The Black Box

Riot Crimes Task Force. Bosch and Edgar had never gotten the chance to interview Dowler the first night of the investigation. Harrod caught up with him by phone five weeks after the murder. By then he had returned to civilian life in a town called Manteca.
    The witness report and statement said Dowler was twenty-seven years old and worked as a big-rig driver. It said he had been in the California National Guard for six years and was assigned to the 237th Transportation Company based in Modesto.
    A blast of adrenaline drilled through Bosch’s body. Modesto.Someone calling himself Alex White had called from Modesto ten years after the murder.
    Bosch swiveled in his chair and communicated the information about the 237th to Chu, who said he had already established in his Internet search that the 237th was one of three National Guard troops that sent people to both Desert Storm and the Los Angeles riots.
    Reading from his screen, Chu said, “You have the two thirty-seventh barracks in Modesto and the twenty-six sixty-eighth from Fresno. Both were transpo companies—truck drivers basically. The third was the two seventieth from Sacramento. They were military police.”
    Bosch wasn’t listening much past truck drivers . He was thinking about the trucks that hauled all the captured weapons out into the Saudi desert for disposal.
    “Let’s focus on the two thirty-seventh. The guy who found the body was with the two thirty-seventh. What else you got on them?”
    “Not a lot so far. It says they served for twelve days in Los Angeles. Only one injury reported—one guy spent a night in a hospital with a concussion when somebody hit him with a bottle.”
    “What about Desert Storm?”
    Chu pointed to his screen.
    “I have that here. I’ll read you the description of their outing during Desert Storm. ‘The soldiers of the two thirty-seventh were mobilized on September twenty, nineteen ninety, with sixty-two personnel. The unit arrived in Saudi Arabia the following November three. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations, the unit transportedtwenty-one thousand tons of cargo, moved fifteen thousand personnel and prisoners of war, and drove eight hundred thirty-seven thousand accident-free miles. The unit returned to Modesto without a single casualty on April twenty-three, nineteen ninety-one.’ See what I mean? These guys were truck drivers and bus drivers.”
    Bosch contemplated the information and statistics for a few moments.
    “We’ve got to get those sixty-two names,” he said.
    “I’m working on it. You were right. Each unit has an amateur website and an archive. You know, newspaper stories and whatnot. But I haven’t found any lists of names from ’ninety-one or ’ninety-two. Just mentions of different people here and there. Like one guy from back then is the sheriff of Stanislaus County now. And he’s also running for Congress.”
    Bosch rolled his chair over so he could look at what Chu had on his screen. There was a photo of a man in a sheriff’s green uniform, holding up a sign that said “Drummond for Congress!”
    “That’s the two thirty-seventh’s website?”
    “Yeah. It says this guy served from ’ninety to ’ninety-eight. So he would’ve—”
    “Wait a minute . . . Drummond, I know that name.”
    Bosch tried to place it, casting his thoughts back to the night in the alley. So many soldiers standing and watching. He snapped his fingers as a fleeting glimpse of a face and a name came through.
    “Drummer. That’s the guy they called Drummer. He was there that night.”
    “Well, J.J. Drummond’s sheriff up there now,” Chu said. “Maybe he’ll help us with the names.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “He might, but let’s hold off on that until we have a better lay of the land.”

21
    B osch went to his computer and pulled up a map of Modesto so he could get a better geographic understanding of where Manteca, Francis Dowler’s hometown, was in relation to Modesto.
    Both were in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, which was better known as the Central Valley and the food basket of the state. Livestock, fruit, nuts, vegetables—everything that was put down on the kitchen or restaurant table in Los Angeles and most parts of California came from the Central Valley. And that included some of the wine on those tables as well.
    Modesto was the anchor city of Stanislaus County, while Manteca was just across the northern border and part of San Joaquin County. The county seat there was