huge inconvenience of it would have brought complaints from the rich hillside homeowners trying to get home after another night of the good life. And nobody stuck on midnight shift wanted more complaints to deal with.

Clewiston had worked Mulholland fatals several times. He was the expert. He was the one they called in from home. He knew that whether the identity of the victim in this case demanded it or not, he’d have gotten the call. It was Mulholland and the Mulholland calls all went to him.

But this one was special anyway. The victim was a name and the case was going five by five. That meant everything about it had to be squared away and done right. He had been thoroughly briefed over the phone by the watch commander about that.

He pulled in behind the last patrol car, put his flashers on, and got out of his unmarked car. On the way to the trunk he pulled his badge from beneath his shirt and hung it out front. He was in civies, having been called in from off-duty, and it was prudent to make sure he announced that he was a detective.

He used his key to open the trunk and began to gather the equipment he would need. The P-1 left his post in the road and walked over.

“Where’s the sergeant?” Clewiston asked.

“Up there. I think they’re about to pull the car up. That’s a hundred thousand dollars he went over the side with. Who are you?”

“Detective Clewiston. The reconstructionist. Sergeant Fairbanks is expecting me.”

“Go on down and you’ll find him by the—whoa, what is that?”

Clewiston saw him staring at the face looking up from the trunk. The crash test dummy was partially hidden by all the equipment cluttering the trunk, but the face was clear and staring blankly up at them. His legs had been detached and were beneath the torso. It was the only way to fit the whole thing in the trunk.

“We call him Arty,” Clewiston said. “He was made by a company called Accident Reconstruction Technologies.”

“Looks sort of real at first,” the patrol officer said. “Why’s he in fatigues?”

Clewiston had to think about that to remember.

“Last time I used Arty it was a crosswalk hit-and-run case. The vic was a marine up from El Toro. He was in his fatigues and there was a question about whether the hitter saw him.”

Clewiston slung the strap of his laptop bag over his shoulder.

“He did. Thanks to Arty we made a case.”

He took his clipboard out of the trunk and then a digital camera, his trusty measuring wheel, and an eight-battery Maglite. He closed the trunk and made sure it was locked.

“I’m going to head down and get this over with,” he said. “I got called in from home.”

“Yeah, I guess the faster you’re done, the faster I can get back out on the road myself. Pretty boring just standing here.”

“I know what you mean.”

Clewiston headed down the westbound lane, which had been closed to traffic. In the dark, there was a mist clinging to the tall brush that crowded the sides of the street. But he could still see the lights and glow of the city down to the south. The accident had occurred in one of the few spots along Mulholland where there were no homes. He knew that on the south side of the road, the embankment dropped down to a public dog park. On the north side was Fryman Canyon, and the embankment rose up to a point where one of the city’s communication stations was located. There was a tower up there on the point that helped bounce communication signals over the mountains that cut the city in half.

Mulholland was the backbone of Los Angeles. It rode like a snake along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from one end of the city to the other. Clewiston knew of places where you could stand on the white stripe and look north across the vast San Fernando Valley and then turn around and look south and see across the Westside and as far as the Pacific and Catalina Island. It all depended on whether the smog was cooperating or not. And if you knew the right spots to stop and look.

Mulholland had that Top of the World feel to it. It could make you feel like a prince of the city and that the laws of nature and physics didn’t apply. The foot came down heavy on the accelerator. That was the contradiction. Mulholland was built for speed but it couldn’t handle it. Speed was a killer.

As he came around the bend Clewiston saw another fire truck and a tow truck from the Van Nuys police garage. The tow truck was positioned sideways across the road. For the moment Mulholland was completely closed. The truck’s cable was down the embankment and stretched taut as it pulled the car up. Clewiston could hear the tow motor straining and the cracking and scraping as the unseen car was being pulled up through the brush. The tow truck shuddered as it labored.

Clewiston saw the man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform and stood next to him as he watched.

“Is he still in it?” he asked Fairbanks.

“No, he was transported to St. Joe’s. But he was DOA. You’re Clewiston, right? The reconstructionist.”

“Right.”

“We’ve got to handle this thing right. Once the ID gets out, we’ll have the media all over this.”

“The captain told me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m telling you, too. In this department the captains don’t get blamed when things go sideways and off the road. It’s always the sergeants and it ain’t going to be me this time.”

“I get it.”

“You have any idea what this guy was worth? We’re talking tens of millions and on top of that he’s supposedly in the middle of a divorce. So we go five by five by five on this thing. Comprende, reconstructionist?”

“It’s Clewiston and I said I get it.”

“Good. This is what we’ve got. Single-car fatality. No witnesses. It appears the victim was heading west when his vehicle, a two-month-old Porsche Carrera, came around that last curve there and for whatever reason didn’t straighten out. We’ve got treads on the road you can take a look at. Anyway, he went straight off the side and then down, baby. Major head and torso injuries. Chest crushed. He pretty much drowned in his own blood before the FD could get down to him. They stretchered him out with a chopper and transported him anyway. Guess they didn’t want any blowback, either.”

“They take blood at St. Joe’s?”

Fairbanks, about forty and a lifer on patrol, nodded.

“I am told it was clean.”

There was a pause in the conversation at that point, meaning that Clewiston could take whatever he wanted from the blood test. He could believe it or believe the celebrity fix was already in.

The moonlight reflected off the dented silver skin of the Porsche as it was pulled up over the edge like a giant, beautiful fish pulled into a boat. Clewiston walked over and Fairbanks followed. The first thing Clewiston saw was that it was a Carrera 4S.

“Hmm,” he mumbled.

“What?” Fairbanks said.

“It’s one of the Porsches with four-wheel drive. Built for these sorts of curves. Built for control.”

“Well, not built good enough, obviously.”

Clewiston put his equipment down on the hood of one of the patrol cars and took only the Maglite over to the Porsche. He swept the light’s beam over the front of the high-performance sports car. The car was heavily damaged in the crash and the front had taken the brunt of it. The molded body had been badly distorted by repeated impacts as it sledded down the steep embankment. He moved in close and squatted when he looked at the front cowling and the shattered passenger-side headlight assembly.

He could feel Fairbanks behind him looking over his shoulder as he worked.

“If there were no witnesses, how did anybody know he’d gone over the side?” Clewiston asked.

“Somebody down below,” Fairbanks answered. “There are houses down there. Lucky this guy didn’t end up in somebody’s living room. I’ve seen that before.”

So had Clewiston. He stood up and walked to the edge and looked down. His light cut into the darkness of the brush. He saw the exposed pulp of the acacia trees and other brush the car had torn through.

He returned to the car. The driver’s door was sprung and Clewiston could see the pry marks left by the jaws used to extricate the driver. He pulled it open and leaned in with his light. There was a lot of blood on the wheel, dashboard, and center console. The driver’s seat was wet with blood and urine.

The key was still in the ignition and turned to the on position. The dashboard lights were still on. Clewiston leaned farther in and checked the mileage. The car had only 1,142 miles on the odometer.

Satisfied with his initial survey of the wreck, he went back to his equipment. He put the clipboard under his arm and picked up the measuring wheel. Fairbanks came over once again.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Not yet, Sergeant. I’m just starting.”

He began sweeping the light over the roadway. He picked up the skid marks and used the wheel to measure the distance of each one. There were four distinct skid marks, left as all four tires of the Porsche tried unsuccessfully to grip the asphalt. When he worked his way back to the starting point, he found scuff marks in a classic slalom pattern. They had been left on the asphalt when the car had turned sharply one way and then the other before going into the braking skid.

He wrote the measurements down on the clipboard. He then pointed the light into the brush on either side of the roadway where the scuff marks began. He knew the event had begun here, and he was looking for indications of cause.

He noticed that there was a small opening in the brush. A narrow pathway that continued on the other side of the road. It was a crossing. He stepped over and put the beam down on the brush and soil. After a few moments he went across the street and studied the path on the other side.

Satisfied with his site survey, he went back to the patrol car and opened his laptop. While it was booting up, Fairbanks came over once again.

“So, how’s it look?”

“I have to run the numbers.”

“Those skids look pretty long to me. The guy must’ve been flying.”

“You’d be surprised. Other things factor in. Brake efficiency, surface and surface conditions—you see the mist moving in right now? Was it like this two hours ago when the guy went over the side?”

“Been like this since I got here. But the fire guys were here first. I’ll get one up here.”

Clewiston nodded. Fairbanks pulled his rover and told someone to send the first responders up to the crash site. He then looked back at Clewiston.

“On the way.”

“Thanks. Does anybody know what this guy was doing up here?”

“Driving home, we assume. His house was in Coldwater and he was going home.”

“From where?”

“That we don’t know.”

“Anybody make notification yet?”

“Not yet. We figure next of kin is the wife he’s divorcing. But we’re not sure where to find her. I sent a car to his house but there’s no answer. We’ve got somebody at Parker Center trying to run her down—probably through her lawyer. There’s also grown children from his first marriage. They’re working on that, too.”

Two firefighters walked up and introduced themselves as Robards and Lopez. Clewiston questioned them on the weather and road conditions at the time they responded to the accident call. Both firefighters described the mist as heavy at the time. They were specific about this because they said the mist hindered their ability to find the place where the vehicle had crashed through the brush and down the embankment.

“If we hadn’t seen the skid marks, we would have driven right by,” Lopez said.

Clewiston thanked them and turned back to his computer. He had everything he needed now. He opened the Accident Reconstruction Technologies program and went directly to the speed and distance calculator. He referred to his clipboard for the numbers he would need. He felt Fairbanks come up next to him.

“Computer, huh? That gives you all the answers?”

“Some of them.”

“Whatever happened to experience and trusting hunches and gut instincts?”

It wasn’t a question that was waiting for an answer. Clewiston added the lengths of the four skid marks he had measured and then divided by four, coming up with an average skid length of sixty-four feet. He entered the number into the calculator template.

“You said the vehicle is only two months old?” he asked Fairbanks.

“According to the registration. It’s a lease he picked up in January. I guess he filed for divorce and went out and picked up the sports car to help him get back in the game.”

Clewiston ignored the comment and typed 1.0 into a box marked B.E. on the template.

“What’s that?” Fairbanks asked.

“Braking efficiency. One-oh is the highest efficiency. Things could change if somebody wants to take the brakes off the car and test them. But for now I am going with high efficiency because the vehicle is new and there’s only twelve hundred miles on it.”

“Sounds right to me.”

Lastly, Clewiston typed 9.0 into the box marked C.F. This was the subjective part. He explained what he was doing to Fairbanks before the sergeant had to ask.

“This is coefficient of friction,” he said. “It basically means surface conditions. Mulholland Drive is asphalt base, which is generally a high coefficient. And this stretch here was repaved about nine months ago—again that leads to a high coefficient. But I’m knocking it down a point because of the moisture. That mist comes in and puts down a layer of moisture that mixes with the road oil and makes the asphalt slippery. The oil is heavier in new asphalt.”

“I get it.”

“Good. It’s called trusting your gut instinct, Sergeant.”

Fairbanks nodded. He had been properly rebuked.

Clewiston clicked the enter button and the calculator came up with a projected speed based on the relationship between skid length, brake efficiency, and the surface conditions. It said the Porsche had been traveling at 41.569 miles per hour when it went into the skid.

“You’re kidding me,” Fairbanks said while looking at the screen. “The guy was barely speeding. How can that be?”

“Follow me, Sergeant,” Clewiston said.

Clewiston left the computer and the rest of his equipment except for the flashlight. He led Fairbanks back to the point in the road where he had found the slalom scuffs and the originating point of the skid marks.

“Okay,” he said. “The event started here. We have a single-car accident. No alcohol known to be involved. No real speed involved. A car built for this sort of road and driving is involved. What went wrong?”

“Exactly.”

Clewiston put the light down on the scuff marks.

“Okay, you’ve got alternating scuff marks here before he goes into the skid.”

“Okay.”

“You have the tire cords indicating he jerked the wheel right initially and then jerked it left, trying to straighten it out. We call it a SAM—a slalom avoidance maneuver.”

“A SAM. Okay.”

“He turned to avoid an impact of some kind, then overcorrected. He then panicked and did what most people do. He hit the brakes.”

“Got it.”

“The wheels locked up and he went into a skid. There was nothing he could do at that point. He had no control because the instinct is to press harder on the brakes, to push that pedal through the floor.”

“And the brakes were what was taking away control.”

“Exactly. He went over the side. The question is why. Why did he jerk the wheel in the first place? What preceded the event?”

“Another car?”

Clewiston nodded.

“Could be. But no one stopped. No one called it in.”

“Maybe…”

Fairbanks spread his hands. He was drawing a blank.

“Take a look here,” Clewiston said.

He walked Fairbanks over to the side of the road. He put the light on the pathway into the brush. He used the light to draw the sergeant’s eyes back across Mulholland to the pathway on the opposite side. Fairbanks looked at him and then back at the path.

“What are you thinking?” Fairbanks asked.

“This is a coyote path,” Clewiston said. “They come up through Fryman Canyon and cross Mulholland here. It takes them to the dog park. They probably wait in heavy brush for the dogs that stray out of the park.”

“So your thinking is that our guy came around the curve and there was a coyote crossing the road.”

Clewiston nodded.

“That’s what I’m thinking. He jerks the wheel to avoid the animal, then overcompensates, loses control. You have a slalom followed by a braking skid. He goes over the side.”

“An accident plain and simple.”

Fairbanks shook his head disappointedly.

“Why couldn’t it have been a DUI, something clear-cut like that?” he asked. “Nobody’s going to believe us on this one.”

“That’s not our problem. All the facts point to it being a driving mishap. An accident.”

Fairbanks looked at the skid marks and nodded.

“Then, that’s it, I guess.”

“You’ll get a second opinion from the insurance company, anyway,” Clewiston said. “They’ll probably pull the brakes off the car and test them. An accident means double indemnity. But if they can shift the calculations and prove he was speeding or being reckless, it softens the impact. The payout becomes negotiable. But my guess is they’ll see it the same way we do.”

“I’ll make sure forensics photographs everything. We’ll document everything six ways from Sunday and the insurance people can take their best shot. When will I get a report from you?”

“I’ll go down to Valley Traffic right now and write something up.”

“Good. Get it to me. What else?”

Clewiston looked around to see if he was forgetting anything. He shook his head.

“That’s it. I need to take a few more measurements and some photos, then I’ll head down to write it up.”

“Then, I’ll get out of your way.”

