The Black Box (16 page)

“So, now I walk?” Washburn said, his eyes warily darting toward the back door of the house.

“Not quite yet,” Bosch said. “We’ve got to go back to Seventy-seventh and do some paperwork.”

“You told me if I helped, you’d drop the charges. Cooperating witness and all that.”

“You’ve cooperated, Charles, and we appreciate it. But we never said we would drop all the charges. We said, you help us, we help you. So we go back now and I make some calls and we will improve your situation. I’m sure we’ll be able to deal with the drug charge. But the child support, you still have to deal with that. That’s a warrant issued by a judge. You’ll have to see him to take care of that.”

“It was a her, and how’m I gonna deal with that if they got me in jail?”

Bosch turned square to Washburn and separated his feet. If 2 Small was going to rabbit, he would do it now. Chu caught the movement and changed his posture as well.

“Well,” Bosch said, “maybe that’s a question you have to ask your lawyer.”

“My lawyer ain’t worth shit. I ain’t even seen him yet.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you start by getting a new one. Let’s go.”

As they were crossing the yard to the broken gate, the face of a boy appeared under the curtain of one of the house’s back windows. Washburn raised his hand and gave him a thumbs-up.

By the time they cleared 77th Street Station, leaving Washburn behind in the holding tank, Bosch knew it would be too late to go directly to the Regional Crime Lab at Cal State with the gun and bullet they had collected. So he and Chu headed back to the PAB and locked them in the Open-Unsolved Unit’s evidence safe.

Before heading home, he checked his desk for messages and saw a Post-it on the back of his chair. He knew it was from Lieutenant O’Toole before even reading it. It was one of O’Toole’s favorite means of communication. The message simply said NEED TO TALK.

“Looks like you get a face-to-face with O’Fool in the morning, Harry,” Chu said.

“Yeah, I can’t wait.”

He wadded up the message and threw it into the trash can. He wouldn’t be hurrying in to see O’Toole in the morning. He had other things to do.

12

T
hey worked like a team. Madeline made the online order and Bosch swung by Birds on Franklin to pick the food up. It was still hot when he got home. They opened the to-go boxes and slid them across the table when they had guessed wrong. They both had gotten the signature rotisserie chicken but Bosch had gone for the baked-beans-and-coleslaw combo with a BBQ dipping sauce, and his daughter had gone with a double order of mac and cheese for her sides and the Malaysian hot-and-sweet dipping sauce. The lavash bread came wrapped in aluminum foil, and a third, smaller container held the order of fried pickles that they’d agreed to share.

The food was delicious. Not as good as eating at Birds but pretty damn close. Though they sat facing each other while eating, they didn’t talk much. Bosch was consumed by thoughts regarding the case and how he would move forward with the weapon he had recovered earlier. His daughter, meantime, was reading a book as she ate. Bosch did not complain, because he considered reading while eating a far better thing than texting and Facebooking, which she usually did.

Bosch was an impatient detective. To him, case momentum was everything. How to get it, how to keep it, how to guard against being distracted from it. He knew he could turn the gun in to the Firearms Unit for analysis and possible restoration of the serial number. But most likely he would hear nothing back for weeks, if not months. He had to find a way to avoid that, to move around the bureaucratic and caseload roadblocks. After a while he thought he had a working plan.

Before long, Bosch had finished his food. He looked across the table and saw that he might get a little bit of mac and cheese if he was lucky.

“You want anymore frickles?” he asked.

“No, you can have the rest,” she said.

He ate the remaining pickles with one bite. He eyed the book she was reading. It was assigned in English lit. She was near the end. Bosch guessed she had no more than a couple chapters left.

“I’ve never seen you jump on a book like that before,” he said. “You going to finish it tonight?”

“We’re not supposed to read the last chapter tonight but there’s no way I can stop. It’s sad.”

“You mean the guy dies?”

“No—I mean, I don’t know yet. I don’t think so. But I’m sad because it will be over.”

Bosch nodded. He wasn’t much of a reader but he knew what she meant. He remembered feeling that way when he got to the end of
Straight Life
, which might have been the last book he actually read cover to cover.

