The Black Box

for long.”
    Bosch went back to his desk. O’Toole didn’t have the authority to suspend him. Police Protective League regulations were clear. A PSB investigation must lead to a formal finding and complaint before that could happen. But what O’Toole was doing would wind the clock tighter. He had a greater need than ever to keep his momentum.
    When he got back to the cubicle, Chu was there at his desk with his coffee.
    “How’s it going, Harry?”
    “It’s going.”
    Bosch sat down heavily in his desk chair. He hit the spacebar on his keyboard and the computer screen came back to life. He saw that he already had a reply from Bonn. He opened the email.
    Detective Bosch, I will make contact with Frej and set up the phone call. I will get back to you with the details as soon as possible. I think at this point we should make our intentions clear. I am promising you confidentiality on this matter as long as you can assure me that I will have the exclusive first story when you make an arrest or wish to seek the public’s help, whichever comes first.
    Are we agreed?
    Bosch had known that his interaction with the Danish journalist would eventually come to this. He hit the return buttonand told Bonn that he agreed to provide him with an exclusive once there was something in the case worth reporting.
    He fired off the email with a hard strike on the send button, then swiveled his chair and looked back toward the squad lieutenant’s office. He could see O’Toole in there, still at his desk.
    “What’s wrong, Harry?” Chu asked. “What did the Tool do now?”
    “Nothing,” Bosch said. “Don’t worry about it. But I gotta go.”
    “Go where?”
    “To see Casey Stengel.”
    “Well, you want some backup?”
    Bosch stared momentarily at his partner. Chu was Chinese-American, and as far as Bosch could tell, he knew nothing about sports. He had been born long after Casey Stengel was dead. He seemed sincere in not knowing who the Hall of Fame baseball player and manager was.
    “No, I don’t think I need backup. I’ll check in with you later.”
    “I’ll be here, Harry.”
    “I know.”

14
    B osch spent an hour roaming around Forest Lawn while waiting to pick up sandwiches at Giamela’s. Out of respect for his former partner Frankie Sheehan, he started at Casey Stengel’s last resting spot and then took the celebrity tour, passing stones etched with names like Gable and Lombard, Disney, Flynn, Ladd, and Nat King Cole as he made his way to the Good Shepherd section of the vast cemetery. Once there, he paid respects to the father he never knew. The stone said “J. Michael Haller, Father and Husband,” but Bosch knew that he was never accounted for in that family equation.
    After a while he walked down the hill a bit to where it was flatter and the graves were closer together. It took him a while because he was working off a twelve-year-old memory, but eventually he found the stone that marked the grave of Arthur Delacroix, a boy whose case Bosch had once worked. A cheap plastic vase containing the dried stems of long-dead flowers sat next to the stone. They seemed to be a reminder of how the boy had been forgotten in life before being forgotten in death. Bosch picked up the vase and found a trash can for it on his way out of the cemetery.
    He arrived at the Firearm Analysis Unit at 11 A.M., two still-warm submarine sandwiches from Giamela’s in a bag with sauce on the side. They went into a break room to eat, and Pistol Pete moaned after taking his first bite of meatball sub—so loudly that he drew two other firearm analysts to the room to see what was going on. Sargent and Bosch grudgingly shared their sandwiches with them, Bosch making friends for life.
    When they got to Sargent’s worktable, Bosch saw that the Beretta he had brought in was already held in a vise with the left side angled up. The frame had already been polished smooth with steel wool in preparation for Sargent’s effort to raise the serial number.
    “We’re ready to go,” Sargent said.
    He pulled on a pair of heavy rubber gloves and a plastic eye shield and took his place on the stool in front of the vise. He then pulled the mounted magnifying glass over by its arm and snapped on the light.
    Bosch knew that every gun legally manufactured in the world carried a unique serial number through which ownership as well as theft could be traced. People who wanted to hinder the tracing of a gun often filed the serial number off with a