Bosch was in the parking lot in front of the Regional Crime Lab by six o’clock Thursday. Dawn’s light was just bleeding into the sky over East L.A. The Cal State campus surrounding the building was quiet this early. Bosch took a parking space that allowed him to view all the lab workers as they parked and headed toward the building. He sipped a coffee and waited.

At 6:25 he saw the person he wanted. He left his coffee behind, got out with the gun package under his arm, and moved between cars and across lanes to head off his quarry. He got to him before the man got to the entrance of the stone-and-glass building.

“Pistol Pete, just the guy I was hoping to run into. I’m even going to the third floor.”

Bosch reached the door and held it open for Peter Sargent. He was a veteran examiner in the lab’s Firearm Analysis Unit. They had worked several cases together in the past.

Sargent used a key card to get through the electronic gate. Bosch held his badge up to the security officer behind the desk and followed Sargent through. He then followed him into the elevator.

“What’s up, Harry? It kind of looked like you were waiting for me out there.”

Bosch gave an aw-shucks-you-got-me smile and nodded.

“Yeah, I guess I was. Because you’re the guy I need on this. I need Pistol Pete.”

The L.A. Times had given him the sobriquet several years earlier in the headline of a story that reported his tireless work in matching a Kahr P9 to bullets from four seemingly unrelated homicides. He gave the key testimony in the successful prosecution of a mob hit man.

“What’s the case?” Sargent asked.

“A twenty-year-old murder. Yesterday we finally recovered what we’re pretty sure is the murder weapon. I need the bullet match done but I also need to see if we can raise the serial number. That’s the key thing. We get that number, and I think it leads us to the suspect. We solve the case.”

“That simple, huh?”

He reached for the package as the elevator doors opened on three.

“Well, we both know nothing is that simple. But the case has got some mojo going and I don’t want to slow it down.”

“Was the number filed or acid burned?”

They were walking down the hall toward the double-door entrance to the Firearms Unit.

“Looks to me like it was filed down. But you can raise it, right?”

“Some of the time we can—at least partially. But you know the process takes four hours, right? A half day. And you know that we’re supposed to take these in line. The wait’s running five weeks, no cutting in line.”

Bosch was ready for that.