“What’s with the black box?” Chu said from behind him.
“Shake cards on the Rolling Sixties. I’m grasping at straws on this thing, hoping something might pop.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
As partners they were assigned the same cases but then split them up and worked them solo until it was time for field work such as surveillance or serving search warrants. Arrests were always a team job as well. This practice gave each an understanding of the other’s workload. Usually, they had coffee on Monday mornings to go over the cases and where each active investigation stood. Bosch had already briefed Chu about the trip to San Quentin when he checked in from SFO the afternoon before.
Bosch opened the box and contemplated the thick stack of FI cards. Thoroughly going through them would probably take the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening. He was fine with that but he was also an impatient man. He removed the brick of 3 ? 5 cards, and a quick survey of them told him they were stacked chronologically, covering the four years on the box’s label. He decided that he would center his initial work on the year of the Anneke Jespersen murder. He culled the cards from 1992 and started reading.
Each card took only a few seconds to digest. Names, aliases, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and assorted other details. Often the officer who conducted the interview wrote down the names of other gang members who were with the individual at the time of the field interview. Bosch saw several names repeated in the cards as either the subjects of interviews or known associates.
Bosch took every address noted on the cards—location of interview and subject’s DL address—and charted it on the Thomas Bros. map that already had the Beretta model 92 murders charted on it. He was looking for close connections to the six murders on his time chart. There were several and most of them were obvious. Two of the murders occurred on street corners where hand-to-hand drug transactions were routinely carried out. It stood to reason that patrol officers and CRASH units would roust gang members congregating at such locations.
It wasn’t until he was two hours into the project, his back and neck getting stiff with the physically repetitive work of charting the cards, that Bosch found something that put a live wire into his blood. A teenager identified on the shake card as a Rolling 60s “BG,” or baby gangster, was stopped for loitering at Florence and Crenshaw on February 9, 1992. The name on his driver’s license was Charles William Washburn. His street name, according to the card, was “2 Small.” At sixteen years old and five foot three, he had already managed to get the signature Rolling 60s tattoo—the number sixty on a gravestone signifying gang loyalty until death on his left biceps. What drew Bosch’s attention was the address on his driver’s license. Charles “2 Small” Washburn lived on West 66th Place, and when Bosch charted the address on the map, he pinpointed it to a property backing up to the alley where Anneke Jespersen had been murdered. Looking at it on the map, Bosch estimated that Washburn lived no more than fifty feet from the spot where Jespersen’s body was found.
Bosch had never worked in a gang-specific unit but he had investigated several gang-related murders over the years. He knew that a baby gangster was a kid who was primed for membership but hadn’t officially been jumped in. There was a cost of admission, and that was usually a show of neighborhood or gang pride, a piece of work, a showing of dedication. Routinely this meant an act of violence, sometimes even a murder. Anybody with a 187 on their record was elevated to full gangster status forthwith.
Bosch leaned back in his chair and tried to stretch the muscles of his shoulders. He thought about Charles Washburn. In early 1992 he was a gangster wannabe, probably looking for his chance to break in. Less than three months after the cops stopped and interviewed him at Florence and Crenshaw, a riot breaks out in his neighborhood and a photojournalist is shot point blank in the alley behind his house.
It was too close a confluence of things to be ignored. He reached for the murder book put together twenty years earlier by the Riot Crimes Task Force.
“Chu, can you run a name for me?” he asked without turning to look at his partner.
“Just a sec.”
Chu was lightning quick on the computer. Bosch’s computer skills were poor. It was routine for Chu to run names on the National Crime Information Center database.
Bosch started flipping through the pages of the murder book. It had hardly been a full field investigation but there had been a canvas of the homes along the alley’s fence line. He found the thin sheaf of reports and started reading names.
“Okay, give it to me,” Chu said.
“Charles William Washburn. DOB seven-four-seventy-five.”
“Born on the fourth of you-lie.”
Bosch heard his partner’s fingers start flying across the keyboard. Meantime, Harry found a canvas report for the Washburn address on West 66th Place. On June 20, 1992, a full fifty days after the murder, two detectives knocked on the door and talked to a Marion Washburn, age fifty-four, and a Rita Washburn, thirty-four, mother and daughter residents of the home. They offered no information about the shooting in the alley on May 1. The interview was short and sweet and took only a paragraph in the report. There was no mention of a third generation of the family being in the house. No mention of sixteen-year-old Charles Washburn. Bosch slapped the murder book closed.
“Got something,” Chu said.
Bosch rotated in his chair to look at his partner’s back.
“Give it to me. I need something.”
“Charles William Washburn, AKA Two Small—but with the number two—has a long arrest record. Drugs mostly, assaults. . . . He’s got a child endangerment on there, too. Let’s see, two installments in the penitentiary and right now out free but wanted since July on a child-support warrant. Whereabouts unknown.”
Chu turned and looked at him.
“Who is he, Harry?”
“Somebody I gotta look at. Can you print that?”
“On the way.”
Chu sent the NCIC report to the unit’s community printer. Bosch keyed the password into his phone and called Jordy Gant.
“Charles ‘Two Small’ Washburn, the two like the number two. You know him?”
“‘Two Small’ . . . uh, that sounds—hold on a second.”
The line went silent and Bosch waited almost a minute before Gant came back on.
“He’s in the current intel. He’s a Sixties guy. First row of the pyramid type of guy. He’s not your shot caller. Where’d you get his name?”
“The black box. In ’ninety-two he lived on the other side of the fence from the Jespersen crime scene. He was sixteen at the time and probably looking to get in with the Sixties.”
Bosch heard typing over the phone as he talked. Gant was doing a further search.
“We have a bench warrant issued from department one-twenty downtown,” he said. “Charles wasn’t paying his baby mama like he was supposed to. Last known address is the house on Sixty-sixth Place. But that’s four years old.”
Bosch knew a bench warrant for a deadbeat dad in South L.A. was almost meaningless. It would hardly draw the attention of a Sheriff’s Department pickup team unless there was some sort of media attention attached. Instead, it was a warrant that would sit in the data banks waiting to rise up the next time Washburn intersected with law enforcement and his name was run through the computer. But as long as he stayed low, he stayed free.
“I’m going to swing by the old homestead and see if I get lucky,” Bosch said.
“You want some backup?” Gant asked.
“No, I’ve got it covered. But what you can do is bump up the heat on the street.”
“You got it. I’ll put the word out on Two Small. Meantime, happy hunting, Harry. Let me know if you get him or you need me out there.”
“Yeah, will do.”
Bosch hung up and turned to Chu.
“Ready to take a ride?”
Chu nodded but with a reluctant frown.
“You coming back by four?”
“You never know. If my guy’s there, it might take some time. You want me to get somebody else?”
