Michael Connelly: Suicide Run: Three Harry Bosch Stories

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 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.”