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ninety-two.”
    Bosch studied Coleman to see if he was seeing where this was going.
    “You following me now, Rufus?”
    “I’m following but I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
    “The gun that killed Anneke Jespersen was never recovered, the case was never solved. Then four years later, you come along fresh out of Corcoran and get arrested and charged with the murder of a rival gang member named Walter Regis, age nineteen. You shot him in the face while he was sitting in a booth at a club on Florence. The supposed motivation was that he was seen selling crack on one of the Sixties’ corners. You were convicted of that crime based on multiple eyewitness testimony and your own statements to police. But the one piece of evidence they didn’t have was the gun you used, a Beretta model ninety-two. The gun was never recovered. You see where I’m going with this?”
    “Not yet.”
    Coleman was starting to dummy up. But that was okay with Bosch. Coleman wanted one thing: to get out of prison. He would eventually understand that Bosch could either help or hurt his chances.
    “Well, let me keep telling the story and you try to follow along. I’ll try to make it easy for you.”
    He paused. Coleman didn’t object.
    “So now we’re up to nineteen ninety-six and you get convicted and get fifteen to life and go off to prison like the good Rolling Sixties soldier that you were. Another seven years go by and now it’s two thousand three and there’s another murder. A street dealer in the Grape Street Crips named Eddie Vaughn gets whacked and robbed while he’s sitting in his car with a forty and a blunt. Somebody reaches in from the passenger side and puts two in his head and two in the torso. But reaching in like that was bad form. The shells were ejected and they bounced all around inside thecar. No time to grab them all. The shooter gets two of them and just runs off.”
    “What’s it got to do with me, man? I was up here by then.”
    Bosch nodded emphatically.
    “You’re right, Rufus, you were up here. But you see, by two thousand three they had this thing called the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. It’s a computer data bank run by the ATF, and it keeps track of bullets and casings collected from crime scenes and murder victims.”
    “That’s fucking fantastic.”
    “Ballistics, Rufus, it’s practically like having fingerprints now. They matched those shells from Eddie Vaughn’s car to the gun you used seven years earlier to wipe out Walter Regis. Same gun used in both killings by two different killers.”
    “That’s some cool shit there, Dee -tective.”
    “It sure is but it’s not really news to you. I know they came up here to talk to you about the Vaughn case. The investigators on that one, they wanted to know who you gave the gun to after you hit Regis. They wanted to know who the Rolling Sixties shot caller that you did the hit for was. Because they were thinking the same guy might’ve called the shot on Vaughn.”
    “I think I might remember that. It was a long time ago. I didn’t tell them shit then and I ain’t telling you shit now.”
    “Yeah, I pulled the report. You told them to fuck themselves and go on back home. See, back then you were still a soldier, brave and strong. But that was nine years ago and you had nothing to lose then. The thought of making parole in ten years was pie-in-the-sky stuff to you. But now it’s a different story. And now we’re talking about three murders with the same gun. Earlier this year I took the shell we picked up at theJespersen scene in ’ninety-two and had it run through the ATF data bank. It matched up to Regis and Vaughn. Three killings tied to one gun—a Beretta model ninety-two.”
    Bosch sat back in his chair and waited for a reaction. He knew that Coleman knew what he wanted.
    “I can’t help you, man,” Coleman said. “You can call the hacks back in for me.”
    “You sure? Because I can help