I put my hands in the air. “All right, I’m sticking ’em up, buddy. Don’t shoot.”

He smiled, showing off a gap between his front teeth. All fun and games.

I watched his little finger tighten around the trigger and said, “Wait! Lemme give you my wallet first.”

Shuffling forward, I dug in my pocket and produced the pitifully light leather billfold. It distracted him just as I hoped, and I snatched the gun out of his hand, grabbing the barrel from the side and twisting it out and free. He stared at me, rubbing his wrist, stunned. “I was just playing.”

“This is a real gun.”

A shitty .22, to be precise. I nosed back the slide—no round in the chamber. Lucky thing, or someone would be bleeding out on the pavement right now. I dropped the magazine. A hollow point peeked out from the top, spring-loaded and ready to go. I reseated the mag and thumbed the safety on.

“Where’d you get this?”

“I didn’t steal it. I didn’t. It was in my trash.” He pointed to a row of houses backing on the parking lot. Garbage cans lined the rickety wooden fence, awaiting pickup. “I found it. On my property. It’s mine.”

I turned the pistol to check the serial number on the frame above the trigger and was not surprised to find only a stripe of gouged metal. “When?”

The other kids circled, scared but keeping a good distance. A boy in an Angels cap ran off toward the row of houses.

“Dunno. Coupla days ago.”

“The night the cops were here?”

“Day after. They weren’t looking for this, though. A lady got kidnapped from right there. That’s why we’re all playing together now. Buddy system.”

“You talk to the cops about this?”

He shook his head, scared. I looked across at his house. The kid in the Angels cap was returning, tugging at the hand of a big man in a flannel shirt. Through a back window, I could make out trophies and baseball pennants.

“You see anything the night she was kidnapped? Out front here? Around ten, eleven?”

“A car was there a little while.” He pointed at a parking space to the left of Kasey’s door—her car would have held the front slot. “Then it was gone. That’s all. I was up watching TV, so I didn’t even see nobody.”

“What kind of car?”

“It had a big butt on it with windows.”

The best description I’d ever heard of a Volvo. I opened my door, digging through printouts. “What color was it?”

“Brown, or black even. It was hard to tell, ’ cause there was no light.”

I handed him a picture of a Volvo 760. “Like this one?”

“Yeah.” A dirty fingernail tapped the printout. “Like that one. Now can I have my gun back?”

“Can I help you?” the man in the flannel shirt shouted, advancing quickly.

“He was playing with a gun.”

“My boys can play with whatever they damn well please.”

“A real gun.”

“Where’s my ten-year-old son gonna get a real gun?”

“It’s not, Daddy. I swear.”

The man continued at me aggressively. I didn’t want to fight a father in front of his son, so I chambered a round, aimed straight up, and fired. The boom sent the kids sprawling on the concrete and the man back on his heels, crouching, arms raised over his head.

“It’s a real gun,” I said.

Their scared reaction didn’t make me feel good about myself. Not even close.

The kids stayed down on the ground until I drove off.

“Remember for Chainer’s Law you showed me how to restore a serial number that had beenled off?” I raised my shirt, showing the pistol snugged in the front of my jeans.

Lloyd stared at me across the pristine sheet of butcher paper that covered his lab bench. “You want to blow your pecker off? This isn’t a movie, Drew.”

I withdrew the .22 and set it down beside the skull-and-bones matchbook, dimpling the glossy paper. Lloyd coughed uneasily and glanced around.

He’d gotten stuck processing some paint chips and was eager to get home to his wife. Given my excitement over the pistol, he’d yielded to my pressure to see him at the lab. He was working late and figured his superiors would be gone by this hour. I’d caught a few stares on my way in, but the halls were mostly abandoned.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said, snapping on latex gloves. “Why bring a gun if he was planning on knocking Broach out with gas?”

“It wasn’t for Kasey. Her he wanted alive and unconscious. It was in case one of the neighbors stumbled in on him or during that short unlit walk to the Volvo.”

He dusted the pistol, though I was certain that five days of fetishistic fondling by the kid would have smudged over any underlying prints. Indeed, besides mine, Lloyd brought up only child-size marks, which we matched against the prints the kid had left on the Volvo flyer I’d shown him. The magazine and bullets—each of which Lloyd dusted and checked—had been wiped clean.

Using a rotary hand tool fitted with a buffing wheel, he sanded the gouged strip where the serial number had been to a mirror finish. “Wouldn’t he know the neighbor’s routines? Everything else about this guy points to meticulous preparation.”

“But I think he was getting desperate,” I said. “Needed a fix, maybe. He’s thinking less clearly here—he should’ve picked someone who lived somewhere more secluded, like Genevieve. But for whatever reason, he wanted Broach. Which meant neighbors. Which meant he wanted a gun for backup. Once he had her safely in the car, he didn’t need the gun anymore. The trash cans were at the curb, right on the way back to the freeway. He could’ve just slowed down and tossed the gun into one of them.”

Lloyd carried the .22 over to a fume hood, beside a wire basket filled with guns, mags, pistols, and slides of all makes and models, samples for comparison. Quite a few had their serial numbers ground off as well. He donned goggles and gloves and clicked a button on the fume hood’s overhang, the fan suctioning air out from the cube of workspace in which the gun rested. The acids and reagents ranged from clear to dark green; Lloyd applied them to the obliterated metal using cotton swabs, wiping gently in one direction. The acids ate into the steel, the smell keen and foul. The metal that had been deformed by the stamping process should erode more quickly, leaving us with a ghost impression of the numerals.

Focused on his task, Lloyd said, “He’s got an unconscious woman in the back of his wagon and he’s worried about getting caught with a gun?”

“It’s not just about getting caught. I think he doesn’t like guns.”

Looking wonkish in his protective eyewear, Lloyd glanced up from the bubbling acid. “Morton Frankel,” he said, “doesn’t strike me as skittish.”

“You might be surprised about the complexities of Morton Frankel. Kasey Broach was twenty years sober. The Xanax? I don’t think she took it. I think he gave it to her.”

“The killer gave her Xanax? Why? She was knocked out.”

“Maybe not the whole time. Sevoflurane’s difficult to regulate, and Frankel’s not an anesthesiologist. Maybe she popped back into consciousness a few times—especially if he kept her under for a long period.”

“Why would he care if he’s a sadist?”

“Maybe he’s not.”

Lloyd guffawed—the broad laugh. “Come on. This hardly matches a guy who used bondage rope to bind her wrists. So now what? He was worried about his victim’s anxiety? Morton Frankel with the two rapes and a molest? What kind of killer is he?”

What I knew of Mort, I had to confess, didn’t match my theory. Which meant either my suspect had to budge or my theory, my character or my plot. Then it struck me—“Frankel’s in a small apartment. If he brought her there, maybe he gave her Xanax in case she stirred so she wouldn’t freak out and make noise before he could adjust the sevoflurane.”

“That,” Lloyd said, “is a valid hypothesis.” He steered the boom-mounted lamp down to a hard oblique angle to pick up contrast on the gun, and used water to rinse off the acid. “I’m getting something.”

I leaned to squint at the emerging characters, lighter than the surrounding steel, but he moved me back from the rising fumes.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “These aren’t numbers. They’re letters.”

“How is that possible?”

He applied a bit more acid, trying to get the final edges to resolve. He could’ve gouged off the number entirely, so no restoration could be performed, then stamped letters on and scratched it down again.”

Easy work for a machinist.

Lloyd took off the eyewear and threw it on the lab bench. “Looks like our boy has a sense of humor.”

I stepped around and peered down at the frame of the .22. Brought to the surface of the gouged metal, a simple message.

NICE TRY.