She put the book down so she could work on finishing her
meal. Harry could now see that there would be no leftover mac and cheese for him.

“You know, you sort of remind me of him,” she said.

“Really? The kid in the book?”

“Mr. Moll said it’s about innocence. He wants to catch little children before they fall off the cliff. That’s the metaphor for the loss of innocence. He knows the realities of the real world and wants to stop the innocent children from having to face it.”

Mr. Moll was her teacher. Maddie had told Bosch that when they took tests in class, he climbed up and stood on his desk so he could watch the students from above and guard against cheating. The kids called him the “Catcher on the Desk.”

Bosch didn’t know how to respond to her, because he had never read the book. He had grown up in youth halls and occasional foster homes. Somehow, the assignment had never come to him. Even if it had, he probably wouldn’t have read it. He was not a good student.

“Well,” he said, “I think I sort of come in after they’ve gone over the cliff, don’t you think? I investigate murders.”

“No, but it’s what makes you want to do that,” she said. “You were robbed of things early. I think that made you want to be a policeman.”

Bosch fell silent. His daughter was very perceptive, and whenever she hit the target with him, he was half embarrassed and half in awe. He also knew that in terms of being robbed early, she was in the same boat. And she had said she, too, wanted to do what her father did. Bosch was both honored and scared by it. He secretly hoped that something else would come along—horses, boys, music, anything—and grab her intensity and interest and change her course.

So far nothing had. So he did all he could to help prepare her for the mission ahead.

Maddie cleared her tri-sectioned container and only chicken bones were left. She was a high-energy kid, and gone were the days when Bosch could expect to finish her plate. He gathered up all the trash and took it to the kitchen to dispose of. He then opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of Fat Tire left over from his birthday.

When he came back out, Maddie was on the couch with her book.

“Hey, I have to leave super-early tomorrow,” he said. “Can you get up in the morning and make your lunch and everything?”

“Of course.”

“What will you have?”

“The usual. Ramen. And I’ll get a yogurt out of the machines.”

Noodles and bacteria-fermented milk. It wasn’t what Bosch would ever be able to consider lunch.

“How are you doing for money for the machines?”

“Good for the rest of this week.”

“What about that boy who was bothering you about not wearing makeup yet?”

“I avoid him. It’s no big deal, Dad, and it’s not ‘yet.’ I’m never wearing makeup.”

“Sorry, that’s what I meant.”

He waited, but that was the end of the discussion. He wondered if her saying the bullying was no big deal was actually her way of saying it was. He wished she would look up from the book when they talked, but she was on the last chapter. He let it go.

He took his beer out to the back deck so he could look out at the city. The air was cold and crisp. It made the lights in the canyon and down on the freeway sharper and clearer. Cold nights always made Bosch feel lonely. The chill worked its way into his backbone and held there, made him think about things he had lost over time.

He turned and looked in through the glass at his daughter on the couch. He watched her finish the book she was reading. He watched her cry when she got to the last page.

13

B
osch was in the parking lot in front of the Regional Crime Lab by six o’clock Thursday. Dawn’s light was just bleeding into the sky over East L.A. The Cal State campus surrounding the building was quiet this early. Bosch took a parking space that allowed him to view all the lab workers as they parked and headed toward the building. He sipped a coffee and waited.

At 6:25 he saw the person he wanted. He left his coffee behind, got out with the gun package under his arm, and moved between cars and across lanes to head off his quarry. He got to him before the man got to the entrance of the stone-and-glass building.

“Pistol Pete, just the guy I was hoping to run into. I’m even going to the third floor.”

Bosch reached the door and held it open for Peter Sargent. He was a veteran examiner in the lab’s Firearm Analysis Unit. They had worked several cases together in the past.

Sargent used a key card to get through the electronic gate. Bosch held his badge up to the security officer behind the desk and followed Sargent through. He then followed him into the elevator.

“What’s up, Harry? It kind of looked like you were waiting for me out there.”

