The Black Box

the law either. A criminal conspiracy surrounding the cover-up of the crime continues that crime. You can still be charged, Banks, and you’re going to be.”

Bosch was winging it, selling the play, even if he was making it up as he went.

He had to, because there was only one outcome that would work here. He had to turn Banks, make him talk and make him willing to give testimony and evidence against the others. All the threats about prosecution and prison were ultimately hollow. Bosch had the thinnest veil of circumstantial evidence tying Banks and the others to Anneke Jespersen’s murder. He had no witnesses and no physical evidence that linked them. He had the murder weapon but could not put it in any of his suspects’ hands. Yes, he could put victim and suspects in close proximity in the Persian Gulf and then a year later in South L.A. But that did not prove murder. Bosch knew it wasn’t enough and that not even the greenest deputy district attorney in L.A. would touch it. Bosch had only one shot here and that was turning an insider out. By a trick or a play or by any means necessary, he had to get Banks to break down and give up the story.

Now Banks shook his head, but it was as if he was trying to ward off some thought or image. As though he thought if he kept his head moving, the reality of what he was facing couldn’t get in.

“No, no, man, you can’t—you gotta help me,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything but you have to help me. You have to promise.”

“I can’t promise you anything, Reggie. But I can go to bat for you with the District Attorney’s Office, and I do know this: prosecutors always take care of their key witnesses. If you want that, then you have to open up and tell me everything. Everything. And you can’t tell me any lies. One lie and it all goes away. And you go away for the rest of your life.”

He let him sit with that for a long moment before continuing. Bosch would make the case against the others here, or the chance would be gone and he would never make it.

“So, you ready to talk to me?” he finally asked.

Banks nodded hesitantly.

“Yes,” Banks said. “I’ll talk.”

31

Bosch plugged the password into his phone and turned on the recording app. He then began the interview. He identified himself and the case the interview was concerning and then identified Reginald Banks, including his age and address. He read Banks his rights from a card he kept in his badge wallet, and Banks said he understood his rights and was willing to cooperate, clearly stating that he did not want to confer with a lawyer first.

From there Banks told a twenty-year story in ninety minutes, beginning with the Saudi Princess. He never used the word rape, but he acknowledged that four of them—Banks, Dowler, Henderson, and Cosgrove—had sex with Anneke Jespersen in a stateroom on the ship while she was incapacitated by alcohol and a drug Cosgrove had slipped into her drink. Banks said Cosgrove called the drug “romp and stomp,” but Banks didn’t know why. He said it was something given to cattle to calm them down before they were trans-ported.

Bosch guessed he was talking about a veterinary sedative called Rompun. It had come up in other cases he had worked.

Banks continued, saying that Jespersen had been specifically targeted by Cosgrove, who told the others she was probably a natural blond and that he had never been with a woman like that before.

When Bosch asked if J.J. Drummond was in the stateroom during the attack, Banks emphatically said no. He said afterward that Drummond knew what happened but that he was not part of it. He said the five men were not the only men from 237th Company on leave on the ship at that time but that no one else was involved.

Banks cried as he told the story, often saying how sorry he was to have been a part of what happened in the stateroom.

“It was the war, man. It just did something to you.”

Bosch had heard that excuse before—the idea that the life-and-death pressures and fears of war should give someone a free pass on despicable and criminal actions they would never commit or even contemplate back home. It was used to excuse everything from killing villages full of people to gang-raping an incapacitated woman. Bosch didn’t buy it and thought Anneke Jespersen had had it right. These were war crimes and they weren’t excusable. He believed that war brought out the true character in a person, good or bad. He had no sympathy for Banks or the others.

“Is that why Cosgrove brought the romp and stomp overseas with him? In case the war did something to him? How many other women did he use it on over there? And what about before? What about in high school? You all went to school together, I bet. Something tells me you guys didn’t just try it out for the first time on that boat.”

“No, man, it wasn’t me. I never used that stuff. I didn’t even know he used it then. I thought she was just, you know, drunk. Drummond told me that later.”

“What are you talking about? You told me Drummond wasn’t there.”

“He wasn’t. I’m talking about later. After we got back here. He knew what happened in that room. He knew everything.”

Bosch needed to know more before he could assess Drummond’s role in the crimes against Anneke Jespersen. Keeping Banks from comfortably spinning his story, he inexplicably jumped in time to the L.A. riots and 1992.

“Tell me about Crenshaw Boulevard now,” he said.

Banks shook his head.

“What?” he said. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t? You were there.”

“I was there but I wasn’t there, you know what’m saying?”

“No, I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Well, of course, I was there. We were called out. But when that girl got shot, I was nowhere near that alley. They had me and Henderson checking IDs down at the roadblock at the other end of the formation.”

“So, you are saying now, and it’s on tape, that you never saw ‘the girl,’ Anneke Jespersen, alive or dead while you were in L.A.?”

The formality of the question gave Banks pause. He knew that Bosch was locking in his story. Bosch had explicitly informed him earlier that if he told the truth, there was hope for him. But he had warned him that if he lied even once, all bets were off and any effort by Bosch to ameliorate Banks’s situation would be stopped.

As a cooperating witness, Banks was no longer handcuffed. He brought his hands up and ran his fingers through his hair. Two hours before, he had been on a stool at the VFW. Now he was figuratively fighting for his life, a life that one way or the other would surely be different after this night.

“Okay, wait, I’m not saying that. I saw her. Yeah, I saw her, but I didn’t know nothing about her getting shot up in that alley. I wasn’t near there. I found out it was her after we got back up here like two weeks later, and that’s the truth.”

“All right, then, tell me about seeing her.”

Banks said that shortly after the 237th arrived in Los Angeles for riot duty, Henderson informed the others that he had seen the “blond girl” from the boat with the rest of the press outside the Coliseum, where the California National Guard units were mustering after driving down in a long truck line from the Central Valley.

At first the others didn’t believe Henderson, but Cosgrove sent Drummond to check the media line because he hadn’t been in the room on the Saudi Princess and wouldn’t be recognized.

“Yeah, but how would he recognize her?” Bosch asked.

“He had seen her on the boat, so he knew what she looked like. He just hadn’t gone to the room with us. He said four was a crowd.”

Bosch computed that and told Banks to go on with the story. He said that Drummond came back from the media line and reported that the woman was indeed there.

“I remember we were saying, ‘What does she want?’ and ‘How the hell did she find us?’ But Cosgrove wasn’t worried. He said she couldn’t prove anything. This whole thing was before DNA and CSI stuff like that, get what’m sayin’?”