“Let me get a knife and some forks and plates.”

From the kitchen she called for him to open his two gifts, starting with the obvious one, but he waited for her return.

As she cut the cake, he opened the long thin box that he knew contained a tie. She often remarked on how old and colorless his ties were. She once even suggested he got his ideas about ties from the old Dragnet television show, from the black-and-white years.

He opened the box to find a tie with a tie-dyed pattern of blues and greens and purples.

“It’s beautiful,” he proclaimed. “I’ll wear it tomorrow.”

She smiled and he moved on to the second gift. He unwrapped it to find a box containing a stack of six CD cases. It was a collection of recently released live recordings of Art Pepper.

“‘Unreleased Art,’” Bosch read. “‘Volumes one to six.’ How did you find these?”

“Internet,” Maddie said. “His widow puts them out.”

“I never heard of this stuff before.”

“She has her own label: Widow’s Taste.”

Bosch saw that some of the cases contained multiple discs. It was a lot of music.

“Should we listen?”

She handed him a plate with a piece of marble cake on it.

“I still have some homework,” she said. “I’m going to go back to my room, but you go ahead.”

“I might start the first one.”

“I hope you like it.”

“Pretty sure I will. Thanks, Maddie. For everything.”

He put the plate and the CDs down on the table and reached to hug his daughter. This time she allowed it, and he was the most thankful for that.

7

Bosch got to the cubicle early Wednesday morning and before anyone in the squad had arrived. He poured coffee out of the take-out cup he’d brought with him into the mug he kept in his desk drawer. He put on his readers and checked for messages, hoping he had gotten lucky and would find that Charles Washburn had been picked up overnight and was waiting for him in a holding cell at 77th Street Division. But there was nothing on the phone or in email about 2 Small. He was still in the wind. There was, however, a return email from Anneke Jespersen’s brother. Bosch felt a trill of excitement when he recognized the words in the subject line: “The investigation of your sister’s murder.”

A week earlier, when Bosch was notified by the ATF that the bullet casing from the Jespersen murder had been matched to ballistics from two other murders, the case jumped from the submission phase to an active investigation. Part of the Open-Unsolved Unit’s case protocol was to alert the victim’s family whenever a case went to active status. This was a tricky thing, however. The last thing the investigator wanted to do was give family members false hope or have them needlessly revisit the trauma of losing a loved one. The initial notification always had to be handled with finesse, and that meant approaching a selected family member with carefully chosen and vetted information.