Desert Star

1

Bosch had the pills lined up on the table ready to go. He was pouring water from the bottle into the glass when the doorbell rang. He sat at the table, thinking he would let it go. His daughter had a key and never knocked, and he wasn’t expecting anyone. It had to be a solicitor or a neighbor, and he didn’t know any of his neighbors anymore. The neighborhood seemed to change over every few years, and after more than three decades of it, he had stopped meeting and greeting newcomers. He actually enjoyed being the cranky old ex-cop in the neighborhood whom people were afraid to approach.

But then the second ring was accompanied by a voice calling his name. It was a voice he recognized.

“Harry, I know you’re in there. Your car’s out front.”

He opened the drawer under the tabletop. It contained plastic utensils, napkins, and chopsticks from takeout bags. With his hand he swept the pills into the drawer and closed it. He then got up and went to the door.

Renée Ballard stood on the front step. Bosch had not seen her in almost a year. She looked thinner than he remembered. He could see where her blazer had bunched over the sidearm on her hip.

“Harry,” she said.

“You cut your hair,” he said.

“A while ago, yeah.”

“What are you doing up here, Renée?”

She frowned as though she had expected a warmer reception. But Bosch didn’t know why she would have after the way things had ended last year.

“Finbar,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“You know what. Finbar McShane.”

“What about him?”

“He’s still out there. Somewhere. You want to try to make a case with me, or do you want to just stand on your anger?”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you let me in, I can tell you.”

Bosch hesitated but then stepped back and held up an arm, grudgingly signaling her to enter.

Ballard walked in and stood near the table where Bosch had just been sitting.

“No music?” Ballard asked.

“Not today,” Bosch said. “So, McShane?”

She nodded, understanding that she had to get to the point.

“They put me in charge of cold cases, Harry.”

“Last I heard, the Open-Unsolved Unit was canceled. Disbanded because it wasn’t as important as putting uniforms on the street.”

“That’s true, but things change. The department is under pressure to work cold cases. You know who Jake Pearlman is, right?”

“City councilman.”

“He’s actually your councilman. His kid sister was murdered way back. It was never solved. He got elected and found out the unit was quietly disbanded and there was nobody looking at cold cases.”

“And so?”

“And so I got wind of it and went to the captain with a proposal. I move over from RHD and reconstitute the Open-Unsolved Unit — work cold cases.”

“By yourself?”

“No, that’s why I’m here. The tenth floor agreed: one sworn officer — me — and the rest of the unit composed of reserves and volunteers and contract players. I didn’t come up with the idea. Other departments have been using the same model for a few years and they’re clearing cases. It’s a good model. In fact, it was your work for San Fernando that made me think of it.”

“And so you want me on this... squad, or whatever you’re calling it. I can’t be a reserve. I wouldn’t pass the physical. Run a mile in under ten minutes? Forget it.”

“Right, so you’d volunteer or we’d make a contract. I pulled all the murder books on the Gallagher case. Six books for four murders — more stuff than you took with you, I’m sure. You could go back to work — officially — on McShane.”

Bosch thought about that for a few moments. McShane had wiped out the whole Gallagher family in 2013 and buried them in the desert. But Bosch had never been able to prove it. And then he retired. He hadn’t solved every case he’d been assigned in almost thirty years working murders. No homicide detective ever did. But this was a whole family. It was the one case he hated most to leave on the table.

“You know I didn’t leave on good terms,” he said. “I walked out before they could throw me out. Then I sued them. They’ll never let me back in the door.”

“If you want it, it’s a done deal,” Ballard said. “I already cleared it before I came here. It’s a different captain now and different people. I have to be honest, Harry, not a lot of people there know about you. You been gone, what, five years? Six? It’s a different department.”

“They remember me up on ten, I bet.”

The tenth floor of the Police Administration Building was where the Office of the Chief of Police and most of the department’s commanders were located.

“Well, guess what, we don’t even work out of the PAB,” Ballard said. “We’re out in Westchester at the new homicide archive. Takes a lot of the politics and prying eyes out of it.”

That intrigued Bosch.

“Six books,” he said, musing out loud.

“Stacked on an empty desk with your name on it,” Ballard said.

Bosch had taken copies of many documents from the case with him when he retired. The chrono and all the reports he thought were most important. He had worked the case intermittently since his retirement but had to acknowledge he had gotten nowhere with it, and Finbar McShane was still out there somewhere and living free. Bosch had never found any solid evidence against him but he knew in his gut and in his soul that he was the one. He was guilty. Ballard’s offer was tempting.

“So I come back and work the Gallagher Family case?” he said.

“Well, you work it, yeah,” Ballard said. “But I need you to work other cases, too.”

“There’s always a catch.”

“I need to show results. Show them how wrong they were to disband the unit. The Gallagher case is going to take some work — six books to review, no DNA or fingerprint evidence that is known. It’s a shoe-leather case, and I’m fine with that, but I need to clear some cases to justify the unit and keep it going so you can work a six-book case. Will that be a problem?”

Bosch didn’t answer at first. He thought about how a year earlier, Ballard had pulled the rug out on him. She had quit the department in frustration with the politics and bureaucracy, the misogyny, everything, and they had agreed to make a partnership and go private together. Then she told him she was going back, lured by a promise from the chief of police to allow her to pick her spot. She chose the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown and that was the end of the planned partnership.

“You know, I had started looking for offices,” he said. “There was a nice two-room suite in a building behind the Hollywood Athletic Club.”

“Harry, look,” Ballard said. “I’ve apologized for how I handled that but you get part of the blame.”

“Me? That’s bullshit.”

“No, you were the one who first told me you can better effect change in an organization from the inside than from the outside. And that’s what I decided. So blame me if it makes you happy, but I actually did what you told me to do.”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t remember telling her that but he knew it was what he felt. It was what he had told his daughter when she was considering joining the department in the wake of all the recent protests and cop hate.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “I’ll do it. Do I get a badge?”

“No badge, no gun,” Ballard said. “But you do get that desk with the six books. When can you start?”

Bosch flashed for a moment on the pills he had lined up on the table a few minutes before.

“Whenever you want me to,” he said.

“Good,” Ballard said. “See you Monday, then. They’ll have a pass for you at the front desk and then we’ll get you an ID card. They’ll have to take your photo and prints.”

“Is that desk near a window?”

Bosch smiled when he said it. Ballard didn’t.

“Don’t press your luck,” Ballard said.

2

Ballard was at her desk, writing a DNA budget proposal, when her phone buzzed. It was the officer at the front.

“I got a guy here, says he was supposed to have a pass waiting. Heron — Her — I can’t say it. Last name is Bosch.”

“Sorry, I forgot to set that up. Give him a visitor pass and send him back. He’s going to be working here, so we’ll have to make him an ID later. And it’s Hieronymus. Rhymes with anonymous.”

“Okay, sending him back.”

Ballard put the phone down and got up to receive Bosch at the front door of the archive, knowing that he would be annoyed with the front-desk snafu. When she got there and opened the door, Bosch was standing six feet back, looking above her head at the wall over the door. She smiled.

“What do you think?” she said. “I had them paint that.”

She stepped out into the hallway so she could turn and look up at the words above the door.

Bosch shook his head. Everybody counts or nobody counts was the philosophy he always brought to homicide work, but it was also his personal philosophy. It wasn’t a slogan and especially not one he liked seeing painted on a wall. It was something you felt and knew inside. Not something advertised, not something that could even be taught.

“Come on, we need something,” Ballard said. “A motto. A code. I want some esprit de corps in this unit. We are going to kick ass.”

Bosch didn’t respond.

“Let’s just go in and get you settled,” Ballard said.

She led the way around a reception counter that fronted the rows of library shelving containing the murder books organized by year and case number. They moved down the aisle to the left of the shelves to the official work area of the reconstituted Open-Unsolved Unit. This was a collection of seven workstations connected by shared partition walls, three on each side and one at the end.

Two of the stations were occupied, the heads of the investigators just cresting the top of the privacy partitions. Ballard stopped at the cubicle at the end of the pod.

“I’m here,” she said. “And I’ve got you set up right here.”

She pointed to a cubicle that shared a partial wall with hers, and Bosch moved around to it. Ballard stepped all the way into hers and folded her arms on the partition so she could look down at his desk. She had already stacked murder books in two separate piles, one big and one small, on the work surface.

“The big pile is Gallagher — I’m sure you recognize that.”

“And this?”

Bosch was opening the top binder in the smaller two-book pile.

“That’s the catch,” Ballard said. “It’s Sarah Pearlman. I want you to start with a review of that.”

“The councilman’s sister,” Bosch said. “You didn’t already look at this?”

“I did, and it looks pretty hopeless. But I want your take on it — before I go back to the councilman with the bad news.”

Bosch nodded.

“I’ll take a look,” he said.

“Before you dive in, let me introduce you to Lilia and Thomas,” Ballard said.

Ballard stepped down to the end of the pod configuration. The last two workstations were occupied by a man and a woman who looked like they were mid to late fifties. Ballard was closest to the man and put her hand on his shoulder as she introduced him. Both gave off professional vibes. The man’s suit jacket was draped over the back of his chair. He wore a tie pulled tight at the collar. He had dark hair and a mustache and wore half glasses for the desk work. The woman had dark hair and was dark complected. She was dressed like Ballard always dressed, in a woman’s suit with a white blouse. She had an American flag pin on her lapel and Bosch wondered if that was to deflect questions about whether she was a foreigner.

“This is Thomas Laffont, who just joined us last week,” Ballard said. “He’s FBI-retired and I’ve paired him with Lilia Aghzafi, who did twenty years with Vegas Metro before wanting to see the ocean and retiring out here. Tom and Lilia are reviewing cases to find candidates for genetic genealogy follow-up, which you may have heard is all the rage in cold case circles.”

Bosch shook hands and nodded to the two investigators.

“This is Harry Bosch,” Ballard said. “Retired LAPD. He won’t toot his own horn, so I will. He was one of the founding members of the old cold case unit and basically has more years in homicide than anybody in the entire police department.”

Ballard then watched Bosch clumsily handle the how-ya-doin’s and small talk. He was not good at hiding his long-held distrust of the FBI. She finally rescued him and took him back to his workstation, telling Aghzafi and Laffont that she had more to go through with the “rookie” member of the squad.

Back at the other end of the pod, they moved into their workstations and Ballard once again stood and leaned over the privacy wall so she could see him while they spoke.

“Wow,” she said. “I just noticed you got rid of the porn-stache. Was that since we talked?”

She was sure it was. She would have noticed its absence up at his house. Bosch’s face reddened as his eyes darted to the other end of the pod to see if Aghzafi and Laffont had heard the comment. He then rubbed his upper lip with a thumb and forefinger as if to make sure he no longer had a mustache.

“It was turning white,” he said.

No other explanation was offered. But Ballard knew it had been turning white since before she had even met Bosch.

“I’m sure Maddie’s happy about that,” she said.

“She hasn’t seen it,” he said.

“Well, how is she doing?”

“As far as I know, fine. Working a lot.”

“I heard she was assigned to Hollywood Division out of the academy. Lucky girl.”

“Yeah, she’s over there on mid-watch. So, this genealogy stuff, how’s that work?”

It was clear to Ballard that Bosch was uncomfortable with the personal questions and was grasping at anything to change the subject.

“You’re not going to have to worry about it,” she said. “It’s good and valid, but it’s science, so it’s expensive. It’s the one place I have to pick our shots. We got a grant from the Ahmanson Foundation, which donated this whole place, but a full genetic rundown costs about eighteen grand if we go outside the department. So we have to pick and choose wisely. I have Tom and Lilia on that, and another investigator you’ll probably meet tomorrow. We have carte blanche on regular DNA analysis because it’s all in-house now. With those, we just have to get in line and wait. I also get one move-to-the-front-of-the-line card I can play each month. The chief gave me that. He also gave us a lab tech specifically assigned to work with our unit’s cases.”

“Nice of him.”

“Yeah, but let’s get back to your orientation. What I’m requiring of our reserves and volunteers is that they give me at least one day a week. Most of them are doing more than that but I stagger them so that we have at least one body in here Monday to Thursday. I’m here full-time and I have Tom and Lilia come on Monday, Paul Masser and Colleen Hatteras on Tuesday, Lou Rawls on Wednesday, and now you... I would say Thursday, but I know you’ll be here much more than that. Most of these guys are as well.”

“Lou Rawls — really?”

“No. And he’s not even Black. His name is Ted Rawls, and after he’d spent ten years as a cop, it would have been impossible not to come out of that with the obvious nickname. So some people still call him Lou and he seems to like it.”

Bosch nodded.

“You should know, though,” Ballard said, leaning forward and lowering her voice so it just barely made it over the privacy wall. “Rawls wasn’t my pick.”

Bosch rolled his chair in closer to his desk to hear better and complete the confidentiality huddle.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“We have more applications than we have seats in the pod,” Ballard said. “The chief gave me the go-ahead to pick who I want and that’s what I’ve done, but Lou Rawls was a Pearlman pick.”

“The councilman.”

“He’s very proprietary about this, he and his chief of staff. It’s about his sister but it’s also about politics. He’s got higher aspirations than city council, and the success of this unit can help. So he put Rawls in and I had to take him.”

“I’ve never heard of him and I think I would have with a name like that. He’s not LAPD, right?”

“No, he’s retired Santa Monica, but that was fifteen years ago, so he doesn’t bring a lot to the table. A lot of hand-holding required, and the thing of it is, he’s a direct pipeline to Pearlman and Hastings.”

“Hastings?”

“Nelson Hastings, Pearlman’s chief of staff. The three of them are like best buds or something. Rawls quit Santa Monica PD after ten years to go into business. So to him this is just a side gig.”

“What’s the business? Is he a PI?”

“No, it’s a business business. He owns a bunch of those mail-drop places. Like UPS, FedEx, box-and-packaging stores. Apparently he’s got them all over the city and does pretty well. He drives a fancy car and has a house in Santa Monica in the college streets. And my guess is he’s one of Pearlman’s main campaign supporters.”

Bosch nodded. He got the picture. A quid pro quo. Ballard leaned back and sat down after realizing that their whispering had been noticed by Laffont and Aghzafi. She could still see Bosch’s eyes over the partition. She continued in a regular tone.

“You’ll meet Paul and Colleen tomorrow,” she said. “They’re solid. Masser is a retired deputy D.A. who worked in Major Crimes, so he’s helpful on the search warrants and legal questions and strategies. It’s good to have him in-house instead of needing to call the D.A.’s Office every time we have a question.”

“I think I remember him,” Bosch said. “And Hatteras?”

“No law enforcement experience. She’s our in-house genealogist and what they call a ‘citizen sleuth.’”

“An amateur. For real?”

“For real. She’s a great internet researcher, and that’s where it’s at with the genetic stuff. IGG — you know what that is, don’t you?”

“Uh...”

“Investigative genetic genealogy. You upload your suspect’s DNA to GEDmatch, which accesses a number of databases, and you sit back and wait for a hit. You must know about this. It was trending big time in cold case investigations until the privacy police arrived, and now it’s a limited resource but still worth pursuing.”

“How they caught the Golden State Killer, right?”

“Exactly. You put in the DNA, and if you’re lucky, you get connections to relatives. A fourth cousin here, a brother nobody knew about there. Then it becomes social engineering. Making contact online, building a family tree with the hope that one branch leads to your guy.”

“And you have a private citizen doing this.”

“She’s an expert, Harry. Just give her a chance. I like her and I think she’s going to work out for us.”

She could see full skepticism in Bosch’s eyes as he looked away from her.

“What?”

“Is this all going to end up in a podcast? Or are we going to make cases?”

Ballard shook her head. She knew he would act this way.

“You’ll see, Harry,” Ballard said. “You don’t have to work with her but I’m betting you will want to eventually. That’s how sure I am. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’m not trying to cause trouble. I’m just happy to be here. You’re the boss and I never question the boss.”

“Yeah, right. That’ll be the day.”

Bosch looked around the room and the pod.

“So, I’m the last guy in,” he said.

“But the first I wanted,” Ballard said. “I just needed to have everything in place before I visited you.”

“And you had to make sure I was cleared.”

“Well, that, too.”

Bosch nodded.

“So, where’s somebody get a cup of coffee around here?” he asked.

“There’s a kitchen with coffee and a fridge,” Ballard said. “You go out through—”

“I’ll take him,” Laffont said. “I need a jolt myself.”

