The Black Box

think the obvious conclusion is that he was outfitting for the invasion.”
    “So the gun went to Kuwait.”
    Wingo nodded.
    “Most likely, but we can’t be sure. That’s where the records stop.”
    Bosch leaned back and looked up at the sky. He suddenly remembered he’d asked Rick Jackson to watch over him. He didn’t think it was necessary anymore and his eyes searched the glass surface of the PAB. The reflection of the sun on the glass coupled with Bosch’s tight angle prevented him from seeing anything. He held his hand up and made the okay sign. He hoped Jackson would get the message and stop wasting his time.
    “What’s that?” Wingo asked. “What are you doing?”
    “Nothing. I had some guy checking on me because you were so spooky about me coming alone and everything. I just told him it was okay.”
    “Thanks a lot.”
    Bosch smiled at her sarcasm. She handed him the file. Her report was complete.
    “Look, I’m a paranoid guy, and you hit the right buttons,” Bosch said.
    “Sometimes paranoia is a good thing,” Wingo replied.
    “Sometimes. So what do you think happened to the gun? How did it get over here?”
    Bosch was working on his own answers to those questions but wanted to hear Wingo’s take before she left. After all, she worked for the federal agency charged with monitoring firearms.
    “Well, we know what happened in Kuwait during Desert Storm.”
    “Yeah, we went over there and kicked the shit out of Saddam’s soldiers.”
    “Right, the actual war lasted less than two months. The Iraqi Army first retreated to Kuwait City and then tried to make a run back across the border to Basra. Lots were killed and even more were captured.”
    “I think that route was called the Highway of Death,” Bosch said, remembering the story and photos filed by Anneke Jespersen.
    “That’s right. I Googled all of this yesterday. There were hundreds of casualties and thousands of captives on that one road alone. They put the captives in buses and their weaponsin trucks and shipped both out to Saudi Arabia, where they had set up the POW camps.”
    “So my gun could have been on one of those trucks.”
    “That’s right. Or it could’ve belonged to a soldier who didn’t make it out alive, or who did make it to Basra. There is no way to tell.”
    Bosch thought about this for a few moments. Somehow a gun from the Iraqi Republican Guard ended up in Los Angeles the following year.
    “What happened to the captured weapons?” he asked.
    “The weapons were stockpiled and destroyed.”
    “And nobody recorded serial numbers?”
    Wingo shook her head.
    “It was war. There were too many weapons and not enough time to stand there and mark down serial numbers or anything like that. We’re talking truckloads of guns. So they were simply destroyed. Thousands of weapons at a time. They would haul them out into the middle of the desert, dump them in a hole, and then blow them to bits with high-grade explosives. They’d let ’em burn for a day or two and then push sand over the hole. Done deal.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Done deal.”
    He continued grinding on it. Something was out on the periphery of his thoughts. Something that connected, that would help bring it all into focus. He was sure of it but he just couldn’t see it clearly.
    “Let me ask you something,” he finally said. “Have you seen this before? I mean a gun from over there showing up over here in a case. A gun that was supposedly seized and destroyed.”
    “I checked on that very question this morning, and the answer is that we have seen it. At least one time that I could find. Just not exactly in this way.”
    “Then in what way?”
    “There was a murder at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in ’ninety-six. A soldier killed another soldier in a drunken rage over a woman. The gun he used was also a Beretta model ninety-two that had belonged to Saddam’s army. The soldier in question had served in Kuwait during Desert Storm. During his confession, he said that he had taken it off a dead Iraqi soldier and later smuggled it home as a souvenir. I couldn’t find in the records I reviewed how that was done, however. But he did get it stateside.”
    Bosch knew that there were many different ways to get souvenir weapons home. The practice was as old as the army itself. When he had served in Vietnam, the easy way was to break the gun down and mail the parts home separately over the course of several weeks.
    “What are you thinking,