Clewiston left him then and headed back up the road to get his camera. He had a small smile on his face that nobody saw.

Clewiston headed west on Mulholland from the crash site. He planned to take Coldwater Canyon down into the Valley and over to the Traffic Division office. He waited until the flashing blue and red lights were small in his rearview mirror before flipping open his phone. He hoped he could get a signal on the cheap throwaway. Mulholland Drive wasn’t always cooperative with cellular service.

He had a signal. He pulled to the side while he attached the digital recorder. He then turned it on and made the call. She answered after one ring, as he was pulling back onto the road and up to speed.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“The apartment.”

“They’re looking for you. You’re sure his attorney knows where you are?”

“He knows. Why? What’s going on?”

“They want to tell you he’s dead.”

He heard her voice catch. He took the phone away from his ear so he could hold the wheel with two hands on one of the deep curves. He then brought it back.

“You there?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m here. I just can’t believe it, that’s all. I’m speechless. I didn’t think it would really happen.”

You may be speechless but you’re talking, Clewiston thought. Keep it up.

“You wanted it to happen, so it happened,” he said. “I told you I would take care of it.”

“What happened?”

“He went off the road on Mulholland. It’s an accident and you’re a rich lady now.”

She said nothing.

“What else do you want to know?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t know anything. It will be better when they come here.”

“You’re an actress. You can handle it.”

“Okay.”

He waited for her to say more. He glanced down at the recorder on the center console and saw the red light glowing. He was good.

“Was he in pain?” she asked.

“Hard to say. He was probably dead when they pried him out. From what I hear, it will be a closed casket. Why do you care?”

“I guess I don’t. It’s just sort of surreal that this is happening. Sometimes I wish you never came to me with the whole idea.”

“You rather go back to being trailer-park trash while he lives up on the hill?”

“No, it wouldn’t be like that. My attorney said the prenup has holes in it.”

Clewiston shook his head. Second-guessers. They hire his services and then can’t live with the consequences.

“What’s done is done,” he said. “This will be the last time we talk. When you get the chance, throw the phone you’re talking on away like I told you.”

“There won’t be any records?”

“It’s a throwaway. Like all the drug dealers use. Open it up, smash the chip, and throw it all away the next time you go to McDonald’s.”

“I don’t go to McDonald’s.”

“Then throw it away at the Ivy. I don’t give a shit. Just not at your house. Let things run their course. Soon you’ll have all his money. And you double-dip on the insurance because of the accident. You can thank me for that.”

He was coming up to the hairpin turn that offered the best view of the Valley.

“How do we know that they think it was an accident?”

“Because I made them think that. I told you, I have Mulholland wired. That’s what you paid for. Nobody is going to second-guess a goddamn thing. His insurance company will come in and sniff around but they won’t be able to change things. Just sit tight and stay cool. Say nothing. Offer nothing. Just like I told you.”

The lights of the Valley spread out in front of him before the turn. He saw a car pulled off at the unofficial overlook. On any other night he’d stop and roust them—probably teenagers getting it on in the backseat. But not tonight. He had to get down to the traffic office and write up his report.

“This is the last time we talk,” he repeated.

He looked down at the recorder. He knew it would be the last time they talked until he needed more money from her.

“How did you get him to go off the road?” she asked.

He smiled. They always ask that.

“My friend Arty did that,” he said.

“You brought a third party into this? Don’t you see that—”

“Relax. Arty doesn’t talk.”

He started into the turn. He realized the phone had gone dead.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

He looked at the screen. No signal. These cheap throwaways were about as reliable as the weather.

He felt his tires catch the edge of the roadway and looked up in time to pull the car back onto the road. As he came out of the turn, he checked the phone’s screen one more time for the signal. He needed to call her back, let her know how it was going to be.

There still was no signal.

“Goddamnit!”

He slapped the phone closed on his thigh. He looked back at the road and froze as his eyes caught and held on two glowing eyes in the headlights. In a moment he broke free and jerked the wheel right to avoid the coyote. He then corrected but the wheels caught on the deep edge of the asphalt. He jerked harder and the front wheel broke free and jumped back up on the road. But the rear wheel slipped out and the car went into a slide.

Clewiston had an almost clinical knowledge of what was happening. It was as if he were seeing it on a video screen as one of the accident re-creations he had prepared a hundred times for court hearings and prosecutions.

The car went into a sideways slide toward the precipice. He knew he would hit the wooded fence—chosen by the city for aesthetic reasons over function and safety—and that he would crash through. He knew at that moment that he was probably a dead man.

The car turned 180 degrees before blowing backward through the safety fence. It then went airborne and arced down, trunk first. Clewiston gripped the steering wheel as if it was still the instrument of his control and destiny. But he knew there was nothing that could help him now. There was no control.

Looking through the windshield he saw the beams of his headlights pointing into the night sky. Out loud he said, “I’m dead.”

The car plunged through a stand of trees, branches shearing off with a noise as loud as firecrackers. Clewiston closed his eyes for the final impact. There was a sharp roaring sound and a jarring impact. The airbag exploded from the steering wheel and snapped his neck back against his seat.

Clewiston opened his eyes and felt liquid surrounding him and rising up his chest. He thought he had momentarily blacked out or was hallucinating. But then the water reached his neck and it was cold and real. He could see only darkness. He was in black water and it was filling the car.

He reached down to the door and pulled on a handle but he couldn’t get the door to open. He guessed the power locks had shorted out. He tried to bring his legs up so he could kick out one of the shattered windows but his seat belt held him in place. The water was up to his chin now and rising. He quickly unsnapped his belt and tried to move again but realized the seat belt hadn’t been the only impediment. His legs—both of them—were somehow pinned beneath the steering column, which had dropped down during the impact. He tried to raise it but couldn’t get it to move an inch. He tried to squeeze out from beneath the weight but he was thoroughly pinned.

The water was over his mouth now. By leaning his head back and raising his chin he gained an inch but that was rapidly erased by the rising tide. In less than thirty seconds the water was over him and he was holding his last breath.

He thought about the coyote that had sent him over the side. It didn’t seem possible that what had happened had happened. A reverse cascade of bubbles leaked from his mouth and traveled upward as he cursed.

Suddenly everything was illuminated. A bright light glowed in front of him. He leaned forward and looked out through the windshield. He saw a robed figure above the light, arms at his side.

Clewiston knew that it was over. His lungs burned for release. It was his time. He let out all of his breath and took the water in. He journeyed toward the light.

James Crossley finished tying his robe and looked down into his backyard pool. It was as if the car had literally dropped from the heavens. The brick wall surrounding the pool was undisturbed. The car had to have come in over it and then landed perfectly in the middle of the pool. About a third of the water had slopped over the side with the impact. But the car was fully submerged except for the edge of the trunk lid, which had come open during the impact. Floating on the surface was a lifelike mannequin that appeared to have been cut in half at the waist. Both top and bottom piece were dressed in military camouflage. The scene was bizarre.

Crossley looked up toward the crest line, where he knew Mulholland Drive edged the hillside. He wondered if someone had pushed the car off the road with the mannequin behind the wheel, if this was some sort of prank.

He then looked back down into the pool. The surface was calming and he could see the car more clearly in the beam of the pool’s light. And it was then that he thought he saw someone sitting unmoving behind the steering wheel.

Crossley ripped his robe off and dove naked into the pool.

Two-Bagger

The bus was forty minutes late.

Stilwell and Harwick waited in a six-year-old Volvo at the curb next to the McDonald’s a block from the depot. Stilwell, the driver, chose the spot because he was betting that Vachon would walk down to the McDonald’s after getting off the bus. They would begin the tail from there.

“These guys, they been in stir four, five years, they get out and want to get drunk and laid in that order,” Stilwell had told Harwick. “But something happens when they get off the freedom bus and see the golden arches waiting for them down the block. Quarter Pounder and fries, ketchup. Man, they miss that shit in prison.”

Harwick smiled.

“I always wondered what happened with real rich guys, you know? Guys who grew up poor, eatin’ fast food, but then made so much money that money doesn’t mean anything. Bill Gates, guys like that. You think they still go to McDonald’s for a grease fix every now and then?”

“In disguise maybe,” Stilwell suggested. “I don’t think they drive up in their limos or anything.”

“Yeah, probably.”

It was new-partner banter. It was their first day together. For Harwick it was also his first day in GIU. Stilwell was the senior partner. The veterano. They were working one of his jackets.

After forty-five minutes and no bus, Stilwell said, “So, what do you want to ask me? You want to ask me about my partner, go ahead.”

“Well, why’d he bug?”

“Couldn’t take the intensity.”

“Since I heard he went into special weapons, I assume you’re talking about your intensity, not the gig’s.”

“Have to ask him. I’ve had three partners in five years. You’re number four.”

“Lucky number four. Next question: What are we doing right now?”

“Waiting on the bus from Corcoran.”

“I already got that part.”

“A meth cook named Eugene Vachon is on it. We’re going to follow him, see who he sees.”

“Uh-huh.”

Harwick waited for more. He kept his eyes on the bus depot half a block up Vine. Eventually, Stilwell reached up to the visor and took a stack of photos out from a rubber band. He looked through them until he found the one he wanted and handed it to Harwick.

“That’s him. Four years ago. They call him Milky.”

The photo was of a man in his early thirties with bone-white hair that appeared to be pulled back in a ponytail. His skin was as white as a new lampshade and his eyes were the light blue of washed-out denim.

“Edgar Winters,” Harwick said.

“What?”

“Remember that guy? He was like an albino rock star in the seventies. Looked just like this guy. He had a brother, Johnny. Maybe he was the albino.”

“Missed it.”

“So, what’s Milky’s deal? If you’re on him, he must be Road Saints, right?”

“He’s on the bubble. He was cooking for them but never got his colors. Then he got popped and went to the Cork for a nickel. He’s got to crack an egg now if he wants in. And from what I hear, he wants in.”

“Meaning whack somebody?”

“Meaning whack somebody.”

Stilwell explained how the Gang Intelligence Unit kept contacts with intelligence officers at prisons all over California. One such contact provided information on Vachon. Milky had been protected by incarcerated members of the Road Saints during his five-year stay at Corcoran State Penitentiary.

As a form of repayment for that protection, as well as a tariff for his admittance to formal membership in the motorcycle gang turned prison and drug organization, Vachon would perform a contract hit upon his release.

Harwick nodded.

“You’re the resident expert on the Saints, so it goes to you. Got that. Who is the target?”

“That’s the mystery we’re going to solve. We’re going to follow Milky and see if we can find that out. He might not even know himself right now. This could be an in-house thing or a subcontract job the Saints took on. A trade-off with the blacks or the eMe. You never know. Milky might not have his orders yet. All we know is that he’s been tapped.”

“And we’re going to step in if we get the chance.”

“When we get the chance.”

“When we get the chance.”

Stilwell handed the whole stack of photos to Harwick.

“That’s the Saints’ active membership. By active I mean not incarcerated. Any one of them could be the target. They’re not above going after their own. The Saints are run by a guy named Sonny Mitchell who’s a lifer up at Ironwood. Anytime anybody on the outside acts up, talks about changing the leadership, maybe bringing it outside the walls, then Sonny has him cut down. Helps keep people in line.”

“How’s he get the word from Ironwood to Milky over at Corcoran?”

“The women. Sonny gets conjugals. He tells his wife, probably right in the middle of giving her a pop. She leaves, tells one of the wives visiting her man in the Cork. It goes like that.”

“You got it down, man. How long’ve you been working these guys?”

“Coming up on five years. Long time.”

“Why didn’t you ever rotate out?”

Stilwell straightened up behind the wheel and ignored the question.

“There’s the bus.”

Stilwell had been right. Milky Vachon’s first stop after getting off the bus was the McDonald’s. He ate two Quarter Pounders and went back to the counter twice for ketchup for his french fries.

Stilwell and Harwick went in a side door and slipped into a booth positioned behind Vachon’s back. Stilwell said he had never met Vachon but that he needed to take precautions because it was likely Vachon had seen his photo. The Saints had their own intelligence net and, after all, Stilwell had been assigned full-time to the gang for half a decade.

When Vachon went to the counter for ketchup the third time, Stilwell noticed that there was an envelope sticking out of the back pocket of his blue jeans. He told Harwick that he was curious about it.

“Most of the time these guys get out, they want no reminders of where they’ve been,” he whispered across the table. “They leave letters, photos, books, everything behind. That letter, that must mean something. I’m not talking sentimental. I mean it means something.”

He thought a moment and nodded to himself.

“I’m gonna go out, see if I can set up a shake. You stay here. When he starts wrapping up his trash, come on out. If I’m not back in time, I’ll find you. If I don’t, use the rover.”

Stilwell called sheriff’s dispatch and had them contact LAPD to send a car. He arranged to meet the car around the corner from the McDonald’s so their conference wouldn’t be seen by Vachon.

It took almost ten minutes for a black-and-white to show. The uniformed officer pulled the car up next to Stilwell’s Volvo, driver’s window to driver’s window.

“Stilwell?”

“That’s me.”

Stilwell pulled a badge out of his shirt. It was on a chain around his neck. Also hung on the chain was a gold 7 about the size of a thumbnail.

“Ortiz. What can I do for you?”

“Around the corner my partner’s keeping an eye on a guy just off the bus from Corcoran. I need to shake him. He’s got an envelope in his back pocket. I’d like to know everything there is to know about it.”

Ortiz nodded. He was about twenty-five, with the kind of haircut that left the sides of his head nearly shaved and a healthy inch of hair up top. He had one wrist on the wheel, and he drummed his fingertips on the dashboard.

“What was he up there for?”

“Cooking crystal meth for the Road Saints.”

Ortiz picked up the rhythm with his fingers.

“He going to go easy? I’m by myself, in case you didn’t notice.”

“At the moment, he should be easy. Like I said, he just got back on the ground. Just give him a kick in the pants, tell him you don’t want him on your beat. That ought to do it. My partner and I will have your back. You’ll be safe.”

“Okay. You going to point him out?”

“He’s an albino with a ponytail. Like that Edgar Winters guy.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. You can’t miss him.”

“All right. Meet back here after?”

“Yeah. And thanks.”

Ortiz pulled away first and Stilwell watched him go. He then followed and turned the corner. He saw Harwick standing on the curb outside the McDonald’s. Moving north on foot half a block away was Vachon.

Stilwell pulled to a stop next to Harwick, and his new partner got in the Volvo.

“I was wondering where you were.”

