Mulholland Dive: Three Stories (7 page)

“Who opened first?” the sergeant yelled. “Who fired?”

“Me,” said one of the men in the alley. “I thought I saw a weapon on the roofline.”

“Where, soldier? What roofline? Where was the sniper?”

“Over there.”

The shooter pointed to the roofline of the rims store.

“Goddamnit!” the sergeant yelled. “Hold your fucking fire. We cleared that roof. There’s nobody up there but us! Our people!”

“Sorry, sir. I saw the—”

“Son, I don’t give a flying fuck what you saw. You get any of my people killed and I will personally frag your ass myself.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Bosch stood up. His ears were ringing and his nerves jangling. The sudden spit of automatic fire wasn’t new to him. But it had been almost twenty-five years since it was a routine part of his life. He went over and picked up his helmet and put it back on.

Sergeant Burstin walked up to him.

“Continue your work, Detectives. If you need me I’ll be on the north perimeter. We have a truck coming in for the remains. I understand that we are to provide a team to escort your car to another location and another body.”

He then charged out of the alley.

“Jesus Christ, you believe that?” Edgar asked. “Like Desert Storm or something. Vietnam. What the hell are we doing here, man?”

“Let’s just go to work,” Bosch said. “You draw the crime scene, I’ll work the body, take pictures. Let’s move.”

Bosch squatted down and opened up the toolbox. He wanted to get a photograph of the bullet casing in place before he bagged it as evidence. Edgar kept talking. The adrenaline rush from the shooting was not dissipating. He talked a lot when he was hyper. Sometimes too much.

“Harry, did you see what you did when that yahoo opened up with the gun?”

“Yeah, I ducked like everybody else.”

“No, Harry, you covered the body. I saw it. You shielded Snow White over there like she was still alive or something.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He lifted the top tray out of the toolbox and reached in for the Polaroid camera. He noted that they only had two packs of film left. Sixteen shots plus whatever was left in the camera. Maybe twenty shots total, and they had this scene and the one waiting on MLK. It was not enough. His frustration was peaking.

“What was that about, Harry?” Edgar persisted.

Bosch finally lost it and barked at his partner.

“I don’t know! Okay? I don’t know. So let’s just go to work now and try to do something for her, so maybe, just maybe, somebody sometime will be able to make a case.”

His outburst had drawn the attention of most of the guardsmen in the alley. The soldier who had started the shooting earlier stared hard at him, happy to pass the mantle of unwanted attention.

“Okay, Harry,” Edgar said quietly. “Let’s go to work. We do what we can. Fifteen minutes and then we’re on to the next one.”

Bosch nodded as he looked down at the dead woman. Fifteen minutes, he thought. He was resigned. He knew the case was lost before it had even started.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

1

T
hey made him wait. The explanation was that Coleman was at chow and pulling him out would create a problem because after the interview they would have to reinsert him into the second meal block, where he might have enemies unknown to the guard staff. Someone could make a move against him and the guards wouldn’t see it coming. They didn’t want that, so they told Bosch to hang loose for forty minutes while Coleman finished his Salisbury steak and green beans, sitting at a picnic table in D yard in the comfort and safety of numbers. All the Rolling 60s at San Quentin shared the same food and rec blocks.

Bosch passed the time by studying his props and rehearsing his play. It was all on him. No help from a partner. He was by himself. Cutbacks in the department’s travel budget had turned almost all prison visits into solo missions.

Bosch had taken the first flight up that morning and hadn’t thought about the timing of his arrival. The delay wouldn’t matter in the long run. He wasn’t flying back till 6
P.M.
and the interview with Rufus Coleman probably wouldn’t take long. Coleman would either go for the offer or not. Either way, Bosch wouldn’t be long with him.

The interview room was a steel cubicle with a built-in table dividing it. Bosch sat on one side, a door directly behind him. Across the table from him was an equal-size space with a matching door. They would bring Coleman through there, he knew.

Bosch was working the twenty-year-old murder of Anneke Jespersen, a photographer and journalist shot to death during the 1992 riots. Harry had worked the case and the crime scene for less than an hour back then before being pulled away to work other murders in a crazy night of violence that had him moving from case to case.

After the riots ended, the department formed the Riot Crimes Task Force, and the investigation of the Jespersen murder was taken over by that unit. It was never solved and after ten years of being classified as open and active, the investigation and what little evidence had been gathered was quietly boxed up and placed in archives. It wasn’t until the twentieth anniversary of the riots was approaching that the media-savvy chief of police sent a directive to the lieutenant in charge of the Open-Unsolved Unit ordering a fresh look at all unsolved murders that occurred during the unrest in 1992. The chief wanted to be ready when the media started their inquiries in regard to their twenty-years-later stories. The department might have been caught flat-footed back in ’92, but not in 2012. The chief wanted to be able to say that all unsolved murders from the riots were still under active investigation.

