The Black Box

should’ve told you,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s justthat I wasn’t even sure I was going to get the time to try to see him. With the budget cutbacks, they don’t allow overnights up there. You gotta go up and back the same day and so I wasn’t sure.”
    “How did he look?”
    Spoken with a mother’s fear in her voice.
    “I guess he looked all right. I asked him if he was okay and he said he was fine. I didn’t see anything that concerned me, Hannah.”
    Her son lived in a place where you were either predator or prey. He wasn’t a big man. His crime had involved drugging his victim, not overpowering her. The tables were turned on him in prison and he was often preyed upon. Hannah had told Bosch all of this.
    “Look, we don’t have to talk about it,” Bosch said. “I just wanted you to know. It wasn’t really planned. I had the extra time and I just asked to see him and they set it up for me.”
    She didn’t respond at first, but then her words came out with a tone of urgency.
    “No, we do have to talk about it. I want to know everything he said, everything you saw. He’s my son, Harry. No matter what he did, he’s my son.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “He said to tell you he loves you.”

5
    T he OU squad room was in full form when Bosch returned after lunch. The black box was where he had left it, and his partner was at his desk in the cubicle, working the keyboard on his computer. He spoke without looking up from his screen.
    “Harry, how goes it?”
    “It goes.”
    Bosch sat down, waiting for Chu to mention his birthday, but he didn’t. The cubicle was set up with their desks on either side so they worked back-to-back. In the old Parker Center, where Bosch had spent most of his career, partners faced each other across desks pushed up against each other. Bosch liked the back-to-back setup better. It gave him more privacy.
    “What’s with the black box?” Chu said from behind him.
    “Shake cards on the Rolling Sixties. I’m grasping at straws on this thing, hoping something might pop.”
    “Yeah, good luck with that.”
    As partners they were assigned the same cases but then split them up and worked them solo until it was time for field work such as surveillance or serving search warrants. Arrests werealways a team job as well. This practice gave each an understanding of the other’s workload. Usually, they had coffee on Monday mornings to go over the cases and where each active investigation stood. Bosch had already briefed Chu about the trip to San Quentin when he checked in from SFO the afternoon before.
    Bosch opened the box and contemplated the thick stack of FI cards. Thoroughly going through them would probably take the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening. He was fine with that but he was also an impatient man. He removed the brick of 3 × 5 cards, and a quick survey of them told him they were stacked chronologically, covering the four years on the box’s label. He decided that he would center his initial work on the year of the Anneke Jespersen murder. He culled the cards from 1992 and started reading.
    Each card took only a few seconds to digest. Names, aliases, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and assorted other details. Often the officer who conducted the interview wrote down the names of other gang members who were with the individual at the time of the field interview. Bosch saw several names repeated in the cards as either the subjects of interviews or known associates.
    Bosch took every address noted on the cards—location of interview and subject’s DL address—and charted it on the Thomas Bros. map that already had the Beretta model 92 murders charted on it. He was looking for close connections to the six murders on his time chart. There were several and most of them were obvious. Two of the murders occurred on street corners where hand-to-hand drug transactions were routinely carried out. It stood to reason that patrol officersand CRASH units would roust gang members congregating at such locations.
    It wasn’t until he was two hours into the project, his back and neck getting stiff with the physically repetitive work of charting the cards, that Bosch found something that put a live wire into his blood. A teenager identified on the shake card as a Rolling 60s “BG,” or baby gangster, was stopped for loitering at Florence and Crenshaw on February 9, 1992. The name on his driver’s license was Charles William Washburn. His street name, according to