“Forgot to turn on my rover.”

“Is that the shake car just went by?”

“That’s it.”

They watched in silence as the black-and-white pulled to the curb next to Vachon and Ortiz stepped out. The patrolman signaled Vachon to the hood of the cruiser and the ex-convict assumed the position without protest.

Stilwell reached to the glove compartment and got out a small pair of field glasses and used them to watch the shakedown.

Ortiz leaned Vachon over the hood and patted him down. He held him in that position with a forearm on his back. After checking him for weapons and coming up empty, Ortiz pulled the white envelope out of Vachon’s back pocket.

With his body positioned over the hood, Vachon could not see what Ortiz was doing. With one hand Ortiz was able to open the envelope and look inside. He studied the contents for a long moment but did not remove them. He then returned the envelope to the man’s back pocket.

“Can you see what it is?” Harwick asked.

“No. Whatever it was, the cop looked at it in the envelope.”

Stilwell continued to watch through the field glasses. Ortiz had now let Vachon stand up and was talking to him face-to-face. Ortiz’s arms were folded in front of him, and his body language suggested he was attempting to intimidate Vachon. He was telling him to get off his beat. It looked pretty routine. Ortiz was good.

After a few moments Ortiz used a hand signal to tell Vachon to move on. He then returned to his car.

“All right, you get back out and stay with Milky. I’ll go talk to the cop and come back for you.”

“Gotcha.”

Ten minutes later the Volvo pulled up next to Harwick at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Harwick climbed back in.

“It was a ticket to a Dodgers game,” Stilwell said. “Tonight’s game.”

“In the envelope? Just a ticket to the game?”

“That’s it. Outside was his address at Corcoran. With a return that was smeared. Not recognizable. Postmark was Palmdale, mailed eight days ago. Inside was just the one ticket. Reserve level, section eleven, row K, seat one. By the way, where is Vachon?”

“Across the street. The porno palace. I guess he’s looking for—”

“That place has a back door.”

Stilwell was out of the car before he finished the sentence. He darted across the street in front of traffic and through the beaded curtain at the entrance to the adult video arcade.

Harwick followed but at a reduced pace. By the time he had entered the arcade, Stilwell had already swept through the video and adult novelty showroom and was in the back hallway, slapping back the curtains of the private video viewing booths. There was no sign of Vachon.

Stilwell moved to the back door, pushed it open, and came out into a rear alley. He looked both ways and did not see Vachon. A young couple, both with ample piercings and drug-glazed eyes, leaned against a dumpster. Stilwell approached them.

“Did you just see a guy come this way a few seconds ago? White guy with white hair. An albino. You couldn’t miss him.”

They both giggled and one mentioned something about seeing a white rabbit going down a hole.

They were useless and Stilwell knew it. He took one last look around the alley, wondering if Vachon had merely been taking precautions when he ducked through the porno house, or if he had seen Stilwell or Harwick tailing him. He knew a third possibility, that Vachon had been spooked by the shakedown and decided to disappear, was also to be considered.

Harwick stepped through the back door into the alley. Stilwell glared at him, and Harwick averted his eyes.

“Know what I heard about you, Harwick? That you’re going to night school.”

He didn’t mean it literally. It was a cop expression. Going to night school meant you wanted to be somewhere else. Not the street, not in the game. You were thinking about your next move, not the present mission.

“That’s bullshit,” Harwick said. “What was I supposed to do? You left me hanging. What if I covered the back? He could’ve walked out the front.”

The junkies laughed, amused by the angry exchange of the cops.

Stilwell started walking out of the alley, back toward Vine, where he had left the car.

“Look, don’t worry,” Harwick said. “We have the game tonight. We’ll get back on him there.”

Stilwell checked his watch. It was almost five. He called back without looking at Harwick.

“And it might be too late by then.”

At the parking gate to Dodger Stadium, the woman in the booth asked to see their tickets. Stilwell said they didn’t have tickets.

“Well, we’re not allowed to let you in without tickets. Tonight’s game is sold out and we can’t allow people to park without tickets for the game.”

Before Stilwell could react, Harwick leaned over to look up at the woman.

“Sold out? The Dodgers aren’t going anywhere. What is it, beach towel night?”

“No, it’s Mark McGwire.”

Harwick leaned back over to his side.

“All right, McGwire!”

Stilwell pulled his badge out of his shirt.

“Sheriff’s deputies, ma’am. We’re working. We need to go in.”

She reached back into the booth and got a clipboard. She asked Stilwell his name and told him to hold in place while she called the stadium security office. While they waited, cars backed up behind them and a few drivers honked their horns.

Stilwell checked his watch. It was forty minutes until game time.

“What’s the hurry?”

“BP.”

Stilwell looked over at Harwick.

“What?”

“Batting practice. They want to see McGwire hit a few fungoes out of the park before the game. You know who Mark McGwire is, don’t you?”

Stilwell turned to look at the woman in the booth. It was taking a long time.

“Yes, I know who he is. I was here at the stadium in ’eighty-eight. He wasn’t so hot then.”

“The series? Did you see Gibson’s homer?”

“I was here.”

“So cool! So was I!”

Stilwell turned to look at him.

“You were here? Game one, ninth inning? You saw him hit it?”

The doubt was evident in his voice.

“I was here,” Harwick protested. “Best fucking sports moment I’ve ever seen.”

Stilwell just looked at him.

“What? I was here!”

“Sir?”

Stilwell turned back to the woman. She handed him a parking pass.

“That’s for lot seven. Park there and then go to the field-level gates and ask for Mr. Houghton. He’s in charge of security and he’ll determine if you can enter. Okay?”

“Thank you.”

As the Volvo went through the gate, it was hit with a volley of horns for good measure.

“So you’re a baseball fan,” Harwick said. “I didn’t know that.”

“You don’t know a lot about me.”

“Well, you went to the World Series. I think that makes you a fan.”

“I was a fan. Not anymore.”

Harwick was silent while he thought about that. Stilwell was busy looking for lot 7. They were on a road that circled the stadium, with the parking lots on either side denoted by large baseballs with numbers painted on them. The numbers weren’t in an order he understood.

“What happened?” Harwick finally asked.

“What do you mean, ‘What happened?’”

“They say baseball is a metaphor for life. If you fall out of love with baseball, you fall out of love with life.”

“Fuck that shit.”

Stilwell felt his face burning. Finally, he saw the baseball with the orange seven painted on it. A dull emptiness came into his chest as he looked at the number. An ache that he vanquished by speeding up to the lot entrance and handing the lot monitor his pass.

“Anywhere,” the monitor said. “But slow it down.”

Stilwell drove in, circled around, and took the space closest to the exit so they could get out quickly.

“If we catch up with Milky here, it’s going to be a goddamn nightmare following him out,” he said as he turned the car off.

“We’ll figure it out,” Harwick said. “So, what happened?”

Stilwell opened the door and was about to get out. Instead, he turned back to his partner.

“I lost my reason to love the game, okay? Let’s leave it at that.”

He was about to get out again, when Harwick stopped him once more.

“What happened? Tell me. We’re partners.”

Stilwell put both hands back on the wheel and looked straight ahead.

“I used to take my kid, all right? I used to take him all the time. Five years old and I took him to a World Series game. He saw Gibson’s homer, man. We were out there, right-field bleachers, back row. Only tickets I could get. That would be a story to tell when he grew up. A lot of people in this town lie about it, say they were here, say they saw it…”

He stopped there, but Harwick made no move to get out. He waited.

“But I lost him. My son. And without him…there wasn’t a reason to come back here.”

Without another word Stilwell got out and slammed the door behind him.

At the field-level gate they were met by Houghton, the skeptical security man.

“We’ve got Mark McGwire in town and everybody and their brother is coming out of the woodwork. I have to tell you guys, if this isn’t legit, I can’t let you in. Any other game, come on back and we’ll see what we can do. I’m LAPD retired and would love to—”

“That’s nice, Mr. Houghton, but let me tell you something,” Stilwell said. “We’re here to see a hitter, but his name isn’t McGwire. We’re trying to track a man who’s in town to kill somebody, not hit home runs. We don’t know where he is at the moment but we do know one thing. He’s got a ticket to this game. He might be here to make a connection and he might be here to kill somebody. We don’t know. But we’re not going to be able to find that out if we’re on the outside looking in. You understand our position now?”

Houghton nodded once under Stilwell’s intimidating stare.

“We’re going to have over fifty thousand people in here tonight,” he said. “How are you two going to—”

“Reserve level, section eleven, row K, seat one.”

“That’s his ticket?”

Stilwell nodded.

“And if you don’t mind,” Harwick said, “we’d like to get a trace on that ticket. See who bought it, if possible.”

Stilwell looked at Harwick and nodded. He hadn’t thought of that. It was a good idea.

“That will be no problem,” said Houghton, his voice taking on a tone of full cooperation. “Now, this seat location. How close do you need and want to get?”

“Just close enough to watch what he does, who he talks to,” Stilwell said. “Make a move if we have to.”

“This seat is just below the press box. I can put you in there and you can look right down on him.”

Stilwell shook his head.

“That won’t work. If he gets up and moves, we’re a level above him. We’ll lose him.”

“How about one in the press box and one below—mobile, moving about?”

Stilwell thought about this and looked at Harwick. Harwick nodded.

“Might work,” he said. “We got the radios.”

Stilwell looked at Houghton.

“Set it up.”

They were both in the front row of the press box looking down on Vachon’s seat and waiting for him to arrive before splitting up. But the seat was empty and the national anthem had already been sung. The Dodgers were taking the field. Kevin Brown was on the mound, promising a classic matchup between himself, a fastball pitcher, and McGwire, a purebred slugger.

“This is going to be good,” Harwick said.

“Just don’t forget why we’re here,” Stilwell replied.

The Cardinals went down one, two, three, and left McGwire waiting on deck. In the bottom half of the first the Dodgers did no better. No hits, no runs.

And no sign of Milky Vachon.

Houghton came down the stairs and told them the ticket Vachon was carrying had been sold as part of a block of seats to a ticket broker in Hollywood. They took the name of the broker and decided they would check it out in the morning.

As the second inning started, Stilwell sat with his arms folded on the front sill of the press box. It allowed a full view of the stadium. All he had to do was lower his eyes and he would see row K, seat one, of section eleven.

Harwick was leaning back in his seat. To Stilwell, he seemed as interested in watching the three rows of sportswriters and broadcasters as he was the baseball game. While the Dodgers were taking the field again, he spoke to Stilwell.

“Your son,” he said. “It was drugs, wasn’t it?”

Stilwell took a deep breath and let it out. He spoke without turning to Harwick.

“What do you want to know, Harwick?”

“We’re going to be partners. I just want to…understand. Some guys, something like that happens, they dive into the bottle. Some guys dive into the work. It’s pretty clear which kind you are. I heard you go after these guys, the Saints, with a vengeance, man. Was it meth? Was your kid on crank?”

Stilwell didn’t answer. He watched a man wearing a Dodgers baseball cap take the first seat in row K below. The hat was on backward, a white ponytail hanging from beneath the brim. It was Milky Vachon. He put a full beer down on the concrete step next to him and kept another in his hand. Seat number two was empty.

“Harwick,” Stilwell said. “We’re partners, but we’re not talking about my kid. You understand?”

“I’m just trying to—”

“Baseball is a metaphor for life, Harwick. Life is hardball. People hit home runs, people get thrown out. There’s the double play, the suicide squeeze, and everybody wants to get home safe. Some people go all the way to the ninth inning. Some people leave early to beat the traffic.”

Stilwell stood up and turned to his new partner.

“I checked you out, Harwick. You’re a beat-the-traffic guy. You weren’t here. In ’eighty-eight. I know. If you were here, you gave up on them and left before the ninth. I know.”

Harwick said nothing. He turned his eyes from Stilwell.

“Vachon’s down there,” Stilwell said. “I’m going down to keep watch. If he makes a move, I’ll tail. Keep your rover close.”

Stilwell walked up the steps and out of the press box.

McGwire struck out at the top of the second inning, and Brown easily retired the side. The Dodgers picked up three runs in the third off an error, a walk, and a home run with two outs.

All was quiet after that until the fifth, when McGwire opened the inning with a drive to the right-field wall. It drew fifty thousand people out of their seats. But the right fielder gloved it on the track, his body hitting hard into the wall pads.

Watching the trajectory of the ball reminded Stilwell of the night in ’88 when Kirk Gibson put a three-two pitch into the seats in the last of the ninth and won the first game of the series. It caused a monumental shift in momentum, and the Dodgers cruised the rest of the way. It was a moment that was cherished by so many for so long. A time in L.A. before the riots, before the earthquake, before O.J.

Before Stilwell’s son was lost.

Brown carried a perfect game into the seventh inning. The crowd became more attentive and noisier. There was a sense that something was going to happen.

Throughout the innings Stilwell moved his position several times, always staying close to Vachon and using the field glasses to watch him. The ex-convict did not move other than to stand up with everybody else for McGwire’s drive to the wall. He simply drank his two beers and watched the game. No one took the seat next to him, and he spoke to no one except a vendor who sold him peanuts in the fourth.

Vachon also made no move to look around himself. He kept his eyes on the game. And Stilwell began to wonder if Vachon was doing anything other than watching a baseball game. He thought about what Harwick had said about falling out of love with baseball. Maybe Vachon, five years in stir, was simply rekindling that love. Maybe he had missed baseball with the same intensity he had missed the taste of alcohol and the feel of a woman’s body.

Stilwell took the rover out of his pocket and clicked the mike button twice. Harwick’s voice came back quickly, his tone clipped and cold.

“Yeah.”

“After the eighth you better come down here so we can be ready when he leaves.”

“I’ll be down.”

“Out.”

He put the rover back on his belt under his jacket.

Brown let it get away from him in the seventh. St. Louis opened with two singles to right, spoiling the perfect game, the no-hitter, and putting the lead in jeopardy with McGwire on deck.

With the runners at the corners Brown walked the next batter, bringing McGwire to the plate with the bases loaded. The Cardinals would gain the lead and the momentum if he could put one over the wall.

Davey Johnson trotted out to the mound for a conference with his pitcher, but the manager appeared to give only a quick pep talk. He left Brown in place and headed back to the dugout, accompanied by a chorus of applause.

The crowd rose to its feet and quieted in anticipation of what would be the confrontation of the night. Stilwell’s rover clicked twice, and he pulled it out of his pocket.

“Yeah?”