“Thanks, Tom,” Ballard said.

Laffont stood up and asked if anyone else wanted coffee. Ballard and Aghzafi declined, and Bosch followed Laffont to the front of the archive room.

Ballard watched them go, hoping Bosch would play nice with the former FBI agent and not cause a clash on his first day on the job.

3

Bosch was used to being alone in his house when he went through old files and murder books and tried to think of case moves not thought of before. It was largely silent work. He now had to get used to working in a squad room again and relearn the skill of tuning out conversations around him so he could focus on the job at hand.

While Ballard worked the phones and the political demands of her job on the other side of a useless privacy wall, he opened the first of three murder books containing the records of the so-far-unsuccessful Sarah Pearlman investigation.

He started with the binder marked VOLUME 1 and immediately went to the table of contents. All crime scene and forensic photos were listed as located in the third volume. He moved to that binder. He wanted to start with the photos, knowing nothing about the case but seeing what the investigators saw on the morning of June 11, 1994, when Sarah’s mutilated body was found in her bed at her family’s home on Maravilla Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

The third murder book contained several clear plastic sleeves clipped to its rings, each holding two 5 x 7 color photos front and back. The pictures were standard harshly lit color photos in which blood looked purple-black, white skin was turned alabaster, and the victim was robbed of her humanity. Sarah Pearlman was just sixteen when her life was brutally ended by a rapist who had choked and stabbed her. In the first photos, Sarah’s body was splayed on the bed with a flannel nightgown pulled up over the exposed torso to cover her face. Bosch initially took the positioning of the nightgown as an effort by the killer to keep the victim from seeing his features. But as he flipped through the photo sleeves, it became clear that the nightgown was pulled up after she had been attacked and killed. Bosch now recognized it as an action of regret. The killer covered his victim’s face so he would no longer have to see it.

There were multiple stab wounds to the chest and neck of the victim, and blood had soaked the sheets and comforter and coagulated around the body. It was also clear from bruising around the neck that the victim had been choked at some point during the ordeal. Counting the years of war and police work, Bosch had been looking at the unnatural cause of death for more than half a century. To say he got used to seeing the depravity and cruelty that humans inflict upon each other would be wrong, but he had long ago stopped thinking of these explosions of violence as aberrations. He had lost much of his faith in the goodness of people. To him the violence wasn’t the departure from the norm. It was the norm.

He knew this was a pessimistic view of the world, but fifty years of toiling in the fields of blood had left him without much hope. He knew that the dark engine of murder would never run low on fuel. Not in his lifetime. Not in anyone’s.

He continued to flip through the photos, to imprint them permanently on his mind. He knew this was the way for him. It was the way to enrage him, to inextricably bind him to a victim he had seen only in photos. It would ignite the fire he needed.

After the crime scene photos came forensic photos, individual shots of evidence and possible pieces of evidence. These included shots of blood spatter on the wall above the headboard and the ceiling over the victim, photos of her torn underwear discarded on the floor, an orthodontic retainer found in the folds of the bed’s comforter.

There were several photos of fingerprints that had been identified by latent techs, dusted and then taped. Bosch knew that these would likely match the victim, since she had inhabited the bedroom. Notations made on these by the original investigators bore this out. But one photo of what appeared to be the bottom half of a palm print had UNK marked on it. Unknown. Its location was a windowsill and its positioning on the sill indicated that it was left by someone climbing in through the window.

In 1994 the partial palm print would have been useless unless directly compared to a suspect’s. Bosch was working homicides then and knew there were no palm-print databases at the time. Even now, almost three decades later, there were few palm prints on file or in databases for comparison.

Bosch looked over the partition at Ballard. She had just hung up from a call with a local businessman known for building hundreds of apartments in downtown. She had been asking him to join the cause and financially support the work of the Open-Unsolved Unit.

“How’d that go?” he asked.

“I’ll find out,” Ballard said. “We’ll see if he strokes out a check. The Police Foundation gave me a list of previous donors. I try to call two or three a day.”

“Did you know you’d be doing that when you signed up for this?”

“Not really. But I don’t mind. I kind of like guilting people into giving us money. You’d be surprised how many knew somebody who was a victim of an unsolved crime.”

“I don’t think I would be.”

“Yeah, I guess probably not. How’s Pearlman looking?”

“Still on the photos.”

“I knew you’d start there. It was a bad one.”

“Yeah.”

“Any initial impressions?”

“Not yet. I want to look again. But the palm print — the partial. I take it you ran it through present-day databases?”

“Yep. First thing. Got nothing.”

Bosch nodded. It wasn’t a surprise.

“And ViCAP?”

“Nada — no matches.”

ViCAP was an FBI program that included a database of violent crimes and serial offenders. But it was widely known for not being a complete database. Many law enforcement agencies did not require detectives to enter cases because of the time it took to fill out the ViCAP surveys.

“Looking at the photos, it’s hard to believe this was a onetime thing.”

“Agreed. Besides ViCAP, I put calls out to cold case squads from San Diego to San Francisco. No hits, no similars. I even called your old pal Rick Jackson. He’s working cold cases for San Mateo County. He called around for me up there, but no dice.”

Jackson was a retired LAPD homicide detective of Bosch’s era.

“How’s Rick doing?” Bosch asked.

“Sounds like he’s closing cases right and left,” Ballard said. “What I hope we start doing down here.”

“Don’t worry. We will.”

“So, listen. On Mondays I go to the PAB to meet with the captain and update him on the work, the budget, and all of that. I’ll probably be downtown till I go home for the day. Are you good? Tom and Lilia can help if you need anything.”

“I’m good. What are the rules about taking stuff home?”

“You can’t take the books out of here. Sort of defeats the purpose of having all the unsolveds in the same place, you know?”

“Got it. Is there a copier?”

“Don’t copy files, Harry. I don’t want to get into a thing with the captain about that.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay?” Ballard said. “I really mean it.”

“Got it,” Bosch said.

“Okay, then, happy hunting. Think you’ll be back tomorrow? No pressure.”

“I think I’ll be back.”

“Good, I’ll see you then.”

“Right.”

Bosch watched Ballard head out, then glanced to the end of the pod to check on Laffont and Aghzafi. He could see only the tops of their heads over the privacy walls. He went back to work, paging through the crime scene photos again so the images would be permanently seared into memory. Once he was through with the photos, he pulled volume 1 back over and started his review at the beginning.

The original investigators on the case were Dexter Kilmartin and Philip Rossler. Bosch knew the names but not the men. They were assigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division, which handled the major cases citywide. He turned to the chronological log they had kept. It showed that detectives from the Hollywood Division homicide unit initially responded to the case on the morning of June 11, but it was quickly turned over to the RHD heavies because, as a sex crime against a sixteen-year-old minor in the Hollywood Hills, it was bound to draw significant media attention.

Bosch was working Hollywood Homicide at the time but was not on the initial callout because it was not his and his partner Jerry Edgar’s turn on the rotation. But he had vague memories of the case and its quick acquisition by RHD. Little did they know that the case would hold media interest for just one day. The next night, the ex-wife of football great and not-so-great actor O. J. Simpson would be found murdered along with an acquaintance in Brentwood, and that would suck all media attention away from the Pearlman case as well as everything else in the city. The Brentwood murders would garner intense media scrutiny for the next year and beyond, and there would be none left for Sarah Pearlman.

Except for Kilmartin and Rossler. The chrono showed that they made all the right moves, in Bosch’s estimation. Most important, they held back from making an early determination about whether this was a stranger murder. The fact that the killer had entered through an unlocked or open window in the victim’s bedroom suggested that the intruder was likely unknown to the victim, but it did not dissuade the detectives from conducting a full field investigation. They pursued an extensive background check on the victim and questioned numerous friends and family members. Sarah attended a private all-girls school in Hancock Park. Though school was out for the summer, the investigators spent several days locating and interviewing classmates, friends, and faculty in a full-scale attempt to draw a picture of the young girl’s world and social life. The week before the murder, Sarah had started a summer job as a greeter at a restaurant on Melrose Avenue called Tommy Tang’s. She had worked at the popular Thai restaurant the summer before and was already known and liked by several employees. They were questioned, and the detectives went so far as to study the restaurant’s credit-card receipts for the days Sarah had worked. They traced and questioned several customers, but none rose to the level of suspect.

The investigation also included the victim’s parents. Sarah’s father was a lawyer who specialized in large real-estate transactions. The detectives interviewed many in his practice and business dealings, including clients who might have been unhappy with his work, as well as some of those on the other side of his more difficult negotiations. No one emerged as a suspect.

Finally, there was Sarah’s ex-boyfriend. Four months before her death, she had broken up with a short-term boyfriend named Bryan Richmond, whom she had met at an annual social between her school and an all-boys school also in Hancock Park. He was extensively questioned and investigated but ultimately cleared. He had moved on from the relationship and had been dating someone new.

At the time of the murder, Sarah’s parents were on a golfing vacation in Carmel, playing the courses at and around Pebble Beach. Sarah was staying at home with her brother, Jake, two years older. On the Friday night of the murder, Sarah had worked at the restaurant and then returned home at about 10 p.m. to the house on Maravilla. She was licensed and had use of her mother’s car while she was gone. Jake Pearlman was out with his girlfriend and didn’t return home till midnight. His mother’s car was in the garage and his sister’s bedroom door was closed. He chose not to disturb her because he could see no light on beneath the door and assumed she was asleep.

In the morning, Sarah’s mother called home to check on her children. Jake told her he had not seen Sarah yet. As it was approaching 11 a.m., she told Jake to go to his sister’s room and wake her so she could talk on the phone. That was when he discovered that Sarah had been brutally murdered in her own bed, and the family’s nightmare began.

Bosch took no notes as he reviewed the many interview summaries in volume 1. The original investigation was thorough and seemed complete. Bosch saw nothing overlooked or needing follow-up. When he had previously worked in the Open-Unsolved Unit, it had not been unusual for him to review a case and see the poor or even lazy quality of a murder investigation. Such was not the case with Sarah Pearlman. It appeared to Bosch that Kilmartin and Rossler had taken the case to heart and had left no stone unturned. And what made this even more impressive to Bosch was the fact that at the time of their investigation, the victim was not related to a powerful politician. That would come many years later.

Two hours into his review, he moved on to volume 2, the second murder book, and found the binder to be stocked by update summaries at thirty days, ninety days, six months, and then annually for five years before the case was officially classified as cold and inactive. No suspect or even person of interest ever emerged, and no determination of whether Sarah knew her killer was ever made.

The back of the volume 2 binder was where ancillary records of inquiries by the victim’s family and others were kept over the years. These showed that Sarah Pearlman’s parents made numerous calls asking for updates until these stopped seven years earlier. The inquiries were then taken up by Councilman Jake Pearlman or came from his chief of staff, Nelson Hastings. Bosch took this transition to mean that Sarah Pearlman’s parents had died without ever seeing justice for their daughter.

Bosch finished his review by going back to the photos in volume 3 and slowly paging through the plastic sleeves, once more looking for anything in Sarah’s bedroom that would possibly stand out as a missed lead or piece of evidence.

He finally came to the forensic shots and the final sleeve, which contained a photo of the print card on which a latent tech had taped the partial palm print. He was staring at it when he felt a peripheral presence and looked up to see that Tom Laffont had stepped over from his workstation.

“All good?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah, good,” Bosch said. “Just reviewing this.”

Bosch felt awkward with Laffont studying him.

“She’s got you on the big one, huh?” Laffont said.

“What do you mean?” Bosch asked.

“The councilman’s sister. I get the feeling if we don’t solve it, we won’t be around for very long.”

“You think?”

“Well, Ballard sure spends a lot of time on the phone with him. You know, giving him the blow-by-blow of what we’re doing here. The conversations always seem to come back to the little sister. So she’s under pressure, no doubt.”

Bosch just nodded.

“You find anything we need to do?” Laffont pressed. “Would love to close that one.”

“Not yet,” Bosch said. “Still looking.”

“Well, good luck. You’re going to need it.”

“What did you do with the Bureau? Were you in the L.A. field office?”

“Started in San Diego, did stints in Sacramento and Oakland before finishing down here. Was on the Major Crimes squad. I punched out at twenty. Got kind of sick of chasing bank robbers.”

“I think I get that.”

“Lilia and I are done for the day. Welcome, and I’ll see you next time.”

“Next time.”

Bosch watched Laffont and Aghzafi gather their things and head out. He waited a beat, then got up to look for a copy machine.

On his way to the archive room exit, Bosch stopped and looked down one of the aisles. Shelves on each side were lined with murder books. Some new blue and some faded, a few of the cases contained in white binders. He stepped into the aisle and walked slowly past the books, running the fingers of his left hand along the plastic bindings as he passed. Each one the story of a murder left unsolved. This was hallowed ground to Bosch. The library of lost souls. Too many for him and Ballard and the others to ever solve. Too many to ever soothe the pain.

When he reached the end of the aisle, he made the turn and walked down the next row. The shelves were similarly stacked with cases. A skylight window above brought the afternoon sun down, throwing natural light on unnatural death. Bosch paused for a moment and stood still. There was only silence in the library of lost souls.

4

Ballard picked pinto up at the daycare on Hillhurst and walked him on a leash back to her apartment. He was a ten-pound Chihuahua mix but he managed to pull hard against the leash, his body clock telling him dinner was at the end of the walk.

As she got to the steps leading to the front door of her building, Ballard got a call and saw Bosch’s name on the caller ID.

“Harry?”

She could hear music in the background. Jazz. She assumed he was home.

“Hey. Where are you at?” he asked.

“About to walk in the door at my place,” Ballard said. “What is that? Sounds nice.”

“Clifford Brown with Strings.”

“So, did you finish your review?”

“Did. Went through it a couple times.”

“And?”

“And the original team did a good job. Actually, a really good job. I saw no flaws.”

Ballard had not really expected Bosch to break the case or even find a flaw in the original investigation. She had reviewed the files herself and had found no strings to tug or stone left unturned.

“Well, it was worth the shot,” she said. “I’ll set up a call with the councilman and let him know that we—”

“I’m looking at the photo of the palm print,” Bosch said. “The partial.”

“What do you mean you’re looking at it? I thought you were home.”

“I am home.”

“So you made copies when I told you not to. That’s a great first day, Harry. Already you—”

“Do you want to hear what I’m thinking, or do you want to fire me for breaking the rules?”

She was silent for a moment before letting his infraction go.

“Fine. What are you thinking?”

“This is just a photo. Is the actual print card still around, or was it digitized and destroyed?”

“They don’t destroy print cards, because all digital matches are followed up with a visual confirmation using the actual print before it can go to court. It’s current protocol. Why do you want the original card?”

“Because when they picked up the print with the tape, I don’t know, maybe they got—”

“Some DNA.”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit, Harry, that might actually work. I wonder if that’s been done before.”

“One way to find out.”

“I’ll talk to the lab first thing tomorrow.”

“You should pull the print — make sure it’s still there after twenty-eight years — protocol or not.”

“I will and then I’ll take it to the lab. This is good, Harry. I should have thought of it, but that’s why I have you. It gives me hope, and that will give Councilman Pearlman hope.”

“I don’t think I would tell him about this until you find out if it’s got a shot, you know.”

“You’re right. Let’s see where it goes first. It’s not really Pearlman I talk to over there, anyway. His chief of staff is constantly up my ass about results.”

Bosch realized that Laffont had been wrong about who she spent time with on the phone. It was Hastings, not Pearlman.

“Yeah, Hastings,” he said. “I saw his name in the murder book. Maybe this will shut him up.”

“Harry, thank you,” Ballard said. “This is why I brought you on the team. And you already came through.”

“Not yet. Let’s see what the lab says.”

“Well, I think you can move on to the Gallagher case if you want now.”

“Okay. I’ll start on it.”

“Let me guess, you already copied the files you didn’t already have?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow at Ahmanson?”

“See you tomorrow.”

Ballard hung up, then punched in the combo on the gate and entered her building.

After feeding the dog and changing into sweats, Ballard called in a pickup order of cacio e pepe pasta to Little Dom’s down the street. She had a half hour before pickup, so she opened her laptop on the kitchen table and went to work, trying to find a case where DNA had been extracted from fingerprints.

A basic search turned up nothing and she grew frustrated. She grabbed her phone off the counter and called the cell phone of Darcy Troy, the DNA tech assigned to handle cases from the Open-Unsolved Unit.

