“I can’t. I have appointments. They’re going to stack up because I have to talk to her.”

“Then make it quick with her and then call me when you catch up on your clients.”

“Why don’t we just have dinner tonight?”

“Okay, that sounds good. Call me or I’ll call you and we’ll figure out where to meet.”

“Okay, Harry. I feel better.”

“Good, Hannah. I’ll talk to you.”

He disconnected and went back to the murder book. Chu interrupted from behind, having heard Bosch’s half of the conversation with Hannah.

“So they aren’t letting up on that,” he said.

“Not yet. Has Mendenhall scheduled you for an interview?”

“Nope, haven’t heard from her.”

“Don’t worry, you will. If anything, she seems like a pretty thorough investigator.”

Bosch went to the front of the murder book to find and reread the statement from Francis John Dowler, the California National Guard soldier who found Anneke Jespersen’s body in the alley off Crenshaw. The report was a transcript of a telephone interview conducted by Gary Harrod of the 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.