“Oh, yeah, it worked. Worked fine. I fired it right there, put a slug in one of the fence posts. Surprised me, I was hardly pullin’ the trigger.”
“Your mother hear the shot?”
“Yeah, she came out but I’d put it in my pants under my shirt. I told her it was the lawn mower backfiring.”
Bosch wondered about the slug in the fence post. If it was still there, it would further corroborate the story. He moved on.
“All right, so you said your mother had you locked up in your room during the riots, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, so when did you find the gun? The riots pretty much ended after three days. May first was the last night. Do you remember when you found the gun?”
Washburn shook his head like he was annoyed.
“That’s too far back, man. I can’t remember what day. I just remember I found the gun is all.”
“Why did you give it to Tru Story?”
“’Cause he was the street boss. I give it to him.”
“You mean he was a boss in the Rolling Sixties Crips, correct?”
“Yes, correct!”
He said it in a mocking white man’s voice. It was clear he wanted to talk to Gant and not Bosch. Harry glanced toward Gant and he took the lead back.
“You said Trumond. You mean Trumont, right? Trumont Story?”
“I guess, man. I didn’t know him that well.”
“Why’d you give him the gun, then?”
“Because I wanted to know him. I wanted to move up the ladder, you know?”
“And did you?”
“Not really. I took a bust and got sent to JD up in Sylmar. I was there for almost two years. After that I sort of missed my chance.”
One of the largest juvenile detention centers was in Sylmar in the northern suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. The juvy courts often sent underage criminals to centers far from their home neighborhoods in an effort to break their connection to gangs.
“Did you ever see that weapon again?” Gant asked.
“Nope, never did,” Washburn answered.
“What about Tru Story?” Bosch asked. “Did you see him again?”
“I’d see him on the street but we never were together. We never spoke.”
Bosch waited a moment to see if he would say more. He didn’t.
“Okay, sit tight, Two Small,” he said.
He tapped Gant on the shoulder as he stood up. The detectives left the interrogation room, closed the door, and huddled together outside. Gant shrugged his shoulders and spoke first.
“It hangs together,” he said.
Bosch nodded reluctantly. Washburn’s story did have the ring of truth. But the ring didn’t matter. He had admitted finding a gun in his backyard. It was most likely the gun Bosch was looking for, but there wasn’t any evidence of that, just as there wasn’t any evidence that 2 Small Washburn’s involvement in Anneke Jespersen’s murder was anything more than what he had admitted to.
“What do you want to do with him?” Gant asked.
“I’m done with him. Book ’im on the warrant and the weed, but let him know that it wasn’t Latitia or anybody else who talked to us.”
“Will do. Sorry it didn’t work out, Harry.”
“Yeah, I was thinking . . .”
“Thinking what?”
“Trumont Story. What if he wasn’t whacked with his own gun?”
Gant cupped his elbow in one hand and rubbed his chin with the other.
“That was almost three years ago.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a long shot. But there was a five-year stretch in there when Story was up in Pelican Bay and nobody used the gun. It stayed hidden.”
Gant nodded.
“He lived on Seventy-third. About a year ago I had occasion to be in that neighborhood on a community relations thing we were running. I knocked on that door and his baby mama was still living in the house.”
Bosch nodded.
“The team that caught his killing, you know if they ever checked the house?”
Gant shook his head.
“I don’t know, Harry, but I’m thinking probably not too closely. Not with a warrant, I mean. I can check.”
Bosch nodded and started toward the squad room door.
“Let me know,” he said. “If they didn’t go through that place, then maybe I will.”
“It might be worth a shot,” Gant said. “But you should know, Story’s baby mama was a hard-core gang girl. Hell, she’d probably be on top of the pyramid if she had the right plumbing. She’s tough.”
Bosch thought about that for a moment.
“We might be able to make that work for us. I don’t know if there is going to be enough here to get paper.”
He was talking about the necessary probable cause to get a search warrant for Trumont Story’s former home almost three years after he was dead. The best way in would be without having to get a warrant signed by a judge. The best way would be to be invited. And given the right play, sometimes the least likely invitation can be offered by the least likely individual.
“I’ll work on a script, Harry,” Gant offered.
“Okay. Let me know.”
10
Chu was at his computer working on a Word document when Bosch got back to the squad room.
“What’s that?”
“Parole letter on the Clancy case.”
Bosch nodded. He was glad Chu was getting the letter done. The department was notified whenever a murderer convicted in one of its cases was coming up for a parole hearing. It was not required but the investigators who worked the case were invited to send letters of objection or recommendation to the parole board. The workload often prevented this from getting done but Bosch was usually a stickler about it. He liked to write letters that described the brutality of the murder in detail, hoping that the horror of the crimes would help sway the board to deny parole. He was attempting to pass this practice on to his partner and had given Chu the task of writing the letter on the Clancy murder, a particularly heinous sexually motivated stabbing.
“I should have something for you to read tomorrow.”
“Good,” Bosch said. “Did you run those names I gave you?”
“Yeah, not much there. Jimenez was totally clean and Banks just has a DUI conviction.”
“You sure?”
“That’s all I found, Harry. Sorry.”
Disappointed, Bosch pulled his chair out and sat down at his desk. It wasn’t that he expected the Alex White mystery to be solved on the spot, but he had been hoping for something more than a drunk driving conviction. Something he could chew on.
“You’re welcome,” Chu said.
Bosch looked back at him and turned his disappointment into annoyance.
“If you want to be thanked all the time for just doing your job, then you picked the wrong career.”
Chu didn’t respond. Bosch fired up his computer and was greeted with an email from Mikkel Bonn of the
