“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?”