Bosch gave an aw-shucks-you-got-me smile and nodded.

“Yeah, I guess I was. Because you’re the guy I need on this. I need Pistol Pete.”

The
L.A. Times
had given him the sobriquet several years earlier in the headline of a story that reported his tireless work in matching a Kahr P9 to bullets from four seemingly unrelated homicides. He gave the key testimony in the successful prosecution of a mob hit man.

“What’s the case?” Sargent asked.

“A twenty-year-old murder. Yesterday we finally recovered what we’re pretty sure is the murder weapon. I need the bullet match done but I also need to see if we can raise the serial number. That’s the key thing. We get that number, and I think it leads us to the suspect. We solve the case.”

“That simple, huh?”

He reached for the package as the elevator doors opened on three.

“Well, we both know nothing is that simple. But the case has got some mojo going and I don’t want to slow it down.”

“Was the number filed or acid burned?”

They were walking down the hall toward the double-door entrance to the Firearms Unit.

“Looks to me like it was filed down. But you can raise it, right?”

“Some of the time we can—at least partially. But you know the process takes four hours, right? A half day. And you know that we’re supposed to take these in line. The wait’s running five weeks, no cutting in line.”

Bosch was ready for that.

“I’m not asking to cut in line. I’m just wondering if maybe you could look at it on your lunch break, and if it looks good, then you put your magic mix on it and check it at the end of the day to see what you’ve got. Four hours but no time taken off the clock from your regular work.”

Bosch spread his arms like he was explaining something that was so simple it was beautiful.

“The line stays intact and nobody gets upset.”

Sargent smiled as he raised his hand to punch in the combo on the unit’s door lock. He typed 1-8-5-2 on the keypad, the year Smith & Wesson was founded.

He pushed the door open.

“I don’t know, Harry. We only get fifty minutes for lunch and I need to go out. I don’t bring my lunch like some of the other guys.”

“That’s why you need to tell me what you want for lunch so I can be back here with it at eleven-fifteen.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

Sargent led him to a workstation that was mainly a padded stool and a high table that was littered with gun parts and barrels and several evidence bags containing bullets or handguns. Taped to the wall over the table was the
Times
headline:

“PISTOL PETE” MAKES STATE’S CASE

AGAINST ALLEGED MOB HIT MAN

Sargent put Bosch’s package down front and center on the table, which Harry took as a good sign. Bosch looked around
to make sure nobody else could see him trying to work Sargent. They were the only ones in the unit so far.

“So what do you think?” Bosch said. “I bet after you guys moved down here you haven’t had a pepper steak from Giamela’s since forever.”

Sargent nodded thoughtfully. The regional lab was only a few years old and it consolidated the crime labs of both the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. The LAPD’s gun unit had previously been located at the Northeast Station up near Atwater. The go-to place up there was a sub shop called Giamela’s. Bosch and whoever his partner of the moment was would always stop there, even scheduling “gun runs” around lunchtime, and often taking their take-out subs into the nearby Forest Lawn Memorial Park to eat. Bosch once had a partner who was a baseball fanatic and always insisted that they make a stop on gun runs to check Casey Stengel’s grave. If it was not properly trimmed and weeded, he would personally alert the caretakers to the problem.

“You know what I miss?” Sargent said. “I miss their meatball sub. That sauce was kick-ass.”

“One meatball sub coming up,” Bosch said. “You want cheese on that?”

“No, no cheese. But can you get the sauce on the side in a cup or something? That way it won’t get soggy.”

“Good thinking. I’ll see you at eleven-fifteen.”

Deal done, he turned to leave the unit before anything changed Sargent’s mind.

“Whoa, wait, Harry,” Sargent quickly said. “What about the ballistics matching? You need that, too, don’t you?”

Bosch couldn’t tell whether Sargent was angling for a second sandwich.

“I do, but I want the serial number first because I can go to work with that while the ballistics stuff gets done. Besides, I’m pretty sure we’ve got the match there. I have a witness who’s IDed the gun.”

Sargent nodded and Bosch started again for the door.