Bosch specifically asked for the Anneke Jespersen case and after twenty years returned to it. Not without misgivings. He knew that most cases were solved within the first forty-eight hours and after that the chances of clearance dropped markedly. This case had barely been worked for even one of those forty-eight hours. It had been neglected because of circumstances, and Bosch had always felt guilty about it, as though he had abandoned Anneke Jespersen. No homicide detective likes leaving a case behind unsolved, but in this situation Bosch was given no choice. The case was taken from him. He could easily blame the investigators that followed him on it, but Bosch had to count himself among those responsible. The investigation started with him at the crime scene. He couldn’t help but feel that no matter how short a time he was there, he must have missed something.

Now, twenty years later, he got another shot at it. And it was a very long shot at that. He believed that every case had a black box. A piece of evidence, a person, a positioning of facts that brought a certain understanding and helped explain what had happened and why. But with Anneke Jespersen, there was no black box. Just a pair of musty cardboard boxes retrieved from archives that gave Bosch little direction or hope. The boxes included the victim’s clothing and bulletproof vest, her passport, and other personal items, as well as a backpack and the photographic equipment retrieved from her hotel room after the riots. There was also the single 9mm shell casing found at the crime scene, and the thin investigative file put together by the Riot Crimes Task Force. The so-called murder book.

The murder book was largely a record of inactivity on the case on the part of the RCTF. The task force had operated for a year and had had hundreds of crimes, including dozens of murders, to investigate. It was almost as overwhelmed as investigators like Bosch had been during the actual riots.

The RCTF had put up billboards in South L.A. that advertised a telephone tip line and rewards for information leading to arrests and convictions for riot-related crimes. Different billboards carried different photos of suspects or crime scenes or victims. Three of them carried a photo of Anneke Jespersen and asked for any information on her movements and murder.

The unit largely worked off what came in from the billboards and other public outreach programs and pursued cases where there was solid information. But nothing of high value ever came in on Jespersen and so nothing ever came of the investigation. The case was a dead end. Even the one piece of evidence from the crime scene—the bullet casing—wasn’t of value without a gun to match it to.

In his survey of the archived records and case effects, Bosch found that the most noteworthy information gathered from the first investigation was about the victim. Jespersen was thirty-two years old and from Denmark, not Germany as Bosch had thought for twenty years. She worked for a Copenhagen newspaper called
Berlingske Tidende,
where she was a photojournalist in the truest sense of the word. She wrote stories and shot film. She had been a war correspondent who documented the world’s skirmishes with both words and pictures.

She had arrived in Los Angeles the morning after the riots had started. And she was dead by the end of that first night. In the following weeks, the
Los Angeles Times
ran short profiles of all those killed during the violence. The story on Jespersen quoted her editor and her brother back in Copenhagen and depicted the journalist as a risk taker who was always quick to volunteer for assignments in the world’s danger zones. In the four years prior to her death, she had covered conflicts in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Senegal, and El Salvador.

The unrest in Los Angeles was hardly on the level of war or some of the other armed conflicts she had photographed and reported on, but according to the
Times,
she happened to be traveling across the United States on vacation when rioting in the City of Angels broke out. She promptly called the photo desk at the
BT,
as the newspaper in Copenhagen was more commonly known, and left a message with her editor saying that she was heading to L.A. from San Francisco. But she was dead before she had filed any photos or a story with the newspaper. Her editor had never spoken to her after getting the message.

After the RCTF was disbanded, the unsolved Jespersen case was assigned to the homicide squad at 77th Street Division, the geographical policing area where the murder occurred. Given to new detectives with their own backup of open cases, the investigation was shelved. The notations in the investigative chronology were few and far between and largely just a record of the outside interest in the case. The LAPD wasn’t working the case with anything approaching fervor, but her family and those who knew Jespersen in the international journalism community did not give up hope. The chronology included records of their frequent inquiries about the case. These marked the record right up until the case files and effects were sent to archives. After that, those who inquired about Anneke Jespersen were most likely ignored, as was the case they were calling about.

Curiously, the victim’s personal belongings were never returned to her family. The archive boxes contained the backpack and property that was turned over to the police several days after the murder, when the manager of the Travelodge on Santa Monica Boulevard matched the unusual name on a riot victim list printed in the
Times
to the guest registry. It had been thought that Anneke Jespersen had skipped out on her room. Her belongings were pushed into a backpack found in her room and then put in a locked storage closet at the motel. Once the manager determined that Jespersen wasn’t coming back because she was dead, the backpack was delivered to the RCTF, which was working out of temporary offices at Central Division in downtown.