“Do you believe this? We gotta send that guy Houghton a six-pack for this.”

Stilwell didn’t reply. His eyes were on Vachon, who had stepped away from his seat and was coming up the stairs to the concessions level.

“He’s moving.”

“What? He can’t be. How can he miss this?”

Stilwell turned his back and leaned against a concrete support column as Vachon emerged from the stairs and walked behind him.

When it was clear, Stilwell looked around and saw Vachon heading toward the lavatory, making his way past several men who were rushing out in time to see McGwire bat.

Stilwell raised his rover.

“He’s going to the bathroom just past the Krispy Kreme stand.”

“He’s had two beers. Maybe he’s just taking a leak. You want me down there?”

As Stilwell replied, a huge noise rose from the crowd and then quickly subsided. Stilwell kept his eyes on the entrance to the men’s room. When he was ten feet from it, a man emerged. Not Vachon. A large white man with a long dark beard and a shaved skull. He wore a tight T-shirt and his arms were fully wrapped in tattoos. Stilwell looked for the skull-with-halo insignia of the Road Saints but didn’t see it.

Still, it was enough to slow his step. The tattooed man turned to his right and kept walking. Harwick’s voice came from the rover.

“Say again. The crowd noise blocked you out.”

Stilwell raised the radio.

“I said, get down here.”

There was another short burst of crowd noise, but it was not sustained enough to indicate a hit or an out. Stilwell walked to the lavatory entrance. He thought about the man with the shaved skull, trying to place the face. Stilwell had left his photos in the rubber band on the Volvo’s visor.

It hit him then. Weapon transfer. Vachon had come to the game to get instructions and a weapon.

Stilwell raised the rover.

“I think he has a weapon. I’m going in.”

He put the rover back into his pocket, pulled his badge out of his shirt, and let it hang on his chest. He unholstered his .45 and stepped into the restroom.

It was a cavernous yellow-tiled room with stainless-steel urine troughs running down both sides until they reached opposing rows of toilet stalls. The place appeared empty but Stilwell knew it wasn’t.

“Sheriff’s Department. Step out with your hands visible.”

Nothing happened. No sound but the crowd noise from outside the room. Stilwell stepped farther in and began again, raising his voice this time. But the sudden echoing cacophony of the crowd rose like an approaching train and drowned his voice. The confrontation on the baseball diamond had been decided.

Stilwell moved past the urinals and stood between the rows of stalls. There were eight on each side. The far door on the left was closed. The rest stood half closed but still shielded the view into each stall.

Stilwell dropped into a catcher’s crouch and looked beneath the doors. No feet could be seen in any of the stalls. But on the floor within the closed stall was a blue Dodgers hat.

“Vachon!” he yelled. “Come out now!”

He moved into position in front of the closed stall. Without hesitation he raised his left foot and kicked the door open. It swung inward and slammed against one of the interior walls of the stall. It then rebounded and slammed closed. It all happened in a second, but Stilwell had enough time to see the stall was empty.

And to know that he was in a vulnerable position.

As he turned his body, he heard a scraping sound behind him and saw movement in the far reach of his peripheral vision. Movement toward him. He raised his gun but knew he was too late. In that same moment, he realized he had solved the mystery of who Vachon’s target was.

The knife felt like a punch to the left side of his neck. A hand then grabbed the back collar of his shirt and pulled him backward at the same moment the knife was thrust forward, slicing out through the front of his neck.

Stilwell dropped his gun as his hands instinctively came up to his torn throat. A whisper then came into his ear from behind.

“Greetings from Sonny Mitchell.”

He was pulled backward and shoved against the wall next to the last stall. He turned and started to slide down the yellow tiles, his eyes on the figure of Milky Vachon heading to the exit.

When he hit the floor, he felt the gun under his leg. His left hand still holding his neck, he reached the gun with his right and raised it. He fired four times at Vachon, the bullets catching him in a tight pattern on the upper back and throwing him into a trash can overflowing with paper towels. Vachon flopped onto the floor on his back, his sky-blue eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling, the overturned trash can rolling back and forth next to him.

Stilwell dropped his hand to the floor and let go of the gun. He looked down at his chest. The blood was everywhere, leaking between his fingers and running down his arm. His lungs were filling and he couldn’t get air into them.

He knew he was dead.

He shifted his weight and turned his hips so he could reach a hand into the back pocket of his pants. He pulled out his wallet.

There was another roar from the crowd that seemed to shake the room. And then Harwick entered, saw the bodies on opposite sides of the room, and ran to Stilwell.

“Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”

He leaned over and studied Stilwell for a moment, then pulled out his rover and started to yell into it. He realized he was on a closed frequency, quickly switched the dial to the open band, and called in the officer-down report. Stilwell listened to it in a detached way. He knew there was no chance. He dropped his eyes to the holy card he held in his hands.

“Hang in there, partner,” Harwick yelled. “Don’t go south on me, man. They’re coming, they’re coming.”

There was a commotion behind him, and Harwick turned around. Two men were standing in the doorway.

“Get out of here! Get the fuck out! Keep everybody back!”

He turned back to Stilwell.

“Listen, man, I’m sorry. I fucked up. I’m so fucking sorry. Please don’t die. Hang on, man. Please hang on.”

His words were coming out like the blood flowing from Stilwell’s neck. Nonstop, a mad torrent. Desperate.

“You were right, man. You were right about me. I—I—I lied about that game. I left and I’m so sorry I lied. You’ve got to stay with me. Please stay with me!”

Stilwell’s eyes started to close and he remembered that night so long ago. That other time. He died then, with his new partner on his knees next to him, blubbering and babbling.

Harwick didn’t quiet himself until he realized Stilwell was gone. He then studied his partner’s face and saw a measure of calm in his expression. He realized that he looked happier than at any other time Harwick had looked at him that day.

He noticed the open wallet on the floor and then the card in Stilwell’s hand. He took it from the dead fingers and looked at it. It was a baseball card. Not a real one. A gimmick card. It showed a boy of eleven or twelve in a Dodgers uniform, a bat on his shoulder, the number 7 on his shirt. It said “Stevie Stilwell, Right Field” beneath the photo.

There was another commotion behind him then, and Harwick turned to see paramedics coming into the room. He cleared out of the way, though he knew it was too late.

As the paramedics checked for vital signs on his fallen partner, Harwick stepped back and used the sleeve of his shirt to dry the tears on his face. He then took the baseball card and slipped it into one of the folded compartments of his badge case. It would be something he would carry with him always.

About the Author

Michael Connelly is the author of the recent #1 New York Times bestsellers The Drop, The Fifth Witness, The Reversal, The Scarecrow, The Brass Verdict, and The Lincoln Lawyer, as well as the bestselling Harry Bosch series of novels. He is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He spends his time in California and Florida.

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The following is an excerpt from the opening pages of The Black Box.

On-sale date: November 26, 2012

Order The Black Box today.

Snow White

1992

By the third night the death count was rising so high and so quickly that many of the divisional homicide teams were pulled off the front lines of riot control and put into emergency rotations in South Central. Detective Harry Bosch and his partner, Jerry Edgar, were pulled from Hollywood Division and assigned to a roving B Watch team that also included two shotgunners from patrol for protection. They were dispatched to any place they were needed—wherever a body turned up. The four-man team moved in a black-and-white patrol car, jumping from crime scene to crime scene and never staying still for long. It wasn’t the proper way to carry out homicide work, not even close, but it was the best that could be done under the surreal circumstances of a city that had come apart at the seams.

South Central was a war zone. Fires burned everywhere. Looters moved in packs from storefront to storefront, all semblance of dignity and moral code gone in the smoke that rose over the city. The gangs of South L.A. stepped up to control the darkness, even calling for a truce to their internecine battles to create a united front against the police.

More than fifty people had died already. Store owners had shot looters, National Guardsmen had shot looters, looters had shot looters, and then there were the others—killers who used the camouflage of chaos and civil unrest to settle long-held scores that had nothing to do with the frustrations of the moment and the emotions displayed in the streets.

Two days before, the racial, social, and economic fractures that ran under the city broke the surface with seismic intensity. The trial of four LAPD officers accused of excessively beating a black motorist at the end of a high-speed chase had resulted in the delivery of not-guilty verdicts. The reading of the jury’s decision in a suburban courtroom forty-five miles away had an almost immediate impact on South Los Angeles. Small crowds of angry people gathered on street corners to decry the injustice. And soon things turned violent. The ever-vigilant media went high and live from the air, broadcasting the images into every home in the city, and then the world.

The department was caught flat-footed. The chief of police was out of Parker Center and making a political appearance when the verdict came in. Other members of the command staff were out of position as well. No one immediately took charge and, more important, no one went to the rescue. The whole department retreated and the images of unchecked violence spread like wildfire across every television screen in the city. Soon the city was out of control and in flames.

Two nights later the acrid smell of burning rubber and smoldering dreams was still everywhere. Flames from a thousand fires reflected like the devil dancing in the dark sky. Gunshots and shouts of anger echoed nonstop in the wake of the patrol car. But the four men in 6-King-16 did not stop for any of these. They stopped only for murder.

It was Friday, May 1. B Watch was the emergency mobilization designation for night watch, a 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. shift. Bosch and Edgar had the backseat, while Officers Robleto and Delwyn had the front. Delwyn, in the passenger seat, held his shotgun across his lap and angled up, its muzzle poking through the open window.

They were rolling to a dead body found in an alley off Crenshaw Boulevard. The call had been relayed to the emergency communications center by the California National Guard, which had been deployed in the city during the state of emergency. It was only 10:30 and the calls were stacking up. King-16 had already handled a homicide call since coming on shift—a looter shot dead in the doorway of a discount shoe store. The shooter had been the store’s owner.

That crime scene was contained within the premises of the business, which allowed Bosch and Edgar to work with relative safety, Robleto and Delwyn posted with shotguns and full riot gear on the sidewalk out front. And that also gave the detectives time to collect evidence, sketch the crime scene, and take their own photos. They recorded the statement of the store owner and watched the videotape from the business’s surveillance camera. It showed the looter using an aluminum softball bat to smash through the glass door of the store. The man then ducked in through the jagged opening he had created and was promptly shot twice by the store owner, who was hiding behind the cash counter and waiting.

Because the coroner’s office was overrun with more death calls than it could handle, the body was removed from the store by paramedics and transported to County-USC Medical Center. It would be held there until things calmed down—if they ever did—and the coroner caught up with the work.

As far as the shooter went, Bosch and Edgar made no arrest. Self-defense or murder while lying in wait, the D.A.’s Office would make the call later.

It was not the right way to proceed but it would have to do. In the chaos of the moment the mission was simple: preserve the evidence, document the scene as well and as fast as possible, and collect the dead.

Get in and get out. And do it safely. The real investigation would come later. Maybe.

As they drove south on Crenshaw they passed occasional crowds of people, mostly young men, gathered on corners or roving in packs. At Crenshaw and Slauson a group flying Crips colors jeered as the patrol car moved by at high speed without siren or flashing lights. Bottles and rocks were thrown but the car moved too fast and the missiles fell harmlessly in its wake.

“We’ll be back, muthafuckers! Don’t you worry.”

It was Robleto who had called out and Bosch had to assume he was speaking metaphorically. The young patrolman’s threat was as hollow as the department’s response had been once the verdicts were read on live TV Wednesday afternoon.

Robleto, behind the wheel, only began to slow as they approached a blockade of National Guard vehicles and soldiers. The strategy drawn up the day before with the arrival of the Guard was to take back control of the major intersections in South L.A. and then move outward, eventually containing all trouble spots. They were less than a mile from one of those key intersections, Crenshaw and Florence, and the Guard troops and vehicles were already spread up and down Crenshaw for blocks. Only as he pulled up to the barricade at 62nd Street did Robleto lower his window.

A guardsman with sergeant stripes came to the door and leaned down to look at the car’s occupants.

“Sergeant Burstin, San Luis Obispo. What can I do for you fellows?”

“Homicide,” Robleto said. He hooked a thumb toward Bosch and Edgar in the back.

Burstin straightened up and made an arm motion so that a path could be cleared and they could be let through.

“Okay,” he said. “She’s in the alley on the east side between Sixty-sixth Place and Sixty-seventh Street. Go on through and my guys will show you. We’ll form a tight perimeter and watch the rooflines. We’ve had unconfirmed reports of sniper fire in the neighborhood.”

Robleto put his window back up as he drove through.

“‘My guys,’” he said, mimicking Burstin’s voice. “That guy’s probably a schoolteacher or something back in the real world. I heard that none of these guys they brought in are even from L.A. From all around the state but not L.A. Probably couldn’t find Leimert Park with a map.”

“Two years ago, neither could you, dude,” Delwyn said.

“Whatever. The guy doesn’t know shit about this place and now he’s all like take charge? Fucking weekend warrior. All I’m saying is we didn’t need these guys. Makes us look bad. Like we couldn’t handle it and had to bring in the pros from San Luis O-fucking-bispo.”

Edgar cleared his throat and spoke from the backseat.

“I got news for you,” he said. “We couldn’t handle it and we couldn’t look any worse than we already did Wednesday night. We sat back and let the city burn, man. You see all that shit on TV? The thing you didn’t see was any of us on the ground kicking ass. So don’t be blaming the schoolteachers from ’Bispo. It’s on us, man.”

“Whatever,” Robleto said.

“Says ‘Protect and Serve’ on the side a the car,” Edgar added. “We didn’t do much of either.”

Bosch remained silent. Not that he disagreed with his partner. The department had embarrassed itself with its feeble response to the initial breakout of violence. But Harry wasn’t thinking about that. He had been struck by what the sergeant had said about the victim being a she. It was the first mention of that and as far as Bosch knew, there hadn’t been any female murder victims so far. This wasn’t to say that women weren’t involved in the violence that had raked the city. Looting and burning were equal-opportunity endeavors. Bosch had seen women engaged in both. The night before, he’d been on riot control on Hollywood Boulevard and had witnessed the looting of Frederick’s, the famous lingerie store. Half the looters had been women.

But the sergeant’s report had given him pause nonetheless. A woman had been out here in the chaos and it had cost her her life.

Robleto drove through the opening in the barricade and continued south. Four blocks ahead a soldier was waving a flashlight, swinging its beam toward an opening between two of the retail shops that lined the east side of the street.

