“Okay, what about the backyard? Can we step back there?”

She seemed confused by the question but then shrugged.

“Knock yourself out but he ain’t out there.” “Is the gate at the back unlocked?”

“It’s broke.”

“Okay, we’ll go around.”

Bosch and Chu left the front step and walked over to the driveway, which went down the side of the house and ended at a wooden fence. Chu had to lift the gate and hold it up on one rusted hinge to open it. They then moved into a backyard strewn with old and broken toys and household furniture. There was a dishwasher lying on its side, and it reminded Bosch of being in the alley twenty years before, when appliances beyond saving were stacked there.

The left side of the property was the rear wall of the former tire rims store on Crenshaw. Bosch went to the rear fence line that separated the yard from the alley. It was too tall for him to see over, so he pulled over a tricycle that was missing a rear wheel.

“Careful, Harry,” Chu said.

Bosch put one foot on the seat of the trike and pulled himself up on the fence. He looked across the alley to the spot where Anneke Jespersen had been murdered twenty years before.

Bosch dropped down to the ground and started walking the fence line, pressing his hand on each plank, looking for a loose one or maybe even a trapdoor that would give someone quick access to and from the alley. Two-thirds of the way down, a plank that he pressed on popped back. He stopped and looked closer and then pulled the board toward himself. It was not attached to the upper or lower cross-braces. He easily pulled the plank out of the fence, creating a ten-inch-wide opening.

Chu came up next to him and studied the opening.

“Somebody small could easily slide through there and have access to the alley,” he said.

“What I was thinking,” Bosch replied.

It was stating the obvious. The question was whether the plank had come loose over time or had been a hidden portal back when Charles “2 Small” Washburn had lived here as a sixteen-year-old baby G looking for a shot at being real G.

Bosch told Chu to take a photo of the opening in the fence with his phone. He’d print it later and put it in the book. He then pushed the plank back into place and turned to survey the rest of the yard once more. He saw Latitia Settles standing in the open back door of the house, watching him through another iron gate. He knew that she had to be guessing that they weren’t really looking for Charles because he hadn’t paid child support.

6

Bosch came home to a birthday cake on the table and his daughter in the kitchen making dinner with instructions from a cookbook.

“Wow, smells good,” he said.

He had the Jespersen murder book under his arm.