“Right, the actual war lasted less than two months. The Iraqi Army first retreated to Kuwait City and then tried to make a run back across the border to Basra. Lots were killed and even more were captured.”

“I think that route was called the Highway of Death,” Bosch said, remembering the story and photos filed by Anneke Jespersen.

“That’s right. I Googled all of this yesterday. There were hundreds of casualties and thousands of captives on that one road alone. They put the captives in buses and their weapons in trucks and shipped both out to Saudi Arabia, where they had set up the POW camps.”

“So my gun could have been on one of those trucks.”

“That’s right. Or it could’ve belonged to a soldier who didn’t make it out alive, or who did make it to Basra. There is no way to tell.”

Bosch thought about this for a few moments. Somehow a gun from the Iraqi Republican Guard ended up in Los Angeles the following year.

“What happened to the captured weapons?” he asked.

“The weapons were stockpiled and destroyed.”

“And nobody recorded serial numbers?”

Wingo shook her head.

“It was war. There were too many weapons and not enough time to stand there and mark down serial numbers or anything like that. We’re talking truckloads of guns. So they were simply destroyed. Thousands of weapons at a time. They would haul them out into the middle of the desert, dump them in a hole, and then blow them to bits with high-grade explosives. They’d let ’em burn for a day or two and then push sand over the hole. Done deal.”

Bosch nodded.

“Done deal.”

He continued grinding on it. Something was out on the periphery of his thoughts. Something that connected, that would help bring it all into focus. He was sure of it but he just couldn’t see it clearly.

“Let me ask you something,” he finally said. “Have you seen this before? I mean a gun from over there showing up over here in a case. A gun that was supposedly seized and destroyed.”

“I checked on that very question this morning, and the answer is that we have seen it. At least one time that I could find. Just not exactly in this way.”

“Then in what way?”

“There was a murder at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in ’ninety-six. A soldier killed another soldier in a drunken rage over a woman. The gun he used was also a Beretta model ninety-two that had belonged to Saddam’s army. The soldier in question had served in Kuwait during Desert Storm. During his confession, he said that he had taken it off a dead Iraqi soldier and later smuggled it home as a souvenir. I couldn’t find in the records I reviewed how that was done, however. But he did get it stateside.”