“Yeah, well, maybe you start by getting a new one. Let’s go.”

As they were crossing the yard to the broken gate, the face of a boy appeared under the curtain of one of the house’s back windows. Washburn raised his hand and gave him a thumbs-up.

By the time they cleared 77th Street Station, leaving Washburn behind in the holding tank, Bosch knew it would be too late to go directly to the Regional Crime Lab at Cal State with the gun and bullet they had collected. So he and Chu headed back to the PAB and locked them in the Open-Unsolved Unit’s evidence safe.

Before heading home, he checked his desk for messages and saw a Post-it on the back of his chair. He knew it was from Lieutenant O’Toole before even reading it. It was one of O’Toole’s favorite means of communication. The message simply said NEED TO TALK.

“Looks like you get a face-to-face with O’Fool in the morning, Harry,” Chu said.

“Yeah, I can’t wait.”

He wadded up the message and threw it into the trash can. He wouldn’t be hurrying in to see O’Toole in the morning. He had other things to do.

Chapter 12

12

They worked like a team. Madeline made the online order and Bosch swung by Birds on Franklin to pick the food up. It was still hot when he got home. They opened the to-go boxes and slid them across the table when they had guessed wrong. They both had gotten the signature rotisserie chicken but Bosch had gone for the baked-beans-and-coleslaw combo with a BBQ dipping sauce, and his daughter had gone with a double order of mac and cheese for her sides and the Malaysian hot-and-sweet dipping sauce. The lavash bread came wrapped in aluminum foil, and a third, smaller container held the order of fried pickles that they’d agreed to share.

The food was delicious. Not as good as eating at Birds but pretty damn close. Though they sat facing each other while eating, they didn’t talk much. Bosch was consumed by thoughts regarding the case and how he would move forward with the weapon he had recovered earlier. His daughter, meantime, was reading a book as she ate. Bosch did not complain, because he considered reading while eating a far better thing than texting and Facebooking, which she usually did.

Bosch was an impatient detective. To him, case momentum was everything. How to get it, how to keep it, how to guard against being distracted from it. He knew he could turn the gun in to the Firearms Unit for analysis and possible restoration of the serial number. But most likely he would hear nothing back for weeks, if not months. He had to find a way to avoid that, to move around the bureaucratic and caseload roadblocks. After a while he thought he had a working plan.