The Black Box

envelope.
    “What murder you talking about?”
    Bosch looked up at him. There was the first give. Bosch reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out the photo of Jespersen he’d had made from her press pass. He held it up for Coleman to see.
    “A white girl? I don’t know nothin’ about no murdered white girl.”
    “I didn’t say you did.”
    “Then, what the fuck we doin’ here? When did she get her ass killed?”
    “May first, nineteen ninety-two.”
    Coleman did the date math, shook his head, and smiled like he was dealing with a dummy.
    “You got the wrong guy. ’Ninety-two I was in Corcoran on a five spot. Eat that shit, Dee -tective.”
    “I know exactly where you were in ’ninety-two. You think I’d come all the way up here if I didn’t know everything about you?”
    “All I know is that I was nowhere near some white girl’s murder.”
    Bosch shook his head as if to say he wasn’t arguing that point.
    “Let me explain it to you, Rufus, because I’ve got somebody else I want to see in here and then a plane to catch. You listening now?”
    “I’m listening. Let’s hear your shit.”
    Bosch held the photo up again.
    “So we’re talking twenty years ago. The night of April thirtieth going into May first, nineteen ninety-two. The second night of the L.A. riots. Anneke Jespersen from Copenhagen is down on Crenshaw with her cameras. She’s taking pictures for the newspaper back in Denmark.”
    “The fuck she doin’ down there? She shouldn’t a been down there.”
    “I won’t argue that, Rufus. But she was there. And somebody stood her up against a wall in an alley and popped her right in the eye.”
    “Wadn’t me and I don’t know a thing about it.”
    “I know it wasn’t you. You’ve got the perfect alibi. You were in prison. Can I continue?”
    “Yeah, man, tell your story.”
    “Whoever killed Anneke Jespersen used a Beretta. We recovered the shell at the scene. The shell showed the distinctive markings of a Beretta model ninety-two.”
    Bosch studied Coleman to see if he was seeing where this was going.
    “You following me now, Rufus?”
    “I’m following but I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
    “The gun that killed Anneke Jespersen was never recovered, the case was never solved. Then four years later, you come along fresh out of Corcoran and get arrested and charged with the murder of a rival gang member named Walter Regis, age nineteen. You shot him in the face while he was sitting in a booth at a club on Florence. The supposed motivation was that he was seen selling crack on one of the Sixties’ corners. You were convicted of that crime based on multiple eyewitness testimony and your own statements to police. But the one piece of evidence they didn’t have was the gun you used, a Beretta model ninety-two. The gun was never recovered. You see where I’m going with this?”
    “Not yet.”
    Coleman was starting to dummy up. But that was okay with Bosch. Coleman wanted one thing: to get out of prison. He would eventually understand that Bosch could either help or hurt his chances.
    “Well, let me keep telling the story and you try to follow along. I’ll try to make it easy for you.”
    He paused. Coleman didn’t object.
    “So now we’re up to nineteen ninety-six and you get convicted and get fifteen to life and go off to prison like the good Rolling Sixties soldier that you were. Another seven years go by and now it’s two thousand three and there’s another murder. A street dealer in the Grape Street Crips named Eddie Vaughn gets whacked and robbed while he’s sitting in his car with a forty and a blunt. Somebody reaches in from the passenger side and puts two in his head and two in the torso. But reaching in like that was bad form. The shells were ejected and they bounced all around inside thecar. No time to grab them all. The shooter gets two of them and just runs off.”
    “What’s it got to do with me, man? I was up here by then.”
    Bosch nodded emphatically.
    “You’re right, Rufus, you were up here. But you see, by two thousand three they had this thing called the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. It’s a computer data bank run by the ATF, and it keeps track of bullets and casings collected from crime scenes and murder victims.”
    “That’s fucking fantastic.”
    “Ballistics, Rufus, it’s practically like having fingerprints now. They matched those shells from Eddie Vaughn’s car to the