The Black Box

important. Let’s go back to the Saudi Princess . Do you remember when you were on the ship?”
    “It was in March, right before my unit got sent home. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known I’d be back in Georgia a month later. But the army didn’t tell me that, so I went on a seventy-two-hour leave.”
    Bosch nodded. He was back on the path. He just needed to stay there.
    “Do you remember being interviewed by a journalist? A woman named Anneke Jespersen?”
    There was only a short pause before Jackson answered.
    “The Dutch girl? Yes, I remember her.”
    “Anneke was Danish. Are we talking about the same woman? A Caucasian blond, pretty, about thirty?”
    “Yes, yes, I only did one interview. Dutch, Danish—I remember that name and I remember her.”
    “Okay, where did she interview you, do you remember?”
    “I was in a bar. I don’t remember which one, but it was near the pool. That’s where I hung out.”
    “Do you remember anything about the interview besides that?”
    “The interview? Not really. It was just a few quick questions.She interviewed a bunch of us. And it was loud in there and people were drunk, you know?”
    “Right.”
    Now was the moment. The only question he really had to ask.
    “Did you ever see Anneke again after that day?”
    “Well, first I saw her the next night in the same place. Only she wasn’t working. She said she filed her story or sent her pictures in or something and now she had her own leave. She had two more days on the boat and she was off the clock.”
    Bosch paused. That wasn’t what he had been expecting to hear. He was thinking about Jespersen’s trip to Atlanta.
    “Why are you asking about her?” Jackson asked. “Is she the one that’s dead?”
    “Yes, she’s dead, I’m afraid. She was murdered twenty years ago in L.A.”
    “Oh, dear Lord.”
    “It was during the riots in ’ninety-two. It was a year after Desert Storm.”
    He waited to see if she would react to that, but there was only silence.
    “I think it was somehow connected to that boat,” he said. “Do you remember anything else about her being on the boat? Was she drunk when you saw her the next day?”
    “I don’t know about drunk. But she had a bottle in her hand. We both did. That’s what you did on that boat. Drink.”
    “Right. Anything else you remember about it?”
    “I just remember that her being the blond bombshell that she was, she was having a harder time than any of us keeping the boys at bay.”
    “Us” meaning the women in the bar and on the boat.
    “That’s what she asked me about when she came to see me at Benning.”
    Bosch froze. He didn’t make a sound, he didn’t take a breath. He waited for more. When nothing came forth, he tried to gently coax the story out.
    “When was that?” he asked.
    “About a year after Storm. I remember I was a short-timer by then. It was like two weeks before my discharge. She somehow found me and came to the base, asking all these questions.”
    “What exactly did she ask, do you remember?”
    “She asked about that second day, you know, when she was off duty. First she asked if I’d seen her, and I said, don’t you remember? She then asked me who she was with and when was the last time I saw her.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I remembered that she went off with some of the guys. They said they were going to go to the disco and I didn’t want to go. So they left. I didn’t see her again until she came to Fort Benning.”
    “Did you ask her why she wanted this information?”
    “Not really. I think I kind of knew.”
    Bosch nodded. It was likely the reason she remembered the last conversation so clearly after twenty years.
    “Something happened to her on that boat,” he said.
    “I think so,” Jackson said. “But I didn’t ask the specifics. I didn’t think she wanted to tell me. She just wanted answers to her questions. She wanted to know who she was with.”
    Bosch thought he now understood many of the mysteries ofthe case. What the war crime was that Anneke Jespersen was investigating, and why she shared what she was doing with no one else. He felt a deeper heartbreak for the woman he never met or knew.
    “Tell me about the men she went off with on the boat. How many were there?”
    “I don’t remember, three or four.”
    “Do you remember anything else about them? Anything at all?”
    “They were from California.”
    Now Bosch paused as Jackson’s answer rang in his head