“Hey, girl.”

“Darcy, how’s it going?”

“Can’t complain unless you’re going to hit me up with something.”

“I just have a question for the moment.”

“Shoot.”

“Have you ever heard of DNA being pulled off a fingerprint or a palm print?”

“I’ve heard it talked about at the forensic conferences, but are you talking about case law sanctioning it?”

“No, more like whether you can get DNA from prints.”

“Fingerprints are made from the oils on your fingers. It’s still bodily fluid.”

“Palm prints, too?”

“Sure. And if you get people with sweaty palms, then you probably stand a better chance.”

“Sweaty like from being about to commit a crime like rape and murder?”

“There you go.”

“How would you like to be the first at the LAPD to try it?”

“I could use the change of pace. Whaddaya got?”

“I’m not sure I’ve got anything yet. But one of my guys is looking at a case from ’94 — home invasion, rape, and murder — and they pulled half a palm print off the windowsill on the suspected entry point.”

“How was it collected?”

“Dusted with gray powder and taped to a white card.”

“Shit, that doesn’t make it easy. The powder would have absorbed the oil, and the tape they used won’t help. But I could take a look.”

“First thing tomorrow I’m going to latents to pull it.”

“If it’s still there, you mean.”

“Should be. It’s an open case. No RDO.”

The department issued records disposal orders to the evidence units only when a case was solved and considered completed.

“Well, if you find it, bring it to me. I won’t even count it as your jump-the-line pass for this month. Just because this is something new.”

“That sounds like a deal I can’t refuse. I’m going to go now before you change your mind.”

Both women laughed.

“See you tomorrow, Darcy.”

Ballard disconnected and checked the time. She had to go pick up her food. She grabbed the leash and hooked it to Pinto’s collar, then headed out. Little Dom’s was two blocks away. The restaurant people there knew her well from in-person and takeout orders on a weekly basis. It had been her go-to place since she moved into the neighborhood. Her food was ready and waiting and still hot. And there was even a dog biscuit for Pinto.

5

Bosch left his home before dawn because he wanted to get to his destination while the sun was still low in the sky. He got up to the 210 freeway and headed east in very light traffic until he reached the 15 and turned northeast, joining the cars headed toward Las Vegas. But short of the Nevada border he jogged directly north on Death Valley Road and into the Mojave Desert. The road cut across a barren land of brush and sand, the low-lying salt pan off in the distance, glowing white in the morning sun like snow.

At the Old Spanish Trail to Tecopa he pulled off the road by an Inyo County Sheriff’s Department call box and cell tower powered by a sun panel. He put on a Dodgers cap and got out in the sun. It was 7 a.m. and already 79 degrees according to his phone. He walked past the call box and about thirty feet into the brush. He found the spot easily. The lone mesquite tree was still there, partially shading the four columns of rocks piled one on top of another to create a sculpture of sorts marking where the grave had been found. Three of the rock columns had crumbled over time, knocked down by desert winds or earthquakes.

To Bosch it was another place of hallowed ground. It was where an entire family had ended. A father, mother, daughter, and son murdered and then buried in the rock and sand, never to be found had it not been for a Cal State geological expedition studying the nearby salt pan for evidence of climate change.

Bosch noticed that a profusion of flowers had sprouted around the rocks and the trunk of the mesquite tree. Each flower had a yellow button center surrounded by white petals. They were low to the ground and probably pulling water as well as shade from the mesquite, which Bosch knew could send roots eighty feet down through the rock and sand and salt to find water. They were built to stand tall in the harshest of environments.

Bosch didn’t plan to stay long. But he knew that this had to be the starting point to the work he was beginning. Before going once more into the abyss, he had to find his grounding in the case. The emotional core. And he knew without a doubt that he was standing at it. The media and everybody else called it the Gallagher case. Bosch never did. He could not diminish it that way. To him it was the Gallagher Family case. An entire family had been murdered. Taken from their home in the night. Found here by happenstance a year later.

Squatting down amid the flowers, Bosch started to rebuild the rock columns, carefully stacking them again in solid balance. He was wearing old jeans and work boots. He was careful not to catch a finger beneath the heavier rocks as he restacked them. He knew that nature would eventually undo his work here but he felt the need to rebuild the rock garden as he began to rebuild the case.

He was almost finished when he heard a vehicle on the road behind him and the crush of sand and stone as it pulled off the paved road and came to a stop. Bosch glanced over his shoulder and saw the markings on the white SUV: INYO COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.

A lone man in uniform made his way across the scrub to get to Bosch.

“Harry,” he said. “This is a surprise.”

“Beto,” Bosch said. “I could say the same. You just happened to be passing by in the middle of nowhere?”

“No, couple years ago we put a camera on the sun panel by the street. I get alerts. I saw a car pull over and then I saw it was you. Been a long time, brother.”

“Long time is right.”

Beto Orestes was the Inyo County investigator who first responded to the call about bodies being found in the desert eight years before. The grim discovery led to a unique partnership between Orestes and Bosch and their departments. The crimes committed against the Gallagher family were Los Angeles — based but the bodies were found in Inyo County. While the LAPD took the lead on the case, the crime scene investigation was headed by Orestes and run by his department. An ancillary investigation went into why this spot in the desert was chosen and whether it was completely random or possibly a decision that could help identify and link a suspect. It didn’t lead to a conclusion but it was thorough, and Orestes had impressed Bosch with his commitment to the case.

As the weeks and then months went by, Inyo County’s involvement grew less and less. Orestes’ superiors viewed it as an L.A. case inconveniently located in their jurisdiction. Orestes was handed other investigations and responsibilities. Meantime, Bosch was also taken off full-time status on the investigation and given other unsolved cases to pursue until he retired. As the two departments pulled back, and the Open-Unsolved unit was disbanded, the Gallagher Family case fell through the cracks between them.

“I called to check on you about a year ago and they told me you were retired,” Orestes said. “Now I find you in the rock garden we made all those years ago.”

“I’m back on it, Beto,” Bosch said. “I thought I should start here.”

“They take you back?”

“On a voluntary basis.”

“Well, anything I can do, you know how to get me.”

“I do.”

Bosch stood up and dusted off his pants. He was done here. Orestes reached down and picked one of the flowers.

“Hard to believe something so beautiful can exist in this place,” he said. “And people say there is no God. You ask me, there’s God right there.”

He turned the stem between his fingers, and the flower turned like a pinwheel.

“You know what that is?” Bosch asked.

“Sure,” Orestes said. “This one’s called the desert star.”

Bosch nodded. He wasn’t convinced that it was God on earth, but he liked that.

They started back toward their vehicles.

“What about McShane?” Orestes asked. “He poke his head up somewhere?”

“Not as far as I know,” Bosch said. “But I haven’t started to look again. I will today.”

“What’s ‘on a voluntary basis’ actually mean, Harry?”

“The cold case unit is run by one sworn officer, and the rest are part-timers and volunteers.”

“You know, you always struck me as the kind of guy who would do it even if they didn’t pay you.”

“Yeah, well, I guess so.”

They got to the road and Orestes studied Bosch’s old Cherokee.

“That thing going to make it?” he asked. “I got five gallons of water if you want to top off the radiator.”

“No, I’ll be fine,” Bosch said. “The engine’s solid but the AC not so much. That’s why I came out early.”

“So, let me know how it goes, yeah?”

“I will.”

Orestes started toward his SUV and threw a line over his shoulder.

“I’d sure like to see this one cleared before I’m done,” he said.

“Me, too,” Bosch said. “Me, too.”

6

Ballard entered the homicide archive, expecting to find Bosch at his workstation reviewing the Gallagher books. She was excited to update him on her trip to Piper Tech and then to the DNA lab that morning. But there was no Bosch.

Paul Masser, Lou Rawls, and Colleen Hatteras were at their stations and she greeted them. Rawls was in a day before his assigned day. Ballard took this as a sign that he had caught a break on one of the cases he was working or he was just eager to meet the newest team member, Harry Bosch. She decided that it was likely the latter, as his case work moved at a glacial pace with breaks being elusive. In fact, he was the the first official member of the team but had yet to close a case — even a gimme, like a direct DNA case match.

“I thought we were going to meet the new guy you mentioned in the email Sunday,” Masser said.

“We are,” Ballard said. “Or at least we were. Not sure where he is, but he did say he’d be in. So why don’t we start with updates on cases and then we’ll see where we’re at with him.”

Ballard spent the next hour listening as her volunteer crew spoke about their cases and efforts. She was more than their supervisor. As the only full-time sworn officer on the squad, she was not only in charge of the team but also was each member’s individual partner when it came to making decisions that one day might be questioned in court or reviewed by an appeals panel. When cases eventually made their way into the court system, it was likely that she would become the lead investigator and witness for the prosecution.

Lou Rawls went first and fastest, simply reporting that he was still reviewing the cases in the stack Ballard had given him three weeks before and preparing requests for DNA analysis. It was the exact same report he had given the previous week. Since Rawls was the only one on the squad whom Ballard was forced to take on, she felt no hesitation in expressing disappointment in the slow pace of his work.

“Come on, we gotta get these in,” she said at the end of his report. “We all know the lab is backed up. We need to get cases in the pipeline. The department and the city council are not going to wait around forever. This is a results-based unit. Saying we’re waiting on lab results is a lot better than saying we’re working on it.”

“Well, if we made some progress on Sarah Pearlman, I think we’d all feel less pressure,” Rawls countered.

“We are making progress,” Ballard said. “We’ll talk about that later when Bosch is here. Anything else, Lou?”

“No, that’s it from me,” Rawls said.

He sounded annoyed that Ballard had called him out on his report.

“Okay, who wants to go next?” Ballard said, moving on.

“Just a quick one from me,” Masser said. “I have an appointment this afternoon with Vickie Blodget at the D.A. As you all know, she’s the cold case liaison, and I’ll be asking her to sign off on the Robbins and Selwyn cases. Hopefully you’ll have those in your next report to management and council.”

The cases Masser mentioned were DNA cases that led to suspects who were guilty but would never be prosecuted because of extenuating circumstances, such as the suspect being deceased or already serving a life sentence for other crimes. The cases could not be officially classified as solved or closed without the review and approval of the District Attorney’s Office and their designated reviewer. With Vickie Blodget as their go-to, this had become a rubber-stamp process, but it was still a protocol that had to be followed. These cases would be classified as “cleared other” because of the lack of prosecution involved.

The DNA match in the Robbins case led to a man who had died in prison in Colorado, where he had been serving a life sentence for another murder. The Selwyn case was also a DNA match but the suspect was still alive. He was seventy-three years old and on death row at San Quentin. He was never going to see freedom. Though Ballard had gone up to San Quentin to interview him and get a confession, the killer denied his involvement. Since his DNA had been found inside the body of his thirteen-year-old victim, Ballard was undeterred. She had no doubt he was the killer, and she was asking the D.A. to file charges but defer the prosecution. It was the most efficient way to proceed, given that the killer would never get off death row — at least not alive. This decision was agreed to by the family of the victim, who were not interested in rehashing the horrible death of their loved one forty-one years later.

“As soon as Blodget signs off, I want the families informed,” Ballard said. “Will you handle that, Paul?”

“Gladly,” Masser said. “I have the contacts in the files.”

Even though on the face of it, the perpetrators of these crimes had escaped true justice, Ballard had found that those calls to the victims’ loved ones were still very much needed. To give final answers to the mystery and pain that had in many cases accompanied a family for decades was the noble calling of the unit. Ballard had told the people on her team that this was their mandate and duty and not to be taken lightly.

“Okay,” Ballard said, again moving on. “Colleen, where are we with Cortez?”

“Still working social,” Hatteras said. “Growing the tree. Getting close.”

Ballard nodded. Hatteras was working a genealogy case — a 1986 rape and murder with DNA extracted from swabs in the rape kit for which no match was found in the state and national databases. The next step was submitting the evidence to genealogy databases and attempting to identify relatives of the original DNA depositor. Hatteras called this process “watering the tree” and so far this had led to a young woman living in Las Vegas who Hatteras believed might be a distant relative of the killer. Before reaching out directly to the woman, Hatteras was now engaged in the social media sleuthing that would help grow the family tree, leading her from branch to branch and eventually to the identity of a suspect.

“When do you expect to make direct contact with the descendant?” Ballard asked.

“By the end of the week,” Hatteras said. “You get me a ticket to Vegas and I’ll go connect the dots.”

“When you’re ready, I’ll put in the request,” Ballard said.

She then started to end the meeting.

“Okay, everybody, good work,” she said. “Keep at it and remember to give me your hours. Even though you’re not getting paid for your work, we need to track hours for the bosses. They love knowing how much they’re getting for free.”

“So that’s it?” Rawls said. “We have to wait for the new guy to come in to get the download on this new lead the lab’s got on Pearlman?”

The question revealed that Rawls had already heard from Nelson Hastings, Councilman Pearlman’s chief of staff, whom Ballard had updated during her drive in from downtown. On the call, she had only told Hastings there was a new lead on the Pearlman case but couldn’t discuss it until she had results from the lab. She was tempted now to give a response that would lay out Rawls as a direct and unauthorized conduit to the councilman’s office. But she decided to hold back on that confrontation and wait for a better time.

“Well, it’s a wait-and-see situation,” she said. “But thanks to some out-of-the-box thinking by our newest team member, we have a pretty solid genetic lead. This morning down at the Piper Tech print archives, I pulled a card containing the partial palm print believed since day one to have been left by the suspect. I took it to the lab, and they pulled back the tape, swabbed the print, and got DNA. Not a lot but enough to send through the databases. Hopefully we get lucky.”

“Wow,” Masser said. “Be great if it hits.”

Ballard’s attention was drawn past Masser to the aisle next to the case shelves. Harry Bosch was walking toward the pod. He was wearing dusty blue jeans, lace-up work boots, and a denim shirt with perspiration stains under the arms.

“And speak of the devil,” Ballard said.

7

Bosch approached the cold case pod with the eyes of four people, three of whom he didn’t know, cast upon him.

“Harry,” Ballard said. “I was just updating the team on Pearlman. They got DNA off the palm print and we put a rush on matching. We should know yea or nay on a match by the end of the week.”

“That’s good,” Bosch said.

He held up a hand to the strangers in the pod he had not yet met.

“Hey, everybody,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Ballard said. “This is Harry Bosch.”

As Bosch moved to his workstation, Ballard went around the pod, introducing Masser, Rawls, and Hatteras. Masser and Rawls nodded to him, while Hatteras stood and extended her hand over the privacy partition to shake his. She held it after the shake for an awkward two seconds like she was trying to get some sort of read off him, then released it. This prompted Rawls to stand and extend a hand.

“That was smart thinking on the palm print,” he said.

“Oh, I bet somebody here would have thought of it,” Bosch said.

“The councilman will be impressed,” Rawls said.

“Well,” Ballard said, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves till we see where the matching goes.”

Bosch remembered that Rawls was the one Ballard hadn’t chosen for the team. He quietly sat down at his station, and Rawls and Hatteras did the same as Ballard continued.

“So, we were sort of having a team meeting, Harry,” she said. “What I like to do is talk about the cases we’re all working, because we all come from different places and departments and agencies, and I think it’s good to put everything on the table. You never know where a good idea might come from. Like you with the palm print.”

“Okay,” Bosch said.

He felt uncomfortable with all eyes still on him. It felt like he was about to get called on in class and hadn’t done the homework.

“So,” Ballard said, “I know you haven’t started yet on the Gallagher case, but why don’t you give a general summary of the earlier investigation and your thoughts on where you might want to go with it.”

“Uh, okay,” Bosch said hesitantly. “I guess, first of all, I don’t call it the Gallagher case. I call it the Gallagher Family case because it’s a quadruple killing, a whole family: mother, father, nine-year-old daughter, and thirteen-year-old son.”

“How awful,” Hatteras said.

“Yeah, it gets pretty bad,” Bosch said. “It takes a certain kind of killer to take out a whole family like that.”

Bosch paused for a moment to see if there were any other comments, then continued.

“The Gallaghers lived in the Valley — sort of on the border between Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys. And it was thought at first that their disappearance was voluntary. None of the neighbors saw them go, but once it was established that they were gone, it was thought that they just up and left because of business and financial issues. You know, pulled up stakes and just split.”

“A family business?” Masser asked.

