The Black Box (20 page)

“This is about his daughter,” he said.

Maddie looked over the book at him.

“What do you mean?”

“This song. ‘Patricia.’ He wrote it for his daughter. He was away from her for long periods in her life, but he loved her and he missed her. You can hear that in it, right?”

She thought a moment and then nodded.

“I think. It almost sounds like the saxophone is crying.”

Bosch nodded back.

“Yeah, you hear it.”

He went back to his work. He was going through the numerous story links that Bonn had supplied in an email. They included Anneke Jespersen’s last fourteen stories and photo essays for the
Berlingske Tidende
as well as the ten-years-later story the newspaper published in 2002. It was tedious work because the articles were in Danish and he had to use an Internet translation site to piece them together in English two or three paragraphs at a time.

Anneke Jespersen had photographed and reported on the short first Gulf War from all angles. Her words and pictures came from the battlefields, the runways, the command posts, even the cruise ship used by the Allies as a floating R&R retreat. Her dispatches to the
BT
showed a journalist documenting a new kind of war, a high-tech battle launched swiftly from the sky. But Jespersen did not stay at a safe distance.
When the battle moved to the ground in Operation Desert Sabre, she found her way into the action with the Allied troops, documenting the battles to retake Kuwait City and Al Khafji.

Her stories told the facts, her photographs showed the costs. She photographed the U.S. barracks in Dhahran, where twenty-eight soldiers died in a SCUD missile attack. There were no photos of bodies, but the smoking hulks of destroyed Humvees somehow imparted the human loss. She shot the POW camps in the Saudi desert, where Iraqi prisoners carried constant weariness and fear in their eyes. Her camera caught the billowing black smoke of the Kuwaiti oil fields burning behind the retreat of the Iraqi troops. And her most haunting shots were of the Highway of Death, where the long convoy of enemy troops as well as Iraqi and Palestinian civilians had been mercilessly bombed by Allied forces.

Bosch had been to war. His was a war of mud and blood and confusion. But he saw up close the people they killed, that he killed. Some of those memories were as crystal clear to him as the photographs now on his screen. They came to him mostly at night when he couldn’t sleep or unexpectedly when some everyday image conjured up a somehow connected image from the jungles or tunnels where he had been. He knew war first hand, and Anneke Jespersen’s words and pictures struck him as the closest he had ever seen it through a journalist’s eyes.

After the cease-fire, Jespersen didn’t go home. She stayed in the region for months, documenting the refugee camps and destroyed villages, the efforts to rebuild and recover as the Allies transitioned into something called Operation Provide Comfort.

If it was possible to get to know the unseen person on the other side of the camera, the one holding the pen, it was in these postwar stories and photos. Jespersen sought out the mothers and children and those most damaged and dispossessed by war. They may have just been words and pictures but together they told the human side and cost of a high-tech war and its aftermath.

Maybe it was the accompaniment of Art Pepper’s soulful saxophone, but as he painstakingly translated and read the stories and looked at the pictures, Bosch felt that he somehow grew closer to Anneke Jespersen. Across twenty years she reached forward with her work and tugged at him, and this made his resolve stronger. Twenty years earlier he had apologized to her. This time he promised her. He would find out who took everything away from her.

The last stop on Bosch’s digital tour of the life and work of Anneke Jespersen was the memorial website constructed by her brother. To enter the site, he had to register with his email address, a digital equivalent to signing the guest registry at a funeral. The site was then divided into two sections: photos taken by Jespersen and photos taken of her.

Many of the shots in the first section were from the articles Bosch had already seen through the links provided by Bonn. There were many extra photos from the same pieces, and he thought a few of them were better than the frames chosen to run with the stories.

The second section was more like a family photo album, with shots of Anneke starting from when she was a skinny little girl with white-blond hair. Bosch moved through these quickly until he came to a series of photographs that Anneke
had taken herself. These were all shot in front of different mirrors over several years. Jespersen posed with her camera on a strap around her neck, holding it at chest level and shooting without looking through the viewfinder. Taken together, Bosch could see the progression of time in her face. She remained beautiful from image to image, but he could see the wisdom deepening in her eyes.