Aside from soldiers posted every twenty-five yards, Crenshaw was abandoned. There was an eerie and dark stillness. All of the businesses on both sides of the streets were dark. Several had been hit by looters and arsonists. Others had miraculously been left untouched. On still others, boarded-up fronts announced with spray paint that they were “Black Owned,” a meager defense against the mob.

The alley opening was between a looted wheel-and-tire shop called Dream Rims and a completely burned-out appliance store called Used, Not Abused. The burned building was wrapped with yellow tape and had been red-tagged by city inspectors as uninhabitable. Bosch guessed that this area had been hit early in the riots. They were only twenty blocks or so from the spot where the violence had initially sparked at the intersection of Florence and Normandie, the place where people were pulled from cars and trucks and beaten while the world watched from above.

The guardsman with the flashlight started walking ahead of 6-K-16, leading the car into the alley. Thirty feet in, the guardsman stopped and held up his hand in a fist, as if they were on recon behind enemy lines. It was time to get out. Edgar hit Bosch on the arm with the back of his hand.

“Remember, Harry, keep your distance. A nice six-foot separation at all times.”

It was a joke meant to lighten the situation. Of the four men in the car, only Bosch was white. He’d be the likely first target of a sniper. Of any shooter, for that matter.

“Got it,” Bosch said.

Edgar punched his arm again.

“And put your hat on.”

Bosch reached down to the floorboard and grabbed the white riot helmet he had been issued at roll call. The order was to wear it at all times while on duty. He thought the shiny white plastic, more than anything else, made them targets.

He and Edgar had to wait until Robleto and Delwyn got out and opened the rear doors of the cruiser for them. Bosch then finally stepped out into the night. He reluctantly put the helmet on but didn’t snap the chinstrap. He wanted to smoke a cigarette but time was of the essence, and he was down to a final smoke in the pack he carried in the left pocket of his uniform shirt. He had to conserve that one, as he had no idea when or where he would get the chance to replenish.

Bosch looked around. He didn’t see a body. The alley was clotted with debris old and new. Old appliances, apparently not worthy of resale, had been stacked against the side wall of Used, Not Abused. Trash was everywhere, and part of the eave had collapsed to the ground during the fire.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Over here,” the guardsman said. “Against the wall.”

The alley was lit only by the patrol car’s lights and the guardsman’s flashlight. The appliances and other debris threw shadows against the wall and the ground. Bosch turned on his Mag-Lite and aimed its beam in the direction the guardsman had pointed. The wall of the appliance shop was covered with gang graffiti. Names, RIPs, threats—the wall was a message board for the local Crips set, the Rolling 60s.

He walked three steps behind the guardsman and soon he saw her. A small woman lying on her side at the bottom of the wall. She had been obscured by the shadow cast by a rusting-out washing machine.

Before approaching any farther, Bosch played his light across the ground. At one point in time the alley was paved but now it was broken concrete, gravel, and dirt. He saw no footprints or evidence of blood. He slowly moved forward and squatted down. He rested the heavy barrel of the six-cell flashlight on his shoulder as he moved its beam over the body. From his long experience looking at dead people, he guessed she had been deceased at least twelve to twenty-four hours. The legs were bent sharply at the knees and he knew that could be the result of rigor mortis or an indication that she had been on her knees in the moments before her death. The skin that was visible on the arms and neck was ashen and dark where blood had coagulated. Her hands were almost black and the odor of putrefaction was beginning to permeate the air.

The woman’s face was largely obscured by the long blond hair that had fallen across it. Dried blood was visible in the hair at the back of the head and was matted in the thick wave that obscured her face. Bosch moved the light up the wall above the body and saw a blood spatter-and-drip pattern that indicated she had been killed here, not just dumped.

Bosch took a pen out of his pocket and reached forward, using it to lift the hair back from the victim’s face as he played the light on it. There was gunshot stippling around the right eye socket and a penetration wound that had exploded the eyeball. She had been shot from only inches away. Front to back, point-blank range. He put the pen back in his pocket and leaned in farther, pointing the light down behind her head. The exit wound, large and jagged, was visible. Death had no doubt been instantaneous.

“Holy shit, is she white?”

It was Edgar. He had come up behind Bosch and was looking over his shoulder like an umpire hovering over a baseball catcher.

“Looks like it,” Bosch said.

He moved the light over the victim’s body now.

“What the hell’s a white girl doing down here?”

Bosch didn’t answer. He had noticed something hidden under the right arm. He put his light down so he could pull on a set of gloves.

“Put your light on her chest,” he instructed Edgar.

Gloves on, Bosch leaned back in toward the body. The victim was on her left side, her right arm extending across her chest and hiding something that was on a cord around her neck. Bosch gently pulled it free.

It was a bright orange LAPD press pass. Bosch had seen many of them over the years. This one looked new. Its lamination sleeve was still clear and unscratched. It had a mug shot–style photo of a woman with blond hair on it. Beneath it was her name and the media entity she worked for.

Anneke Jespersen

Berlingske Tidende

“She’s foreign press,” Bosch said. “Anneke Jespersen.”

“From where?” Edgar asked.

“I don’t know. Germany, maybe. It says Berlin…Berlin-something. I can’t pronounce it.”

“Why would they send somebody all the way over from Germany for this? Can’t they mind their own business over there?”

“I don’t know for sure if she’s from Germany. I can’t tell.”

Bosch tuned out Edgar’s chatter and studied the photograph on the press pass. The woman depicted was attractive even in a mug shot. No smile, no makeup, all business, her hair hooked behind her ears, her skin so pale as to be almost translucent. Her eyes had distance in them. Like the cops and soldiers Bosch had known who had seen too much too soon.

Bosch turned the press pass over. It looked legit to him. He knew press passes were updated yearly and a validation sticker was needed for any member of the media to enter department news briefings or pass through media checkpoints at crime scenes. This pass had a 1992 sticker on it. It meant that the victim received it sometime in the last 120 days, but noting the pristine condition of the pass, Bosch believed it had been recent.

Harry went back to studying the body. The victim was wearing blue jeans and a vest over a white shirt. It was an equipment vest with bulging pockets. This told Bosch that it was likely that the woman had been a photographer. But there were no cameras on her body or nearby. They had been taken, and possibly had even been the motive for the murder. Most news photographers he had seen carried multiple high-quality cameras and related equipment.

Harry reached to the vest and opened one of the breast pockets. Normally this would be something he would ask a coroner’s investigator to do, as jurisdiction of the body belonged to the County Medical Examiner’s Office. But Bosch had no idea if a coroner’s crew would even show at the crime scene and he wasn’t going to wait to find out.

The pocket held four black film canisters. He didn’t know if this was film that had been shot or was unused. He rebuttoned the pocket and in doing so felt a hard surface beneath it. He knew rigor mortis comes and goes in a day, leaving the body soft and movable. He pulled back the equipment vest and knocked a fist on the chest. It was a hard surface and the sound confirmed this. The victim was wearing a bulletproof vest.

“Hey, check out the hit list,” Edgar said.

Bosch looked up from the body. Edgar’s flashlight was now aimed at the wall above. The graffiti directly over the victim was a 187 count or hit list with the names of several bangers who had gone down in street battles. Ken Dog, G-Dog, OG Nasty, Neckbone, and so on. The crime scene was in the Rolling 60s territory. The 60s were a subset of the massive Crips gang. They were at endless war with the nearby 7-Treys, another Crips subset.

The general public was largely under the impression that the gang wars that gripped most of South L.A. and claimed victims every night of the week came down to a Bloods versus Crips battle for supremacy and control of the streets. But the reality was that the rivalries between subsets of the same gang were some of the most violent in the city and largely responsible for the weekly body counts. The Rolling 60s and 7-Treys were at the top of that list. Both Crips sets operated under kill-on-sight protocols and the score was routinely noted in the neighborhood graffiti. An RIP list was used to memorialize homies lost in the endless battle, while a lineup of names under a 187 heading was a hit list, a record of kills.

“Looks like what we’ve got here is Snow White and the Seven-Trey Crips,” Edgar added.

Bosch shook his head, annoyed. The city had come off its hinges and here in front of them was the result—a woman put up against a wall and executed—and his partner didn’t seem to be able to take it seriously.

Edgar must have read Bosch’s body language.

“It’s just a joke, Harry,” he said quickly. “Lighten up. We need some gallows humor around here.”

“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll lighten up while you go get on the radio. Tell them what we’ve got here, make sure they know it’s a member of the out-of-town media and see if they’ll give us a full team. If not that, at least a photographer and some lights. Tell them we really could use some time and some help on this one.”

“Why? ’Cause she’s white?”

Bosch took a moment before responding. It was a careless thing for Edgar to have said. He was hitting back because Bosch had not responded well to the Snow White quip.

“No, not because she’s white,” Bosch said evenly. “Because she’s not a looter and she’s not a gangbanger and because they better believe that the media is going to jump all over a case involving one of their own. Okay? Is that good enough?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

Edgar went back to the car to use the radio and Bosch returned to his crime scene. The first thing he did was delineate the perimeter. He backed several of the guardsmen down the alley so he could create a zone that extended twenty feet on either side of the body. The third and fourth sides of the box were the wall of the appliance shop on one side and the wall of the rims store on the other.

As he marked it off Bosch noted that the alley cut through a residential block that was directly behind the row of retail businesses that fronted Crenshaw. There was no uniformity in the containment of the backyards that lined the alley. Some of the homes had concrete walls, while others had wood-slat or chain-link fences.

Bosch knew that in a perfect world he would search all those yards and knock on all those doors, but that would have to come later, if at all. His attention at the moment had to be focused on the immediate crime scene. If he got the chance to canvas the neighborhood, he would consider himself lucky.

Bosch noticed that Robleto and Delwyn had taken positions with their shotguns at the mouth of the alley. They were standing next to each other and talking, probably sharing a complaint about something. Back in Bosch’s Vietnam days, that would have been called a sniper’s two-for-one sale.

There were eight guardsmen posted inside the alley on the interior perimeter. Bosch noticed that a group of people were beginning to congregate and watch from the far end. He waved over the guardsman who had led them into the alley.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

“Drummond, but everyone calls me Drummer.”

“Okay, Drummer, I’m Detective Bosch. Tell me who found her.”

“The body? That was Dowler. He came back here to take a leak and he found her. He said he could smell her first. He knew the smell.”

“Where’s Dowler now?”

“I think he’s on post at the southern barricade.”

“I need to talk to him. Will you get him for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Drummond started to move toward the entrance of the alley.

“Hold on, Drummer, I’m not done.”

Drummond turned around.

“When did you deploy to this location?”

“We’ve been here since eighteen hundred yesterday, sir.”

“So you’ve had control of this area since then? This alley?”

“Not exactly, sir. We started at Crenshaw and Florence last night and we’ve worked east on Florence and north on Crenshaw. It’s been block by block.”

“So when did you get to this alley?”

“I’m not sure. I think we had it covered by dawn today.”

“And all the looting and burning in this immediate area, that was already over?”

“Yes, sir, happened first night from what I’ve been told.”

“Okay, Drummer, one last thing. We need more light here. Can you bring back here one of those trucks you have with all the lights on top?”

“It’s called a Humvee, sir.”

“Yeah, well, bring one back here from that end of the alley. Come in past those people and point the lights right at my crime scene. You got it?”

“Got it, sir.”

Bosch pointed to the end opposite the patrol car.

“Good. I want to create a cross-hatching of light here, okay? It’s probably going to be the best we can do.”

“Yes, sir.”

He started to trot away.

“Hey, Drummer.”

Drummond turned around once more and came back.

“Yes, sir.”

Bosch whispered now.

“All your guys are watching me. Shouldn’t they be turned around, eyes out?”

Drummond stepped back and twirled his finger over his head.

“Hey! Turn it around, eyes out. We’ve got a job here. Keep the watch.”

He pointed down the alley toward the gathering of onlookers.

“And make sure we keep those people back.”

The guardsmen did as they were told and Drummond headed out of the alley to radio Dowler and get the light truck.

Bosch’s pager buzzed on his hip. He reached to his belt and snapped the device out of its holder. The number on the screen was the command post and he knew he and Edgar were about to be given another call. They hadn’t even started here and they were going to be yanked. He didn’t want that. He put the pager back on his belt.

Bosch walked over to the first fence that started from the back corner of the appliance shop. It was a wood-slat barrier that was too tall for him to look over. But he noticed it had been freshly painted. There was no graffiti, not even on the alley side of it. He noted this because it indicated that there was a homeowner on the other side who cared enough to whitewash the graffiti. Maybe it was the kind of person who kept their own watch and might have heard or even seen something.

From there he crossed the alley and dropped to a squatting position at the far corner of the crime scene. Like a fighter in his corner, waiting to come out. He started playing the beam of his flashlight across the broken concrete and dirt surface of the alley. At the oblique angle, the light refracted off the myriad surface planes, giving him a unique view. Soon enough he saw the glint of something shiny and held the beam on it. He moved in on the spot and found a brass bullet casing lying in the gravel.

He got down on his hands and knees so he could look closely at the casing without moving it. He moved the light in close and saw that it was a 9mm brass casing with the familiar Remington brand mark stamped on the flat base. There was an indentation from the firing pin on the primer. Bosch also noted that the casing was lying on top of the gravel bed. It had not been stepped on or run over in what he assumed was a busy alleyway. That told him that the casing had not been there long.

Bosch was looking around for something to mark the casing’s location with when Edgar stepped back into the crime scene. He was carrying a toolbox and that told Bosch that they weren’t going to get any help.

“Harry, what’d you find?”

“Nine-millimeter Remington. Looks fresh.”

“Well, at least we found something useful.”

“Maybe. You get the CP?”

Edgar put down the toolbox. It was heavy. It contained the equipment they had quickly gathered in the kit room at Hollywood Station once they heard they could not count on any forensic backup in the field.

“Yeah, I got through but it’s no-can-do from the command post. Everybody’s otherwise engaged. We’re on our own out here, brother.”

“No coroner, either?”

“No coroner. The National Guard’s coming with a truck for her. A troop transporter.”

“You gotta be kidding me. They’re going to move her in a fucking flatbed?”

“Not only that, we got our next call already. A crispy critter. Fire Department found him in a burned-out taco shop on MLK.”

“Goddamnit, we just got here.”

“Yeah, well, we’re up again and we’re closest to MLK. So they want us to clear and steer.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not done here. Not by a long shot.”

“Nothing we can do about it, Harry.”

Bosch was obstinate.

“I’m not leaving yet. There’s too much to do here and if we leave it till next week or whenever, then we’ve lost the crime scene. We can’t do that.”

