The Black Box

to the hay-strewn floor next to him.
    Drummond looked down at the body. The heart’s last few contractions sent blood gushing from the bullet entrance point into the dirty straw. Drummond pocketed Bosch’s gun again and then reached down to the gun he had given Banks earlier. He picked it up.
    “Back in the car, when you were alone with him, you told him to use it on me, didn’t you?”
    Bosch didn’t answer and Drummond didn’t wait long before moving on.
    “You’d think he would’ve checked to see if it was loaded.”
    He popped out the magazine and wiggled it empty in front of Bosch.
    “You were right, Detective,” he said. “You attacked the weak link and Reggie was the weakest link. Bravo on that.”
    Bosch realized he had been wrong. This was the end. He brought his knees up and pressed his back against the beam. He braced himself.
    He then dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. He conjured up an image of his daughter. It was from a memory of a good day. It was a Sunday and he had taken her to the empty parking lot of a nearby high school for a driving lesson. It had started rough with her foot heavy on the brake. But by the time they were finished, she was operating the car smoothly and with more skill than most drivers Bosch encountered on the real streets of L.A. He was proud of her, and more important, she was proud of herself. At the end of the lesson, when they had switched seats and Bosch was driving them home, she told him she wanted to be a cop, that she wanted to carry on his mission. It had come out of the blue, just something that had developed out of their closeness that day.
    Bosch thought about that now and felt a calmness overtake him. It would be his last memory, what he took with him into the black box.
    “Don’t go anywhere, Detective. I’m going to need you later.”
    It was Drummond. Bosch opened his eyes and looked up. Drummond nodded and started heading back toward the door. Bosch saw him slide the gun he had given Banks under his jacket and into his back waistband. The ease with which he had put Banks down and the practiced motion of slipping the gun behind his back suddenly made things click into place for Bosch. You didn’t coldly dispatch someone like that unless you had done it before. And of the five conspirators, only onehad a job in 1992 in which a throw-down gun—one without a serial number—might be useful. To Drummond, his IRG gun wasn’t a souvenir of Desert Storm. It was a working gun. That was why he brought it to L.A.
    “It was you,” Bosch said.
    Drummond stopped and looked back at him.
    “Did you say something?”
    Bosch stared at him.
    “I said I know it was you. Not Cosgrove. You killed her.”
    Drummond stepped back toward Bosch. His eyes roamed the dark edges of the barn and then he shrugged. He knew he held all the cards. He was talking to a dead man and dead men tell no tales.
    “Well,” he said. “She was becoming a nuisance.”
    He smirked and seemed delighted to share confirmation of his crime with Bosch after twenty years. Bosch worked it.
    “How did you get her into the alley?” he asked.
    “That was the easy part. I went right up to her and told her I knew who and what she was looking for. I said I was on the boat and I heard about it. I said I would be her source but I was scared and couldn’t talk. I told her I’d meet her at oh-five-hundred in the alley. And she was dumb enough to be there.”
    He nodded as if to say done deal.
    “What about her cameras?”
    “Same as the gun. I threw all that stuff over the fences back there. I took the film out first, of course.”
    Bosch envisioned it. A camera landing in somebody’s backyard and being kept or pawned instead of turned in to police.
    “Anything else, Detective?” asked Drummond, clearly relishing his chance to flaunt his cleverness to Bosch.
    “Yeah,” Bosch said. “If it was you who did it, how did you keep Cosgrove and the others in line for twenty years?”
    “That was easy. Carl Junior would’ve been disowned if the old man had learned of his involvement in any of this. The others just followed along and got put down if they didn’t.”
    With that he turned and headed toward the door. He pushed it open but then hesitated. He looked back at Bosch with a grim smile as he reached over and turned out the overhead light.
    “Get some sleep, Detective.”
    He then stepped out and closed the door behind him. Bosch heard the steel slide bar strike home as