Page 63 of Resurrection Walk

“Okay,” she said. “Almost done.”

“No worries,” Bosch said. “Just glad we aren’t doing this in the summer.”

His breath kicked up a puff of desert dust.

“Okay, got it,” she said. “We’re good.”

Bosch rolled to his side and started to get up.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Actually, stay like that, on your knees,” she said. “Let me capture that while we’re here. Just turn to your left about forty-five degrees.”

Moving on his knees, Bosch turned. Arslanian tweaked his position slightly and then told him to drop his hands limply to his sides. He did so and she told him to hold still.

“Okay,” she said. “Do you need help getting all the way up?”

“No, I’m good,” he said.

He got to one knee and pushed himself up. He started brushing the dust and loose scrub grass off his clothes. He was wearing jeans and a patterned shirt with the tails out.

“Sorry about your clothes,” Arslanian said.

“Don’t be,” Bosch said. “Part of the job. I had a feeling I would get dirty out here.”

“But I’m sure your job description doesn’t include playing dead.”

“You’d be surprised. Driver, investigator, subpoena service. I’ve worked for Haller for nine months or so and there’s always a new job within the job, you know?”

“I do. This is my third case with him. I never know what to expect when he calls me.”

Bosch walked over to where she was taking the camera and laser mount off the tripod. She, too, was wearing blue jeans and a work shirt, which had several pens in a breast pocket. She was short and compact, her body shape largely hidden beneath the baggy shirt she wore untucked. And she was newly blond, which Bosch had learned when he picked her up at the airport the day before. Initially he’d looked around baggage claim for a woman whom Haller had described as a redhead.

“So, with all of this, you’re going to make a re-creation of the shooting?” he asked.

“Exactly,” Arslanian said. “We’ll be able to show the murder as close to the way it happened as possible.”

“Amazing.”

“It’s a program that I was involved in developing. It can be tweaked according to height, distance, all physical parameters. What I call the forensic physics of a case.”

Bosch wasn’t sure what all of that meant, though he did know artificial intelligence was a controversial subject, depending on the application. It reminded him of when people first started talking about DNA in law enforcement. It took a while for the technology to be accepted, but now it was considered, wrongly or rightly, to be the easy solve for violent crimes.

“I like what I do,” Arslanian said. “It’s fun to figure out exactly how something happened and why.”

“I get that,” Bosch said.

“How long were you a cop?”

“About forty years.”

“Wow. And military before that? Do you know what the high-ready gun stance is?”

“Sure.”

“That’s what we’re going to show. When Lucinda was married to Roberto, he taught her to shoot. He took her to the range and there are photos of her in high-ready stance. That’s what I’ll base this on.”

“Okay.”

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