The Black Box

shrugged.
    “Knock yourself out but he ain’t out there.” “Is the gate at the back unlocked?”
    “It’s broke.”
    “Okay, we’ll go around.”
    Bosch and Chu left the front step and walked over to the driveway, which went down the side of the house and ended at a wooden fence. Chu had to lift the gate and hold it up on one rusted hinge to open it. They then moved into a backyard strewn with old and broken toys and household furniture. There was a dishwasher lying on its side, and it reminded Bosch of being in the alley twenty years before, when appliances beyond saving were stacked there.
    The left side of the property was the rear wall of the formertire rims store on Crenshaw. Bosch went to the rear fence line that separated the yard from the alley. It was too tall for him to see over, so he pulled over a tricycle that was missing a rear wheel.
    “Careful, Harry,” Chu said.
    Bosch put one foot on the seat of the trike and pulled himself up on the fence. He looked across the alley to the spot where Anneke Jespersen had been murdered twenty years before.
    Bosch dropped down to the ground and started walking the fence line, pressing his hand on each plank, looking for a loose one or maybe even a trapdoor that would give someone quick access to and from the alley. Two-thirds of the way down, a plank that he pressed on popped back. He stopped and looked closer and then pulled the board toward himself. It was not attached to the upper or lower cross-braces. He easily pulled the plank out of the fence, creating a ten-inch-wide opening.
    Chu came up next to him and studied the opening.
    “Somebody small could easily slide through there and have access to the alley,” he said.
    “What I was thinking,” Bosch replied.
    It was stating the obvious. The question was whether the plank had come loose over time or had been a hidden portal back when Charles “2 Small” Washburn had lived here as a sixteen-year-old baby G looking for a shot at being real G.
    Bosch told Chu to take a photo of the opening in the fence with his phone. He’d print it later and put it in the book. He then pushed the plank back into place and turned to surveythe rest of the yard once more. He saw Latitia Settles standing in the open back door of the house, watching him through another iron gate. He knew that she had to be guessing that they weren’t really looking for Charles because he hadn’t paid child support.

6
    B osch came home to a birthday cake on the table and his daughter in the kitchen making dinner with instructions from a cookbook.
    “Wow, smells good,” he said.
    He had the Jespersen murder book under his arm.
    “Stay out of the kitchen,” she said. “Go out on the deck till I tell you it’s ready. And put that work on the shelf—at least until after dinner. Turn on the music, too.”
    “Yes, boss.”
    The dining-room table was set for two. After putting the murder book literally on a shelf in the bookcase behind it, he turned on the stereo and opened the CD drawer. His daughter had already loaded the tray with five of his favorite discs. Frank Morgan, George Cables, Art Pepper, Ron Carter, and Thelonious Monk. He set it on random play and stepped out onto the deck.
    Outside on the table, there was a bottle of Fat Tire waiting for him in a clay flowerpot filled with ice. This puzzled him. Fat Tire was one of his favorite beers, but he rarely keptalcohol in the house and knew he had not purchased any beer recently. His daughter, at sixteen, looked older than her years but not old enough to buy beer without getting her driver’s license checked.
    He cracked open the bottle and took a long pull. It felt good going down, burning the back of his throat with its cold bite. It was a welcome relief after a day of walking the gun and narrowing in on Charles Washburn.
    A plan had been set with the help of Jordy Gant. By the last roll call the next day, all patrol officers and gang units in South Bureau would have seen Washburn’s photo and been told he was a high-priority pickup. The legal cause would be the child-support warrant, but once Washburn was in custody, Bosch would be alerted and he would go see him with something else to talk about entirely.
    Still, Bosch could not rest on a BOLO. He had work to do. Forgetting it was his birthday, he had brought the murder book home with the plan of combing through every page, looking for any reference to Washburn and anything else he had missed or not followed up on.
    But