That was when he noticed the printing along the bottom edge of the page. It was a fax tag. Gary Harrod had obviously typed up the statement and faxed it to Dowler for his approval and signature. It had then been faxed back. The fax identification along the bottom of the page gave the phone number and a company name: Cosgrove Agriculture, Manteca, California. Bosch guessed that it was Dowler’s employer.

“Cosgrove,” Bosch said.

The same name was on the John Deere dealership where the Alex White call had come from ten years ago.

“Yeah, I’ve got that,” Chu said from behind him.

Bosch turned around.

“Got what?”

“Cosgrove. Carl Cosgrove. He was in the unit. I got him in some of the pictures here. He’s some sort of a bigwig up there.”

Bosch realized that they had stumbled onto a connection.

“Send me that link, will you?”

“Sure thing.”

Bosch turned to his computer and waited for the email to come through.

“This is the two thirty-seventh’s website you’re looking at?” he asked.

“Yeah. They got stuff on here going back to the riots and Desert Storm.”

“What about a list of personnel?”

“No list, but there are some names in these stories and with the pictures. Cosgrove’s one.”

The email came through. Bosch quickly opened it and clicked on the link.

Chu was right. The website looked amateurish, to say the least. At sixteen, his own daughter had created better-looking web pages for school assignments. This one had obviously been started years earlier, when websites were a new cultural phenomenon. No one had bothered to update it with contemporary graphics and design.

The main heading announced the site as the “Home of the Fighting 237th.” Below this were what seemed to be the company’s motto and logo, the words Keep on Truckin’ and a variation on comic artist Robert Crumb’s iconic truckin’ man striding forward, one large foot in front of his body. The 237th version had the man in an army uniform, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Beneath that were blocks of information about the current company’s training outings and recreational activities. There were links for making contact with the site manager or for joining group discussions. There was also one marked “History,” and Bosch clicked on it.

The link brought him to a blog that required him to scroll down through twenty years of reports about the company’s accomplishments. Luckily, the callouts for the Guard had been few and far between and it didn’t take long to get to the early nineties. These reports had obviously been loaded onto the site when it was first constructed in 1996.