The report concluded that the burns were caused by a stun gun, a handheld device that emits a powerful electric charge and renders its victims unconscious or incapacitated for several minutes or longer, depending on the charge. Normally, a charge from a stun gun would leave two small and almost unnoticeable marks on the skin indicating the location of the twin contacts. But if the contact points of the device were held unevenly against the skin, the electric charge would arc and often burn the skin in the manner seen on Becky Verloren’s neck.

The autopsy summary also noted that an examination of the victim’s bare feet found no soil deposits or cuts or bruises, which would be evident had the girl walked barefoot up the mountainside in the dark.

Bosch drummed his pen on the report and thought about this. He knew this was a mistake made by Green and Garcia. The victim’s feet should have been examined at the scene and they should have made the jump right then to the idea that the suicide was a setup. Instead they missed it and they lost two days waiting for the autopsy on a weekend. Those days plus the two days lost when patrol wrote the parents’ call off as a runaway case added up to a bad number in a murder investigation. There was no doubt that the case was slow out of the blocks. Bosch was beginning to see how badly the department had let Rebecca Verloren down.

The autopsy report also contained the results of a gunshot residue test conducted on the victim’s hands. While GSR was found on Becky Verloren’s right hand, there was no indication of it on her left. Even though Verloren was right-handed Bosch knew that the GSR test was an indicator that she had not actually fired the gun that killed her. Experience-no matter how limited-and common sense would have told the investigators that the girl would have needed to use both hands to properly hold the heavy gun pointed against her own chest and to pull the trigger. The result would have been GSR on both her hands.