Bosch was handed the box, and opening it he found it full of well-worn cards.
“How did this survive the purging?” he asked.
Gant knew he meant the department’s shift toward digital data storage. Across the board, hard files were being turned into digital files to make way for an electronic future.
“Man, we knew that if they archived these on computers, they would miss all kinds of stuff. These are handwritten, Harry. Sometimes you can’t figure out the writing to save your life. We knew most of the info on these cards wouldn’t make it across, know what I mean? So we held on to as many of those black boxes as we could. You were lucky, Harry, we still had the Sixties in a box. Hope there’s something in there that helps.”
Bosch pushed back his chair to get up.
“I’ll make sure you get it back.”
4
Bosch was back at the Open-Unsolved Unit before noon. The place was largely deserted, as most detectives came in early and took their lunch break early. There was no sign of David Chu, Harry’s partner, but that wasn’t a concern. Chu could be at lunch or anywhere in the building or the outlying crime labs in the area. Bosch knew that Chu was working on a number of submissions, that is, the early stages of cases in which genetic, fingerprint, or ballistics evidence is prepared and submitted to various labs for analysis and comparison.
Bosch put the files and the black box down on his desk and picked up the phone to see if he had any messages. He was clear. He was just settling in and getting ready to start looking through the material he had received from Gant when the unit’s new lieutenant came by the cubicle. Cliff O’Toole was new not only to the OU but to Robbery-Homicide Division as well. He had been transferred in from Valley Bureau, where he had run the full detective squad in Van Nuys. Bosch hadn’t had a lot of interaction with him yet, but what he had seen and heard from others in the squad wasn’t good. After arriving to take over command of Open-Unsolved, in record time the lieutenant garnered not one but two nicknames with negative connotations.
“Harry, how’d it go up there?” O’Toole asked.
Before authorizing the trip to San Quentin, O’Toole had been fully briefed on the gun connection between the Jespersen case and the Walter Regis murder carried out by Rufus Coleman.
“Good and bad,” Bosch answered. “I got a name from Coleman. One Trumont Story. Coleman said Story supplied the gun he used for the Regis hit and took it back right after. The catch is that I can’t go to Story because Story is now dead—got whacked himself in ’oh-nine. So I spent the morning at South Bureau and did some checking to confirm the timeline and that Story does fit in. I think Coleman was telling me the truth and not just trying to lay it all off on a dead guy. So it wasn’t a wasted trip but I’m not really any closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen.”
He gestured to the files and the shake box on his desk.
O’Toole nodded thoughtfully, folded his arms, and sat on the edge of Dave Chu’s desk, right on the spot where Chu liked to put his coffee. If Chu had been there, he wouldn’t have liked that.
“I hate hitting the travel budget for a bum trip,” he said.
“It wasn’t a bum trip,” Bosch said. “I just told you that I got a name and the name fits.”
“Well, then, maybe we should just put a bow on it and call it a day,” O’Toole said.
“Putting a bow on a case” referred to C-Bow, or CBO, which meant a case was cleared by other means. It was a designation used to formally close a case when the solution is known but does not result in an arrest or prosecution because the suspect is dead or cannot be brought to justice for other reasons. In the Open-Unsolved Unit, cases frequently were “cleared by other” because they were often decades old and matches of fingerprints or DNA led to suspects long deceased. If the follow-up investigation puts the suspect in the time and location of the crime, then the unit supervisor has the authority to clear the case and send it to the District Attorney’s Office for its rubber stamp.
But Bosch wasn’t ready to go there with Jespersen yet.
“No, we don’t have a CBO here,” Bosch said firmly. “I can’t put the gun in Trumont Story’s hands until four years after my case. That gun could have been in a lot of other hands before that.”
“Maybe so,” O’Toole said. “But I don’t want you turning this into a hobby. We’ve got six thousand other cases. Case management comes down to time management.”
He put his wrists together as if to say he was handcuffed by the constraints of the job. It was this officious side of O’Toole that Bosch had so far been unable to warm up to. He was an administrator, not a cop’s cop. That was why “The Tool” was the first nickname he had received.
“I know that, Lieutenant,” Bosch said. “My plan is to work with these materials, and if nothing comes of it, then it will be time to look at the next case. But with what we’ve got now, this isn’t a CBO. So it won’t go toward fattening our stats. It will go back as unsolved.”
Bosch was trying to make it clear with the new man that he wasn’t going to play the statistics game. A case was cleared if Bosch was convinced it was truly cleared. And putting the murder weapon in a gangbanger’s hand four years after the fact was hardly good enough.
“Well, let’s see what you get when you look it all over,” O’Toole said. “I’m not pushing for something that’s not there. But I was brought in here to push the unit. We need to close more cases. To do that we need to work more cases. So, what I’m saying is that if it’s not there on this one, then move on to the next one, because the next one might be the one we can close. No hobby cases, Harry. When I came in here, too many of you guys were working hobby cases. We don’t have the time anymore.”
“Got it,” Bosch said, his voice clipped.
O’Toole started to head back toward his office. Bosch threw a mock salute at his back and noticed the coffee ring on the seat of his pants.
O’Toole had recently replaced a lieutenant who liked to sit in her office with the blinds closed. Her interactions with the squad were minimal. O’Toole was the opposite. He was hands-on to a sometimes overbearing degree. It didn’t help that he was younger than half the squad, and almost two decades younger than Bosch. His overmanagement of the largely veteran crew of detectives in the unit was unnecessary and Bosch found himself chafing at the collar whenever O’Toole approached.
Added to that, he was clearly a numbers cruncher. He wanted to close cases for the sake of the monthly and yearly reports that he sent up to the tenth floor. It had nothing to do with bringing justice to murder victims long since forgotten. So far, it appeared that O’Toole had no feel for the human content of the job. He had already reprimanded Bosch for spending an afternoon with the son of a murder victim who wanted to be walked through the crime scene twenty-two years after his father had been killed. The lieutenant had said the victim’s son could have found the crime scene on his own and Bosch could have used the half day to work on cases.
The lieutenant suddenly pirouetted and came back toward the cubicle. Bosch wondered if he had seen the sarcastic salute in the reflection of one of the office windows.
“Harry, a couple other things. First, don’t forget to get your expenses in on the trip. They’re really on my ass about timely filing of that stuff and I want to make sure you get anything back that you took out of your own pocket.”
Bosch thought about the money he deposited in the canteen account of the second inmate he had visited.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “There’s nothing. I stopped for a hamburger at the Balboa and that was it.”