The Black Box

“Yeah, I get it. So when did you, personally, actually see her?”

Banks said that once their unit received orders and moved out to Crenshaw Boulevard, he saw Jespersen. She had followed the transport and was taking photographs of the men in the unit as they deployed along the boulevard.

“It was like she was this ghost following us, takin’ pictures of us. It was creepin’ me out. Henderson, too. We thought she was like going to do a story on us or something.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“No, not to me. Never.”

“What about Henderson?”

“Not that I saw, and he was with me most of the time.”

“Who killed her, Reggie? Who took her in that alley and killed her?”

“I wish I knew, man, because I would tell you. But I wasn’t up there.”

“And you five guys never talked about it after?”

“Well, yeah, we talked but it was never said who did what. Drummer took charge and said we had to make a pact never to talk about it again. He said Carl was rich and he would take care of everybody as long as we kept quiet about it. And if we didn’t, he said he’d make sure we all went down for it.”

“How?”

“He said he had the evidence. He said that what happened on the boat was motive and we’d all get charged. Conspiracy to commit murder.”

Bosch nodded. It all fit with his own conspiracy theory.

“So, who actually shot the woman? Was it Carl? Is that what you took from all that?”

Banks shrugged.

“Well, yeah, that’s what I always thought. He pushed her into that alley or lured her in there, and the others kept watch for him. They were together up there. Carl, Frank, and Drummer. But me and Henderson, we weren’t there, man. I’m telling you.”

“And then that night, Frank Dowler goes into the alley to take a leak and just happens to ‘discover’ the body.”

Banks just nodded.

“Why? Why’d he bother? Why didn’t they just leave the body there? It probably wouldn’t have been found for at least a few days.”

“I don’t know. I think they thought that if they found it during the riots, the investigation would be all messed up. You know, like it would be hurried. Drummer was a deputy up here and he knew about cop stuff. We were hearing stories about how nothing was being done about anything. It was crazy out there.”

Bosch stared at him for a long moment.

“Yeah, well, they were right about that,” he said.

Bosch paused there as he tried to consider what he still needed to ask. Sometimes when a witness opened up, there were so many aspects of a case or a crime to cover that it was hard to keep track. He remembered that what had brought him to this moment with Banks was the gun. Follow the gun, he reminded himself.

“Whose gun was used to kill her?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Not mine. Mine’s at home in a safe.”

“You all had Berettas from Iraq?”

Banks nodded and told a story about their unit driving truckloads of seized Iraqi weapons out to a hole dug in the ground in the Saudi desert so that they could be blown apart and buried. Almost all of the members of the unit working the operation cadged handguns from the trucks, including the five men who would later be on the Saudi Princess at the same time as Anneke Jespersen.

The weapons were then shipped home, hidden by Banks—the company’s inventory officer—in the bottom of the company’s equipment cartons.

“It was like the fox guarding the henhouse,” Banks said. “We were a transportation company and I was one of the guys in charge of breaking everything down and putting it in cartons. Gettin’ those guns home was easy.”

“And then you distributed them when you got back here.”

“That’s right. And all I know is that I still got mine at home in the safe, so that proves I wasn’t the one who killed her.”

“Were you all carrying them in L.A.?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t. You’d have to hide the thing the whole time.”

“But you were going to a city that you saw on TV was totally out of control. You didn’t want to bring something extra just in case?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know, man. We weren’t that tight anymore, you know? After Desert Storm we came back and we all did our own thing. And then when we got called back up for L.A., we were back together. But nobody asked nobody who was bringing their extra gun with them.”

“All right. But one more thing about those guns. Who removed the serial numbers from them?”

Banks looked confused.

“What do you mean? Nobody, as far as I know.”

“You sure about that? The gun that killed that woman in that alley had the serial number removed. None of you guys did that? You never filed down the numbers?”

“No, why would we? I mean, I didn’t. The guns were sort of like souvenirs from being over there. Like a keepsake.”

Bosch would have to think about Banks’s answer. Charles Washburn had insisted that the gun he found in his backyard already had its serial number removed. This jibed with the fact that the shooter threw the gun over the fence after the murder, indicating a strong belief that the gun could not be traced to him in any way. But if Banks was to be believed, not all the members of the Saudi Princess five removed the serial numbers after returning from the Gulf War. But at least one of them did. There was something sinister about that. At least one of the five knew the weapon was going to be more than a souvenir. It was going to be used someday.

Bosch considered what was next. It was important for him to document all parts of the story, including the ongoing and changing relationships among the five men from the ship.

“Tell me about Henderson. What do you think happened to him?”

“Somebody killed him, that’s what happened.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, man. All I know is that he told me we were clear on the boat thing because enough time had gone by, and that we had nothing to do with what happened in L.A., so we were totally in the clear there, too.”

Banks said that he never had another conversation with Henderson. A month later he was murdered in the robbery at the restaurant he managed.

“The restaurant that was owned by Cosgrove,” Bosch said.

“That’s right.”

“It said in a newspaper story at the time that he was starting to get his own restaurant going. Do you know anything about that?”

“I read that, too, but I didn’t know about it.”

“Did you think the robbery was just coincidence?”

“No, I thought the whole thing was a message. My take was that Chris thought he was in the clear but that he had something he could hold over Carl. He went to him and said, put me in business or else, and then the robbery happened and he got clipped. You know, they’ve never caught anybody for it and they never will.”

“So then who did it?”

“How the fuck do I know? Carl’s got tons of money. If he needs something done, it’ll get done, get what’m saying?”