The Black Box

stuff. I didn’teven 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’?”
    “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