The Black Box

Bosch had no idea who White was but was intrigued by the area code. It wasn’t one of L.A.’s codes and Bosch couldn’t place it.
    Harry opened his laptop, Googled the area code, and soon learned that it was assigned to Stanislaus County in the state’s Central Valley—250 miles from Los Angeles.
    Bosch checked his watch. It was late but not that late. He called the number that followed Alex White’s name in the chrono. The line rang once and then went to a recording of a woman’s pleasant voice.
    “You have reached Cosgrove Tractor, the Central Valley’s number-one John Deere dealership, located at nine-twelve Crows Landing Road in Modesto. We are convenient to the Golden State Highway and are open Monday through Saturday from nine to six. If you would like to leave a message, a member of our sales team will call you back as soon as possible.”
    Bosch hung up before the beep, deciding that he would callback the next day during business hours. He also knew that Cosgrove Tractor might have nothing to do with the call. The number could have been assigned to a different business or individual back in 2002.
    “Are you ready for your cake?”
    Bosch looked up. His daughter had come out of her bedroom. She was wearing a long sleep shirt now, the dress probably hung in her closet.
    “Sure.”
    He closed the murder book and, getting up, put it on the coffee table. As he approached the dining-room table, he attempted to hug his daughter, but she gently ducked away and turned toward the kitchen.
    “Let me get a knife and some forks and plates.”
    From the kitchen she called for him to open his two gifts, starting with the obvious one, but he waited for her return.
    As she cut the cake, he opened the long thin box that he knew contained a tie. She often remarked on how old and colorless his ties were. She once even suggested he got his ideas about ties from the old Dragnet television show, from the black-and-white years.
    He opened the box to find a tie with a tie-dyed pattern of blues and greens and purples.
    “It’s beautiful,” he proclaimed. “I’ll wear it tomorrow.”
    She smiled and he moved on to the second gift. He unwrapped it to find a box containing a stack of six CD cases. It was a collection of recently released live recordings of Art Pepper.
    “‘ Unreleased Art ,’” Bosch read. “‘Volumes one to six.’ How did you find these?”
    “Internet,” Maddie said. “His widow puts them out.”
    “I never heard of this stuff before.”
    “She has her own label: Widow’s Taste.”
    Bosch saw that some of the cases contained multiple discs. It was a lot of music.
    “Should we listen?”
    She handed him a plate with a piece of marble cake on it.
    “I still have some homework,” she said. “I’m going to go back to my room, but you go ahead.”
    “I might start the first one.”
    “I hope you like it.”
    “Pretty sure I will. Thanks, Maddie. For everything.”
    He put the plate and the CDs down on the table and reached to hug his daughter. This time she allowed it, and he was the most thankful for that.

7
    B osch got to the cubicle early Wednesday morning and before anyone in the squad had arrived. He poured coffee out of the take-out cup he’d brought with him into the mug he kept in his desk drawer. He put on his readers and checked for messages, hoping he had gotten lucky and would find that Charles Washburn had been picked up overnight and was waiting for him in a holding cell at 77th Street Division. But there was nothing on the phone or in email about 2 Small. He was still in the wind. There was, however, a return email from Anneke Jespersen’s brother. Bosch felt a trill of excitement when he recognized the words in the subject line: “The investigation of your sister’s murder.”
    A week earlier, when Bosch was notified by the ATF that the bullet casing from the Jespersen murder had been matched to ballistics from two other murders, the case jumped from the submission phase to an active investigation. Part of the Open-Unsolved Unit’s case protocol was to alert the victim’s family whenever a case went to active status. This was a tricky thing, however. The last thing the investigator wanted to do was give family members false hope or have them needlessly revisit thetrauma of losing a loved one. The initial notification always had to be handled with finesse, and that meant approaching a selected family member with carefully chosen and vetted information.
    In the