Then Bosch saw Gant appear at the mouth of the hallway. He was smiling and holding up a large Ziploc bag containing a black pistol.

“Got it, Harry. We’re good.”

Bosch told Chu to retrieve the two GED guys and he let out his first full breath in ten minutes. It was the best way to have worked it. There was no way O’Toole would have approved his going for a search warrant. There wasn’t enough probable cause for a judge to okay a search three years after the subject’s death. So the dummy warrant scam was the best way. And Gant’s script had worked perfectly. Briscoe had given them the gun voluntarily, without their having to illegally search the house.

As Gant approached the door, Bosch could see that the Ziploc bag was wet.

“Toilet tank?”

An obvious place. One of the top five hiding places used by criminals. They all watched The Godfather at some point in their maturation process.

“Nope. The drain pan under the washing machine.”

Bosch nodded. That wasn’t even top twenty-five. Briscoe reached around Gant and unlocked the security gate. Bosch pulled it open to let him out.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Briscoe,” he said.

“Just get the fuck off my property now and don’t come back,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Gladly.”

Bosch threw her a mock salute and followed Gant off the stoop. Gant handed him the bag and Harry checked the weapon as they walked. The plastic bag was smeared with black mold and scratched from years of use but he could tell the gun was a Beretta model 92.

At the trunk of his car Harry put on a pair of latex gloves and removed the gun from the plastic bag so he could carefully examine it. He first noted that the left side had a deep scrape mark along the barrel and frame that had been painted over or filled in with a marker. It appeared to be the weapon that Charles 2 Small Washburn had described finding in his backyard after the Jespersen murder.

Bosch next checked the serial number on the left side of the frame. But it appeared that the machine-stamped number was gone. By holding the weapon up closer and angling it in the light, he could see where the metal had been scarred by several scrape marks. He doubted these could have been caused by the lawn mower blade. Rather, it looked like a concentrated and deliberate effort to obliterate the tracking number. The closer he looked at the scarring on the metal, the more he was convinced. Either Trumont Story or a previous holder of the gun had purposely removed the serial number.

“That it?” Gant asked.

“Looks like it.”

“You see the serial number?”

“No, it’s gone.”

Bosch ejected the fully loaded magazine and the bullet from the gun’s chamber. He then transferred the weapon to a new plastic evidence bag. Ballistics testing would have to confirm the gun’s connection to the Jespersen killing and those that followed, but Bosch felt sure that he was holding the first solid piece of evidence produced in the case in twenty years. It didn’t necessarily move him any closer to Anneke Jespersen’s killer but it was something. It was a starting point.