“Yes, I am, and this is my motherfucking house.”
“Would you please open the door so you can read the document? It is fully enforceable whether you cooperate with us or not.”
“I don’t want to read a goddamn thing. I know my rights and you can’t just show me a piece of paper and expect me to open my door.”
“Ma’am, you—”
“Harry, can I talk to the lady?”
It was Gant, coming up to the stoop at just the right moment and just according to the script they had worked out.
“Sure, knock yourself out,” Bosch said gruffly, as if he was more annoyed with Gant’s intrusion than with Briscoe. He stepped back and Gant stepped up.
“She’s got five minutes to open up, or we cuff her, put her in a car, and then go in. I’m calling backup now.”
Bosch pulled his cell phone out and walked into the scrub grass out in front so Briscoe could see him making the call.
Gant started speaking in a low voice to the woman in the doorway, doing the Louis Gossett Jr. act, trying to sweet-talk his way to the prize.
“Momma, you remember me? I came by here a few months back. They brought me along here to try to keep the peace, but there’s no stopping them. They’re coming in and they’re going to be looking through all your stuff. Opening things, gettin’ into your private things, gettin’ into whatever anybody else’s got in here. You want that?”
“This is some bullshit. Tru been dead goin’ on three years and now they come around here? They haven’t even solved his damn murder and they sticking a warrant in my face?”
“I know, Momma, I know, but you gotta think about yourself here. You don’t want these guys tearin’ up your house. Where’s the gun at? We know Tru had it. Just give it up and these guys will leave you be.”
Bosch clicked off his phony call and started back toward the house.
“That’s it, Jordy. Backup’s coming and time’s up.”
Gant held a hand back with the palm up.
“Hold on a sec, Detective, we’re talking here.”
He then looked at Briscoe and tried one last time.
“We’re talking, right? You want to avoid this whole thing, right? You don’t want your neighbors seeing this, you sittin’ cuffed in a car, now, do you?”
He paused and Bosch paused and everybody waited.
“Only you,” Briscoe finally said.
She pointed through the gate at Gant.
“That’s cool,” he said. “You going to lead me to it?”
She unlocked the security gate and pushed it toward him.
“Only you come in.”
Gant looked back at Bosch and winked. He was in. He went through the doorway and Briscoe pulled the gate closed and locked it again.
Bosch didn’t like that last part. He moved up the steps and looked in through the bars. Briscoe was leading Gant down a hallway toward the rear of the house. For the first time, he noticed a boy of about nine or ten sitting on a couch playing a handheld video game.
“Jordy, you okay?” he called.
Gant looked back and Bosch put his hands on the security gate’s handle and shook it to remind him that he was locked in and his backup was locked out.
“We’re cool,” Gant called back. “Momma’s going to give it up. She doesn’t want you crackers tearing her place up.”
He smiled as he disappeared from sight. Bosch stayed at the door, leaning close to it so he would hear any sound that might be trouble. He put the phony warrant—dummied off an old one—into his coat’s inside pocket to be used another day.
He waited five minutes and heard nothing except the electronic beeps of the boy’s game. He assumed that the kid was Trumont Story’s child.
“Hey, Jordy?” he finally called out.
The boy didn’t look away from his game. There was no reply.
“Jordy?”
Again no reply. Bosch tried the door handle, even though he knew it was locked. He turned back to the two GED cops and signaled them to go around the house to the back, to see if there was an open door. Chu jumped up on the stoop.
Then Bosch saw Gant appear at the mouth of the hallway. He was smiling and holding up a large Ziploc bag containing a black pistol.
“Got it, Harry. We’re good.”
Bosch told Chu to retrieve the two GED guys and he let out his first full breath in ten minutes. It was the best way to have worked it. There was no way O’Toole would have approved his going for a search warrant. There wasn’t enough probable cause for a judge to okay a search three years after the subject’s death. So the dummy warrant scam was the best way. And Gant’s script had worked perfectly. Briscoe had given them the gun voluntarily, without their having to illegally search the house.
As Gant approached the door, Bosch could see that the Ziploc bag was wet.
“Toilet tank?”
An obvious place. One of the top five hiding places used by criminals. They all watched
“Nope. The drain pan under the washing machine.”
Bosch nodded. That wasn’t even top twenty-five. Briscoe reached around Gant and unlocked the security gate. Bosch pulled it open to let him out.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Briscoe,” he said.
“Just get the fuck off my property now and don’t come back,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Gladly.”
Bosch threw her a mock salute and followed Gant off the stoop. Gant handed him the bag and Harry checked the weapon as they walked. The plastic bag was smeared with black mold and scratched from years of use but he could tell the gun was a Beretta model 92.
At the trunk of his car Harry put on a pair of latex gloves and removed the gun from the plastic bag so he could carefully examine it. He first noted that the left side had a deep scrape mark along the barrel and frame that had been painted over or filled in with a marker. It appeared to be the weapon that Charles 2 Small Washburn had described finding in his backyard after the Jespersen murder.
Bosch next checked the serial number on the left side of the frame. But it appeared that the machine- stamped number was gone. By holding the weapon up closer and angling it in the light, he could see where the metal had been scarred by several scrape marks. He doubted these could have been caused by the lawn mower blade. Rather, it looked like a concentrated and deliberate effort to obliterate the tracking number. The closer he looked at the scarring on the metal, the more he was convinced. Either Trumont Story or a previous holder of the gun had purposely removed the serial number.
“That it?” Gant asked.
“Looks like it.”
“You see the serial number?”
“No, it’s gone.”
Bosch ejected the fully loaded magazine and the bullet from the gun’s chamber. He then transferred the weapon to a new plastic evidence bag. Ballistics testing would have to confirm the gun’s connection to the Jespersen killing and those that followed, but Bosch felt sure that he was holding the first solid piece of evidence produced in the case in twenty years. It didn’t necessarily move him any closer to Anneke Jespersen’s killer but it was something. It was a starting point.
