“ Chinatown was great,” Bosch said sarcastically. “You ought to try it some day. It’s got me sitting here counting cars on the freeway.”

“Well, at least you won’t run out.”

“Yeah. What’s going on with you?”

“Pounds finally did it.”

“Did what?”

“Stuck me with somebody new.”

Bosch was silent a moment. The news gave him a sense of finality. The thought that maybe he would never get his job back began to creep into his mind.

“He did?”

“Yeah, he finally did. I caught a case this morning. So he stuck one of his suckups with me. Burns.”

“Burns? From autos? He’s never worked homicide. Has he ever even worked CAPs?”

Detectives usually followed one of two paths in the department. One was property crimes and the other was crimes against persons. The latter included specializing in homicide, rape, assault and robbery. CAPs detectives had the higher-profile cases and usually viewed property crime investigators as paper pushers. There were so many property crimes in the city that the investigators spent most of their time taking reports and processing the occasional arrest. They actually did little detective work. There was no time to.

“He’s been a paper guy all the way,” Edgar said. “But with Pounds that doesn’t matter. All he cares about is having somebody on the homicide table who isn’t going to give his shit back to him. And Burns is just the guy. He probably started lobbying for the job the minute the word went out about you.”

“Well, fuck him. I’m gonna get back to the table and then he goes back to autos.”

Edgar took his time before answering. It was as if Bosch had said something that made no sense to him.

“You really think that, Harry? Pounds ain’t going to stand for you coming back. Not after what you did. I told him when he told me I was with Burns that, you know, no offense but I’d wait until Harry Bosch came back and he said if I wanted to handle it that way, then I’d be waitin’ until I was an old man.”

“He said that? Well, fuck him, too. I still got a friend or two in the department.”

“ Irving still owes you, doesn’t he?”

“I guess maybe I’ll find out.”

He didn’t go further with it. He wanted to change the subject. Edgar was his partner but they had never gotten to the point where they completely confided in each other. Bosch played the mentor role in the relationship and he trusted Edgar with his life. But that was a bond that held fast on the street. Inside the department was another matter. Bosch had never trusted anyone, never relied on anyone. He wasn’t going to start now.

“So, what’s the case?” he asked, to divert the conversation.

“Oh, yeah, I wanted to tell you about it. This was weird, man. First the killing’s weird, then what happened after. The call out was to a house on Sierra Bonita. This is about five in the A.M. The citizen reports he heard a sound like a gunshot, only muffled-like. He grabs his deer rifle out of the closet and goes outside to take a look. This is a neighborhood that’s been picked clean lately by the hypes, you know? Four B and Es on his block alone this month. So, he was ready with the rifle. Anyway, he goes down his driveway with the gun-the garage is in the back-and he sees a pair of legs hanging out of the open door of his car. It was parked in front of the garage.”

“He shoots him?”

“No, that’s the crazy thing. He goes up with his gun but the guy in his car is already dead. Stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver.”

Bosch didn’t get it. He didn’t have enough of the facts. But he said nothing.

“The air bag killed him, Harry.”

“What do you mean, the air bag killed him?”

“The air bag. This goddamn hype was stealing the air bag out of the steering wheel and somehow the thing went off. It inflated instantly, like it was supposed to, and drove the screwdriver right into his heart, man. I’ve never seen anything like it. He must’ve been holding the screwdriver backwards or he was using the butt-end to bang on the wheel. We haven’t exactly figured out that part yet. We talked to a guy at Chrysler. He says that you take the protective cover off, like this dude had, and even static electricity can set the thing off. Our dead guy was wearing a sweater. I don’t know, could’ve been it. Burns says it’s the first death by static cling.”

While Edgar chuckled at his new partner’s humor, Bosch thought about the scenario. He remembered a department info bulletin going out on air bag thefts the year before. They had become a hot commodity in the underground market, with thieves getting as much as three hundred dollars apiece for air bags from unscrupulous body shops. The body shops would buy them for three hundred and turn around and charge a customer nine hundred to install one. That was double the profit derived when ordering from the manufacturer.

“So it goes down as accidental?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah, accidental death. But the story ain’t over. Both doors of the car were open.”

“The dead guy had a partner.”

“That’s what we figure. And so if we find the fucker we can charge him. Under the felony homicide law. So we had SID laser the inside of the car and pull all the prints they could. I took ’em down to Latents and talked one of the techs into scanning them and running them on the AFIS. And bingo.”

“You got the partner?”

“Dead bang. That AFIS computer has got a long reach, Harry. One of the nets is the U.S. Military Identification Center in St. Louis. We got a match on our guy outta there. He was in the Army ten years ago. We got his ID from that, then got an address from the DMV and picked him up today. He copped on the ride in. He’s gonna go away for a while.”

“Sounds like a good day, then.”

“Didn’t end there, though. I haven’t told you the weird part yet.”

“Then tell me.”

“Remember I said we lasered the car and took all the prints?”

“Right.”

“Well, we got another match, too. This one on the crime indexes. A case outta Mississippi. Man, all days should be like this one was.”

“What was the match?” Bosch asked. He was growing impatient with the way Edgar was parceling out the story.

“We matched prints put on the net seven years ago by something called the Southern States Criminal Identification Base. It’s like five states that don’t add up in population to half of L.A. Anyway, one of the prints we put through today matched the doer on a double homicide in Biloxi all the way back in ’seventy-six. Some guy the papers there called the Bicentennial Butcher on account he killed two women on the Fourth of July.”

“The car’s owner? The guy with the rifle?”

“Damn right. His fingerprints were on the cleaver left in one girl’s skull. He was a bit surprised when we came back to his house this afternoon. We said, ‘Hey, we caught the partner of the guy who died in your car. And by the way, you’re under arrest for a two-bagger, motherfucker.’ I think it blew his mind, Harry. You shoulda been there.”

Edgar laughed loudly into the phone and Bosch knew, after only one week of being grounded, how much he missed the job.

“Did he cop?”

“No, he kept quiet. You can’t be that stupid and get away with a double murder for almost twenty years. That’s a nice run.”

“Yeah, what’s he been doing?”

“Looks like he’s just been laying low. Owns a hardware on Santa Monica. Married and has a kid and a dog. A total reform case. But he’s going back to Biloxi. I hope he likes southern cooking ’cause he won’t be coming back here anytime soon.”

Edgar laughed again. Bosch said nothing. The story was depressing because it was a reminder of what he was no longer doing. It also reminded him about what Hinojos had asked about defining his mission.

“Got a couple of Mississippi state troopers comin’ out tomorrow,” Edgar said. “Talked to them a little while ago and they are happy campers.”