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
Detective 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.