“We don’t have a choice, partner. We don’t make the rules.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, tell you what. We give it fifteen minutes. We take a few pictures, bag the casing, put the body on the truck, and then we shuffle on down the road. Come Monday, or whenever this is over, it isn’t even going to be our case anymore. We go back to Hollywood after everything calms down and this thing stays right here. Somebody else’s case then. This is Seventy-seventh’s turf. It’ll be their problem.”

It didn’t matter to Bosch what came later, whether the case went to detectives at 77th Street Division or not. What mattered was what was in front of him. A woman named Anneke from someplace far away lay dead in front of him and he wanted to know who did it and why.

“Doesn’t matter that it’s not going to be our case,” he said. “That’s not the point.”

“Harry, there is no point,” Edgar said. “Not now, not with complete chaos all around us. Nothing matters right now, man. The city is out of control. You can’t expect—”

The sudden rip of automatic gunfire split the air. Edgar dove to the ground and Bosch instinctively threw himself toward the wall of the appliance shop. His helmet went flying off. Bursts of gunfire from several of the guardsmen followed until finally the shooting was quelled by shouting.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

The gunshots ended and Burstin, the sergeant from the barricade, came running up the alley. Bosch saw Edgar slowly getting up. He looked like he was unharmed but he was looking at Bosch with an odd expression.

“Who opened first?” the sergeant yelled. “Who fired?”

“Me,” said one of the men in the alley. “I thought I saw a weapon on the roofline.”

“Where, soldier? What roofline? Where was the sniper?”

“Over there.”

The shooter pointed to the roofline of the rims store.

“Goddamnit!” the sergeant yelled. “Hold your fucking fire. We cleared that roof. There’s nobody up there but us! Our people!”

“Sorry, sir. I saw the—”

“Son, I don’t give a flying fuck what you saw. You get any of my people killed and I will personally frag your ass myself.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Bosch stood up. His ears were ringing and his nerves jangling. The sudden spit of automatic fire wasn’t new to him. But it had been almost twenty-five years since it was a routine part of his life. He went over and picked up his helmet and put it back on.

Sergeant Burstin walked up to him.

“Continue your work, Detectives. If you need me I’ll be on the north perimeter. We have a truck coming in for the remains. I understand that we are to provide a team to escort your car to another location and another body.”

He then charged out of the alley.

“Jesus Christ, you believe that?” Edgar asked. “Like Desert Storm or something. Vietnam. What the hell are we doing here, man?”

“Let’s just go to work,” Bosch said. “You draw the crime scene, I’ll work the body, take pictures. Let’s move.”

Bosch squatted down and opened up the toolbox. He wanted to get a photograph of the bullet casing in place before he bagged it as evidence. Edgar kept talking. The adrenaline rush from the shooting was not dissipating. He talked a lot when he was hyper. Sometimes too much.

“Harry, did you see what you did when that yahoo opened up with the gun?”

“Yeah, I ducked like everybody else.”

“No, Harry, you covered the body. I saw it. You shielded Snow White over there like she was still alive or something.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He lifted the top tray out of the toolbox and reached in for the Polaroid camera. He noted that they only had two packs of film left. Sixteen shots plus whatever was left in the camera. Maybe twenty shots total, and they had this scene and the one waiting on MLK. It was not enough. His frustration was peaking.

“What was that about, Harry?” Edgar persisted.

Bosch finally lost it and barked at his partner.

“I don’t know! Okay? I don’t know. So let’s just go to work now and try to do something for her, so maybe, just maybe, somebody sometime will be able to make a case.”

His outburst had drawn the attention of most of the guardsmen in the alley. The soldier who had started the shooting earlier stared hard at him, happy to pass the mantle of unwanted attention.

“Okay, Harry,” Edgar said quietly. “Let’s go to work. We do what we can. Fifteen minutes and then we’re on to the next one.”

Bosch nodded as he looked down at the dead woman. Fifteen minutes, he thought. He was resigned. He knew the case was lost before it had even started.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

The Gun Walk

2012

1

They made him wait. The explanation was that Coleman was at chow and pulling him out would create a problem because after the interview they would have to reinsert him into the second meal block, where he might have enemies unknown to the guard staff. Someone could make a move against him and the guards wouldn’t see it coming. They didn’t want that, so they told Bosch to hang loose for forty minutes while Coleman finished his Salisbury steak and green beans, sitting at a picnic table in D yard in the comfort and safety of numbers. All the Rolling 60s at San Quentin shared the same food and rec blocks.

Bosch passed the time by studying his props and rehearsing his play. It was all on him. No help from a partner. He was by himself. Cutbacks in the department’s travel budget had turned almost all prison visits into solo missions.

Bosch had taken the first flight up that morning and hadn’t thought about the timing of his arrival. The delay wouldn’t matter in the long run. He wasn’t flying back till 6 P.M. and the interview with Rufus Coleman probably wouldn’t take long. Coleman would either go for the offer or not. Either way, Bosch wouldn’t be long with him.

The interview room was a steel cubicle with a built-in table dividing it. Bosch sat on one side, a door directly behind him. Across the table from him was an equal-size space with a matching door. They would bring Coleman through there, he knew.

Bosch was working the twenty-year-old murder of Anneke Jespersen, a photographer and journalist shot to death during the 1992 riots. Harry had worked the case and the crime scene for less than an hour back then before being pulled away to work other murders in a crazy night of violence that had him moving from case to case.

After the riots ended, the department formed the Riot Crimes Task Force, and the investigation of the Jespersen murder was taken over by that unit. It was never solved and after ten years of being classified as open and active, the investigation and what little evidence had been gathered was quietly boxed up and placed in archives. It wasn’t until the twentieth anniversary of the riots was approaching that the media-savvy chief of police sent a directive to the lieutenant in charge of the Open-Unsolved Unit ordering a fresh look at all unsolved murders that occurred during the unrest in 1992. The chief wanted to be ready when the media started their inquiries in regard to their twenty-years-later stories. The department might have been caught flat-footed back in ’92, but not in 2012. The chief wanted to be able to say that all unsolved murders from the riots were still under active investigation.

Bosch specifically asked for the Anneke Jespersen case and after twenty years returned to it. Not without misgivings. He knew that most cases were solved within the first forty-eight hours and after that the chances of clearance dropped markedly. This case had barely been worked for even one of those forty-eight hours. It had been neglected because of circumstances, and Bosch had always felt guilty about it, as though he had abandoned Anneke Jespersen. No homicide detective likes leaving a case behind unsolved, but in this situation Bosch was given no choice. The case was taken from him. He could easily blame the investigators that followed him on it, but Bosch had to count himself among those responsible. The investigation started with him at the crime scene. He couldn’t help but feel that no matter how short a time he was there, he must have missed something.

Now, twenty years later, he got another shot at it. And it was a very long shot at that. He believed that every case had a black box. A piece of evidence, a person, a positioning of facts that brought a certain understanding and helped explain what had happened and why. But with Anneke Jespersen, there was no black box. Just a pair of musty cardboard boxes retrieved from archives that gave Bosch little direction or hope. The boxes included the victim’s clothing and bulletproof vest, her passport, and other personal items, as well as a backpack and the photographic equipment retrieved from her hotel room after the riots. There was also the single 9mm shell casing found at the crime scene, and the thin investigative file put together by the Riot Crimes Task Force. The so-called murder book.

The murder book was largely a record of inactivity on the case on the part of the RCTF. The task force had operated for a year and had had hundreds of crimes, including dozens of murders, to investigate. It was almost as overwhelmed as investigators like Bosch had been during the actual riots.

The RCTF had put up billboards in South L.A. that advertised a telephone tip line and rewards for information leading to arrests and convictions for riot-related crimes. Different billboards carried different photos of suspects or crime scenes or victims. Three of them carried a photo of Anneke Jespersen and asked for any information on her movements and murder.

The unit largely worked off what came in from the billboards and other public outreach programs and pursued cases where there was solid information. But nothing of high value ever came in on Jespersen and so nothing ever came of the investigation. The case was a dead end. Even the one piece of evidence from the crime scene—the bullet casing—wasn’t of value without a gun to match it to.

In his survey of the archived records and case effects, Bosch found that the most noteworthy information gathered from the first investigation was about the victim. Jespersen was thirty-two years old and from Denmark, not Germany as Bosch had thought for twenty years. She worked for a Copenhagen newspaper called Berlingske Tidende, where she was a photojournalist in the truest sense of the word. She wrote stories and shot film. She had been a war correspondent who documented the world’s skirmishes with both words and pictures.

She had arrived in Los Angeles the morning after the riots had started. And she was dead by the end of that first night. In the following weeks, the Los Angeles Times ran short profiles of all those killed during the violence. The story on Jespersen quoted her editor and her brother back in Copenhagen and depicted the journalist as a risk taker who was always quick to volunteer for assignments in the world’s danger zones. In the four years prior to her death, she had covered conflicts in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Senegal, and El Salvador.

The unrest in Los Angeles was hardly on the level of war or some of the other armed conflicts she had photographed and reported on, but according to the Times, she happened to be traveling across the United States on vacation when rioting in the City of Angels broke out. She promptly called the photo desk at the BT, as the newspaper in Copenhagen was more commonly known, and left a message with her editor saying that she was heading to L.A. from San Francisco. But she was dead before she had filed any photos or a story with the newspaper. Her editor had never spoken to her after getting the message.

After the RCTF was disbanded, the unsolved Jespersen case was assigned to the homicide squad at 77th Street Division, the geographical policing area where the murder occurred. Given to new detectives with their own backup of open cases, the investigation was shelved. The notations in the investigative chronology were few and far between and largely just a record of the outside interest in the case. The LAPD wasn’t working the case with anything approaching fervor, but her family and those who knew Jespersen in the international journalism community did not give up hope. The chronology included records of their frequent inquiries about the case. These marked the record right up until the case files and effects were sent to archives. After that, those who inquired about Anneke Jespersen were most likely ignored, as was the case they were calling about.

Curiously, the victim’s personal belongings were never returned to her family. The archive boxes contained the backpack and property that was turned over to the police several days after the murder, when the manager of the Travelodge on Santa Monica Boulevard matched the unusual name on a riot victim list printed in the Times to the guest registry. It had been thought that Anneke Jespersen had skipped out on her room. Her belongings were pushed into a backpack found in her room and then put in a locked storage closet at the motel. Once the manager determined that Jespersen wasn’t coming back because she was dead, the backpack was delivered to the RCTF, which was working out of temporary offices at Central Division in downtown.

The backpack was in one of the archive boxes that Bosch had retrieved from case storage. It contained two pairs of jeans, four white cotton shirts, and assorted underwear and socks. Jespersen obviously traveled light, packing like a war correspondent even for a vacation. This was probably because she was heading straight back to war following her vacation in the United States. Her editor had told the Times that the newspaper was sending Jespersen directly from the States to Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, where war had broken out just a few weeks earlier. Reports of mass rapes and ethnic cleansing were breaking in the media, and Jespersen was heading to the center of the war, due to leave the Monday after the riots erupted in Los Angeles. She probably considered the quick stop by L.A. to snap shots of rioters just a warm-up for what awaited in Bosnia.

Also in the pockets of the backpack were Jespersen’s Danish passport along with several packages of unused 35mm film.

Jespersen’s passport showed an INS entry stamp at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York six days before her death. According to the investigative records and the newspaper accounts, she had been traveling by herself and had made it to San Francisco when the verdicts came down in Los Angeles and the violence began.

None of the records or news stories accounted for where in the United States Jespersen had been during the five days leading up to the riots. It apparently wasn’t seen as germane to the investigation of her death.

What did seem clear was that the breakout of violence in Los Angeles was a strong pull to Jespersen and she immediately diverted, apparently driving through the night to Los Angeles in a rental car she had picked up two days earlier at San Francisco International. On Thursday morning, April 30, she presented her passport and Danish press credentials at the LAPD media office in order to get a press pass.

Bosch had spent most of 1969 and 1970 in Vietnam. He had encountered many journalists and photographers in the base camps and out in fire zones as well. In all of them, he had seen a unique form of fearlessness. Not a warrior’s fearlessness but almost a naive belief in one’s ultimate survival. It was as though they believed that their cameras and press passes were shields that would save them, no matter the circumstance.

He had known one photographer particularly well. His name was Hank Zinn and he worked for the Associated Press. He had once followed Bosch into a tunnel in Cu Chi. Zinn was the kind of guy who never turned down an opportunity to go out into Indian country and get what he called “the real thing.” He died in early 1970 when a Huey he had jumped on for transport to the front was shot down. One of his cameras was recovered intact in the debris field and somebody at base developed the film. It turned out Zinn was shooting frames the whole time the chopper was taking fire and then going down. Whether he was valiantly documenting his own death or thinking he was going to have great shots to file when he got back to base camp could never be known. But knowing Zinn, Bosch believed he thought he was invincible and the chopper crash would not be the end of the line.

As Bosch took up the Jespersen case after so many years, he wondered if Anneke Jespersen had been like Zinn. Sure of her invincibility, sure that her camera and press pass would lead her through the fire. There was no doubt that she had put herself in harm’s way. He wondered what her last thought was when her killer pointed the gun at her eye. Was she like Zinn? Had she taken his picture?

According to a list provided by her editor in Copenhagen and contained in the RCTF investigation file, Jespersen carried a pair of Nikon 4s and a variety of lenses. Of course, her field equipment was taken and never recovered. Whatever filmed clues might have been in her cameras were long gone.

The RCTF investigators developed the canisters of film found in the pockets of her vest. Some of these black-and-white 8 x 10 prints, along with four proof sheets showing miniatures of all ninety-six shots, were in the murder book, but they offered very little in the way of evidence or investigative leads. They were simply shots of the California National Guard mustering at the Coliseum after being called into the fray in Los Angeles. Other shots were of guardsmen manning barricades at intersections in the riot zone. There were no shots of violence or burning and looting, though there were several of guardsman on post outside businesses that had been looted or burned. The photos were apparently taken on the day of her arrival, after she had gotten her press pass from the LAPD.

Beyond their historic value as documentation of the riots, the photos were deemed useless to the murder investigation in 1992, and Bosch couldn’t disagree with that assessment twenty years later.

The RCTF file also contained a property report dated May 11, 1992, and detailing the recovery of the Avis rental car that Jespersen had picked up at San Francisco International before the riots. The car had been found abandoned on Crenshaw Boulevard seven blocks from the alley where her body was found. In the ten days it had been sitting there, it had been broken into and its interior stripped. The report stated that the car and its contents, or lack thereof, had no investigative value.