“Not really,” Bosch said. “Mr. Gallagher — Stephen Gallagher — was an industrial contractor. He had a couple of pretty big warehouses and an equipment yard up on San Fernando Road in Sylmar, and he rented out cranes and hydraulic lifts and all kinds of equipment used in heavy construction. One of the warehouses was just for scaffolding and that sort of stuff.”

“And then they were found dead,” Hatteras said. “I remember this now. Out in the desert. And that’s where you’ve been this morning.”

Bosch looked at her for a moment and then nodded.

“Yeah, a year later they were found. A geologist from Cal State Northridge and his students were up there in the Mojave on some kind of climate change study and they found the boy’s body. What was left of it. The grave had been disturbed by animals. Coyotes or whatever. That led to all four being discovered and eventually identified as the Gallaghers. They used dental records — the boy, Stephen Jr., had braces.”

“So wouldn’t it be a San Bernardino County case?” Masser asked.

“Actually, the location was Inyo County and it was a joint investigation,” Bosch said. “I was on the first Open-Unsolved Unit back then, and we got the case because it was believed that after a year, the trail was cold. I was the lead. I worked it pretty hard but never broke it open. Then I retired and the case basically went on a shelf...

“But now I’m back and on it again. And, yes, I went up there this morning.”

Bosch looked at Ballard to see if he had said enough.

“Why did you go up there?” she asked.

He knew that she already knew the answer. He didn’t like being put on the spot like this — discussing or justifying his moves.

“I just thought it was the place to start,” he said. “To try to get momentum going again. While I was there, the investigator I worked with from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department showed up. There’s been nothing happening on it from their end either.”

“Can you tell us about Finbar McShane?” Ballard asked. “The more the group knows, the more we might be in a position to have ideas.”

“Stephen Gallagher was born in Ireland,” Bosch said. “Dublin. He met an American woman visiting from L.A. — Jennifer Clarke — and they came back here and eventually married and he started his business. So then at some point he hired another Irish guy, named Finbar McShane. He was from Belfast in Northern Ireland and it was never established if they knew each other previously. McShane wasn’t a partner but he was running the business with Stephen. After the Gallaghers disappear, McShane keeps the business going and piece by piece he starts selling off the equipment. To make this short, a year later the bodies that were never supposed to be found are discovered. And guess what? McShane is gone and the warehouses and the equipment yard are empty. It was a classic bust-out operation.”

“What’s that mean?” Hatteras asked. “A ‘bust-out’?”

“It’s like a scheme,” Bosch said. “A con in which you hollow out a business by ordering products and selling them and basically selling everything until there’s nothing left and it collapses, leaving all your suppliers unpaid and on the hook for the losses.”

“You ever watch The Sopranos?” Rawls asked. “Great show. They did it all the time.”

“So McShane is your suspect,” Masser said, attempting to get back to Bosch’s story. “Any estimate on how much selling all the equipment brought in?”

“We were able to track the sales,” Bosch said. “It was just over eight hundred thousand.”

“Four lives for eight hundred K,” Rawls said.

“If he did it,” Hatteras said.

“Tell them about the letter,” Ballard said.

“We got a letter addressed to the LAPD, supposedly from him,” Bosch said. “He claimed he was innocent and that he left because he didn’t want to be falsely accused.”

“Postmark?” Hatteras asked.

“It was local,” Bosch said. “We put flags on his passport. If he left the country and got back to Belfast or anywhere else, then he did it without his passport.”

“I think he’s still here,” Hatteras said. “I can feel it.”

Bosch looked at her, then turned his eyes to Ballard.

“Talk about the evidence,” Ballard said. “How were they killed?”

“They were executed,” Bosch said. “With a nail gun from one of Gallagher’s warehouses. It was in the grave with them. And there was evidence that the grave had been dug with an excavator.”

“What the heck is an excavator?” Masser asked.

“It’s got two wheels and it can be towed on the back of a pickup,” Bosch said. “I’ve got a picture here somewhere I can show you. The point is, the grave wasn’t dug with a shovel. It was too precise, and it was clear that some solid rock had been split by something with more force than a shovel or a pickax. The grave was close enough to the paved road up there that he could have backed in there with the excavator and used it to get in and out pretty quickly. And one of the first machines McShane sold after the family disappeared was an excavator. We can prove that.”

Bosch pulled open one of the murder books on his desk and started leafing through it, looking for the photo of the excavator. He spoke as he searched.

“We were able to trace that sale, and the buyer let us examine the excavator. There was still a piece of rock lodged in one of the tire treads that matched the creosote at the gravesite.”

“All four were in one grave?” Rawls asked.

“Yes,” Bosch said. “It would have been the fastest way to do it. The hole was about six by four and then four feet deep. The parents were dropped in first, then the children on top of them. Along with the nail gun.”

He found a brochure from Shamrock Industrial Rentals that showed the excavator in question. He handed it over the partition to Masser.

“But that was the only link we ever made to McShane, and it wasn’t enough for an arrest warrant,” Bosch said.

“You went to the D.A. with this?” Masser asked. “I would have been tempted to file.”

“I did, and I guess I wish I’d come to you,” Bosch said. “The filing deputy I brought it to said he wanted more. McShane selling the excavator was not proof he used it to bury the family. There were holes in the linkage. The equipment yard was unguarded at night. Someone could have used Stephen Gallagher’s keys to open the yard and take the excavator for the night.”

“That’s a hell of a stretch,” Masser said.

“I felt the same,” Bosch said. “But I didn’t get to make the call. I was told to get more evidence... and I didn’t. So plan B was to find McShane, stick him in a room, and get him to cop-out. But that never happened and he’s still in the wind. That’s where it stands.”

Finished with his summary, Bosch waited for more questions and suggestions from the others. There was only silence until finally Hatteras asked, “Do you still have the original letter McShane wrote expressing his innocence?” she asked.

“We do,” Bosch said. “It’s handwritten on letterhead from the company.”

“I meant, do you have it there, or is it in evidence archives?” Hatteras said. “I’d like to see the original.”

“It’s here,” Bosch said.

He opened the thickest murder book because he knew it contained the plastic sleeves holding the photos from the case. The letter was sealed in one of the sleeves. He opened the binder’s rings, slipped out the sleeve with the McShane letter, and handed it to Hatteras.

She looked at it for a moment, holding the sleeve at the edges with two hands.

“Can I take it out?” she asked.

“Why?” Bosch asked. “It’s evidence.”

“I want to hold it,” Hatteras said.

“It was processed back then, right?” Ballard said.

“Yes,” Bosch said. “No prints, but the signature was matched to McShane’s. He sent it.”

“I mean, she can take it out,” Ballard said. “It’s been processed.”

“I guess,” Bosch said. “Whatever.”

He watched Hatteras open the sleeve and slip the document out. She then held it the same way with two hands, no gloves. But she wasn’t reading it. Bosch saw that her eyes were closed.

Bosch turned to Ballard, a puzzled look on his face. Before either could speak, Hatteras did.

“I think he’s telling the truth,” she said.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“McShane,” Hatteras said. “I think he was telling the truth when he wrote that he was innocent but couldn’t prove it.”

“What are you talking about?” Bosch said. “You weren’t even read—”

It hit Bosch then. But Ballard spoke before he could.

“Harry, let’s sidebar this for the moment,” she said. “I think it would be best if everybody went back to their own cases now, and I’ll finish showing Harry around the facility.”

Masser returned the brochure to Bosch, followed by Hatteras handing him the McShane letter, back in its protective sleeve.

Ballard stood up.

“Let’s start with our interview room,” she said.

Ballard started walking toward the aisle that led to the archive room entrance. Bosch put the brochure and letter sleeve back on the binder rings, snapped them closed, and then followed her.

8

Ballard stepped into the interview room, bracing for what she knew would be coming from Bosch but acting like everything was routine and normal. Bosch closed the door after following her in.

“You put a psychic on the team?” he said. “Are you kidding me? You brought me in to work with a psychic? Are we going to hold séances to talk to the dead and ask them who killed the Gallagher family?”

“Harry, settle down,” Ballard said. “I knew you would lose your shit about Hatteras. I didn’t expect it to come out so fast. And for the record, she calls herself an ‘empath,’ not a psychic, okay?”

Bosch shook his head.

“Whatever,” he said. “It’s still kooky shit. You know you can never use her in court. She’ll get torn apart and it will shred the case. I don’t want her anywhere near Gallagher. She’ll taint it with this mumbo jumbo.”

Ballard didn’t respond at first. She waited for Bosch to settle and be quiet. She then pulled out one of the chairs at the interview table and sat.

“Sit down, Harry.”

Bosch reluctantly did as he was told.

“Look, I didn’t know anything about this empath stuff till after she was on the team,” Ballard said. “It’s not why she’s in the unit and it’s not what she does here. I told you, she’s on the genealogical work. And her people-reading skills — the so-called empathy — help with all the social engineering that is a necessary part of that work.”

“Like I said, I don’t want her near Gallagher and McShane. Because I’m going to find McShane and nothing is going to taint the case when I do.”

“Fine. I won’t let her near it.”

“Good.”

“So, can you cool off now?”

“I’m cool, I’m cool.”

“Good. You just steer clear of Colleen and I’ll make sure she steers clear of you. But you have to remember that, like you, these people are volunteers. They’re giving their time and talents to this, and Colleen does good work. I don’t want to lose her.”

“I get it. She does her thing and I do mine.”

“Thank you, Harry. Let’s go back.”

Ballard got up. Bosch didn’t.

“Wait,” he said. “Tell me about the palm print. It sounds like you told the whole team already.”

“I did, because it’s the best break on the case we’ve gotten,” Ballard said. “Darcy Troy — our DNA tech — swabbed it and said there was enough for a full analysis. She’s pretty stoked. I think she just wants to be first to pull DNA off a print, so she’s put it to the front of the line. We’ll know something soon, but there isn’t much to say until she gets back to me. And when I hear from her, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Okay.”

“So how are you going to attack the Gallagher Family case?”

“Dig into the books, go through property and evidence, see if anything pops all these years later. Gallagher had four other employees besides McShane. I’ll probably interview them again. And now that I have some authority, I’ll see if I can find McShane. He had family in Belfast, not that they’d give him up. But maybe he’s surfaced. You never know what will fall when you shake a tree after a few years.”

“Let me know how I can help. I’m not just the administrator here. I want to work cases. Especially this kind. Otherwise, I’ll just be babysitting the others.”

“Good to know.”

“I mean it.”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

They returned to the pod and each silently sat down at their respective workstations. Bosch took the stack of murder books from the Gallagher Family case and spread them out in front of him so he could see the labels on the front covers. He knew that volume 1 contained the investigative chronology, which would be the bible of the case, a multipage listing of the moves he had made during the original investigation — each entry noted by date and time with an addendum reference to any larger report written in follow-up.

He knew he would be working with the chrono now, getting his footing in the case again while also looking for any step that he had missed the first time or interpretation of the facts that bore rethinking. But what he first wanted was the 8 x 10 photo of Emma Gallagher in a plastic sleeve at the front of the book. He had put it there many years before so it would be unavoidable every time he and whoever might follow him on the case opened the first murder book to check the chrono.

He slipped the photo of the nine-year-old girl out of the sleeve. It was a school photo. She wore a green plaid jumper that announced Catholic school, and a smile that showed a second tooth just beginning to fill a gap in the bottom row. The photo made him sad. He had attended her autopsy and knew that the tooth never got the chance to come all the way in.

He pinned the photo with a tack on the half wall that separated his cubicle from the work space of Colleen Hatteras. As he leaned forward to do it, she looked over the partition.

“Detective Harry?” she asked.

“Don’t call me that,” Bosch said. “Just Harry is fine.”

“Harry, then. I just wanted to say, I didn’t want to upset you with what I said.”

“Don’t worry, you didn’t. Everything’s fine.”

“Well, then I just want to add that I don’t think you’ll find Finbar McShane. I don’t think he’s alive.”

Bosch looked at her for a long moment before responding.

“Why do you think that?” he asked.

“I can’t explain it,” Hatteras said. “I just get these feelings. Most of the time they’re true. Do you know for a fact he’s still alive?”

Bosch cut his eyes over the wall to Ballard’s station. She was sitting and looking at her computer screen, but Bosch could tell she was listening. He looked back at Hatteras.

“For a fact, no,” Bosch said. “The last confirmation that he was alive was three years after the murders.”

“What was it?” Hatteras asked.

“Stephen Gallagher had an office manager, his first and longest-serving employee, named Sheila Walsh. Her home out in Chatsworth got broken into three years after the murders. Somebody rifled through her home office files and desk. They moved a paperweight and left fingerprints.”

“Finbar McShane.”

Bosch nodded.

“I was retired from the LAPD by then and was working cold cases for San Fernando,” he said. “But I got word about the burglary from my old partner Lucy Soto. It was being handled by Devonshire Division detectives. Sheila Walsh told them that she had no idea what McShane might have been looking for. She didn’t think anything of real value had been taken from her office.”

“Weird,” Hatteras said.

“Yeah. So he was alive then. Whether he is now is just a guess.”

“I trust my instincts. I don’t think you’ll find him alive.”

“What are you getting now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Behind you is the library of lost souls. Six thousand unsolved murders. Aren’t they talking to you, sending messages?”

Before Hatteras could muster a response, Ballard broke in.

“Harry,” she said.

That was all she said, his name in a tone that sounded like a mother warning a child to stop whatever it was he was doing.

Bosch looked at her and then back at Hatteras.

“I have work to do,” he said.

He then hunched down over his desk and out of her eyeline as well as Ballard’s. He opened volume 1 of the murder books and looked at the table of contents. Witness interviews and statements were in volume 3. He went there and found the summaries he had written after three separate interviews with Sheila Walsh.

Sheila Walsh was the first employee Stephen Gallagher hired when he started his equipment rental company in 2002, and she had been with the company through its expansion over the next several years. She had become a key part of the investigation in terms of telling Bosch how the business operated, opening its books, and tracing equipment that had been sold off by McShane.

There were three other employees at Shamrock but Walsh was the most important to the investigation. The other three were men who worked in the warehouse and equipment yard. Walsh was an insider, working in the same suite of offices as Gallagher and McShane.

Bosch reread the summaries of the Walsh interviews and wrote her name, birth date, and address down on a page in a pocket notebook. He then looked over the partition at Ballard.

“Do I have access to the DMV?” he asked.

“Uh, no,” she said. “Only sworn officers. What do you need?”

Bosch tore the page out of the notebook and handed it over the partition to Ballard.

“Can you run her?” he asked. “I want to see if she’s still at that address.”

“Yeah, hold on,” Ballard said.

Bosch heard her fingers on her keyboard as she pulled up the DMV database and ran Sheila Walsh’s name and birth date.

“Her current license has the same address,” she reported.

“Thanks,” Bosch said.

He got up and leaned over the partition.

“You going to go see her?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d start there.”

“You okay going alone?”

“Of course. But I have a question. Back in the day, I sent a lot of stuff we collected at the family’s house and at the office to property. Do I have the authority to have it sent out here, or do you need to do that?”

“Probably me. But it will be faster if we tell them to pull it and then you or I go pick it up. Depends on how soon you want it. Picking up, you can probably get it tomorrow. Delivery out here may take up to a week.”

“I’ll pick it up — if I’m allowed. I still don’t have any credentials.”

“I have the case number. I’ll order it and tell them you’ll be by in the morning to pick it up. Just show them your retired ID. That will work for now. You need to go to the front office here and make an appointment to give photo and prints. Then you’ll get an ID.”

“Okay. Thanks. Another question: Do I have access to the locker room here? I want to clean up, change my shirt.”

“You still carry backup clothes in your car?”

“I did today. I knew I was going out to the desert.”

“You have access to the locker room and showers. I can’t promise they’ll have a free locker for you.”

“Well, they’re police cadets in there, right? I don’t carry a gun, and who’s going to steal my wallet?”

The primary use of the Ahmanson Center was as a second academy for the training of police recruits. Most field training remained at the original academy at Elysian Fields. The Ahmanson was for classroom training — and retraining in some cases. The murder book archive occupied only a small part of the campus.

“You could leave your wallet here and come back for it after you clean up,” Ballard said.

“I’ll be fine,” Bosch said.

“Then, happy hunting.”

“You, too.”

Bosch headed for the door, walking along the endcaps of the murder-book shelves. Taped to the end of each row was a 3 x 5 card showing the range of files by case number, which always began with the year the crime took place. It was a Dewey decimal system of the dead.

