When he got back to the cubicle, Chu was there at his desk with his coffee.
“How’s it going, Harry?”
“It’s going.”
Bosch sat down heavily in his desk chair. He hit the spacebar on his keyboard and the computer screen came back to life. He saw that he already had a reply from Bonn. He opened the email.
Detective Bosch, I will make contact with Frej and set up the phone call. I will get back to you with the details as soon as possible. I think at this point we should make our intentions clear. I am promising you confidentiality on this matter as long as you can assure me that I will have the exclusive first story when you make an arrest or wish to seek the public’s help, whichever comes first.
Are we agreed?
Bosch had known that his interaction with the Danish journalist would eventually come to this. He hit the return button and told Bonn that he agreed to provide him with an exclusive once there was something in the case worth reporting.
He fired off the email with a hard strike on the send button, then swiveled his chair and looked back toward the squad lieutenant’s office. He could see O’Toole in there, still at his desk.
“What’s wrong, Harry?” Chu asked. “What did the Tool do now?”
“Nothing,” Bosch said. “Don’t worry about it. But I gotta go.”
“Go where?”
“To see Casey Stengel.”
“Well, you want some backup?”
Bosch stared momentarily at his partner. Chu was Chinese-American, and as far as Bosch could tell, he knew nothing about sports. He had been born long after Casey Stengel was dead. He seemed sincere in not knowing who the Hall of Fame baseball player and manager was.
“No, I don’t think I need backup. I’ll check in with you later.”
“I’ll be here, Harry.”
“I know.”
14
Bosch spent an hour roaming around Forest Lawn while waiting to pick up sandwiches at Giamela’s. Out of respect for his former partner Frankie Sheehan, he started at Casey Stengel’s last resting spot and then took the celebrity tour, passing stones etched with names like Gable and Lombard, Disney, Flynn, Ladd, and Nat King Cole as he made his way to the Good Shepherd section of the vast cemetery. Once there, he paid respects to the father he never knew. The stone said “J. Michael Haller, Father and Husband,” but Bosch knew that he was never accounted for in that family equation.
After a while he walked down the hill a bit to where it was flatter and the graves were closer together. It took him a while because he was working off a twelve-year-old memory, but eventually he found the stone that marked the grave of Arthur Delacroix, a boy whose case Bosch had once worked. A cheap plastic vase containing the dried stems of long-dead flowers sat next to the stone. They seemed to be a reminder of how the boy had been forgotten in life before being forgotten in death. Bosch picked up the vase and found a trash can for it on his way out of the cemetery.
He arrived at the Firearm Analysis Unit at 11 A.M., two still-warm submarine sandwiches from Giamela’s in a bag with sauce on the side. They went into a break room to eat, and Pistol Pete moaned after taking his first bite of meatball sub—so loudly that he drew two other firearm analysts to the room to see what was going on. Sargent and Bosch grudgingly shared their sandwiches with them, Bosch making friends for life.
When they got to Sargent’s worktable, Bosch saw that the Beretta he had brought in was already held in a vise with the left side angled up. The frame had already been polished smooth with steel wool in preparation for Sargent’s effort to raise the serial number.
“We’re ready to go,” Sargent said.
He pulled on a pair of heavy rubber gloves and a plastic eye shield and took his place on the stool in front of the vise. He then pulled the mounted magnifying glass over by its arm and snapped on the light.
Bosch knew that every gun legally manufactured in the world carried a unique serial number through which ownership as well as theft could be traced. People who wanted to hinder the tracing of a gun often filed the serial number off with a variety of tools or attempted to burn it off with acids.
But the manufacturing of the weapon and the stamping procedure involved in placing the serial number on it in the first place gave law enforcement a better-than-good chance of recovering the number. When a serial number is stamped on a gun’s surface during manufacture, the procedure compresses the metal below the letters and numbers. The surface may later be filed or acid burned, but it very often still leaves the compression pattern beneath. Various methods can be used to draw the serial number out. One involves the application of a mixture of acids and copper salts that reacts to the compressed metal, revealing the numbers. Another involves the use of magnets and iron residue.
“I want to start with Magnaflux because if it works it’s quicker and it doesn’t damage the weapon,” Sargent said. “We still have ballistics work to do with this baby and I want to keep it in working order.”
“You’re the boss,” Bosch said. “And as far as I’m concerned, quicker is better.”
“Well, let’s see what we get.”
Sargent attached a large, round magnet on the underside of the gun, directly below the slide.
“First we magnetize . . .”
He then reached up to a shelf over the table and took down a plastic spray bottle. He shook it and then pointed it at the weapon.
“Now we go with Pistol Pete’s patented iron-and-oil recipe . . .”
Bosch leaned in close as Sargent sprayed the gun.
“Iron and oil?”
“The oil is thick enough to keep the magnetized iron suspended. You spray it on and then the magnet will draw the iron to the surface of the gun. Where the serial number was stamped and the metal is denser, the magnetic pull is greater. The iron should eventually line up as the number. In theory, anyway.”
“How long?”
“Not long. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we go with acid, but that will most likely damage the gun. So we don’t want to do that until the ballistics work is finished. You have somebody lined up for that?”
“Not yet.”
Sargent was talking about the analysis that would confirm that the bullet that killed Anneke Jespersen was fired from the gun in front of them. Bosch was confident that it was, but it was necessary to have forensic confirmation. Bosch was knowingly going about this backwards to maintain his speed. He wanted that serial number so he could trace the gun, but he also knew that if Sargent’s oil-and-iron process didn’t work, he would have to slow things down and proceed in proper order. With O’Toole making his PSB complaint, the delay could effectively kill the forward progression of the case—just what O’Toole was hoping to do so that he could bask in the glow of approval from the chief.
“Well, then, let’s hope this works,” Sargent said, bumping Bosch out of these thoughts.
“Yeah,” Harry said. “So should I wait, or do you want to call me?”
“I like to give it about forty minutes. You can wait if you want.”
“Tell you what, call me as soon as you know.”
“You got it, Harry. Thanks for the sub.”
“Thanks for the work, Pete.”
There had been times in Bosch’s career when he knew the phone number of the Police Protective League’s Defense Assistance Office by heart. But back in his car, Bosch opened his phone to talk with a defense rep in regard to the O’Toole matter and realized that he had forgotten the number. He thought for a moment, hoping it would come to him. Two young criminalists moved through the parking lot, the wind lifting their white lab coats. He guessed that they were crime scene specialists, because he didn’t know them. He rarely worked live crime scenes anymore.