The Black Box

black-and-white 8 × 10 prints, along with four proof sheets showing miniatures of all ninety-six shots, were in the murder book, but they offered very little in the way of evidence or investigative leads. They were simply shots of the California National Guard mustering at the Coliseum after being called into the fray in Los Angeles. Other shots were of guardsmenmanning barricades at intersections in the riot zone. There were no shots of violence or burning and looting, though there were several of guardsmen on post outside businesses that had been looted or burned. The photos were apparently taken on the day of her arrival, after she had gotten her press pass from the LAPD.
    Beyond their historic value as documentation of the riots, the photos were deemed useless to the murder investigation in 1992, and Bosch couldn’t disagree with that assessment twenty years later.
    The RCTF file also contained a property report dated May 11, 1992, and detailing the recovery of the Avis rental car that Jespersen had picked up at San Francisco International. The car had been found abandoned on Crenshaw Boulevard seven blocks from the alley where her body was found. In the ten days it had been sitting there, it had been broken into and its interior stripped. The report stated that the car and its contents, or lack thereof, had no investigative value.
    What it came down to was that the one piece of evidence found by Bosch within the first hour of the investigation remained the most important hope for a resolution. The bullet casing. Over the past twenty years, law enforcement technologies had grown at light speed. Things not even dreamed about then were routine now. The advent of technological applications to evidence and crime solving had led to reassessments of old unsolved crimes everywhere on the planet. Every major metropolitan police department had teams assigned to cold case investigations. Using new technologies on old cases sometimes came down to shooting fish in a barrel: DNA matches, fingerprint matches, and ballistics matches often led to slam-bangcases against culprits who had long believed they had gotten away with murder.
    But sometimes it was more complicated.
    One of the first moves Bosch made upon reopening case number 9212-00346 was to take the bullet casing to the Firearms Unit for analysis and profiling. Because of the workload backup and the nonpriority status of cold case requests coming from the Open-Unsolved Unit, three months went by before Bosch got a return. The response wasn’t a panacea, an answer that would immediately solve the case, but it gave Bosch a pathway. After twenty years of no justice for Anneke Jespersen, that wasn’t bad at all.
    The firearms report gave Bosch the name Rufus Coleman, forty-one years old and a hard-core member of the Rolling 60s Crips gang. He was currently incarcerated for murder in the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin.

2
    I t was almost noon by the time the door opened and Coleman was led in by two prison guards. He was locked with his arms behind his back into the seat across the table from Bosch. The guards warned him that they would be watching and then left the two of them staring at each other across the table.
    “You a cop, right?” Coleman said. “You know what puttin’ me in a room with a cop could do to me, if one a these hacks put word ’round?”
    Bosch didn’t answer. He studied the man across from him. He had seen mug shots but they only framed Coleman’s face. He knew Coleman was big—he was a known Rolling 60s enforcer—but not this big. He had a heavily muscled and sculpted physique, a neck wider than his head—including his ears. Sixteen years of pushups and sit ups and whatever exercises he could manage in his cell had given him a chest that easily extended beyond his chin, and biceps-triceps vises that looked like they could crush walnuts to powder. In the mug shots, his hair had always had a stylized fade. Now his head was clean-shaven and he had used his dome as a canvas for theLord. On either side he had blue prison-ink crosses wrapped in barbed wire. Bosch wondered if that was part of the lobbying effort with the parole board. I’m saved. It says so right here on my cranium.
    “Yes, I’m a cop,” Bosch finally said. “Up from L.A.”
    “Sher’ff’s or PD?”
    “LAPD. My name’s Bosch. And Rufus, this is going to be the single luckiest or unluckiest day of your life. The cool thing is you’re going to get to pick