The Black Box

there.
    Jackson was quiet as they moved through the lobby and then turned left into the dimly lit side-exit lobby. There was a bench with a bronze statue of Charlie Chaplin sitting on it.Jackson sat down next to the figure and signaled Bosch to the other side.
    “What?” Bosch said as he sat down. “We should get back.”
    Jackson was upset. He shook his head and leaned across Charlie Chaplin’s lap so he could whisper.
    “Harry,” he said. “I think you’re really screwed on this.”
    Bosch didn’t understand Jackson’s mood or his apparent surprise that the department would go to this length over a fifteen-minute interview in San Quentin. But to Bosch this was nothing new. The first time he got dinged by Internal Affairs was thirty-five years earlier. He caught a beef for stopping by a dry cleaner’s—which was on his beat—to pick up his pressed uniforms while on his way to the station at the end of watch. Since then, nothing surprised him about how the department policed its own.
    “So what,” he said dismissively. “Let her sustain the complaint. What’s the worst they could give me? Three days? A week? I’ll take my kid to Hawaii.”
    Jackson shook his head again.
    “You don’t get it, do you?”
    Now Bosch was thoroughly confused.
    “Don’t get what? It’s Internal Affairs, no matter what they’re calling it now. What’s not to get?”
    “This is not just about a week’s suspension. You’re on the DROP, man. That’s a contract and you don’t have the same protections—that’s probably why nobody from the League called you back. A contract can be voided on a CUBO.”
    Now it hit Bosch. The year before, he had signed a five-year contract under the Deferred Retirement Option Plan. He had effectively retired in order to freeze his pension and then cameback to work under the contract. There was a clause in that contract that allowed the department to dismiss him if he was found guilty of committing a crime or if an internal charge of Conduct Unbecoming an Officer was sustained against him.
    “Don’t you see what O’Fool is doing?” Jackson asked. “He’s reshaping the squad, trying to make it his squad. Anybody he doesn’t like or has a problem with or isn’t showing him the proper respect and allegiance, he’ll pull this sort of shit to move them out.”
    Bosch nodded as he saw the scheme come together. He knew what Jackson didn’t; that O’Toole might not be acting alone, just to feather his nest. He might be doing the bidding of the man on the tenth floor.
    “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” he said.
    “Oh, shit,” Jackson said. “What?”
    “Not here. Let’s go.”
    They left Charlie Chaplin behind and headed back to the PAB on foot. Along the way, Bosch told Jackson two stories, one old and the other new. The first was the backstory behind the case Bosch worked the year before involving the death of then-councilman Irvin Irving’s son. Bosch recounted how he had been used by the chief and a former partner he trusted in a successful political coup, resulting in Irving losing his bid for reelection. A police department sympathizer was elected in his stead.
    “That already put me on a collision course with Marty,” he said. “And with the case I’m working now, we’ve collided.”
    He then explained how the man on the tenth floor was trying through O’Toole to pressure him into slowing down the forward momentum of the Anneke Jespersen case. By the timehe was finished with the story, Bosch guessed that Jackson fully regretted having signed on as Harry’s defense rep.
    “So, in the grand scheme of things,” Jackson said as they entered the front courtyard of the PAB, “you are not interested in slowing it down, not even just pushing it quietly over into next year?”
    Bosch shook his head.
    “She’s waited too long,” he said. “And whoever killed her has been free too long. I’m not slowing down for anything.”
    Jackson nodded as they went through the automatic doors.
    “I didn’t think so.”

18
    B osch was no sooner at his desk in his cubicle in the Open-Unsolved Unit than he was visited by his new nemesis, Lieutenant O’Toole.
    “Bosch, did you set up an appointment with the PSB investigator yet?”
    Bosch swiveled in his seat so he could look up at his supervisor. O’Toole had his suit jacket off and was wearing suspenders with a design of little golf clubs on them. His tie tack was a miniature LAPD badge. They sold them in the