What it came down to was that the one piece of evidence found by Bosch within the first hour of the investigation remained the most important hope for a resolution. The bullet casing. Over the past twenty years, law enforcement technologies had grown at light speed. Things not even dreamed about then were routine now. The advent of technological applications to evidence and crime solving had led to reassessments of old unsolved crimes everywhere on the planet. Every major metropolitan police department had teams assigned to cold case investigations. Using new technologies on old cases sometimes came down to shooting fish in a barrel: DNA matches, fingerprint matches, and ballistics matches often led to slam-bang cases against culprits who had long believed they had gotten away with murder.

But sometimes it was more complicated.

One of the first moves Bosch made upon reopening case number 9212-00346 was to take the bullet casing to the Ballistics Unit for analysis and profiling. Because of the workload backup and the nonpriority status of cold case requests coming from the Open-Unsolved Unit, three months went by before Bosch got a return. The response wasn’t a panacea, an answer that would immediately solve the case, but it gave Bosch a pathway. After twenty years of no justice for Anneke Jespersen, that wasn’t bad at all.

The ballistics report gave Bosch the name Rufus Coleman, forty-one years old and a hard-core member of the Rolling 60s Crips gang. He was currently incarcerated for murder in the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin.

2

It was almost noon by the time the door opened and Coleman was led in by two prison guards. He was locked with his arms behind his back into the seat across the table from Bosch. The guards warned him that they would be watching and then left the two of them staring at each other across the table.

“You a cop, right?” Coleman said. “You know what puttin’ me in a room with a cop could do to me, if one a these hacks put word ’round?”

Bosch didn’t answer. He studied the man across from him. He had seen mug shots but they only framed Coleman’s face. He knew Coleman was big—he was a known Rolling 60s enforcer—but not this big. He had a heavily muscled and sculpted physique, a neck wider than his head—including his ears. Sixteen years of pushing and lifting prison-yard iron had given him a chest that easily extended beyond his chin, and biceps-triceps vises that looked like they could crush walnuts to powder. In the mug shots, his hair had always had a stylized fade. Now his head was clean-shaven and he had used his dome as a canvas for the Lord. On either side he had blue prison-ink crosses wrapped in barbed wire. Bosch wondered if that was part of the lobbying effort with the parole board. I’m saved. It says so right here on my cranium.

“Yes, I’m a cop,” Bosch finally said. “Up from L.A.”

“Sher’ff’s or PD?”

“LAPD. My name’s Bosch. And Rufus, this is going to be the single luckiest or unluckiest day of your life. The cool thing is you’re going to get to pick which one of those days it is. Most of us, we never get the chance to choose between good luck and bad luck. One or the other of them just sort of happens. It’s fate. But this time you do, Rufus. You get to choose. Right now.”

“Yeah, how’s that? You the man with all the luck in your pockets?”

Bosch nodded.

“Today I am.”

Bosch had placed a file folder on the table before Coleman was brought in. He now opened it and lifted out two letters. He left the envelope, which was addressed and already stamped, in the file, just far enough away that Coleman wouldn’t be able to read it.

“So next month you’re taking your second shot at parole, I hear,” Bosch said.

“That’s right,” Coleman said, a slight tone of curiosity and concern in his voice.

“Well, I don’t know if you know how it works but the same two board members who heard your first hearing two years ago come back for your second. So you got two guys coming who already turned you down once. That means you’re going to need help, Rufus.”

“I already got the Lord on my side.”

He leaned forward and turned his head from side to side so Bosch could get a good look at the tattooed crosses. They reminded Bosch of the team logo on the side of a football helmet.

“I think you’re going to need more than a couple tattoos, you ask me.”

“I’m not asking you dick, Five-oh. I don’t need your help. I got my letters all sorted and the D-block chaplain and my good record. I even got a forgiveness letter from the Regis family.”

Walter Regis was the name of the man Coleman had murdered in cold blood.

“Yeah, how much you pay for that?”

“I didn’t pay. I prayed and the Lord provided. The family knows me and what I’m about now. They forgive my sins, as does the Lord.”

Bosch nodded and looked down at the letters in front of him for a long moment before continuing.

“All right, so you got it all set. You got the letter and you’ve got the Lord. You may not need me working for you, Rufus, but you sure don’t want me working against you. That’s the thing. You don’t want that.”

“So get to it. What’s your fucking play?”

Bosch nodded. Now they were down to it. He lifted the envelope.

“You see this envelope? It’s addressed to the parole board in Sacramento and it’s got your inmate number down here in the corner and it’s got a stamp on it all ready to go.”

He put the envelope down and picked up the letters, one in each hand, holding them out side by side for Coleman to look at and read.

“I’m going to put one of these two letters in that envelope and drop it in a mailbox as soon as I get out of here today. You’re going to decide which one.”

Coleman leaned forward and Bosch heard the shackles click against the back of his metal chair. He was so big it looked like he was wearing a linebacker’s shoulder pads under his gray prison jumpsuit.

“What are you talking about, Five-oh? I can’t read that shit.”

Bosch leaned back and turned the letters so he could read them.

“Well, they are letters addressed to the parole board. One speaks very favorably of you. It says you are remorseful about the crimes you have committed and have been cooperating with me in seeking the resolution of a long unsolved murder. It ends—”

“I ain’t cooperating with you on shit, man. You can’t put a snitch jacket on me. You watch your fucking mouth on that shit.”

“It ends with me recommending that you be granted parole.”

Bosch put the letter down and turned his attention to the other.

“Now, this second one is not so good for you. This one says nothing about remorse. It says that you have refused to cooperate in a murder investigation in which you have important information. And lastly it says that the LAPD’s Gang Intelligence Unit has gathered intel that suggests that the Rolling 60s are awaiting your return to freedom so they can once again utilize your skills as a hit man for the—”

“That’s some bullshit right there! That’s a lie! You can’t send that shit!”

Bosch calmly put the letter down on the table and started folding it for the envelope. He looked at Coleman deadpan.

“You’re going to sit there and tell me what I can do and can’t do? Uh-uh, that’s not how this works, Rufus. You give me what I want and I give you what you want. That’s how it works.”

Bosch ran his finger along the creases of the letter and then started sliding it into the envelope.

“What murder you talking about?”

Bosch looked up at him. There was the first give. Bosch reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out the photo of Jespersen he’d had made from her press pass. He held it up for Coleman to see.

“A white girl? I don’t know nothin’ about no murdered white girl.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“Then what the fuck we doin’ here? When did she get her ass killed?”

“May first, nineteen ninety-two.”

Coleman did the date math, shook his head, and smiled like he was dealing with a dummy.

“You got the wrong guy. ’Ninety-two I was in Corcoran on a five spot. Eat that shit, Dee-tective.”

“I know exactly where you were in ‘ninety-two. You think I’d come all the way up here if I didn’t know everything about you?”

“All I know is that I was nowhere near some white girl’s murder.”

Bosch shook his head as if to say he wasn’t arguing that point.

“Let me explain it to you, Rufus, because I’ve got somebody else I want to see in here and then a plane to catch. You listening now?”

“I’m listening. Let’s hear your shit.”

Bosch held the photo up again.

“So we’re talking twenty years ago. The night of April thirtieth going into May first, nineteen ninety-two. The second night of the L.A. riots. Anneke Jespersen from Copenhagen is down on Crenshaw with her cameras. She’s taking pictures for the newspaper back in Denmark.”

“The fuck she doin’ down there? She shouldn’t a been down there.”

“I won’t argue that, Rufus. But she was there. And somebody stood her up against a wall in an alley and popped her right in the eye.”

“Wadn’t me and I don’t know a thing about it.”

“I know it wasn’t you. You’ve got the perfect alibi. You were in prison. Can I continue?”

“Yeah, man, tell your story.”

“Whoever killed Anneke Jespersen used a Beretta. We recovered the shell at the scene. The shell showed the distinctive markings of a Beretta model ninety-two.”

Bosch studied Coleman to see if he was seeing where this was going.

“You following me now, Rufus?”

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

“The gun that killed Anneke Jespersen was never recovered, the case was never solved. Then four years later, you come along fresh out of Corcoran and get arrested and charged with the murder of a rival gang member named Walter Regis, age nineteen. You shot him in the face while he was sitting in a booth at a club on Florence. The supposed motivation was that he was seen selling crack on one of the Sixties’ corners. You were convicted of that crime based on multiple eyewitness testimony and your own statements to police. But the one piece of evidence they didn’t have was the gun you used, a Beretta model ninety-two. The gun was never recovered. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Not yet.”

Coleman was starting to dummy up. But that was okay with Bosch. Coleman wanted one thing: to get out of prison. He would eventually understand that Bosch could either help or hurt his chances.

“Well, let me keep telling the story and you try to follow along. I’ll try to make it easy for you.”

He paused. Coleman didn’t object.

“So now we’re up to nineteen ninety-six and you get convicted and get fifteen to life and go off to prison like the good Rolling Sixties soldier that you were. Another seven years go by and now it’s two thousand three and there’s another murder. A street dealer in the Grape Street Crips named Eddie Vaughn gets whacked and robbed while he’s sitting in his car with a forty and a blunt. Somebody reaches in from the passenger side and puts two in his head and two in the torso. But reaching in like that was bad form. The shells were ejected and they bounced all around inside the car. No time to grab them all. The shooter gets two of them and just runs off.”

“What’s it got to do with me, man? I was up here by then.”

Bosch nodded emphatically.

“You’re right, Rufus, you were up here. But you see, by two thousand three they had this thing called the National Integrated Ballistic Identification System. It’s a computer data bank run by the ATF, and it keeps track of bullets and casings collected from crime scenes and murder victims.”

“That’s fucking fantastic.”

“Ballistics, Rufus, it’s practically like having fingerprints now. They matched those shells from Eddie Vaughn’s car to the gun you used seven years earlier to wipe out Walter Regis. Same gun used in both killings by two different killers.”

“That’s some cool shit there, Dee-tective.”

“It sure is but it’s not really news to you. I know they came up here to talk to you about the Vaughn case. The investigators on that one, they wanted to know who you gave the gun to after you hit Regis. They wanted to know who the Rolling Sixties shot caller that you did the hit for was. Because they were thinking the same guy might’ve called the shot on Vaughn.”

“I think I might remember that. It was a long time ago. I didn’t tell them shit then and I ain’t telling you shit now.”

“Yeah, I pulled the report. You told them to fuck themselves and go on back home. See, back then you were still a soldier, brave and strong. But that was nine years ago and you had nothing to lose then. The thought of making parole in ten years was pie-in-the-sky stuff to you. But now it’s a different story. And now we’re talking about three murders with the same gun. Earlier this year I took the shell we picked up at the Jespersen scene in ‘ninety-two and had it run through the ATF data bank. It matched up to Regis and Vaughn. Three killings tied to one gun—a Beretta model ninety-two.”

Bosch sat back in his chair and waited for a reaction. He knew that Coleman knew what he wanted.

“I can’t help you, man,” Coleman said. “You can call the hacks back in for me.”

“You sure? Because I can help you.”

He lifted the envelope.

“Or I could hurt you.”

He waited.

“I could make sure you put in another ten years here before they even look at you again for parole. Is that how you want to play it?”

Coleman shook his head.

“And how long you think I’d last out there if I helped you, man?”

“Not long at all. I’ll give you that. But nobody has to know about this, Rufus. I’m not asking you to testify in court or give a written statement.”

At least not yet, Bosch thought.

“All I want is a name. Between you and me right here and that’s it. I want the guy who called the hit. The guy who gave you the gun and told you to take out Regis. The guy you gave the gun back to after you did the job.”

Coleman cast his eyes to the table as he thought. Bosch knew he was weighing the years. Even the strongest of soldiers has a limit.

“It’s not like that,” he finally said. “The shot caller never talks to the gunner. There are buffers, man.”

Bosch had been briefed by Gang Intelligence before making the journey. He had been told that the hierarchies of the longtime South Central gangs were usually set up like paramilitary organizations. It was a pyramid and a bottom-level enforcer like Coleman wouldn’t even know who had called the hit on Regis. So Bosch had used the question as a test. If Coleman named the shot caller, he would know Coleman was lying.

“All right,” Bosch said. “I get that. So then let’s keep it simple. Keep it on the gun. Who gave it to you the night you hit Regis and who’d you give it back to after?”

Coleman nodded and kept his eyes down. He remained silent and Bosch waited. This was the play. This was what he had come for.

“I can’t do this no more,” Coleman whispered.

Bosch said nothing and tried to keep his breathing normal. Coleman was going to break.

“I got a kid,” he said. “She’s practically a grown woman and I never seen her anywhere but this place. I seen her in prison, that’s all.”

Bosch nodded.

“That shouldn’t be,” he said. “I’ve got a daughter myself and I went through a lot of years without her.”

Bosch now saw a wet shine in Coleman’s eyes. The gang soldier was worn by years of incarceration and guilt and fear. Sixteen years of watching his own back. The layers of muscle were simply the disguise of a broken man.

“Give me the name, Rufus,” he urged. “And I send the letter. Done deal. You don’t give me what I want and you know you’ll never get out of here alive. And there’ll always be glass between you and your girl.”

With his arms cuffed behind him, Coleman could do nothing about the tear that dripped down his left cheek. He bowed his head.

“True story,” Bosch heard him say.

Bosch waited. Coleman said nothing else.

“Tell it,” Bosch finally said.

“Tell what?” Coleman asked.

“The true story. Tell it.”

Coleman shook his head.

“No, man, that’s the name. Trumont Story. They call him Tru, like T-R-U. He gave me the gun to do the job and I gave it back after.”

Bosch nodded. He had gotten what he’d come for.

“One thing, though,” Coleman said.

“What’s that?”

“Tru Story’s been dead a long time, man. Least that’s what I heard up here.”

Bosch had prepared himself on the way up. In the past two decades, the gang body count in South L.A. was in the thousands. He knew that there was a better-than-good chance he was looking for a dead man. But he also knew that the trail didn’t necessarily stop with Tru Story.

“You still going to send in that letter?” Coleman asked.

Bosch stood up. He was done. The brutish man in front of him was a stone-cold killer and was in the place he deserved to be. But Bosch had made a deal with him.

“You’ve probably thought about it a million times,” he said. “What do you do after you get out and hug your daughter?”

