The Black Box

the card, was “2 Small.” At sixteen years old and five foot three, he had already managed to get the signature Rolling 60s tattoo—the number sixty on a gravestone signifying gang loyalty until death on his left biceps. What drew Bosch’s attention was the address on his driver’s license. Charles “2 Small” Washburn lived on West 66th Place, and when Bosch charted the address on the map, he pinpointed it to a property backing up to the alley where Anneke Jespersen had been murdered. Looking at it on the map, Bosch estimated that Washburn lived no more than fifty feet from the spot where Jespersen’s body was found.
    Bosch had never worked in a gang-specific unit but he had investigated several gang-related murders over the years. He knew that a baby gangster was a kid who was primed for membership but hadn’t officially been jumped in. There was a cost of admission, and that was usually a show of neighborhood or gang pride, a piece of work, a showing of dedication. Routinely this meant an act of violence, sometimes even a murder. Anybody with a 187 on their record was elevated to full gangster status forthwith.
    Bosch leaned back in his chair and tried to stretch the musclesof his shoulders. He thought about Charles Washburn. In early 1992 he was a gangster wannabe, probably looking for his chance to break in. Less than three months after the cops stopped and interviewed him at Florence and Crenshaw, a riot breaks out in his neighborhood and a photojournalist is shot point blank in the alley behind his house.
    It was too close a confluence of things to be ignored. He reached for the murder book put together twenty years earlier by the Riot Crimes Task Force.
    “Chu, can you run a name for me?” he asked without turning to look at his partner.
    “Just a sec.”
    Chu was lightning quick on the computer. Bosch’s computer skills were poor. It was routine for Chu to run names on the National Crime Information Center database.
    Bosch started flipping through the pages of the murder book. It had hardly been a full field investigation but there had been a canvas of the homes along the alley’s fence line. He found the thin sheaf of reports and started reading names.
    “Okay, give it to me,” Chu said.
    “Charles William Washburn. DOB seven-four-seventy-five.”
    “Born on the fourth of you-lie.”
    Bosch heard his partner’s fingers start flying across the keyboard. Meantime, Harry found a canvas report for the Washburn address on West 66th Place. On June 20, 1992, a full fifty days after the murder, two detectives knocked on the door and talked to a Marion Washburn, age fifty-four, and a Rita Washburn, thirty-four, mother and daughter residents of the home. They offered no information about the shooting in the alleyon May 1. The interview was short and sweet and took only a paragraph in the report. There was no mention of a third generation of the family being in the house. No mention of sixteen-year-old Charles Washburn. Bosch slapped the murder book closed.
    “Got something,” Chu said.
    Bosch rotated in his chair to look at his partner’s back.
    “Give it to me. I need something.”
    “Charles William Washburn, AKA Two Small—but with the number two—has a long arrest record. Drugs mostly, assaults. . . . He’s got a child endangerment on there, too. Let’s see, two installments in the penitentiary and right now out free but wanted since July on a child-support warrant. Whereabouts unknown.”
    Chu turned and looked at him.
    “Who is he, Harry?”
    “Somebody I gotta look at. Can you print that?”
    “On the way.”
    Chu sent the NCIC report to the unit’s community printer. Bosch keyed the password into his phone and called Jordy Gant.
    “Charles ‘Two Small’ Washburn, the two like the number two. You know him?”
    “‘Two Small’ . . . uh, that sounds—hold on a second.”
    The line went silent and Bosch waited almost a minute before Gant came back on.
    “He’s in the current intel. He’s a Sixties guy. First row of the pyramid type of guy. He’s not your shot caller. Where’d you get his name?”
    “The black box. In ’ninety-two he lived on the other side ofthe fence from the Jespersen crime scene. He was sixteen at the time and probably looking to get in with the Sixties.”
    Bosch heard typing over the phone as he talked. Gant was doing a further search.
    “We have a bench warrant issued from department one-twenty downtown,” he said. “Charles wasn’t paying