“Harry, how’d it go up there?” O’Toole asked.

Before authorizing the trip to San Quentin, O’Toole had been fully briefed on the gun connection between the Jespersen case and the Walter Regis murder carried out by Rufus Coleman.

“Good and bad,” Bosch answered. “I got a name from Coleman. One Trumont Story. Coleman said Story supplied the gun he used for the Regis hit and took it back right after. The catch is that I can’t go to Story because Story is now dead—got whacked himself in ’oh-nine. So I spent the morning at South Bureau and did some checking to confirm the timeline and that Story does fit in. I think Coleman was telling me the truth and not just trying to lay it all off on a dead guy. So it wasn’t a wasted trip but I’m not really any closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen.”

He gestured to the files and the shake box on his desk.

O’Toole nodded thoughtfully, folded his arms, and sat on the edge of Dave Chu’s desk, right on the spot where Chu liked to put his coffee. If Chu had been there, he wouldn’t have liked that.

“I hate hitting the travel budget for a bum trip,” he said.

“It wasn’t a bum trip,” Bosch said. “I just told you that I got a name and the name fits.”

“Well, then, maybe we should just put a bow on it and call it a day,” O’Toole said.

“Putting a bow on a case” referred to C-Bow, or CBO, which meant a case was cleared by other means. It was a designation used to formally close a case when the solution is known but does not result in an arrest or prosecution because the suspect is dead or cannot be brought to justice for other reasons. In the Open-Unsolved Unit, cases frequently were “cleared by other” because they were often decades old and matches of fingerprints or DNA led to suspects long deceased. If the follow-up investigation puts the suspect in the time and location of the crime, then the unit supervisor has the authority to clear the case and send it to the District Attorney’s Office for its rubber stamp.

But Bosch wasn’t ready to go there with Jespersen yet.

“No, we don’t have a CBO here,” Bosch said firmly. “I can’t put the gun in Trumont Story’s hands until four years after my case. That gun could have been in a lot of other hands before that.”

“Maybe so,” O’Toole said. “But I don’t want you turning this into a hobby. We’ve got six thousand other cases. Case management comes down to time management.”

He put his wrists together as if to say he was handcuffed by the constraints of the job. It was this officious side of O’Toole that Bosch had so far been unable to warm up to. He was an administrator, not a cop’s cop. That was why “The Tool” was the first nickname he had received.