“I know that, Lieutenant,” Bosch said. “My plan is to work with these materials, and if nothing comes of it, then it will be time to look at the next case. But with what we’ve got now, this isn’t a CBO. So it won’t go toward fattening our stats. It will go back as unsolved.”

Bosch was trying to make it clear with the new man that he wasn’t going to play the statistics game. A case was cleared if Bosch was convinced it was truly cleared. And putting the murder weapon in a gangbanger’s hand four years after the fact was hardly good enough.

“Well, let’s see what you get when you look it all over,” O’Toole said. “I’m not pushing for something that’s not there. But I was brought in here to push the unit. We need to close more cases. To do that we need to work more cases. So, what I’m saying is that if it’s not there on this one, then move on to the next one, because the next one might be the one we can close. No hobby cases, Harry. When I came in here, too many of you guys were working hobby cases. We don’t have the time anymore.”

“Got it,” Bosch said, his voice clipped.

O’Toole started to head back toward his office. Bosch threw a mock salute at his back and noticed the coffee ring on the seat of his pants.

O’Toole had recently replaced a lieutenant who liked to sit in her office with the blinds closed. Her interactions with the squad were minimal. O’Toole was the opposite. He was hands-on to a sometimes overbearing degree. It didn’t help that he was younger than half the squad, and almost two decades younger than Bosch. His overmanagement of the largely veteran crew of detectives in the unit was unnecessary and Bosch found himself chafing at the collar whenever O’Toole approached.

Added to that, he was clearly a numbers cruncher. He wanted to close cases for the sake of the monthly and yearly reports that he sent up to the tenth floor. It had nothing to do with bringing justice to murder victims long since forgotten. So far, it appeared that O’Toole had no feel for the human content of the job. He had already reprimanded Bosch for spending an afternoon with the son of a murder victim who wanted to be walked through the crime scene twenty-two years after his father had been killed. The lieutenant had said the victim’s son could have found the crime scene on his own and Bosch could have used the half day to work on cases.

The lieutenant suddenly pirouetted and came back toward the cubicle. Bosch wondered if he had seen the sarcastic salute in the reflection of one of the office windows.

“Harry, a couple other things. First, don’t forget to get your expenses in on the trip. They’re really on my ass about timely filing of that stuff and I want to make sure you get anything back that you took out of your own pocket.”