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.

“I told you all to get!” Briscoe called from behind her security gate. “Leave me alone or I’ll sue your asses for harassment! Why don’t you make yourselves useful and find out who killed Tru Story.”

Bosch put the gun into an open cardboard box he kept in the trunk and then slammed the lid, looking at the woman over the roof of his car. He held his tongue as he came around to the driver-side door.

They were lucky. Charles Washburn had not only been unable to make bail but he had yet to be transferred from the lockup at 77th Street Station to the city jail downtown. He was pulled out and returned to the interview room in the Detective Bureau and was waiting there when Bosch, Chu, and Gant walked in.

“What, we got three stooges now?” he said. “It take all three a you to roust me this time?”