Bosch didn’t answer and Drummond didn’t wait long before moving on.

“You’d think he would’ve checked to see if it was loaded.”

He popped out the magazine and wiggled it empty in front of Bosch.

“You were right, Detective,” he said. “You attacked the weak link and Reggie was the weakest link. Bravo on that.”

Bosch realized he had been wrong. This was the end. He brought his knees up and pressed his back against the beam. He braced himself.

He then dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. He conjured up an image of his daughter. It was from a memory of a good day. It was a Sunday and he had taken her to the empty parking lot of a nearby high school for a driving lesson. It had started rough with her foot heavy on the brake. But by the time they were finished, she was operating the car smoothly and with more skill than most drivers Bosch encountered on the real streets of L.A. He was proud of her, and more important, she was proud of herself. At the end of the lesson, when they had switched seats and Bosch was driving them home, she told him she wanted to be a cop, that she wanted to carry on his mission. It had come out of the blue, just something that had developed out of their closeness that day.

Bosch thought about that now and felt a calmness overtake him. It would be his last memory, what he took with him into the black box.

“Don’t go anywhere, Detective. I’m going to need you later.”

It was Drummond. Bosch opened his eyes and looked up. Drummond nodded and started heading back toward the door. Bosch saw him slide the gun he had given Banks under his jacket and into his back waistband. The ease with which he had put Banks down and the practiced motion of slipping the gun behind his back suddenly made things click into place for Bosch. You didn’t coldly dispatch someone like that unless you had done it before. And of the five conspirators, only one had a job in 1992 in which a throw-down gun—one without a serial number—might be useful. To Drummond, his IRG gun wasn’t a souvenir of Desert Storm. It was a working gun. That was why he brought it to L.A.

“It was you,” Bosch said.

Drummond stopped and looked back at him.

“Did you say something?”

Bosch stared at him.

“I said I know it was you. Not Cosgrove. You killed her.”

Drummond stepped back toward Bosch. His eyes roamed the dark edges of the barn and then he shrugged. He knew he held all the cards. He was talking to a dead man and dead men tell no tales.

“Well,” he said. “She was becoming a nuisance.”