In the last photos it was as if she was staring directly and only at Bosch. He found it hard to break away from her stare.

The site had a comments section, and Bosch opened it to find that a flurry of comments beginning in 1996, when the website was constructed, tapered over the years to just one in the past year. The poster was her brother, who built and maintained the site. So that he could read the comment in English, Bosch copied his comment into the Internet translator he had been using.

Anneke, time does not erase the loss of you. We miss you as a sister, artist, friend. Always.

With those sentiments, Bosch clicked out of the website and closed his laptop. He was finished for the night, and though his efforts had brought him closer to Anneke Jespersen, they did not in the end give him insight into what had sent her to the United States a year after Desert Storm. It gave him no clue to why she had come to Los Angeles. There was no story on war crimes, nothing that appeared to warrant follow-up, let alone a trip to Los Angeles. Whatever it was that Anneke was chasing, it remained hidden from him.

Harry looked at his watch. The time had flown. It was after
eleven and he had an early start in the morning. The disc had ended and the music had stopped, but he hadn’t noticed when. His daughter had fallen asleep on the couch with her book and he had to decide whether to wake her to go to bed or just cover her with a blanket and leave her undisturbed.

Bosch stood up and his hamstrings protested as he stretched. He took the pizza box off the coffee table and, limping, walked it slowly into the kitchen, where he put it on top of the trash can to take out later. He looked down at the box and silently chastised himself for once again putting his work ahead of his daughter’s proper nutrition.

When he came back out to the living room Madeline was sitting up on the couch, still half asleep, holding a hand in front of a yawn.

“Hey, it’s late,” he said. “Time for bed.”

“No, duh.”

“Come on, I’ll walk you in.”

She stood and leaned into him. He put his arm around her shoulders and they walked down the hall to her bedroom.

“You’re on your own again tomorrow morning, kid. That okay?”

“You don’t have to ask, Dad.”

“I’ve got a breakfast appointment at seven and—”

“You don’t have to explain.”

At her doorway he let her go, kissing her on the top of her head, smelling the pomegranate from her shampoo.

“Yes, I do. You deserve somebody who’s more around. Who’s here for you.”

“Dad, I’m too tired. I don’t want to talk about this.”

Bosch gestured back down the hall toward the living room.

“You know if I could play that song like him, I would. Then you’d know.”

He had gone too far with it, pushing his guilt on her.

“I do know!” she said in an annoyed tone. “Now, good night.”

She went through the doorway and closed the door behind her.

“Good night, baby,” he said.

Bosch went to the kitchen and took the pizza box out to the trash can. He made sure the top was sealed against coyotes and other creatures of the night.

Before going back inside, he used his keys to open the padlock on the storage room at the back wall of the carport. He pulled the string to the overhead light and started scanning the crowded shelves. Junk he had kept through most of his life was in boxes on the dusty shelves. He reached up and brought one box down to the workbench and then reached back for what had been behind it on the shelf.

He pulled down the white riot helmet he had worn on the night he met Anneke Jespersen. He looked over its scratched and dirty surface. With his palm he wiped the dust off the sticker affixed to the front. The winged badge. He studied the helmet and remembered the nights the city came apart. Twenty years had gone by. He thought about all of those years, all that had come to him and all that had stayed or gone away.

After a while he put the helmet back on the shelf and replaced the box that had hidden it. He locked the storage room and went back inside to bed.

17

D
etective Nancy Mendenhall was a small woman with a sincere if not disarming smile. She didn’t look the least bit threatening, which immediately put Bosch on guard. Not that he wasn’t alert and ready for anything when he and Rick Jackson entered the Bradbury Building for Harry’s scheduled interview. His long history of fending off internal investigators dictated that he not return Mendenhall’s smile and that he be suspicious of her statement that she was simply seeking the truth with an open mind and no agenda dictated from above.