Bosch ran a hand along the endcaps as he walked. He didn’t believe in ghosts or the dead reaching out from the dark beyond. But he felt a reverence and empathy as he passed by on his way out.

9

Ballard was just finishing the case summary that she had compiled as part of a request to the Ahmanson Foundation for grant money for a genealogical case Tom Laffont had put together and would work with Hatteras.

“Colleen, Tom’s not here, so I’m sending you this grant app,” she said without taking her eyes off her screen. “Read the case summary and make sure I have it right.”

“Send it, I’ll read it,” Hatteras said.

“I want to get it in today. Maybe get a quick answer so you and Tom can go to work.”

“I’m ready. Send it.”

Just as Ballard closed the document, her desk phone buzzed. She saw on the ID screen that it was Darcy Troy from the DNA lab. She answered the phone while opening an email and sending the grant document to Hatteras.

“Darcy, whaddaya got for me?”

“Well, good and bad news on Sarah Pearlman.”

“Tell me.”

“The good news is we got a hit off the DNA from the palm print. The bad news is it’s a case-to-case hit.”

A case-to-case hit meant the DNA profile from the palm print was matched to the profile from another open case, one where the donor/suspect was unknown. Case-to-case hits were what led to genealogical investigations. This was disappointing in the moment for Ballard because she was looking for a street case, an investigation that took her out into the city and knocking on doors, looking for an identified individual whose DNA was in the law enforcement data banks. That was what Bosch was chasing now with McShane and she wanted the same for herself. It’s what true detectives lived for.

She grabbed a pen off the desk and got ready to write on a legal pad.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” she said. “What’s the name and case number?”

Troy recited the case number first. It was a homicide from 2005, which meant there were eleven years between the Sarah Pearlman murder and the linked case. The victim’s name was Laura Wilson and she was twenty-four years old at the time of her murder.

“Anything else on your end?” Ballard asked.

“Well, it’s unusual on the science side,” Troy said. “As far as how they even came up with the DNA on the 2005 case.”

“Yeah? Tell me.”

“You know the old saying, right? Secretions, not excretions. We extract DNA from bodily fluids — blood, sweat, and semen primarily. But not from bodily waste, because the enzymes destroy DNA.”

“No shit, no piss.”

“Yes, normally, but in this case, it was apparently extracted from urine. You’ll have to get the full details when you pull the book, but according to the few notes I have here, urine was swabbed at the crime scene because the hope was they would find swimmers. If the guy raped the victim before he used the toilet, then there might still be sperm in the urethra and that would come out in the urine. But they found no swimmers. But what they did find was blood.”

“Blood in the urine.”

“Correct. The extraction was handled quickly and they didn’t get a full profile, but they got enough to put on CODIS. They got no hits then but we just connected it with our case.”

CODIS was the national database containing millions of DNA samples collected by law enforcement across the country.

“How did they know the urine with the blood in it came from the killer?” Ballard asked.

“I wasn’t here then, so I don’t know the answer to that,” Troy said. “It’s not in the notes we have here. But hopefully it’s in the murder book.”

“Okay. You said it was not a full profile. Are you saying it’s not a full match to the Pearlman case?”

“No, it’s a match for sure. But as far as going into court with it, I will have to run the numbers, and that will take me some time. But it basically means fewer zeroes. We are not talking about this being a one in thirteen quadrillion match. Something less, but still encompassing the human population of the last hundred years.”

Ballard knew that Troy had the tendency to get lost in the wonder of the numbers. But she had handled enough DNA cases to be able to interpret what she was saying.

“So you’ll be able to testify that this DNA is unique.”

“Well, to be exact, I can testify that no other person on this planet in the last hundred years has had this DNA.”

“Got it. That’s all I need. Now we just have to find the guy. I’m going to go look for the book now. Thanks for the quickie, Darcy.”

“Glad to help. Let me know how it goes.”

“I will.”

Ballard put the phone down and got up.

“Good news?” Hatteras asked.

“Think so,” Ballard said. “Might be another case for you. Did you read that grant app?”

“Read it and sent it back to you. Good to go.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll send it out in a few.”

Ballard headed down the aisle that ran along the endcaps, looking for the 2005 row. She found it and turned the wheel to move the shelves and open the row. She ticked a fingernail along the spines of the murder books until she found case 05-0243 and slid it out. The Laura Wilson case was contained in one overstuffed binder, which Ballard knew she would immediately reinstall in two binders to make flipping through the documents easier. She double-checked that there was not a second binder misplaced nearby during the shelving and saw that none of the other binders on the shelf carried the same case number.

She stepped out of the row and cranked it closed again, thinking all the while about how Bosch called the archives the “library of lost souls.” If that was true, she had one of those lost souls in her hand.

Back at her workstation, Ballard emailed the grant app first, then opened the thick binder she had brought from the archives. Because the origin of the DNA in the case was so unusual, she went straight to the forensics section to see how it came to be that DNA was extracted from urine.

A summary statement from the lead investigator told the story. The victim was murdered in her home, where she lived alone. The crime scene investigators noticed that the toilet seat in the bathroom off the bedroom was up, indicating that a man had used it. While checking the toilet seat and flush handle for fingerprints, a criminalist noticed urine droplets on the rim of the bowl. These drops were reddish brown in color, indicating the possibility of blood cells in the urine. The droplets were collected on swabs, and DNA extraction was conducted the same day because of the fear of possible DNA decay. A partial profile was established and then entered into the CODIS database, drawing no matches.

The summary went on to state that further analysis and medical consultation by investigators determined that the urine had come from someone who had kidney or bladder disease, causing hematuria, the medical term for blood in the urine.

Ballard was excited by what she had read and eager to see whether the investigators used the confirmation of kidney disease as an angle of investigation. Had they looked for a suspect among men being treated for kidney disease? She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out two empty binders. She removed all the documents and plastic sleeves from the original murder book, split the stack, and slipped each half onto the rings of a new binder. She then got up and went to the kitchen to get coffee before she settled in to read the case’s investigative chronology.

Laura Wilson was a young African American woman trying to make it as an actress and living alone in an apartment paid for by her parents back in Chicago. She had moved out to L.A. two years before her death and was in the midst of a promise to herself and her supporters to make it and become self-supporting within five years or to turn around and go home. She was taking acting lessons and routinely auditioning for small parts in films and television shows. She had also joined an acting troupe that worked out of a twenty-seat theater in Burbank. Her apartment was on Tamarind Avenue near the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin. Wilson had joined the organization and was taking classes, also paid for by her parents, in hopes that she would make connections that would help her in the entertainment business.

She had been found murdered on Saturday morning, November 5, 2005, by a friend she was supposed to go with to a Scientology seminar. The friend found the door to her apartment ajar, entered, and found the victim dead in her bed. Cause of death was determined to be manual strangulation — a silk scarf was knotted around her neck. The body was mutilated postmortem.

“What is that?”

Ballard had been so immersed in her reading that she had not noticed that Rawls had come around the pod and was looking over her shoulder.

“The DNA we got on the Pearlman case was linked to this one from ’05,” she said.

“Wow, interesting,” Rawls said.

Ballard closed the binder and swiveled her chair so she could look up at him.

“What’s up, Lou?” she asked.

“I’m taking off,” Rawls said. “I gotta put out a fire at my store in Encino. Angry customer says we lost a package containing a priceless antiquity.”

“That’s gotta hurt. You coming back later this week?”

“Not sure. I’ll let you know.”

“Okay. I’ll see you when I see you.”

Rawls walked off and Ballard immediately turned back to the binder, her mind already deeply embedded in the murder of Laura Wilson.

10

Bosch recognized Sheila Walsh’s house from the last time he had knocked on the door years before. She answered quickly but clearly didn’t remember him. He was older and grayer and maybe his eyes weren’t as sharp as that last time, but after a long moment, she was able to place him, if not remember his name. She smiled.

“Detective,” she said. “This is a surprise.”

“Mrs. Walsh,” Bosch said. “I was hoping you’d remember me.”

“Don’t be silly, of course I do. And it’s Sheila. Has there been a break in the case?”

“Can I come in so we can talk?”

“Yes, yes. Come in, please.”

Walsh stepped back and let Bosch enter. She looked the same as Bosch remembered her. Now pushing sixty, she had more wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but she was still an attractive woman who looked like she ate about one meal a week. Her thin body, narrow shoulders, and big hair had not changed at all, confirming Bosch’s suspicions back in the day that it was a wig.

“Can I get you a coffee or a water or something?” she asked.

“No, I’m fine,” Bosch said. “But we can sit in the kitchen if you want. I remember that was where we sat before.”

“Sure, let’s go back.”

She led him through a dining room — which was clearly being used as an office — to a kitchen that had a small round breakfast table with four chairs.

“Have a seat,” Walsh said. “Has Finbar McShane finally turned up?”

“Uh, no,” Bosch said. “In fact, that was going to be my first question to you. Have you heard any word about him recently? Anything at all?”

“Oh, no. If I had, I would have called you. But I thought you told me you were retiring the last time I saw you.”

“I was. I did. But now I’m back working cold cases and so... I’m looking into the Gallagher Family case again. And trying to find McShane.”

“Ah, I see. Well, if you ask me, he’s back in Belfast or somewhere over there.”

“Yeah, that’s the consensus, but I’m not so sure.”

Bosch looked past her and through a sliding door to the backyard. There was a deck and a small in-ground pool back there. A vegetable garden in long wooden planters had screened canopies over them to keep deer and coyotes and other animals out. The house was in Chatsworth, in the northwest corner of the Valley, and the wildlife came down out of the nearby hills at night. Beyond the planters he could see the rock outcroppings of Stony Point Park in the distance.

“I get stuck thinking about the break-in you had three years after the murders,” Bosch said. “It puzzles me. What was he looking for here?”

“Well, that’s a mystery that will last until you find him,” Walsh said. “Because I’m just as baffled as you are. I didn’t have anything of his. I didn’t know anything about the case beyond what I told the police.”

Bosch reached into the inside pocket of the sport coat he had put on after showering in the locker room at Ahmanson. He pulled out a document, unfolded it, and looked it over before speaking.

“This is the incident report,” he said. “Written before the fingerprints were identified as McShane’s. Says the burglar ate food out of the refrigerator, took a box of old record albums, then lifted money and an iPhone out of your purse.”

“That’s right,” Walsh said.

“Rifled through the desk in the home office and moved the paperweight — a glass Waterford globe — and looked through your mail.”

“Right, but not a desk. I use my dining room table as a desk. And I had the paperweight on my pile of to-do stuff. Bills and mail. At the time, I was learning to be an online travel agent. You know, after Shamrock was gone, I had to do something. So I had documents and cruise brochures in the stack, too. Stuff I needed for online training.”

“Why would McShane be interested in that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. But he would not have known what was in that pile until he checked it, right?”

Bosch nodded and looked back at the incident report. It was a question among many that had nagged him about the case. What was McShane looking for?

“It’s the only place his prints were found,” he said. “There were his, your son’s, and yours. That’s it.”

“I remember that,” Walsh said. “I remember I also had that theory I told the officers about back then.”

“Which was?”

“You know, the paperweight was Waterford glass. It’s made in Ireland. He was from Ireland. Maybe he picked it up because of that.”

Bosch nodded as he thought about that theory.

“Right, that’s in the report,” he said. “But Waterford is in Ireland and McShane was from Northern Ireland. And if he knew it was Waterford or it had some kind of nostalgic value to him, why didn’t he take it?”

“Well... I don’t know,” Walsh said. “Maybe only he knows.”

“Maybe... So, how’s your son doing?”

“He’s good. He moved out to Santa Clarita, works at a golf course up there.”

“Good. Is he an instructor or—”

“No, he doesn’t even play golf. Thinks it’s too boring. But he likes the outdoors. He’s a greenskeeper at Sand Canyon. It’s a good job. Early to work and he gets off before the traffic builds up.”

Bosch nodded and decided to end the small talk.

“Mrs. Walsh, I appreciate your time, especially with me showing up out of the blue,” he said. “But I would really like to go back to the year of the murders and pick your brain again about what was happening with the business and in the office between Stephen Gallagher and Finbar McShane. Do you mind? Can you give me a few more minutes?”

“If you think it will help,” Walsh said. “But my memory of it is probably not what it was back then.”

“That’s okay. It’s sort of funny, because sometimes after a good chunk of time goes by, people remember some things they didn’t mention before and forget some of the things they said. So it helps to sift through everything again. I think that family, especially those two kids, deserves it.”

“Of course they do. That’s why I’m willing to help. I think about those kids all the time. Horrible.”

“Thank you. I want to go back to the period before the murders, when it seemed that there was a strain in the relationship between Gallagher and McShane. I remember you told me that there had been arguments between them.”

“Yes, there were. But it was always behind closed doors. You know, I could hear raised voices but not always what exactly was being said. Like that.”

“How frequent were the arguments?”

“Well, for a while it seemed like every day.”

“But the company — according to the books we looked at — was doing well, right? Before the Gallaghers disappeared, I mean.”

“It was. We were busy all the time. I know that one of the things Fin wanted was to hire more people and, you know, expand. Maybe open another yard and fill it with equipment. He said more inventory would mean more business.”

“But Stephen didn’t want to expand.”

“No, he was very conservative. He built the company from nothing. So he was cautious, and Fin always wanted to do more. They argued, but Stephen owned the business and had final say. Who would have thought it would lead to what happened? Those poor, poor kids. I mean, if it was a business dispute, why did they have to be killed like that?”

They were going over well-trod ground, but Bosch needed to walk the case again to get his footing. He questioned Walsh for another half hour, and she never complained or tried to cut it short. She also provided nothing new in terms of significant case information. But her story of the final days of Shamrock Industrial Rentals had not changed in the years since Bosch had last heard it, and there was a significance to that.

He finished the interview with questions about the months after the disappearance of the Gallagher family when she and McShane attempted to keep the business afloat while they ostensibly waited for the family and the business owner to return. She once again said she had not known that McShane was running ads on Craigslist and selling off equipment rather than renting it out. That is, until he, too, disappeared, leaving the company with a virtually empty warehouse and equipment yard.

“He tricked me like he tricked everybody,” she said. “We were used to having the scaffolding and the cranes and all the equipment gone for long periods of time because they were used in long-term projects. I had no idea the stuff was never coming back because he sold it.”

“What do you remember about the day McShane disappeared?” Bosch asked.

“It was more like days. He didn’t show up one day and then he called and said he was sick. He said he’d probably be out a couple days.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“No, a couple days went by and he was still a no-show, and I had a customer come in who was having an issue with a JLG lift he said Fin sold him. He said Fin gave him a warranty and he wanted it fixed. That’s when I found out he was selling stuff. I called his number and the line was dead. Disconnected. I got suspicious, checked the bank accounts, and found they were empty. He took everything and disappeared.”

“You called the police.”

“I called the missing persons guy that I had called when the family disappeared and he said he would look into it. And then those bodies were found up there in the desert and you took over the case. Did you ever find out where he transferred the money to?”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t like being the one answering questions, but this one he answered.

“It was converted to cryptocurrency,” he said. “Bitcoin was pretty new back then but we couldn’t trace it after that. It was gone.”

“Too bad,” Walsh said.

“Yeah, too bad. So, I’m going to leave you alone now. Thank you for your time. If you have a piece of paper, I’ll leave you my cell number in case you think of anything else. I don’t have business cards.”

“Sure.”

“Sometimes a conversation like this can spark new memories.”

Walsh got up from the table and opened a drawer below the kitchen counter. She took out a pad and pen and Bosch gave her the number.

“You think you’ll catch him this time?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m hoping we do. It’s why I came back.”

“ ‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’ ”

“MLK, right? Let’s hope he was right.”

Bosch left the house and Walsh closed the door. Bosch paused on the front step. Back when Bosch was a young detective going through two packs of smokes a day while working in the Homicide Special unit downtown, he had a routine he’d follow when he left someone’s home after an interview. You never knew how an unanticipated visit from a police detective would affect a witness or suspect. He would stand just outside the front door and take out his cigarettes. He would then light up a smoke with a lighter that was always slow to spark. And he would turn slightly as if to block the wind, but he was really turning an ear toward the door. He would listen in hopes of hearing words spoken inside after his departure. On more than one occasion he picked up tense, sometimes angry voices. One time he even heard someone inside say, “He knows we did it!”

