The Black Box

He studied the helmet and remembered the nights the city came apart. Twenty years had gone by. He thought about all of those years, all that had come to him and all that had stayed or gone away.
    After a while he put the helmet back on the shelf and replaced the box that had hidden it. He locked the storage room and went back inside to bed.

17
    D etective Nancy Mendenhall was a small woman with a sincere if not disarming smile. She didn’t look the least bit threatening, which immediately put Bosch on guard. Not that he wasn’t alert and ready for anything when he and Rick Jackson entered the Bradbury Building for Harry’s scheduled interview. His long history of fending off internal investigators dictated that he not return Mendenhall’s smile and that he be suspicious of her statement that she was simply seeking the truth with an open mind and no agenda dictated from above.
    She had her own private office. It was small but the chairs in front of her desk were comfortable. It even had a fireplace, as many of the offices in the old building did. The windows behind her looked out across Broadway to the building that housed the old Million Dollar Theater. She put a digital recorder on the desk, which was matched by Jackson’s own recorder, and they began. After identifying all parties in the room and going through the routine admonishments about police officers giving compelled statements, Mendenhall simply said, “Tell me about your trip on Monday to the prison at San Quentin.”
    For the next twenty minutes Bosch relayed the facts regarding his trip to the prison to interview Rufus Coleman about the gun that had been used to kill Anneke Jespersen. He gave her every detail he could think of, including how long he had to wait before the prisoner was brought to him. Bosch and Jackson had decided at breakfast beforehand that Bosch would hold nothing back in hope that Mendenhall’s common sense would dictate that she see the complaint from O’Toole as a bullshit beef.
    Bosch supplemented his story with copies of documents from the murder book so Mendenhall would see that it was absolutely necessary for him to travel to San Quentin to talk to Coleman and that the trip was not manufactured so that he could meet up with Shawn Stone.
    The interview seemed to go well, with Mendenhall asking only general questions that allowed Bosch to expand. When he was finished she narrowed her focus to specifics.
    “Did Shawn Stone know you were coming?” she asked.
    “No, not at all,” Bosch replied.
    “Did you tell his mother beforehand that you were going to see him?”
    “No, I did not. It was an impromptu thing. Like I said before, my flights were set. I had the time for a quick meet and I asked to see him.”
    “But they did bring him to you in the law enforcement interview room, correct?”
    “That’s correct. They didn’t tell me to go to the family and friends visitation room. They said they would bring him to me.”
    This was the only place where Bosch felt he was vulnerable.He had not asked to visit with Shawn Stone as a citizen would. He stayed in the room where they had brought in Rufus Coleman and simply asked to see another inmate—Stone. He knew that that could be seen as using his badge to get an advantage.
    Mendenhall pressed on.
    “Okay, and when you made the travel arrangements to go up to San Quentin, did you factor in time between flights so that you could have time to visit with Shawn Stone?”
    “Absolutely not. You never know when you go up there how long it will take them to deliver your prisoner or how long the prisoner will talk to you. I’ve gone up there for what ended up being a one-minute interview, and I’ve gone up there when a one-hour interview turns into four. You never know, so you always give yourself extra time.”
    “You gave yourself a four-hour window at the prison.”
    “That’s about right. Plus you have the uncertainties of traffic. You have to fly up there, take the train to the rental-car center, get your car and get up to the city, get all the way across the city and then the Golden Gate, and then you have to do all of that coming back. You build in time for contingencies. I ended up with a little over four hours at the prison and I only used two waiting and then talking to Coleman. Do the math. I had extra time and I used it to see this kid.”
    “Exactly when did you tell the guards you wanted to see Stone?”
    “I remember looking at my watch as they took