with resignation in his voice.
“Okay, man, that’s your choice. We’ll get you a lawyer.”
He looked up at the ceiling where the camera was located and raised an imaginary phone to his ear.
He then looked back at Lam and knew he wasn’t going to be convinced by words alone. It was show-and-tell time.
“All right, they’re making the call. If you don’t mind, while we’re waiting here I’m going to tell you a few things. You can share them with your lawyer when he gets here.”
“Whatever,” Lam said. “I don’t care what you say as long as I get the attorney.”
“Okay, then, let’s start with the crime scene. You know, there were a few things about it that bothered me from the beginning. One was that Mr. Li had the gun right there under the counter and never got the chance to pull it. Another was that there were no head wounds. Mr. Li was shot three times in the chest and that was it. No shot to the face.”
“Very interesting,” Lam said sarcastically.
Bosch ignored it.
“And you know what all of that told me? That said that Li probably knew his killer and hadn’t felt threatened. And that this was a piece of business. This wasn’t revenge, this wasn’t personal. This was purely a piece of business.”
Bosch reached down to the box and removed the lid. He reached in for the plastic evidence bag that held the bullet casing taken from the victim’s throat. He tossed it on the table in front of Lam.
“There it is, Eugene. You remember looking for that? Coming around the counter, moving the body, wondering what the fuck happened to that casing? Well, there it is. There’s the one mistake that brought it all down on you.”
He paused while Lam stared at the casing, fear permanently lodging in his eyes.
“You never leave a soldier behind. Isn’t that the shooter’s rule? But you did, man. You left that soldier behind and it brought us right to your door.”
Bosch picked up the bag and held it up between them.
“There was a fingerprint on the casing, Eugene. We raised it with something called electrostatic enhancement. EE, for short. It’s a new science for us. And the print we got belonged to your old roommate Henry Lau. Yeah, it led us to Henry and he was very cooperative. He told us the last time he fired and then reloaded his gun was at a range about eight months ago. His fingerprint was sitting on that shell all that time.”
Harry reached down to the box and removed Henry Lau’s gun, still in its black felt bag. He took it out of the bag and put the weapon down on the table.
“We went to Henry and he gave us the weapon. We had it checked out by ballistics yesterday, and sure enough, it’s our murder weapon, all right. This is the gun that killed John Li at Fortune Liquors on September eighth. The problem was that Henry Lau has a solid alibi for the time of the shooting. He was in a room with thirteen other people. He’s even got Matthew McConaughey as an alibi witness. And then on top of that, he told us he hadn’t given his gun out to anybody to borrow.”
Bosch leaned back and scratched his chin with his hand, as if he were still trying to figure out how the gun ended up being used to kill John Li.
“Damn, this was a big problem, Eugene. But then, of course, we got lucky. The good guys often get lucky. You made us lucky, Eugene.”
He paused for effect and then brought down the hammer.
“You see, whoever used Henry’s gun to kill John Li cleaned it up after and then reloaded it so Henry wouldn’t ever know his gun had been borrowed and used to kill a man. It was a pretty good plan, but he made one mistake.”
Bosch leaned forward across the table and looked at Lam eye to eye. He turned the gun on the table so that its barrel was pointing at the suspect’s chest.
“One of the bullets that were replaced in the magazine had a nice readable thumbprint on it. Your thumbprint, Eugene. We matched it to the print they took when you traded in your New York driver’s license for a California DL.”
Lam’s eyes slowly dropped away from Bosch’s and down to the table.
“All of this, it means nothing,” he said.
There was little conviction in his voice.
“Yeah?” Bosch responded. “Really? I don’t know about that. I