the glowing lights set up by forensics around a black hardtop Mustang, a woman stepped away from the gathering and approached him. She wore navy slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. She had a badge clipped to her belt and introduced herself as Kim Gunn. Bosch handed her the extra coffee he had brought and she was almost gleeful about receiving it. She seemed very young to be a homicide detective, even in a divisional squad. This told Bosch that she was good at it or politically connected-or both.
“You’ve got to be a cop’s kid,” Bosch said.
“Why’s that?”
“I was told your full name is Kimber Gunn. Only a cop would name a kid that.”
She smiled and nodded. Kimber was the name of a company that manufactured firearms, in particular the tactical pistols used by specialty squads in law enforcement.
“You got me,” she said. “My father was in LAPD SWAT in the seventies. But I got it better than he did. His name is Tommy Gunn.”
Bosch nodded. He remembered the name from when he first came on the department and was in patrol.
“I heard of him back then. I didn’t know him, though.”
“Well, I’ve heard of you. So I guess that makes us even.”
“You’ve heard of me?”
“From my friend Kiz Rider. We go to BPO meetings together.”
Bosch nodded. Rider was his former partner, now working out of the office of the chief of police. She was also recently elected president of the Black Peace Officers Association, a group that monitored the racial equality of hiring and firing as well as promotions and demotions in the department.
“I miss working with her and I don’t say that about too many people,” Bosch said.
“Well, she says the same about you. You want to take a look at the crime scene now?”
“Yes, I do.”
They started walking toward the lights and the waiting Mustang.
“Did you get anything from the neighbors yet?” Bosch asked.
Gunn nodded.
“No shortage of witnesses,” she said. “When David Blitzstein started yelling in the street, he woke up the neighborhood. I had the best of the lot taken to the station to give formal statements.”
“Anybody hear the gun?”
“Uh-uh.”
Bosch stopped and looked at her.
“Nobody?”
“Nobody we’ve found-and that includes Blitzstein himself. I’ve been up and down the street and nobody heard a gunshot. Everybody heard the guy screaming and plenty of them looked out their windows and saw him standing in the street. Nobody heard or saw a gun. Nobody heard or saw the getaway vehicle, either.”
“You mean if there was one.”
“If there was one.”
Bosch started back toward the Mustang but then stopped again.
“What was your take on the husband?” he asked.
“Like I said, he’s been nothing but cooperative so far. You thinking the husband?”
“At the moment I’m thinking everybody. What was this guy wearing when he was in the middle of the street yelling for help?”
“Blue jeans. No shirt, no shoes.”
“Any blood on him?”
“Not that I saw.”
Bosch’s phone buzzed. It was his partner.
“Harry, I’ve been talking to the manager of the card room. He said Tracey Blitz won a lot of money last night.”
“How much is a lot?”
“She cashed in sixty-four hundred in chips.”
That jibed with what David Blitzstein had told Kimber Gunn.
“Do they have cameras in the parking lot?” Bosch asked.
“Hold on.”
Ferras put his hand over the phone and Bosch heard a muffled back-and-forth conversation. Then Ferras came back on the line.
“There are cameras,” Ferras reported. “He’s going 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
