Michael Connelly: 9 Dragons

An hour later, after conferring with a prosecutor from the district attorney’s office, Bosch entered the room carrying a cardboard box containing the case evidence and sat down across the table from Lam. The suspect looked up with scared eyes. They always did after a period of isolation. What was just an hour on the outside was an eternity inside. Bosch put the box down on the floor, then folded his arms on the table.

“Eugene, I’m here to explain the facts of life to you,” he said. “So listen closely to what I tell you. You have a big choice to make here. The fact of the matter is that you are going to prison. There’s no doubt about that. But what you are going to decide here in the next few minutes is how long you go for. It can be until you are a very old man or until they stick the needle in your arm and put you down like a dog…

“Or you can leave yourself a chance at getting your freedom back one day. You’re a very young man, Eugene. I hope you make the right choice.”

He paused and waited but Lam didn’t react.

“It’s sort of funny. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve sat across a table like this with a lot of men who have killed. I can’t say they were all bad or evil men. Some had reasons and some were manipulated. They got led down the path.”

Lam shook his head in a show of bravado.

“I told you people, I want a lawyer. I know my rights. You can’t ask me any questions once I ask for a lawyer.”

Bosch nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, you’re right about that, Eugene. Absolutely right. Once you’ve invoked your rights we can’t question you. Not allowed. But, see, that’s why I’m not asking you anything here. I’m just telling you how it is going to be. I’m telling you that you have a choice to make here. Silence is certainly a choice. But if you choose silence, you’ll never see the outside world again.”

Lam shook his head and looked down at the table.

“Please leave me alone.”

“Maybe it would help you if I summarized things and gave you a clearer picture of where you’re at here. You see, I am perfectly willing to share with you, man. I’ll show you my whole hand because, you know what? It’s a royal flush. You play poker, right? You know that’s the hand that can’t be beat. And that’s what I’ve got here. A royal fucking flush.”

Bosch paused. He could see curiosity in Lam’s eyes. He couldn’t help but wonder what they had on him.

“We know you did the dirty work on this thing, Eugene. You went into that store and you shot Mr. Li dead in cold blood. But we’re pretty sure it wasn’t your idea. It was Robert who sent you in there to kill his father. And he’s the one we want. I’ve got a deputy district attorney sitting in the other room and he’s ready to make you a deal-fifteen to life if you give us Robert. You’ll do the fifteen for sure, but after that, you get a shot at freedom. You convince a parole board you were just a victim, that you got manipulated by a master, and you walk free…

“It could happen. But if you go the other way, you roll the dice. If you lose, you’re done. You’re talking about dying in prison in fifty years-if the jury doesn’t decide to stick the needle in your arm first.”

Lam quietly said, “I want a lawyer.”

Bosch nodded and responded 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 happen to think it means a lot, Eugene. And the prosecutor on the other side of that camera is thinking the same thing. He says it sounds like a prison door slamming, with you standing there on the wrong side of it.”