The Black Box

“I have eight o’clock open. Will that work?”

“Sure, your place or mine?”

“I would prefer that you come here, unless that’s a problem.”

She was talking about the Bradbury Building, where most of PSB was located.

“No problem, Mendenhall. I’ll be there with a rep.”

“Very good. We’ll see if we can get this handled. I ask one last thing, Detective.”

“What’s that?”

“That you refer to me as Detective or Detective Mendenhall. It is disrespectful to call me by just my last name. I would rather our relationship be professional and respectful from the start.”

Bosch had just gotten to his cubicle and saw Chu at his station. He realized he never called Chu by his first name or his rank. Was he being disrespectful all this time?

“You got it, Detective,” he said. “I’ll see you at eight.”

He disconnected the call. Before sitting down, he leaned over the partition into Rick Jackson’s cubicle.

“I have an interview over at the Bradbury tomorrow at eight. Shouldn’t take too long. The League hasn’t called me back yet. You want to come be my rep?”

While the League provided defense reps for PSB interviews, any officer could act as a defense rep as long as he or she didn’t have a part in the investigation at hand.

He chose Jackson because he had been around and he had a natural take-no-shit quality about his face. It was always an intimidating force during an interrogation of a suspect. On occasion Bosch had used him to sit in during an interview. Jackson’s silent stare often unnerved the suspect. Bosch thought Jackson might give him an advantage when he sat down across from Detective Mendenhall.

“Sure, I’m in,” Jackson said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Let’s meet at seven at the Dining Car. We’ll eat and I’ll go over everything.”

“You got it.”

Bosch sat down in his seat and realized he might have just insulted Chu by not asking him to stand as his rep. He turned in his seat to address his partner.

“Hey, uh, Chu—uh, David.”

Chu turned around.

“I can’t use you as my rep because Mendenhall is probably going to have to talk to you about the case. You’ll be a witness.”

Chu nodded.

“You understand?”

“Sure, Harry. I understand.”

“And me calling you by your last name all the time, that was no disrespect. It’s just what I do with people.”

Now Chu seemed confused by Bosch’s half-assed apology.

“Sure, Harry,” he said again.

“So, we’re good?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

“Good.”

Part Two

WORDS AND PICTURES

16

Bosch had begun making his way through the Art Pepper recordings his daughter had given him for his birthday. He was on volume three and listening to a stunning version of “Patricia” recorded three decades earlier at a club in Croydon, England. It was during Pepper’s comeback period after the years of drug addiction and incarceration. On this night in 1981 he had everything working. On this one song, Bosch believed he was proving that no one would ever play better. Harry wasn’t exactly sure what the word ethereal meant, but it was the word that came to mind. The song was perfect, the saxophone was perfect, the interplay and communication between Pepper and his three band mates was as perfect and orchestrated as the movement of four fingers on a hand. There were a lot of words used to describe jazz music. Bosch had read them over the years in the magazines and in the liner notes of records. He didn’t always understand them. He just knew what he liked, and this was it. Powerful and relentless, and sometimes sad.

He found it hard to concentrate on the computer screen as the song played, the band going on almost twenty minutes with it. He had “Patricia” on other records and CDs. It was one of Pepper’s signatures. But he had never heard it played with the same sinewy passion. He looked at his daughter, who was lying on the couch reading a book. Another school assignment. This one was called The Fault in Our Stars.

“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