It had now been decades since his last smoke. Instead of a pack of cigarettes, he pulled out his phone while standing on the porch outside Sheila Walsh’s home. He checked to see if any messages had come in while he had been conducting the interview. There was only one and it was a text from Ballard:

He turned slightly to see if there was anything to hear. He heard Walsh’s voice. It was a one-sided conversation indicating that she had made a phone call.

“That detective who was on the Gallagher case was just here,” she said. “He just showed up out of the blue...”

He heard nothing else as the voice trailed off and Walsh apparently walked deeper into the house and away from the front door.

Bosch stepped off the porch and headed to his car. He smiled as he remembered the case in which he had heard the confession from the front stoop. Now he wondered whom Sheila Walsh had called and whether it could be Finbar McShane.

11

Ballard got to Birds before Bosch. He was coming all the way from the far corner of the San Fernando Valley and it would take a while, even in reverse rush-hour traffic. She ordered a beer but held off on a food order. She was going through the chrono from the Laura Wilson murder book that she had copied before leaving. She knew she was breaking the no-copying rule, but she felt it was her rule to break.

This was her third read-through of the forty-five-page case chronology. Now that the Wilson murder had been connected to the Pearlman case, Ballard needed to know it like it was her own. The place to get that knowledge was the chrono, which was a meticulously detailed account of the original investigators’ work. Though their investigation did not lead to an arrest and prosecution, the path they took would be very informative.

As a young would-be actress, Laura Wilson had myriad interactions with people across the city as she went to one cattle-call audition after another at studios and production facilities from Culver City to Hollywood to Burbank. It was her job to build a social network in the entertainment industry that could alert her to possible jobs in her chosen profession. In addition to that pattern, she was a frequent visitor to Scientology facilities and events in Hollywood. She was also attending a twelve-student acting class twice a week, and once a month her acting troupe put on shows at its theater in Burbank. These activities added to her many personal interactions, any one of which could have been with her killer.

As expected, the chrono detailed the investigators’ efforts to get some kind of handle on the young woman’s life. The detectives broke her interactions into groups they dubbed Hollywood, Scientology, and Other. Two former boyfriends, one in L.A. and one back in Chicago, were questioned and cleared by alibis. The investigators spent weeks and then months on the interviews, running records checks, and leaning hard on acquaintances who had criminal records. Still, no person of interest ever emerged and the case eventually went cold.

The last inputs to the chrono were annual due diligence entries that simply stated that the case remained open pending new information.

Ballard clipped the pages of the chrono back together and left it on the table. She was sure Bosch would want to take it with him to read when he got home. She was pulling her phone to call him and see how far out he still was, when she received a call from Nelson Hastings.

“Hello, Detective,” he said. “I hear there is a major break in the Sarah Pearlman case. Is there anything I can share with the councilman?”

“Who told you that?” Ballard asked.

She knew it had been Rawls but she wanted to see how Hastings would answer. It would go into what Ballard called the matrix of trust. Details, actions, reactions, and statements of those she came into contact with combined to establish how much or how little trust she would invest in them. She was still gathering information on Hastings and his boss, the councilman.

“I just happened to be talking to Ted Rawls on my drive home today, and he mentioned it,” Hastings said. “I was surprised that he knew but I had not been informed. I thought you agreed to keep me apprised on the case.”

“Well, I think it’s premature to call it a major break and that’s why I haven’t ‘apprised’ you,” Ballard said. “We have connected Sarah’s killing to another murder that happened eleven years later. But the newer case remains open and unsolved, so it’s hard for me to consider it a break. We just have two victims now instead of one.”

“How was the connection made?”

“DNA.”

“I didn’t think there was DNA in Sarah’s case.”

“There wasn’t until yesterday, but we found it and it led to this new case.”

“What is that victim’s name?”

“Laura Wilson. She was older than Sarah by a few years. But there are case similarities. She was also sexually assaulted and murdered in her bed.”

“I see.”

“But that’s all we really have at the moment, so I would relax, Mr. Hastings. If something develops from this that Councilman Pearlman needs to know, I will call you first thing.”

“Thank you, Detective.”

Hastings disconnected and Ballard looked up to see Bosch entering the restaurant. She caught his eye with a wave and he came over and slid into the corner booth.

“How was your interview?” Ballard asked.

“Nothing really new,” Bosch said. “But it was a good place to restart. She called somebody right after I left, so that’s curious.”

“This that trick you told me about, standing on the front step and eavesdropping?”

“It works sometimes. So what’s up?”

“Well, thanks to you and the DNA we pulled off the palm print, we now have a hit on another case.”

“Where? When?”

“Here in ’05. In fact, right around the corner on Tamarind.”

“I just parked on Tamarind.”

“I’m going to walk over after we leave to check the place out. Here is the chrono. You can take it with you if you want to read it tonight.”

“I thought no copies left Ahmanson.”

Ballard smiled.

“No copies leave with you. I’m the boss. I can make copies.”

“Got it. A double standard — you’ll go far in the LAPD.”

“That’s not as funny as you think it is.”

“Okay, so what else do you know about the case?”

Ballard started reviewing what she considered the important points gained from her read-through of the Wilson murder book.

“The bottom line is, if there wasn’t a genetic link between these cases, I wouldn’t have connected them,” she said. “One victim is white, one Black; one in her teens, one in her twenties; one strangled, one stabbed. One murdered in her house, where she lived with her parents and brother; the other killed in an apartment, where she lived alone.”

“But both were sexually assaulted and killed in their beds,” Bosch said. “Did you look at the crime scene? Did he cover the second victim’s face?”

“No, he didn’t. I guess eleven years after killing Sarah Pearlman, he was no longer ashamed of what he had done.”

Bosch nodded. A waiter came to the table and they both ordered rotisserie chicken plates and Bosch said he’d drink what Ballard was drinking. After the waiter took the order to the kitchen, Bosch spoke.

“Eleven years between cases,” he said. “That’s not likely.”

“I know,” Ballard said. “There’s got to be others out there.”

“These two were the mistakes.”

“Where he left DNA.”

“The other thing is: two cases eleven years apart and both in L.A.”

“Both in Hollywood.”

“He’s not a traveler.”

“He’s still here.”

Bosch nodded.

“Most likely,” he said.

After eating, they left the restaurant and walked down to Tamarind Avenue. They turned right and walked up the street, which was lined on both sides by two-story postwar apartment buildings with names like the Capri and the Royale. Ballard located Laura Wilson’s apartment building — the Warwick — halfway up the block on the east side.

She and Bosch stood side by side and looked silently at the facade of the structure. It was a Streamline Moderne design and painted in shades of aqua and cream. It looked aerodynamic and safe. There was no hint of the violence that had occurred there so many years before.

Ballard pointed up at the windows on the left side of the second floor.

“Her place was second floor at the front,” she said. “That corner.”

Bosch just nodded.

“I’m going to put everybody on the team on this tomorrow,” Ballard said. “We need to get this guy.”

Bosch nodded again.

“You okay putting McShane on hold for a bit?” Ballard asked.

“No,” Bosch said. “But I’ll do it.”

12

From his pod, Bosch watched Ballard rally the team into focusing on the Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson cases. She had told him the night before at Birds that she planned to call in everyone but Rawls because she didn’t want him leaking everything they were doing to Nelson Hastings. Instead, she would text Rawls and tell him to take the day off if he still needed time to put out the fire at his business. Based on what she knew of his work ethic as an investigator, Ballard predicted the response from Rawls would be a thumbs-up emoji and he would not show up. So far she had been right.

Ballard gave assignments to each investigator in the pod, hoping that with many fresh eyes, they would break new ground in terms of finding the nexus where the two victims crossed paths with the same killer. The two young women were separated by age, race, financial status, and experience but somewhere in their lives there was a connection. Ballard put Bosch on crime scene review, while others on the team were assigned to review statements from family, friends, and witnesses. Tom Laffont would handle the medical lead. It did not seem that the original detectives had pursued the potential angle of investigation that the blood in the urine gave them. Blood in the urine was an indication of possible kidney or bladder disease that was either being treated or would reach a point that it needed to be treated.

“It also means our suspect might be dead,” Laffont cautioned.

“That may be the case,” Ballard said. “But we still need to identify him and clear these cases. I don’t have to remind you all that Councilman Pearlman is our patron saint on the city council. If we can get answers as to what happened to his sister, we’re going to be able to keep this unit alive for years to come.”

While Bosch didn’t like the political machinations inherent in the case, he wholly understood a family’s need for answers. It had taken him more than thirty years to get answers about his own mother’s killing when he was a boy. The answers did not provide closure but there was a resolution to his efforts. In that regard he fully understood what Jake Pearlman was looking for and needed. The fact that he was wielding his political power to get it was understandable. If he’d had that kind of juice, Bosch would have done the same in his mother’s case. Instead, he had used the power of his badge.

Ballard had come in early and made individual packages of copies pertaining to each investigator’s assignment. She handed them out at the end of the meeting, including giving Harry an inch-thick printout containing copies of the forensic reports and crime scene photos from the Wilson case.

Before starting in on the assignment, Bosch wanted to do something that had nagged at him since interviewing Sheila Walsh. He had been awake most of the night with thoughts that he had blown the Gallagher Family case by missing something about the break-in at her home.

Once Ballard was sitting down again at her station, Bosch got up and came around to the end of the pod.

“I need to run a name for criminal history,” he said. “Can you do it?”

“On the Wilson case?” she asked. “Already?”

“No, on Gallagher.”

“Harry, I want you working on Wilson and Pearlman. I thought we agreed on this last night, and I just finished telling everybody how important it is to us.”

“I’m going to start on it today, but I stayed up all night thinking about this, so I just want to put it in motion and see what I’ve got to come back to after Wilson. Okay?”

“What’s the name?”

Bosch was holding the fingerprints report from the Sheila Walsh break-in. Ballard opened up the portal to the National Crime Information Center database and he read the name he wanted checked for a criminal record.

“Jonathan Boatman, DOB July 1, ’87.”

Ballard typed it in and waited while the database was searched for matches.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“Sheila Walsh’s son,” Bosch said. “Probably a son from an early marriage and she changed her name when she divorced or remarried.”

“And you never ran him before?”

“I did back in the day and he was clean. It’s in the murder book. But right now I want to see if he stayed clean.”

“And what makes you think he didn’t?”

“Because yesterday was the first time I got a look at the incident report on that burglary at Sheila Walsh’s house. McShane’s prints were found, and it was assumed that he was the one who broke in. I was retired by then and Devonshire handled it. I heard about it from Lucy Soto and even I took it as a sign that McShane was alive and still local. I changed my mind yesterday.”

“Why?”

“The incident report. It says food was taken from the refrigerator, a purse was emptied, a cell phone and a collection of old record albums were stolen. It was amateur hour. Like the work of a hype making a quick hit: getting food and cash and something he could sell for a fix.”

“The albums. I remember there were shops all over Hollywood that would buy vinyl. Amoeba and few others.”

“The son’s prints were found but dismissed because the mother — Sheila Walsh — said he was a regular visitor to the house.”

“I see where you’re going with this. Drug addicts usually rip off their families before they get into serious crime, because they know the family won’t prosecute. At least at first.”

“Right.”

“So if the son committed the burglary, McShane’s prints being there take on a whole new meaning.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Plus, the call she made after I left yesterday. I was hoping it might be McShane, but her son might make better sense.”

“But why would she report the burglary if she thought her son might have done it?”

“Maybe she didn’t realize it was him till later. A lot of people in that position don’t want to believe their son or their daughter would do such a thing.”

The search results started printing out on Ballard’s screen.

“Boatman’s got a history now,” Ballard said.

Bosch put a hand on her desk for support as he leaned down to read the screen. Jonathan Boatman had a record for drug possession, DUI, loitering, and disorderly conduct. All the arrests came after the murders of the Gallagher family, when Bosch would have routinely run his name, as well as after the burglary. Since then, Boatman had gone down the path of addiction and crime. The drug possession charge led to a plea agreement in which he escaped jail time by entering a six-month drug rehab program at County-USC Medical Center. The NCIC report came complete with mug shots from the arrests, and in them it was clear that Jonathan Boatman had been on a downward spiral. His face grew thin across the array of photos to the point of gauntness. The last shot showed skin blotches and a festering sore on his lower lip and, most telling of all, a dead-eyed look that showed no reaction to the fact that he was being sucked into the criminal justice system.

“Looking at the mug shots. I’m guessing meth,” Ballard said.

“Yeah,” Bosch said, pointing at the screen. “All the arrests came after the break-in. Maybe if I was still working the case back then, I would have picked up on it.”

“But you weren’t. You were retired. So don’t beat yourself up about it. Maybe it leads to something now.”

“Maybe.”

But Bosch still felt like he had somehow dropped the ball and let the Gallagher family down. If he had stuck with the case instead of retiring, he would have seen that the burglary and McShane were not linked and there was another reason for his prints to be on the glass paperweight.

As if reading his thoughts, Ballard tried to give Bosch further absolution.

“Just remember,” she said. “Sheila Walsh didn’t see it for what it was and called the police. So you’re not alone.”

“She’s a mother,” Bosch said. “I’m a cop. Was a cop.”

“I’m telling you not to—”

“Can you just send that report to me? Including mug shots.”

“Harry, come on. This is exactly why we review cases. To see with new eyes. To see what was not seen before. So take the win here. You have a whole new angle to work.”

“Will you send it to me?”

“Yes, I’m sending. But don’t go running off on this. I need you on Pearlman and Wilson. I mean it.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll have my take on the crime scene and forensics by the end of the day.”

Bosch went back to his station to await her email. Once he had the NCIC report pulled up on his screen, he sent it to the printer. He noted that Boatman’s last arrest was two years before. He might have cleaned up since then and kept himself right — with the law, at least. The fact that he reportedly had a job as a greenskeeper was a strong indication of recovery.

He looked at the booking photos that were part of the package and committed Boatman’s face to memory. He then googled an address for the Sand Canyon Country Club and entered it in his phone’s GPS app.

Bosch closed his laptop and got up to go to the printer and then his car.

“Harry, are you leaving?” Ballard asked as he crossed behind her.

“Printer,” Bosch said. “Then I’m going to take a drive.”

“A drive? Where?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

He could feel Ballard staring at him as he kept going.

While buckling up in the Cherokee a few minutes later, he got a text from Ballard. She was upset.

Bosch felt both contrite and annoyed. He was trying to solve the murder of a family, and to him that took precedence over everything else in the world. He texted her back but restrained himself from saying anything that would inflame the situation any further.

He waited to see if there was a reply. When there wasn’t, he started the car and headed for the parking lot exit.

A few minutes later, Bosch was on the northbound 405 in moderate midmorning traffic. The freeway was elevated here and he had a good view of the towers of Century City coming up on his right and the Santa Monica Mountains dead ahead. His GPS app told him it was going to be fifty-eight minutes before he arrived at the Sand Canyon Country Club. He turned KJazz on the radio and caught the Shelly Berg Trio’s take on “Blackbird,” the old Beatles song.

He turned it up. It was good driving music.

13

Ballard told herself not to be annoyed with Bosch. She knew that putting him on a team did not make him a team player. That was not in his DNA. She got up and went to his workstation. The package from the Wilson case that she had put together for him was sitting on the desk. He had said she’d have his review by the end of the day, but not if he did not have the records with him to review. She picked up the stack and went back to her station. She would do the work on it if Bosch wouldn’t.

In the breakout of team assignments on the case, Ballard had given herself the digital media associated with Laura Wilson. Data from the victim’s laptop and cell phone had been downloaded by the original investigators onto thumb drives that were slipped into the pocket on the inside cover of the murder book. Ballard had gone through the material on each drive earlier and had planned for a deeper dive. But she decided to put that digital work aside and to first review the materials she had given Bosch.

Since she had already studied the forensic reports and crime scene photos at length after connecting the Wilson and Pearlman cases, she decided to approach this new review differently. Whether in person at a crime scene or when looking at photos, the investigator always focuses on the center — the body. These photos were as horrible to look at as those of Sarah Pearlman. A young woman’s body violated in many ways. A still life of stolen hopes and dreams. Ballard decided to put these aside and work her way from the outside in.

The crime scene photographer had been thorough and had taken dozens of “environmental” shots depicting the victim’s entire home — inside and out — at the time of the murder. These included shots of the contents of closets and cabinets and drawers and of photos framed and hung on the walls. All of this allowed the case investigators ready access to the entire environment of the killing location. It also allowed them to better understand the victim by seeing how she had set up her home. It gave them an idea of the things that were important to her in life.