Coleman answered without missing a beat.

“I find a corner.”

He waited, knowing Bosch would jump to the wrong conclusion.

“And I start to preach. I tell everybody what I’ve learned. What I know. Society won’t have no problem with me. I’ll be a soldier still. But I’ll be a soldier for Christ.”

Bosch nodded. He knew that many who left here had the same plan. To go with God. Few of them made it. It was a system that relied on repeat customers. In his gut he knew Coleman was probably one of them.

“Then I’ll send the letter,” he said.

3

In the morning, Bosch went to the South Bureau on Broadway to meet with Detective Jordy Gant in the Gang Enforcement Detail. Gant was at his desk and on a phone call when Bosch arrived but it didn’t sound important and he quickly got off.

“How’d it go up there with Rufus?” he said.

He smiled as a way of showing understanding if Bosch said, as expected, that the trip to San Quentin was a bust.

“Well, he gave me a name but he also told me the guy was dead, so the whole thing could have been him playing me while I was playing him.”

“What’s the name?”

“Trumont Story. Heard of him?”

Gant just nodded, but Bosch could tell it wasn’t necessarily in confirmation of Story’s death but in how the name fit with something else. Gant turned to a short stack of files on the side of his desk. Next to it was a small black box labeled “Rolling 60s—1991–1994.” Bosch recognized it as a box that was used in the old days for holding field interview cards. That was before the department started using computers to store intelligence data.

“Imagine that,” Gant said. “And I just happen to have Tru Story’s file right here.”

“Yeah, imagine that,” Bosch said, taking the file.

He opened it directly to an 8 x 10 shot of a man lying dead on a sidewalk. There was a contact entry wound on his left temple. His right eye had been replaced with a large exit wound. A small amount of blood had oozed onto the concrete and coagulated by the time the photo had been shot.

“Nice,” Bosch said. “Looks like he let somebody get a little too close. This still an open case?”

“That’s right.”

Harry flipped past the photo and checked the date on the incident report. Trumont Story had been dead three years. He closed the file and looked at Gant sitting smugly in his desk chair.

“Tru Story’s been dead since ’oh-nine and you just happen to have his file on your desk?”

“Nope, I pulled it for you. Pulled two others as well and thought you might even want to look at our shake cards from back in ’ninety-two. Never know, a name in there might mean something to you.”

“Maybe so. Why’d you pull the files?”

“Well, after we talked about your case and the ATF matches to the other two—you know, three cases, one gun, three different shooters—I started to—”

“Actually, it’s a long shot, but it could be just two shooters. The same guy who kills my victim in ’ninety-two comes back around and hits Vaughn in ’oh-three.”

Gant shook his head.

“Could be but I’m thinking no. Too long a shot. So I was thinking for the sake of argument, three victims, three different shooters, one gun. So I went through our Rolling Sixties cases. That is, cases they were involved in on either side of the violence. As killers or the killed. I pulled cases that might be related to this gun and I got three where there were gunshot killings in which no ballistics evidence was recovered. Two were hits on Seven-Treys, and one—you guessed it—was Tru Story.”

Bosch was still standing. Now he pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Can I take a quick look at the other two?”

Gant handed the files across the desk and Bosch started a quick survey. These weren’t murder books. They were gang files and therefore abbreviated accounts and reports on the killings. The full murder books would be in the hands of the homicide investigators assigned to the cases. If he wanted more, Bosch would have to requisition them, or drop by the lead detective’s desk to borrow a look.

“Typical stuff,” Gant said as Bosch read. “You sell on the wrong corner or visit a girl in the wrong neighborhood and you’re marked for death. The reason I threw Tru Story in there was that he was shot elsewhere and dumped.”

Bosch looked over the files at Gant.

“And what’s that mean?”

“That it mighta been an inside job. His own crew. It’s unusual to see a body dump in a gang killing. You know, with the drive-bys and straight-up assassinations. Nobody takes the time to pop a guy and then move the body unless there’s a reason. One might be to disguise that it was internal housekeeping. He was dumped on Seven-Trey turf, so the thinking was he was probably hit on his own turf and then dumped in enemy territory to make it look like he strayed across the line.”

Bosch registered all of this. Gant shrugged his shoulders.

“Just a working guess,” he said. “The case is still open.”

“It’s gotta be more than a working guess,” Bosch said. “What do you know that leads you to make a guess like that? Are you working this?”

“I’m not homicide, I’m intel. I was called in to consult. But that was back then—three years ago. All I know now is that the case is still open.”

The Gang Enforcement Detail was the overarching street gang branch of the LAPD. It had homicide squads, detective squads, intelligence units, and community outreach programs.

“Okay, so you consulted,” Bosch said. “So, what do you know from three years ago?”

“Well, Story was high up in the pyramid I told you about the other day. It can get contentious up there. Everybody wants to be at the top, and then when you’re there, you gotta look over your shoulder, see who’s coming up behind you.”

Gant gestured toward the files Bosch held.

“You said so yourself when you saw the picture. He let somebody get too close. That’s for damn sure. You know how many gang murders involve contact wounds? Almost none—unless, like it’s a club shooting or something. Then only sometimes. But most of the time these guys don’t get up close and personal. This time, however, with Tru Story, they did. So the theory was at the time that the Sixties did this one themselves. Somebody near the top of the pyramid had reason to believe Tru Story had to go and it got done. Bottom line, it could be the same gun you’re looking for. There was no slug and no shell recovered, but the wound would work with a nine-mill, and now that you’ve got Rufus Coleman up there in the Q putting your Beretta model ninety-two in Tru Story’s hands, then it sounds even better.”

Bosch nodded. It made a certain amount of sense.

“And the GED never picked up on what this was about?”

Gant shook his head.

“Nah, they never got close. You gotta understand something, Harry. The pyramid is most vulnerable at the bottom. The street level. It’s also most visible there.”

He was saying that the GED’s efforts were largely focused on street dealers and street crimes. If a gang homicide wasn’t solved within forty-eight hours, there would soon be a new one to run with. It was a war of attrition on both sides of the line.

“So . . . ,” Bosch said. “Let’s go back to the Walter Regis killing, the one Rufus Coleman carried out and was convicted for in ’ninety-six. Coleman said Tru Story gave him the gun and his instructions, he did the job, and then he gave the gun back. He said that it wasn’t Story’s idea to whack Regis. He, too, had gotten the order. So, do we have any idea who it came from? Who was the shot caller for the Rolling Sixties back in ’ninety-six?”

Gant shook his head again. He was doing a lot of that.

“It was before my time, Harry. I was in a black-and-white in Southeast. And to tell you the truth, we were kind of naive back then. That was when we ran CRASH at them. You remember CRASH?”

Bosch did. The explosion of the gang population and its attendant violence occurred with the same speed as the crack epidemic in the 1980s. The LAPD in South Central was overwhelmed and responded with a program called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. The program had an ingenious acronym and some said they spent more time coming up with that than they did on the actual program. CRASH attacked the lower edges of the pyramid. It disrupted the street business of the gangs but rarely reached toward the top. And no wonder. The street soldiers who sold drugs and carried out missions of retribution and intimidation rarely knew more than what the day’s job was and rarely gave even that up.

These were young men fired in the anti-cop cauldron of South L.A. They were seasoned by racism, drugs, societal indifference, and the erosion of traditional family and education structures, then put out on the street, where they could make more in a day than their mothers made in a month. They were cheered on in this lifestyle from every boom box and car stereo by a rap message that said, fuck the police and the rest of society. Putting a nineteen-year-old gangbanger in a room and getting him to give up the next guy in the line was about as easy as opening a can of peas with your fingers. He didn’t know who the next guy in line was and wouldn’t give him up if he did. Prison and jail were accepted extensions of gang life, part of the maturation process, part of earning gang stripes. There was no value in cooperating. There was only a downside to it—the enmity of your gang family, which always came with a death warrant.

“So, what you’re saying,” Bosch said, “is that we don’t know who Trumont Story was working for back then or where he got the gun that he gave to Coleman to take out Regis.”

“Most of that’s right. Except the gun part. My guess is that Tru always had that gun and he gave it out to people he wanted to use it. See, we know lots more now than we knew then. So taking today’s knowledge and applying it to back then, it would work like this. We start with a guy at the top or near the top of the pyramid called the Rolling Sixties street gang. This guy is like a captain. He wants a guy named Walter “Wide Right” Regis dead because he’s been selling where he shouldn’t be selling. So the captain goes to his trusted sergeant at arms named Trumont Story and whispers in his ear that he wants Regis taken care of. At that point, it is Story’s job and he has to get it done to maintain his position in the organization. So he goes to one of the trusted guys on his crew, Rufus Coleman, gives him a gun, and says the target is Regis and this is the club where he likes to hang. While Coleman goes off to do the job, Story goes and gets himself an alibi because he’s the keeper of that gun. Just a little safeguard in case he and the gun are ever connected. That’s how they do it now, so I’m saying that’s how they probably did it back then—only we didn’t exactly know it.”

Bosch nodded. He was getting the sense of the fruitlessness of his search. Trumont Story was dead and the connection to the gun was gone with him. He was really no closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen than he was on the night twenty years ago when he stared down at her body and apologized. He was nowhere.

Gant identified his disappointment.

“Sorry, Harry.”

“Not your fault.”

“It probably saves you a bunch of trouble anyway.”

“Yeah, how so?”

“Oh, you know, all those unsolved cases from back then. What if the only one we closed was the white girl’s? That probably wouldn’t go over too well in the community, know what I mean?”

Bosch looked at Gant, who was black. He hadn’t really considered the racial issues in the case. He was just trying to solve a murder that had stuck with him for twenty years.

“I guess so,” he said.

They sat in silence for a long moment before Bosch asked a question.

“So, what do you think, could it happen again?”

“What, you mean the riots?”

Bosch nodded. Gant had spent his whole career in South L.A. He would know the answer better than most.

“Sure, anything can happen down here,” Gant answered. “Are things better between the people and the department? Sure, way better. We got some of the people actually trusting us now. The murder count’s way down. Hell, crime in general is way down and the bangers don’t run the streets with impunity. We got control, the people have control.”

He stopped there and Bosch waited but that was it.

“But . . . ,” Bosch prompted.

Gant shrugged.

“Lotta people without jobs, lotta stores and businesses closed up. Not a lot of opportunities out there, Harry. You know where that goes. Frustration, agitation, desperation. That’s why I say anything could happen. History runs in a cycle. It repeats itself. It could happen again, sure.”

Bosch nodded. Gant’s take on things was not far from his own.

“Can I take these files?” he asked.

“As long as you bring them back,” Gant said. “I’ll also loan you the black box.”

He reached behind him and grabbed the card box. When he turned back, Bosch was smiling.

“What? You don’t want it?”

“No, no, I want it. I’m just thinking of a partner I had once. This was way back. His name was Frankie Sheehan, and he—”

“I knew Frankie. A shame what happened.”

“Yeah, but before that, when we were partners, he always had this saying about working homicide. He said, you have to find the black box. That’s the first thing, find the black box.”

Gant had a confused look on his face.

“You mean like on a plane?”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, like in a plane crash, they have to find the black box, which records all the flight data. They find the black box and they’ll know what happened. Frankie said it was the same with a murder scene or a murder case. There will be one thing that makes it all make sense. You find it and you’re gold. It’s like finding the black box. And now here you are, giving me a black box.”

“Well, don’t expect too much outta this one. We call them CRASH boxes. It’s just the shake cards from back then.”

Before the advent of the MDT—the mobile data terminal installed in every patrol car, officers carried FI cards in their back pockets. These were merely 3 x 5 cards for writing down notes from field interviews. They included the date, time, and location of the interview, as well as the name, age, address, aliases, tattoos, and gang affiliation of the individual questioned. There was also a section for the officer’s comments, which was primarily used to record any other observations worth noting about the individual.

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had long decried the department’s practice of conducting field interviews, calling them unwarranted and unconstitutional, likening them to shakedowns. Undaunted, the department continued the practice, and the FI cards became known across its ranks as shake cards.

Bosch was handed the box, and opening it, he found it full of well-worn cards.

“How did this survive the purging?” he asked.

Gant knew he meant the department’s shift toward digital data storage. Across the board, hard files were being turned into digital files to make way for an electronic future.

“Man, we knew that if they archived these on computers, they would miss all kinds of stuff. These are handwritten, Harry. Sometimes you can’t figure out the writing to save your life. We knew most of the info on these cards wouldn’t make it across, know what I mean? So we held on to as many of those black boxes as we could. You were lucky, Harry, we still had the Sixties in a box. Hope there’s something in there that helps.”

Bosch pushed back his chair to get up.

“I’ll make sure you get it back.”

Books by Michael Connelly

Featuring Harry Bosch

The Black Echo

The Black Ice

The Concrete Blonde

The Last Coyote

Trunk Music

Angels Flight

A Darkness More Than Night

City of Bones

Lost Light

The Narrows

The Closers

Echo Park

The Overlook

Nine Dragons

The Drop

The Black Box

Featuring Mickey Haller

The Lincoln Lawyer

The Fifth Witness

Featuring Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller

The Brass Verdict

The Reversal

Featuring Jack McEvoy

The Poet

The Scarecrow

Other Novels

Blood Work

Void Moon

Chasing the Dime

Anthologies

Mystery Writers of America Presents The Blue Religion: New Stories about Cops, Criminals, and the Chase (editor)

Nonfiction

Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers

Short Stories

Suicide Run: Three Harry Bosch Stories (e-book only)

Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories (e-book only)

Mulholland Dive: Three Stories (e-book only)

The Safe Man: A Ghost Story (e-book only)

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2007 by Hieronymus, Inc.
Excerpt from The Black Box copyright © 2012 by Hieronymus, Inc.
Author photograph by Terrill Lee Lankford
Cover design by Allison Warner
Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

“Cahoots,” was originally published in Measures of Poison, edited by Dennis McMillan. “Mulholland Dive,” was originally published in Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton. It also appeared in A Prisoner of Memory, edited by Ed Gorman, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos and Otto Penzler. “Two-Bagger,” was originally published in Murderers’ Row, edited by Otto Penzler, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2002, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First e-book edition: September 2012

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ISBN 978-0-316-23367-5

Contents

Title Page
Welcome
Cahoots
Mulholland Dive
Two-Bagger
About the Author
A Preview of The Black Box
Snow White
1
2
3
Books by Michael Connelly
Copyright