Making sense of the sequence of events in the crime was always important to Bosch.
“Now you going to drop my charges and shit?” Washburn asked.
Bosch came out of his thoughts and looked at him.
“No, not yet. We still want to find that bullet.”
“Why you need that? You got the gun now.”
“Because it will help tell the story. Juries like the little details. Let’s go.”
Bosch stood up and started packing the three guns back in the cardboard box. Holding the cuffs out, Gant signaled Washburn to stand up. Washburn stayed put in his chair and continued protesting.
“I told you where it is, man. You don’t need me.”
Bosch suddenly realized something and waved Gant back.
“Tell you what, Charles. You promise to cooperate out there and we don’t have to go with the cuffs. And we’ll be sure to keep you and your ex far apart. That work for you?”
Washburn looked at Bosch and nodded. Harry saw the change. The little man had been worried about his son seeing him cuffed up.
“But if you jackrabbit on us,” Gant said, “I will hunt your ass down and you ain’t going to like it when I find you. Now, let’s go.”
This time he helped Washburn up out of his seat.
A half hour later Bosch and Chu stood with Washburn in the backyard of his boyhood home. Gant was in the front of the house, maintaining a vigil with Washburn’s ex, making sure her anger didn’t translate into aggressive action against the father of her child.
It didn’t take Washburn long to point out the fence post he had put a bullet in twenty years before. The penetration mark was still visible, especially in the angled light of their flashlights. The hole had broken the weather seal on the wood and been the point of water damage. Chu first took a photograph with his phone, while Bosch held a business card next to the penetration point to give it scale. Then Bosch opened the blade of his folding knife and dug into the soft, rotting wood, soon prying out the lead slug. He rolled it between his fingers to clean it off and then held it up. The bullet that had been ahead of it in the gun had killed Anneke Jespersen.
He dropped the slug into a small evidence bag opened by Chu.
“So, now I walk?” Washburn said, his eyes warily darting toward the back door of the house.
“Not quite yet,” Bosch said. “We’ve got to go back to Seventy-seventh and do some paperwork.”
“You told me if I helped, you’d drop the charges. Cooperating witness and all that.”
“You’ve cooperated, Charles, and we appreciate it. But we never said we would drop all the charges. We said, you help us, we help you. So we go back now and I make some calls and we will improve your situation. I’m sure we’ll be able to deal with the drug charge. But the child support, you still have to deal with that. That’s a warrant issued by a judge. You’ll have to see him to take care of that.”
“It was a her, and how’m I gonna deal with that if they got me in jail?”
Bosch turned square to Washburn and separated his feet. If 2 Small was going to rabbit, he would do it now. Chu caught the movement and changed his posture as well.
“Well,” Bosch said, “maybe that’s a question you have to ask your lawyer.”
“My lawyer ain’t worth shit. I ain’t even seen him yet.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you start by getting a new one. Let’s go.”
As they were crossing the yard to the broken gate, the face of a boy appeared under the curtain of one of the house’s back windows. Washburn raised his hand and gave him a thumbs-up.
By the time they cleared 77th Street Station, leaving Washburn behind in the holding tank, Bosch knew it would be too late to go directly to the Regional Crime Lab at Cal State with the gun and bullet they had collected. So he and Chu headed back to the PAB and locked them in the Open-Unsolved Unit’s evidence safe.
Before heading home, he checked his desk for messages and saw a Post-it on the back of his chair. He knew it was from Lieutenant O’Toole before even reading it. It was one of O’Toole’s favorite means of communication. The message simply said NEED TO TALK.
“Looks like you get a face-to-face with O’Fool in the morning, Harry,” Chu said.
“Yeah, I can’t wait.”
He wadded up the message and threw it into the trash can. He wouldn’t be hurrying in to see O’Toole in the morning. He had other things to do.
12
They worked like a team. Madeline made the online order and Bosch swung by Birds on Franklin to pick the food up. It was still hot when he got home. They opened the to-go boxes and slid them across the table when they had guessed wrong. They both had gotten the signature rotisserie chicken but Bosch had gone for the baked-beans-and-coleslaw combo with a BBQ dipping sauce, and his daughter had gone with a double order of mac and cheese for her sides and the Malaysian hot-and-sweet dipping sauce. The lavash bread came wrapped in aluminum foil, and a third, smaller container held the order of fried pickles that they’d agreed to share.
The food was delicious. Not as good as eating at Birds but pretty damn close. Though they sat facing each other while eating, they didn’t talk much. Bosch was consumed by thoughts regarding the case and how he would move forward with the weapon he had recovered earlier. His daughter, meantime, was reading a book as she ate. Bosch did not complain, because he considered reading while eating a far better thing than texting and Facebooking, which she usually did.
Bosch was an impatient detective. To him, case momentum was everything. How to get it, how to keep it, how to guard against being distracted from it. He knew he could turn the gun in to the Firearms Unit for analysis and possible restoration of the serial number. But most likely he would hear nothing back for weeks, if not months. He had to find a way to avoid that, to move around the bureaucratic and caseload roadblocks. After a while he thought he had a working plan.
Before long, Bosch had finished his food. He looked across the table and saw that he might get a little bit of mac and cheese if he was lucky.
“You want anymore frickles?” he asked.
“No, you can have the rest,” she said.
He ate the remaining pickles with one bite. He eyed the book she was reading. It was assigned in English lit. She was near the end. Bosch guessed she had no more than a couple chapters left.
“I’ve never seen you jump on a book like that before,” he said. “You going to finish it tonight?”
“We’re not supposed to read the last chapter tonight but there’s no way I can stop. It’s sad.”
“You mean the guy dies?”
“No—I mean, I don’t know yet. I don’t think so. But I’m sad because it will be over.”
Bosch nodded. He wasn’t much of a reader but he knew what she meant. He remembered feeling that way when he got to the end of Straight Life, which might have been the last book he actually read cover to cover.
She put the book down so she could work on finishing her meal. Harry could now see that there would be no leftover mac and cheese for him.
“You know, you sort of remind me of him,” she said.
“Really? The kid in the book?”
“Mr. Moll said it’s about innocence. He wants to catch little children before they fall off the cliff. That’s the metaphor for the loss of innocence. He knows the realities of the real world and wants to stop the innocent children from having to face it.”
Mr. Moll was her teacher. Maddie had told Bosch that when they took tests in class, he climbed up and stood on his desk so he could watch the students from above and guard against cheating. The kids called him the “Catcher on the Desk.”
Bosch didn’t know how to respond to her, because he had never read the book. He had grown up in youth halls and occasional foster homes. Somehow, the assignment had never come to him. Even if it had, he probably wouldn’t have read it. He was not a good student.