Though Wilson’s apartment had only one bedroom, there was ample storage space for clothes and other belongings. Ballard moved slowly through the photos, enlarging areas that caught her interest as she went. The clothes in the walk-in closet indicated that either Wilson dedicated a large amount of her income to what she wore or money for her wardrobe was part of the support that came from her parents or other acquaintances. Nothing in any of the records showed that she’d had a current boyfriend. She had been on two fledgling social media apps at the time — Myspace and Facebook — but Ballard’s earlier review of those did not show Wilson as a Hollywood party girl. She seemed to be quite serious about her five-year plan, and the rich assortment of clothes and shoes in her apartment were most likely part of that. Some taped auditions on her computer showed that she often tried out for young but sophisticated roles in movies and TV. In each of these she had dressed the part, and now Ballard was looking at the walk-in closet where Laura had put together those outfits. There was something depressing about it — that this young woman had had a plan, that she worked hard at it, prepared herself for it, stood in front of the mirror on the closet door and made sure she looked just right for a part, and that all her ambition was taken away in a horrible night of violence. Ballard made a vow to herself that she would never put this case back on the shelf. That no matter what happened, she would work this case as long as she was working cases.

The emotion of the moment hit her and made her go to the murder book to find the contacts page. The next of kin were listed as parents Philip and Juanita Wilson in Chicago. In short descriptions, Philip was listed as a fourteenth-ward committee member and Juanita was listed as a schoolteacher. Ballard knew she would be opening old wounds by calling, but she also knew parents never got past the death of a child at any age. Ballard wanted them to know the case was not on a shelf anymore and was being worked.

She called the number, and it was still good after seventeen years. An old woman’s voice answered. If Laura Wilson were still alive, she would be over forty, putting her parents at least in their sixties and probably older.

“Mrs. Wilson?”

“Yes, is this LAPD?”

Ballard realized that her desk phone probably carried a generic LAPD ID.

“Yes, ma’am, my name is Renée Ballard. I’m a detective with the LAPD. I’m in charge of the Open-Unsolved Unit.”

“Did you catch him? The man who killed my baby?”

“No, ma’am, not yet. I’m calling to tell you we have reopened the investigation and are pursuing new leads. I just wanted you to know.”

“What new leads?”

“I can’t really get into that right now, Mrs. Wilson. But if something happens and we make an arrest, I will be calling you and your husband to let you know first. For right now, I just wanted to introduce my—”

“My husband is dead. He got Covid and died two years ago. Right when it all started.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“He’s with Laura now. At the end he couldn’t breathe. He died like her, not being able to breathe.”

Ballard wasn’t sure how to exit the call. She thought she would be giving the parents of Laura Wilson hope, but she realized that she was just a reminder of the family’s ongoing trauma.

“I can tell you one thing, Mrs. Wilson, and this is just between you and me for right now. We have connected Laura’s case to another case and we are hoping that investigating them together will help lead us to the man who did this.”

“What other case? You mean a murder?”

“Yes, a case that happened before. The DNA matches.”

“You mean, before Laura was killed by this man, he killed someone else? Another girl? Did you put out a warning?”

“The connection was only made through DNA, and aspects of the crime were different enough that no connection was made back when these crimes happened. Do you have something to write my name down with? I will give you my direct cell number in case you have questions or anything else comes up.”

It was a clumsy transition, but Ballard hoped it would bring the call to an end. Juanita Wilson wrote down her name and cell number. Ballard ended the call with an invitation to Wilson to call anytime if she had questions or thought of something that might be helpful to the renewed investigation.

After Ballard finally put the phone back into its cradle, Colleen Hatteras poked her head up over the privacy wall.

“The mother?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ballard said.

She was annoyed that Hatteras had heard the conversation.

“The father is dead?” Hatteras asked.

“Yes,” Ballard said. “He never saw justice for his daughter.”

“Covid?”

“Yeah.”

Ballard looked up at her, wondering if that was an educated guess or an empathic feeling. She decided not to ask.

“How are you doing with the witness statements?” she asked instead.

Hatteras had been given the statements made by Laura Wilson’s professional and social acquaintances to determine if any were inconsistent or needed to be followed up. Such followups would be a long shot, since the murder occurred so long ago and the people interviewed might now have little recall of that time period.

“Nothing is popping up so far,” Hatteras said. “But I have more to go.”

“Okay,” Ballard said. “Let me know.”

“Did you order the evidence from property?”

“I did. I said so during the briefing. It should get here today or tomorrow. Why?”

“Can I see the property list?”

“Sure.”

Ballard easily found it in the murder book, unsnapped the rings, and handed the sheet over the privacy wall to Hatteras.

“What are you looking for?” Ballard asked.

Hatteras didn’t answer until she had scanned the list of property and evidence stored back in 2005.

“I just wanted to see what was there,” Hatteras said. “They kept her nightgown and the bedclothes.”

“Right,” Ballard said. “It would have been evidence presented in court if a case had ever been made.”

“Sometimes I can get a communication from this sort of evidence.”

“What do you mean by ‘a communication’?”

“I don’t know, like a feeling. A message.”

“Colleen, I don’t think we’re going to go down that path. I have to safeguard our investigations so that they can’t be successfully challenged in court. You understand? I think if we go the psychic route — and please don’t take this personally — we will run into credibility issues.”

“I know. I understand. It’s just a thought, something to consider if we hit a wall with the investigation.”

“Okay, I’ll keep it in mind. But you said sometimes you get a communication from evidence like this. When have you done that before?”

“Well, I haven’t officially done it before. But sometimes families have called me because they’ve heard about my gift. It was how I got into the whole genealogy field. From families wanting answers.”

Ballard just nodded. She wished Hatteras had mentioned this during the interview process.

“I’m going to get back on this now, Colleen,” she said.

“Sure,” Hatteras said. “Me, too.”

Hatteras dropped out of sight behind the wall and Ballard tried to put aside the growing realization that she had chosen wrong in bringing her onto the team. She went back to reviewing the crime scene photographs. Laura Wilson’s bedroom walk-in closet had a built-in bureau next to the shoe racks. The photographer had opened each of the six drawers and photographed the contents without disturbing them. The first four drawers from the bottom were crammed with folded clothing, underwear, and socks. The two smaller side-by-side drawers that occupied the top tier of the bureau were filled mostly with jewelry, hair bands, and other accoutrements. One of these drawers also seemed to be the junk drawer. There were receipts, matchbooks, postcards, loose change, earbuds, phone chargers, Halloween candy, and other things.

But one thing in this drawer caught Ballard’s eye in a big way. It was a round white pin-on button with orange letters that said “JAKE!” Attached to its bottom edge were two short lengths of red-white-and-blue-striped ribbon.

This gave Ballard pause and she moved quickly to the computer to open Google and run the name Jake Pearlman. While the councilman was not an internationally known politician, he did rate a Wikipedia page that listed his pathway to power in Los Angeles. The page documented his first bid for election to the city council in 2005. He had run for the Hollywood seat left vacant when a councilman resigned following a federal indictment for campaign contribution violations. Jake Pearlman lost the election but remained active in politics, and more than a decade later, he won that same Hollywood seat on the council.

Ballard had not known about Pearlman’s early run for elected office but recognized the campaign button because the councilman had used its simple style in his more recent elections.

Ballard leaned back in her chair and thought about this. The 2005 election came on November 8, just three days after Laura Wilson was murdered. Somewhere in that campaign season she had picked up or been given a button that ended up in her junk drawer. What, if anything, did this mean? Was it coincidence that she ended up with a button supporting a candidate whose sister had been murdered eleven years earlier by the man who would also kill Wilson?

She had to consider that this was no coincidence and that the connection meant something to the case. She needed to pursue this and get more information.

And she had to talk to Harry Bosch.

14

Bosch was not a golfer. It was a sport that required more money than he could afford while growing up, and as an adult, he had always been too busy with his job to engage in five-hour outings on a golf course. Added to that, it still took more money than he could spare, and he had issues with calling any endeavor that involved drinking and smoking a sport. All that aside, he knew enough about it to know that it was likely that the greenskeepers worked early, doing much of their job on the course before the golfers came with their electric carts, clubs, and cigars.

He got to the Sand Canyon Country Club shortly before eleven and quickly found the hidden compound where the machinery involved in grooming the course was kept and the greenskeepers had a long break table under the spreading branches of an old sand pine. Bosch was not dressed for golf, so the workers knew right away that he had not wandered into their presence looking for a lost ball. He picked out Boatman’s face from the many turned toward him and waved a hello.

“Jonathan, I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes,” he said.

“Uh, talk to me about what?” Boatman said. “Who are you?”

“Harry Bosch. I talked to your mother yesterday and I thought she was going to tell you I was planning to come by today.”

“My mother? She didn’t tell me shit. I’m on my break, man. You can’t just come back here.”

Bosch glanced around as if looking for a way out. He did this so that his jacket would open, revealing the badge clipped to his belt. The badge was authentic, but it said RETIRED across the bottom of the shield where for many years it had said DETECTIVE. He believed he was far enough away from the table that it could not be read by Boatman or any of the others.

“Okay,” he said. “I thought it would just save some time. But I’ll go back to the office at the clubhouse and get it set up.”

He started to walk back toward the open gate in the fence he had entered through. As expected, Boatman stopped him. He wasn’t keen on bringing management into whatever this was.

“Okay, hold on, hold on,” he said.

Bosch turned around and saw that Boatman was now sliding off the bench. He walked around the table and to Bosch. Harry noted that his skin was clear and his face fuller than in the mug shots. It looked like he was clean. According to the arrest reports Bosch had reviewed, Boatman was thirty-five years old. Whether or not he had stopped using, his years of addiction had added years to his appearance and demeanor. He looked at least forty, with thinning brown hair and stooped shoulders. And though his arms were well-tanned from his work outside in the sun, his complexion was sallow. Most telling of all, his eyes were still dead.

“What’s this about?” he asked. “We don’t need to get management involved.”

“Is there anywhere private we can talk?” Bosch asked.

“Not exactly. But let’s get out of here. This is fucked up, man. I mean, I work here, and I don’t need the fucking police coming around.”

Boatman led Bosch around the grounds maintenance enclosure into an area under a wind-billowing canopy that protected new sod from being burned by the sun. There were four-foot-high stacks of sod squares on wooden pallets ready to be moved anywhere on the course that replanting was needed.

He abruptly turned around to face Bosch.

“All right, now what is it?” he demanded. “I am totally clean. Been that way for two years, four months, and six days.”

“I don’t care if you’re clean or not, Jonathan,” Bosch said. “This is not about your history with drugs.”

“Then what is it, and what’s my mother got to do with it?”

“Remember the burglary at your mother’s place? I was talking to her about it yesterday and your name came up, and I thought I would check in with you, see what you remember.”

Boatman put both hands on his hips and adopted what he thought was an intimidating stance. He was a solid three inches taller than Bosch and he mistakenly thought that his height and his age were an advantage.

“You come all the way out here to talk about that?” he said. “A ten-year-old burglary where a fucking phone was taken?”

“More like six years ago,” Bosch said calmly. “And there was more than a phone taken.”

“Whatever. Who gives a fuck? I wasn’t even there. Why do you come to my place of work and ask me this shit? Are you trying to get me fired, motherfucker? I don’t care how old you are, I’ll knock your fucking head—”

Before he finished the threat, Bosch pistoned his left fist under Boatman’s chin and into his throat. Boatman bit off his last word, stepped back, and leaned over, trying to get a breath down his windpipe. Bosch put his hand on his shoulder to steady him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Relax and it’ll come back. Just relax.”

Boatman’s legs went out and he landed butt-first on the ground. Bosch gently guided him down so that he was lying on his back.

“You just lost your breath, that’s all,” he said. “Just take it easy and it’ll come back.”

Boatman’s face was almost purple, but then Bosch saw his skin begin to turn red and his breathing start to return to normal.

“That’s it,” he said. “You’re all right. Just keep breathing.”

“Fuck you,” Boatman said.

His words came out strangled and high-pitched.

“You were threatening me and I had to stop it,” Bosch said.

“I wasn’t...,” Boatman said.

He stopped talking, realizing it was too soon. Bosch was crouched next to him, ready to strike again if Boatman was foolish enough to attempt to retaliate.

He didn’t. He relaxed and eventually turned his head to see if any of his coworkers had seen him laid low by an old man.

“What the fuck do you want?” he finally asked.

“I want to know if that was you who did the burglary.”

“Why would I rip off my own mother?”

Boatman started to get up but Bosch put his hand on his chest and pushed him back down.

“Stay down,” he said. “You ripped her off for drug money. It was crystal meth, right?”

“I’m not talking to you, man,” Boatman said. “I’m not telling you shit.”

“You sure? I mean, it doesn’t matter. It’s long past any statute of limitations. If I had still been a cop back then, things might’ve been different. But you got lucky and got away with it. You can’t be charged now. So you might as well tell me.”

“Like I said, I’m not telling you shit.”

He looked away from Bosch, refusing to give him his eyes.

“It’s okay, Jonathan,” Bosch said. “You just did.”

“Wrong, asshole,” Boatman said.

“So what did your mother say yesterday when she called you after I left?”

“She said you’re an asshole.”

“Really? That hurts.”

“Yeah, good.”

Bosch patted him on the cheek.

“You be good now, Jonathan,” he said.

His knees cracked as he got up. He stumbled a bit getting his balance and tried to hide his own physical exhaustion from the encounter. He turned from Boatman and started back toward the parking lot.

“Fuck you, old man!”

Boatman had yelled it loud but without much conviction. Bosch didn’t even bother to look back. His acknowledgment was a simple wave and then he made a turn and was out of Boatman’s sight.

He knew that Boatman would most likely be on the phone to his mother within minutes. That was okay with Bosch, too. He wanted Sheila Walsh to know that this was not over. Not by a long shot.

15

Ballard wanted to get away from Ahmanson to think. She drove up to Abbott Kinney in Venice and ordered a harvest bowl at the Butcher’s Daughter. Since her breakup with Garrett Single, the paramedic, she had tended to eat vegetarian when on her own. Single had prided himself on his barbecue skills, and it had been a consistent part of the relationship. She had spent the last three months on a cleanse of him and all red meats. She now preferred watermelon radish to brisket and, like the butcher’s daughter, could not see herself going red again.

She was casually making a list as she ate. Then she got a call from one of the first entries on the list. Nelson Hastings.

“Just checking in,” he said, “seeing if there’s anything I can put in front of the councilman today.”

“I was going to call you,” Ballard said.

“Really? What’s up?”

“I wanted to ask you, how far back do the councilman’s campaign records go?”

“If you mean our quarterly CDRs, we keep them from day one. What’s this about?”

“What’s a CDR?”

“Campaign donation report. We file them in accordance with the law. But again, what’s this about, Detective?”

His voice had an urgency and higher pitch than usual. Ballard guessed that the most likely place that elected politicians ran afoul of the law was in the area of money. She quickly tried to allay the concern.

“This has nothing to do with campaign contributions,” she said. “I was wondering about personnel, volunteers, that sort of thing. How far back do you keep records?”

“Well, we keep some,” Hastings said. “I’d have to check. Is there something specific I would be looking for?”

Ballard noted that his voice had returned to its regular, modulated tone.

“Laura Wilson,” Ballard said. “She had a ‘JAKE!’ campaign button in a drawer and I was just wondering if she might have volunteered for him. She wouldn’t have had the money to make a campaign donation, I don’t think, but her parents were active in Chicago politics. I thought maybe she could have gotten involved when she came out here.”

“I thought you told me that she was killed eleven years after Sarah,” Hastings said. “That would be, what, ’05? ’06? Jake didn’t get to the council till six years ago.”

“Right, but he ran unsuccessfully in ’05 in a special election to fill the same seat he has now. Laura lived in the district where he was running, so I thought maybe...”

“Well, that’s before my time. I’d have to see what records we have. What would it mean if that was the case and she was part of the campaign?”

“I don’t know yet. We’re looking for connections between the victims, and if she worked for Jake, then that’s a pretty interesting connection. We’d have to see where it led.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. Let me do this: I’ll see what we’ve got in our records and get back to you as soon as I can. Okay?”

“That would be great. I’m not at the office right now, but when I get back, I could shoot you over a photo of her if that would help.”

