Suicide Run

to let me see if she was followed out of the lot.”
    “Good. Let me know.”
    Bosch hung up.
    “That was my partner at the casino,” he told Gunn. “He confirmed she won sixty-four hundred dollars last night. He’ll check the cameras to see if she was followed when she left.”
    Gunn nodded.
    “Let’s go take a look at the victim,” Bosch said.

    Bosch silently studied the murder scene for several minutes, trying to take in the nuances of motivation. Tracey Blitzstein had a contact wound on the left side of her head just above the ear. There was an explosive exit wound encompassing much of her upper right cheek. Her body sat behind the steering wheel of the Mustang, held in place by the seat belt and shoulder strap. She was killed before she had made a move to get out of the car.
    Her small clutch purse was lying unzipped on her lap. Her head was turned slightly to the right and down, her chin on her chest. There were blood spatters and brain material on the dashboard, steering wheel and passenger seat and door. But little blood had dripped from the wounds down onto her clothes or purse. Death had come instantly, the heart getting no chance to pump blood from the wounds.
    Bosch noted that the Mustang’s windows were all intact. He believed that this meant that the fatal shot had been fired through the driver’s open door. Bosch drove a Mustang himself. He knew that when the car’s transmission was placed in drive, the doors automatically locked. This meant that the shooter didn’t open the door. The victim did. She had likely stopped the car, killed the engine and then opened the door to get out before taking off the seat belt. It was when she opened the door that the killer approached, most likely from behind the car, and fired the fatal shot into her brain from a position slightly behind her. She probably never saw her killer or knew what was coming.
    Bosch noticed a yellow evidence marker on the passenger-side door. There was a padded armrest with a hole in it. The yellow tags were used to mark locations of ballistic evidence. He knew that the slug that had killed Tracey Blitzstein had been stopped by the car door.
    Bosch saw another yellow marker on the front hood of the car. It marked the location of a bullet casing that had been found in the crack between the hood and the car’s front right fender. It was most likely the shell ejected from the killer’s gun. Bullet casings were usually ejected from the gun’s chamber in an arc to the right rear of the weapon. This was by design because almost all automatics were manufactured for right-handed shooters and a right-rear ejection arc would take the casing away from the shooter.
    But a shell could easily be redirected forward after rebounding off another object. And if a left-hander was firing the weapon, that object could be the shooter himself. Bosch was left-handed and had personal experience with this—one time a red-hot shell had hit him in the eye after being ejected during range practice. He knew that, depending on the shooter’s stance and how the weapon was held, there was a possibility in this case that the ejected shell hit the shooter and then caromed forward—perhaps to land on the front hood of the car the killer had just fired into.
    Bosch nodded to himself. He had a hunch that he was looking for a left-handed gun.
    “What is it?” Gunn asked.
    “Nothing yet. Just a theory.”
    An assistant coroner named Puneet Pram was working the scene along with a forensics team from the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division. While some coroners kept up a running commentary of what they were doing and seeing at a crime scene, Pram was a very quiet worker. Bosch had been at murder scenes with him before and knew that he would not be getting a lot from him until the autopsy. Donald Dussein, the head of the forensics team, was another matter. He was a known character in the department. Known by a variety of nicknames ranging from Donald Duck to D-Squared, he was usually overly forthcoming—to the point of bending facts into theory and confusing his role at a crime scene. Bosch had worked with him as well and knew he would have to rein him in and keep him on point.
    And it wasn’t long into Dussein’s initial briefing that Bosch had to do just that.
    “Couple things first,” Dussein said. “The contact wound to the head. Neat and very clean. Too clean if you ask me.”
    “All right, then, I’m asking you,” Bosch said. “What do you