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 mean by ‘too clean’?”
“Well, Harry, I’ve seen a lot of these in my time. And this has the look of a hitter’s work. I’m talking about a contract killer. You have the illicit world of gambling and money in which this victim traversed and then a hit like this and it all adds-”
“Hold on a second there, Double D. How about you stick to forensics and we’ll do the detective work, okay? I need facts from you, not theories. Now, what about the contact wound is too clean for you? What are you trying to say?”
Chastened, Dussein nodded.
“The burn pattern is too small,” he said. “You see, normally, you put the muzzle up to the side of somebody’s head and pull the trigger, you get a three-to-five-inch burn in the hair and on the skin. The hot gases coming out of the barrel spread and burn. You follow?”
“We follow,” Bosch said.
“Okay, well, we’ve got no burn here. We’ve got a contact wound but we’ve got no burn. No gases and you know what that means.”
Bosch nodded. He did know. It meant that the weapon used to kill Tracey Blitzstein was likely equipped with a sound suppressor-a silencer that would have rechanneled the sound of the shot. In doing so it would have rechanneled the explosion of hot gases as well. It would have sent them backward through the baffles of the snap- on device toward the shooter, leaving the victim’s hair unburned except in the immediate area of the wound.
“It would explain why none of the witnesses heard the shot,” Bosch said.
Dussein nodded.
“What are you saying, the shooter used a silencer?” Gunn asked.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Dussein said.
He gestured toward the body.
“There is no burn. This is a contact wound with no burn. I’m telling you, the shooter used a suppressor.”
Bosch nodded. He decided it might be best to move on to the rest of the review.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk about ballistics.”
Dussein nodded, ready to move on.
“We got lucky there,” he said. “The slug impacted in the padding of the door and we recovered it in good shape. We also have the casing recovered from the front of the vehicle. A forty-caliber federal. Between the slug and the shell we will be able to match it to a weapon. You just need to find the weapon.”
Bosch nodded.
“I’m wondering how the shell ended up on the front hood,” he said.
“That’s a good question,” Dussein said. “You want to hear my theory?”
“How about I tell you mine?”
Bosch moved to the open door of the Mustang and reached in with his left hand, stopping a half foot from the victim’s head.
“I’m thinking the shooter was possibly left-handed. In this position the shell could have bounced off his body and then ricocheted forward over the roof to the front hood.”
“My theory exactly.”
Dussein beamed. Bosch just nodded.
“What about the purse?” he asked. “Can we have that yet?”
“Give me five more minutes and then it’s yours,” Dussein replied.
Bosch nodded again and stepped back away from the car. He signaled Gunn outside the grouping so they could confer privately.
“Tell me again what the witnesses said about the husband when they saw him in the street?”
“They said he was in the middle of the street, screaming for help, yelling things like call the cops and call for an ambulance. The man who lives across the street was the next on scene and checked on the victim. He saw that there was no hope and took the husband back over to his place. He was sitting on the porch with him when police arrived on scene.”
Gunn pointed across the street to the old craftsman with a porch running its entire length.
“The neighbor gave him some clothes, too,” she added. “A T-shirt and a pair of sandals. Blitzstein never went back into his own house before we shipped him downtown.”
“Okay, good. Let’s just make sure nobody goes into the house until we get a search warrant.”
He looked around the crime scene. Gunn took a step closer and spoke in a lower voice.
“You really like him for this, don’t you? The husband. I wish I knew what I was missing.”
Bosch shook his head.
“I don’t know. You’re probably not missing anything. Things just don’t seem right to me. Do you know if David Blitzstein is left-handed or right-handed?”
“I don’t know. Do you want me to call my partner? He’s probably still delivering him. He could ask.”
“No, that would tip him off. Let that go for now. Until we…”
He didn’t finish.
“What doesn’t seem right about the scene?” Gunn said, pressing him. “Teach me something.”
“Just a feeling, that’s all. The door was locked on that car when she pulled in. I know, I have a Mustang and the doors automatically lock.”
“Okay, it was locked, but she opened it.”
Bosch shook his head.
“That’s what I don’t see. I know this kind of woman. I was married to one. Someone like her, somebody who moves in a man’s world, somebody who plays cards all night and wins big… somebody who knows the dangers that comes with all of that… I don’t see her swinging that door open before she takes off the seat belt. She wouldn’t open that door until she was ready to move.”
Gunn digested Bosch’s ramble and nodded.
“But she would open it for someone she trusted,” she said.
Bosch pointed a finger at her like a gun and nodded his head.
“Only one problem with that scenario,” she said. “Where’s the gun? I’ve got about a dozen witnesses who saw Blitzstein in the middle of the street in his blue jeans and nothing else.”
Bosch was ready for that argument.
“The gun could be anywhere. It could be in the house or the canal behind the house. It doesn’t matter because the gun and the gunshot do not set the time of the killing. The witnesses didn’t look out their windows because they heard a shot. They looked because Blitzstein was out there screaming in the street.”
Bosch saw recognition flare in Gunn’s eyes.
“You’re saying he had time to get rid of the gun because nobody knows how long it was between when she was capped with the silencer and when he went into the street and started waking up the neighborhood.”
Bosch nodded.
“That’s the other thing. Him going into the street and yelling for help-like he wanted the neighbors to see him. I don’t know, if that was my wife in that car with her brains all over the place… I don’t think I’d end up in the middle of the street with no blood on me. I don’t see that at all.”
His phone buzzed and he started digging it out of his pocket.
“See if Dussein’s done with the purse,” he said. “I’ve got a guy at Parker Center waiting to go to work. I’ll get him on the search warrant for the house.”
“You got it.”
Bosch opened his phone. It was Ignacio Ferras.
“Harry, I’ve looked at all the tapes from the casino’s entrance area and the parking lot. It looks to me like she had a follower.”
