“Go ahead, shoot.”

“Okay, the first thing is, the paper Jespersen worked for. Were you the one who made contact with the people in Denmark?”

There was a long pause as Harrod probed his memory of the case. Bosch had never worked directly with Harrod but he knew of him back when he was with the department. He had a reputation as a solid investigator. It was the reason Bosch had chosen to contact him out of all of the investigators who’d had a piece of the case in those early years. He knew Harrod would help if he could and that he wouldn’t hold back information.

Bosch always made the effort to touch base with the original investigators on cold cases. It was surprising how many were still infected with professional pride, reluctant to help another investigator solve a case they were unable to close themselves.

Not so with Harrod. In their very first conversation, he revealed his guilt over not closing out the Jespersen case and many of the other riot murders he was assigned to. He said the task force was overwhelmed by too many cases with too little evidence to pursue. Like the Jespersen case, most RCTF investigations were based on incomplete or almost nonexistent crime scene investigations. The lack of forensic evidence was crippling.

“Most cases, we didn’t know where to start,” Harrod had told Bosch. “We were running around in the dark. So we put up billboards and offered rewards and primarily that’s what we worked off of. But we didn’t get much, and at the end of the day we didn’t break any new ground. I don’t remember a single case that we closed. So frustrating. It was one of the reasons I pulled the pin at twenty. I had to get away from L.A.”

Bosch couldn’t help but think that the city and the department had lost a good man. His hope was that if he was able to close out the Jespersen case, then Harrod would find a measure of solace in that.

“I remember talking to somebody over there,” Harrod said. “It wasn’t her direct boss, because that person couldn’t speak English. So it was more of a general supervisor and I just got general info. I remember there was a uniform up in Devonshire who spoke the language—Danish—and we used him to make some calls over there.”

This was news to Bosch. There were no reports in the murder book about a phone interview with anyone other than Arne Haagan, the newspaper’s editor in chief.

“Who was interviewed, do you remember?”

“I think it was just other people on the newspaper staff, maybe family members, too.”

“Her brother?”

“Maybe, but I don’t remember, Harry. It was twenty years ago and a different life for me.”

“I understand. Do you remember who it was in Devonshire Division that you used on the calls?”

“It’s not in the book?”

“No, nothing in the book about any Danish-language interviews. It was just somebody in Devonshire patrol?”