She had her own private office. It was small but the chairs in front of her desk were comfortable. It even had a fireplace, as many of the offices in the old building did. The windows behind her looked out across Broadway to the building that housed the old Million Dollar Theater. She put a digital recorder on the desk, which was matched by Jackson’s own recorder, and they began. After identifying all parties in the room and going through the routine admonishments about police officers giving compelled statements, Mendenhall simply said, “Tell me about your trip on Monday to the prison at San Quentin.”

For the next twenty minutes Bosch relayed the facts regarding his trip to the prison to interview Rufus Coleman about the gun that had been used to kill Anneke Jespersen. He gave her every detail he could think of, including how long he had to wait before the prisoner was brought to him. Bosch and Jackson had decided at breakfast beforehand that Bosch would hold nothing back in hope that Mendenhall’s common sense would dictate that she see the complaint from O’Toole as a bullshit beef.

Bosch supplemented his story with copies of documents from the murder book so Mendenhall would see that it was absolutely necessary for him to travel to San Quentin to talk to Coleman and that the trip was not manufactured so that he could meet up with Shawn Stone.

The interview seemed to go well, with Mendenhall asking only general questions that allowed Bosch to expand. When he was finished she narrowed her focus to specifics.

“Did Shawn Stone know you were coming?” she asked.

“No, not at all,” Bosch replied.

“Did you tell his mother beforehand that you were going to see him?”

“No, I did not. It was an impromptu thing. Like I said before, my flights were set. I had the time for a quick meet and I asked to see him.”

“But they did bring him to you in the law enforcement interview room, correct?”

“That’s correct. They didn’t tell me to go to the family and friends visitation room. They said they would bring him to me.”

This was the only place where Bosch felt he was vulnerable.
He had not asked to visit with Shawn Stone as a citizen would. He stayed in the room where they had brought in Rufus Coleman and simply asked to see another inmate—Stone. He knew that that could be seen as using his badge to get an advantage.

Mendenhall pressed on.

“Okay, and when you made the travel arrangements to go up to San Quentin, did you factor in time between flights so that you could have time to visit with Shawn Stone?”

“Absolutely not. You never know when you go up there how long it will take them to deliver your prisoner or how long the prisoner will talk to you. I’ve gone up there for what ended up being a one-minute interview, and I’ve gone up there when a one-hour interview turns into four. You never know, so you always give yourself extra time.”

“You gave yourself a four-hour window at the prison.”

“That’s about right. Plus you have the uncertainties of traffic. You have to fly up there, take the train to the rental-car center, get your car and get up to the city, get all the way across the city and then the Golden Gate, and then you have to do all of that coming back. You build in time for contingencies. I ended up with a little over four hours at the prison and I only used two waiting and then talking to Coleman. Do the math. I had extra time and I used it to see this kid.”

“Exactly when did you tell the guards you wanted to see Stone?”

“I remember looking at my watch as they took Coleman away. I saw it was two-thirty and I knew my flight was at six. I figured that even with traffic and rental-car return I still had at least an hour. I could get back to the airport earlier or I
could see if they could bring me another prisoner real quick. I chose the latter.”

“Did you think of seeing if there was an earlier flight?”

“No, because it didn’t matter. My workday would be over when I got back to L.A. I wasn’t going into the office, so it didn’t matter if I landed at five or seven. I would be done for the day. There’s no overtime anymore. You know that, Detective.”

Jackson cut in and spoke for the first time during the interview.

“Also,” he said, “changing a flight often involves an additional fee. It can be anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, and if he had made that change, he’d have to answer to the budget and travel people about that.”

Bosch nodded. Jackson was improvising on Mendenhall’s question but had come up with a good add.

Mendenhall seemed to have a list she was going through, even though there was nothing on paper in front of her. She mentally ticked off the travel question and moved on to the next.