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 probably how they 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 lotta 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 keep these files awhile?” 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 brings it all together and makes sense of things. 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 ? 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.”
4
Bosch was back at the Open-Unsolved Unit before noon. The place was largely deserted, as most detectives came in early and took their lunch break early. There was no sign of David Chu, Harry’s partner, but that wasn’t a concern. Chu could be at lunch or anywhere in the building or the outlying crime labs in the area. Bosch knew that Chu was working on a number of submissions, that is, the early stages of cases in which genetic, fingerprint, or ballistics evidence is prepared and submitted to various labs for analysis and comparison.
Bosch put the files and the black box down on his desk and picked up the phone to see if he had any messages. He was clear. He was just settling in and getting ready to start looking through the material he had