The backpack was in one of the archive boxes that Bosch had retrieved from case storage. It contained two pairs of jeans, four white cotton shirts, and assorted underwear and socks. Jespersen obviously traveled light, packing like a war correspondent even for a vacation. This was probably because she was heading straight back to war following her vacation in the United States. Her editor had told the
Times
that the newspaper was sending Jespersen directly from the States to Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, where war had broken out just a few weeks earlier. Reports of mass rapes and ethnic cleansing were breaking in the media, and Jespersen was heading to the center of the war, due to leave the Monday after the riots erupted in Los Angeles. She probably considered the quick stop by L.A. to snap shots of rioters just a warm-up for what awaited in Bosnia.

Also in the pockets of the backpack were Jespersen’s Danish passport along with several packages of unused 35mm film.

Jespersen’s passport showed an INS entry stamp at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York six days before her death. According to the investigative records and the newspaper accounts, she had been traveling by herself and had made it to San Francisco when the verdicts came down in Los Angeles and the violence began.

None of the records or news stories accounted for where in the United States Jespersen had been during the five days leading up to the riots. It apparently wasn’t seen as germane to the investigation of her death.

What did seem clear was that the breakout of violence in Los Angeles was a strong pull to Jespersen and she immediately diverted, apparently driving through the night to Los Angeles in a rental car she had picked up two days earlier at San Francisco International. On Thursday morning, April 30, she presented her passport and Danish press credentials at the LAPD media office in order to get a press pass.

Bosch had spent most of 1969 and 1970 in Vietnam. He had encountered many journalists and photographers in the base camps and out in fire zones as well. In all of them, he had seen a unique form of fearlessness. Not a warrior’s fearlessness but almost a naive belief in one’s ultimate survival. It was as though they believed that their cameras and press passes were shields that would save them, no matter the circumstance.

He had known one photographer particularly well. His name was Hank Zinn and he worked for the Associated Press. He had once followed Bosch into a tunnel in Cu Chi. Zinn was the kind of guy who never turned down an opportunity to go out into Indian country and get what he called “the real thing.” He died in early 1970 when a Huey he had jumped on for transport to the front was shot down. One of his cameras was recovered intact in the debris field and somebody at base developed the film. It turned out Zinn was shooting frames the whole time the chopper was taking fire and then going down. Whether he was valiantly documenting his own death or thinking he was going to have great shots to file when he got back to base camp could never be known. But knowing Zinn, Bosch believed he thought he was invincible and the chopper crash would not be the end of the line.

As Bosch took up the Jespersen case after so many years, he wondered if Anneke Jespersen had been like Zinn. Sure of her invincibility, sure that her camera and press pass would lead her through the fire. There was no doubt that she had put herself in harm’s way. He wondered what her last thought was when her killer pointed the gun at her eye. Was she like Zinn? Had she taken his picture?

According to a list provided by her editor in Copenhagen and contained in the RCTF investigation file, Jespersen carried a pair of Nikon 4s and a variety of lenses. Of course, her field equipment was taken and never recovered. Whatever filmed clues might have been in her cameras were long gone.

The RCTF investigators developed the canisters of film found in the pockets of her vest. Some of these black-and-white 8 x 10 prints, along with four proof sheets showing miniatures of all ninety-six shots, were in the murder book, but they offered very little in the way of evidence or investigative leads. They were simply shots of the California National Guard mustering at the Coliseum after being called into the fray in Los Angeles. Other shots were of guardsmen manning barricades at intersections in the riot zone. There were no shots of violence or burning and looting, though there were several of guardsman on post outside businesses that had been looted or burned. The photos were apparently taken on the day of her arrival, after she had gotten her press pass from the LAPD.

Beyond their historic value as documentation of the riots, the photos were deemed useless to the murder investigation in 1992, and Bosch couldn’t disagree with that assessment twenty years later.

The RCTF file also contained a property report dated May 11, 1992, and detailing the recovery of the Avis rental car that Jespersen had picked up at San Francisco International before the riots. The car had been found abandoned on Crenshaw Boulevard seven blocks from the alley where her body was found. In the ten days it had been sitting there, it had been broken into and its interior stripped. The report stated that the car and its contents, or lack thereof, had no investigative value.

What it came down to was that the one piece of evidence found by Bosch within the first hour of the investigation remained the most important hope for a resolution. The bullet casing. Over the past twenty years, law enforcement technologies had grown at light speed. Things not even dreamed about then were routine now. The advent of technological applications to evidence and crime solving had led to reassessments of old unsolved crimes everywhere on the planet. Every major metropolitan police department had teams assigned to cold case investigations. Using new technologies on old cases sometimes came down to shooting fish in a barrel: DNA matches, fingerprint matches, and ballistics matches often led to slam-bang cases against culprits who had long believed they had gotten away with murder.