The Black Box

connotations.
    “Harry, how’d it go up there?” O’Toole asked.
    Before authorizing the trip to San Quentin, O’Toole had been fully briefed on the gun connection between the Jespersen case and the Walter Regis murder carried out by Rufus Coleman.
    “Good and bad,” Bosch answered. “I got a name from Coleman. One Trumont Story. Coleman said Story supplied the gun he used for the Regis hit and took it back right after. The catch is that I can’t go to Story because Story is now dead—got whacked himself in ’oh-nine. So I spent the morning at South Bureau and did some checking to confirm the timeline and that Story does fit in. I think Coleman was telling me the truth and not just trying to lay it all off on a dead guy. So it wasn’t a wasted trip but I’m not really any closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen.”
    He gestured to the files and the shake box on his desk.
    O’Toole nodded thoughtfully, folded his arms, and sat on the edge of Dave Chu’s desk, right on the spot where Chu liked to put his coffee. If Chu had been there, he wouldn’t have liked that.
    “I hate hitting the travel budget for a bum trip,” he said.
    “It wasn’t a bum trip,” Bosch said. “I just told you that I got a name and the name fits.”
    “Well, then, maybe we should just put a bow on it and call it a day,” O’Toole said.
    “Putting a bow on a case” referred to C-Bow, or CBO, which meant a case was cleared by other means. It was a designation used to formally close a case when the solution isknown but does not result in an arrest or prosecution because the suspect is dead or cannot be brought to justice for other reasons. In the Open-Unsolved Unit, cases frequently were “cleared by other” because they were often decades old and matches of fingerprints or DNA led to suspects long deceased. If the follow-up investigation puts the suspect in the time and location of the crime, then the unit supervisor has the authority to clear the case and send it to the District Attorney’s Office for its rubber stamp.
    But Bosch wasn’t ready to go there with Jespersen yet.
    “No, we don’t have a CBO here,” Bosch said firmly. “I can’t put the gun in Trumont Story’s hands until four years after my case. That gun could have been in a lot of other hands before that.”
    “Maybe so,” O’Toole said. “But I don’t want you turning this into a hobby. We’ve got six thousand other cases. Case management comes down to time management.”
    He put his wrists together as if to say he was handcuffed by the constraints of the job. It was this officious side of O’Toole that Bosch had so far been unable to warm up to. He was an administrator, not a cop’s cop. That was why “The Tool” was the first nickname he had received.
    “I know that, Lieutenant,” Bosch said. “My plan is to work with these materials, and if nothing comes of it, then it will be time to look at the next case. But with what we’ve got now, this isn’t a CBO. So it won’t go toward fattening our stats. It will go back as unsolved.”
    Bosch was trying to make it clear with the new man that he wasn’t going to play the statistics game. A case was cleared if Bosch was convinced it was truly cleared. And putting themurder weapon in a gangbanger’s hand four years after the fact was hardly good enough.
    “Well, let’s see what you get when you look it all over,” O’Toole said. “I’m not pushing for something that’s not there. But I was brought in here to push the unit. We need to close more cases. To do that we need to work more cases. So, what I’m saying is that if it’s not there on this one, then move on to the next one, because the next one might be the one we can close. No hobby cases, Harry. When I came in here, too many of you guys were working hobby cases. We don’t have the time anymore.”
    “Got it,” Bosch said, his voice clipped.
    O’Toole started to head back toward his office. Bosch threw a mock salute at his back and noticed the coffee ring on the seat of his pants.
    O’Toole had recently replaced a lieutenant who liked to sit in her office with the blinds closed. Her interactions with the squad were minimal. O’Toole was the opposite. He was hands-on to a sometimes overbearing degree. It didn’t help that he was younger than half the squad, and almost two decades younger than Bosch. His overmanagement of the largely veteran crew of detectives in the unit was unnecessary and Bosch found