“It may, but I think the councilman will know. He never forgets a supporter’s face.”

“Good. If you can run the name by him—”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

“Thank you.”

Ballard hung up and immediately called Darcy Troy at the DNA lab. She knew she might be stepping on Tom Laffont’s toes, since she had assigned him the medical angle to work, but she wanted to keep things in motion.

“Darcy, it’s Renée. Have you heard from Tom Laffont today?”

“Uh, no, was I supposed to?”

“Not necessarily, but I thought he might have called. On the Wilson case, are you able to see if they still have the specimen swabs they got the DNA from?”

“I can check. It should be there unless there was a destroy order from the District Attorney’s Office, and that is only supposed to happen when a case is closed.”

“Good. Can you see what’s there? And then I need a favor.”

“You want further analysis.”

“I do. I want to know more about the blood. In ’05, they were just interested in finding DNA. I want to know why this guy had blood in the urine. The reports in the murder book are very general. Could be kidney disease, could be bladder. I’m thinking all these years later, we might be able to learn more with serology sciences, you know?”

“I do, and I’ll see what we’ve got.”

“How long?”

“It’s not what I do, but I think I can honcho something. If there is still material. Sometimes they use up everything processing for DNA.”

“Fingers crossed. Thanks, Darcy.”

“You got it.”

Ballard disconnected and reminded herself to tell Laffont that she had already put this in play. She packed everything she had on the table into her backpack, put cash down on her check, and left the restaurant.

It took her twenty minutes to get back to the Ahmanson Center. As she was getting out of her car, she took a callback from Nelson Hastings.

“You find out anything, Nelson?”

“Nothing that I think will be helpful to the investigation. Our staffing records, CDRs, and donor lists are complete back to Jake Pearlman’s successful election to the council six years ago. Everything before that apparently was not kept, because he lost the election. I asked around the office and even inquired with the councilman to see if anyone remembered Laura Wilson and came up empty.”

“It was a long shot. Did the councilman have a campaign manager back in ’05? Maybe he or she would remember if Wilson was a volunteer or something.”

As Ballard asked the question, she saw Bosch’s green Cherokee pull into the center’s parking lot.

“I’ll get you the name and contact info,” Hastings said. “But I think the councilman would remember if someone working on his campaign had been murdered. And to be quite honest, an African American volunteer or supporter would have been remembered as well.”

Ballard nodded.

“I think you’re probably right,” she said. “Thanks for your efforts. If you could shoot me an email with the name and number of the campaign manager from ’05, that would be great.”

Ballard saw Bosch pop the hatch of his car and start to pull out boxes. She knew from the red tape on them that they were evidence boxes from property division. She started walking that way.

“Detective Ballard, can I bring up a delicate matter with you?” Hastings said on the phone.

“Uh, sure,” Ballard said. “What’s up?”

“You seem to be going down this road of connecting this woman’s death to the councilman or the campaign, and I just want to caution you to move carefully. Any hint that the councilman could have been involved in this is ridiculous and I’m sure you agree, but if it leaks to the media, it could blow up. So be careful, Detective Ballard. What you have is a ten-cent campaign button of which hundreds, if not thousands, were likely printed.”

Ballard stopped in the middle of a parking lane to respond. She saw that Bosch had noticed her approaching and was waiting at the back of the Cherokee.

“Of course we are proceeding carefully and cautiously, Nelson. And my question about this does not reflect in any way on the councilman. You can tell him that.”

“I will, Detective.”

Hastings disconnected and Ballard continued toward Bosch. He read her face as she approached.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” Ballard said. “Just more bullshit from the city councilman’s guard dog. I see you went by property.”

“Yeah, and they gave me a box from the Wilson case. They said you ordered it and I could save a messenger run if I delivered it. Can you carry one box?”

“Sure.”

Ballard slung her backpack over her shoulder and leaned into the back of the Cherokee to get the box from the original Wilson investigation. It was 24 x 24 x 24 and not heavy. She lifted it and then put it down on the bumper and looked at Bosch.

“Did you talk to the meth addict?” she asked.

“Yeah, I did,” Bosch said. “He’s clean now, but he all but admitted that he committed the burglary at his mother’s house. Now that I know it was him, it changes my thinking on McShane. He could have been in that house anytime between the murders and the burglary.”

“Look, Harry, you can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Wander off on your pet case when I specifically told you I need you on Wilson.”

“Pet case? Four people — a whole family — murdered and buried in a hole out in the desert, and that’s a pet case.”

“Look, it’s a big case; it’s an important case. But Wilson has got to take priority at the moment. I’m not stopping you from working Gallagher but I need you in the short run on Wilson. And I don’t want to be like some kind of a shrew ordering you around. Can’t you just do this for me?”

“I’m here. I’m ready to work. What I did today will get Sheila Walsh thinking: What is Bosch doing? What is he up to? I’ll let that percolate while I work on Wilson and then I’ll come back around. I’m playing the long game with her. So, what do you want me to do?”

“Let’s get this stuff in and then we can talk.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

Ballard then lifted her box and stepped back so that Bosch, balancing a stack of two boxes with one hand, could use the other to close the hatch.

“Let’s drop these at the pod, but then you and I go somewhere to talk,” Ballard said. “I want your take on a couple things.”

“Roger that.”

“You gotta stop saying that. Everybody has to stop saying it.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“When influencers are saying it on TikTok, it’s jumped the shark.”

“I don’t know what one word of that means.”

“Which is a good thing. You okay with those?”

It looked to her like Bosch was struggling with the weight of his two boxes.

“I’m good,” he insisted.

“You want to get coffee?” Ballard asked.

“You read my mind.”

“All right. There’s a break room on the second floor that nobody from the pod knows about yet. It’s for the academy trainers but they’re all at Elysian today for a graduation. We’ll go there.”

“Roger that.”

16

After dropping off the property boxes at the pod, Ballard and Bosch went up to the break room on the second floor. Over black coffee Ballard updated Bosch on what was happening on the Wilson case. She showed him the photo of the junk drawer in the victim’s walk-in closet and asked for his take on it. Bosch saw through her reserve as she mentioned this. He knew that beneath her neutral delivery of the information, there was something exciting to her about this angle of investigation.

“Well, I don’t believe in coincidences until there is no other explanation,” he said. “It needs to be checked out. Have you—”

“I asked Pearlman’s chief of staff to look into it,” Ballard said. “He couldn’t find any records from his failed run for the council. Pearlman himself said he didn’t remember Laura, and none of his current staff go back that far. Hastings said he would let me know who Pearlman’s campaign manager was in ’05, and I’ll follow up on that. I got the idea that it was sort of a seat-of-the-pants operation, a way for Pearlman to get his name out there but he knew from the start that there wasn’t much of a chance he would win.”

“What about Wilson? Anything else in her place that showed she was politically involved or motivated?”

“In the apartment, no. But her father was listed in the murder book as a ward committee member in Chicago. So politics was in her upbringing. She could have taken an interest in it out here. Her apartment was in the district Pearlman was running in.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He took a sip of his coffee and thought about how to proceed with this angle and if it was worth the expenditure of time when there were other angles to follow. But like Ballard, he found something about the campaign button intriguing. Eleven years after Pearlman’s sister is murdered, his campaign button is in the home of a woman killed by the same perpetrator.

It could easily be a coincidence. Ballard said there were hundreds of such buttons distributed back then. But it didn’t feel like a coincidence, and Bosch understood Ballard’s hunch all too well.

“When you talk to the campaign manager, maybe he’ll remember how many of those things were made,” he said. “And since Wilson’s father was in politics, you might want to ask him if his daughter mentioned getting involved out here.”

“Her father’s dead,” Ballard said. “Covid. I talked to her mother but that was before this came up. I’ll call back and ask about politics. I’ll also ask who cleared out Laura’s apartment after her death. It’s pretty unlikely, but maybe somebody has all her stuff.”

Bosch nodded. He hadn’t thought of that. Parents who lose children often hold on to any reminder of them.

“Good idea,” he said. “Anything new on the blood angle and the DNA?”

“Nothing yet,” Ballard said. “But on my way back from lunch, I got an email from Darcy Troy in the lab. She checked the cold storage at serology, and the swabs from the Wilson case — from the toilet — are still there, and there’s enough left for further testing. She hopes to get back tomorrow with more on what exactly was wrong with our doer.”

“That’s good,” Bosch said.

“It wasn’t something they pursued back in the day.”

“They were probably just happy to get the DNA out of it.”

“Well, their oversight could be to our benefit. Obviously, the technology has advanced since 2005, and we might be able to detect things they couldn’t.”

“Let me know about that.”

“Roger that, I will. Shit — now I said it!”

Bosch smiled while Ballard got up and dumped her empty cup in the trash. They went down the stairs and back to the pod. As they approached, Bosch saw that the property box Ballard had left on her desk had been opened and Colleen Hatteras was standing over it, holding up what looked like a pink nightgown. There was no one else in the pod.

“Colleen, what are you doing?” Ballard asked.

“I just needed to see it,” Hatteras said. “To feel it.”

“First of all, you shouldn’t have done that after what we talked about before. And second, and most important of all, you should have worn gloves.”

“Gloves don’t work.”

“What?”

“I need to be able to feel her.”

“Put it back in the box. Now.”

Hatteras did as instructed.

“Go back to your workstation,” Ballard ordered.

Hatteras sullenly stepped back from Ballard’s station. She turned and went back to her own.

Ballard threw a glance at Bosch. She looked as upset as he had ever seen her. He moved to his workstation, checked the red tape on the boxes from the Gallagher Family case, and saw that they had not been tampered with. He sat down but noticed that Ballard was still too agitated to sit down.

“Colleen, I want you to go home,” she said.

“What?” Hatteras said. “I’m right in the middle of the ancestry search on this.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to see you anymore today. You need to go and I need to think about this.”

“Think about what?”

“I told you this morning I didn’t want to go down that road, but you went there anyway. This is a team, but I’m in charge of the team, and you directly ignored my order.”

“I didn’t think it was an order.”

“It was. So, go. Now.”

Ballard dropped out of Bosch’s sight as she sat down. He couldn’t see Hatteras but heard her open and sharply close a desk drawer and then roughly pull a zipper closed on what he assumed was a purse. She then popped up into view and headed toward the exit. Ballard said nothing as she passed the end of the pod.

Hatteras was halfway to the aisle that led to the exit when she pirouetted and came back toward Ballard.

“For what it’s worth, he’s close,” she said. “Her killer is very close.”

“Yeah, you said that about McShane, too,” Ballard said. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

“I didn’t say McShane was close. This is so typical.”

“Just go home, Colleen. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Hatteras pirouetted again and headed to the exit. Once she was gone, Ballard sat up straight in her seat so she could look over the partition at Bosch.

“What do I do about her?” she asked.

Bosch shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how valuable the heritage stuff she does is.”

“Very valuable,” Ballard said.

“Can you get anybody else? What about Lilia?”

“Colleen knows it like the back of her hand. But this psychic shit is a problem. Did she open your boxes?”

“No, they’re safe.”

“This is heading toward a bad end. This whole being-in-charge thing is a pain. I just want to follow cases.”

“I get it.”

She slumped down out of sight but before long she stood up again.

“I have to get out of here, Harry,” she said. “I’m going up to the Valley and I need a partner.”

Bosch stood up, ready to go.

17

They took Ballard’s city ride and were all the way onto the 405 North before Bosch asked what they were doing.

“I made a case list at lunch and there’s an interview I want to cross off,” Ballard said. “Due diligence as much as anything and now’s as good a time as any. I needed to get out of there.”

“Cool,” Bosch said. “Who’s the interview?”

“A guy named Adam Beecher. He and Laura Wilson were in the same theater group out in Burbank. Back then, the ODs leaned on the theater director, a guy named Harmon Harris, because they heard he and Wilson had an affair a year before her death. They thought maybe there was bad blood between them. Harris denied the affair and they dropped it when he offered up Beecher as an alibi.”

She knew that Bosch would know that OD was cold case lingo for original detective.

“Beecher confirmed he was with him the night of the crime,” he said.

“Right,” Ballard said. “And I would’ve left it there but I happened to google these guys at lunch, and it turns out that a few years back, Harmon Harris got #MeToo’d out of the business. It was part of an L.A. Times series on the entertainment business. The sexual assault and harassment complaints about Harris came from both men and women. I guess he was a real Hollywood player, and that kind of scratches the I’m-innocent-because-I’m-gay angle.”

“Right.”

“The Times story also reported through anonymous sources that Harris would extort closeted gay actors who came through his classes and theater. He would threaten to derail their careers by spreading word around that they were gay.”

“So you’re thinking maybe the alibi confirmation was extorted from Beecher. Does Harris still run the theater?”

“No, he’s dead. Car accident last year — a month after he was exposed. He hit an abutment on the one-oh-one.”

“Suicide?”

“Most likely. Anyway, like I said, I hope I’m just checking this off a list. I don’t want a ‘cleared other.’ I don’t want to tell Jake Pearlman that we found the killer but he’s beyond the reach of earthly law.”

“I get that. What about the ODs on Wilson? Have you talked to them yet? I saw in the Pearlman chrono that the originals on that case are dead.”

“I’ve tried on Wilson. One’s dead. The other hasn’t called me back. He’s up in Idaho.”

Many retired LAPD officers moved as far away from the place they had worked as was possible and affordable. Idaho was a favored spot, called Blue Heaven by many for its low crime, clean air, conservative politics, and don’t-tread-on-me attitude. One reason Ballard liked Bosch was his decision to stay in the city he had dedicated so many years to.

“I’ve left two messages,” she said. “I think he’s one of those guys who’s not going to call. If he couldn’t solve it, nobody can. I hate that shit.”

It wasn’t the first time she had encountered the issue when working cold cases, and she couldn’t understand it — putting a detective’s pride in front of justice for a victim and a family who had lost something precious. She also believed it had something to do with gender. Some of these old bulls didn’t like the idea of a female detective taking up their failed investigation and solving the case. She had to admit to herself that it was partially for this reason that she was not vigorously pursuing Dubose.

“What’s the Idaho guy’s name?” Bosch asked. “Maybe I knew him back in the day.”

“Dale Dubose,” Ballard said.

“I don’t remember him. But let me give it a try. I’ll ask around, see if anybody knows him and can get a call through that will be answered.”

“Thanks. Not sure what it will get us, but you never know. Sometimes these old guys take stuff with them after they retire. They shouldn’t, but they do.”

“Funny. So was Dubose at Hollywood or RHD? I don’t remember that name at all.”

“No, the case was flipped to Northeast. Apparently Hollywood had caught two homicides earlier in the day and had everybody going full field on them. The detective lieutenant threw it over the fence to Northeast.”

Hollywood and Northeast Divisions were contiguous. It was not unusual for cases to be moved one way or the other, depending on caseloads and personnel availability.

“All right, well, I’ll see if I can get to Dubose,” Bosch said. “I want to ask why they did nothing with the blood in the urine.”

“I kind of give them a pass on that,” Ballard said. “There was only so much they could draw from the serology back then. Even if they had a list of everybody in L.A. with kidney and bladder disease, what do you do with that? It would be thousands.”

“They could have at least looked for criminal records, sex offenders, narrowed it down from thousands.”

“True. But remember, they were working out of Northeast, not Homicide Special downtown. They were second tier.”

“Doesn’t matter. I was second tier, and everybody counts. You know what this is? She was Black and they didn’t run the lead out. This guy up in Blue Heaven, shoot me his number. I’m going to call him.”

“And say what? You’ll get his voice mail.”

“I’m going to say, if he doesn’t call me back, I’m going to come up there to see him. And he won’t like that.”

“Okay, Harry. Thanks. I’ll send you the number after this interview.”

Ballard merged onto the 101 and skirted the northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains before exiting in Studio City. She headed to the address she had gotten from Adam Beecher’s driver’s license, a house on Vineland in the foothills.

She suddenly realized something.

“Damn. I’m sorry, Harry,” Ballard said. “I just realized we should have driven separately. We’re practically in your neighborhood, and now you’ll have to go all the way back to Ahmanson to get your car.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Bosch said. “You got to fill me in on the case.”

“And get you pissed off about Dubose. I’ll tell you what. After the interview, I can drop you off at home and then I’ll come get you on the way in tomorrow.”

“Well... let’s decide that when we’re done. I have to think about whether I need my car tonight.”

“Okay. Hot date?”

“Uh, no. But speaking of hot dates, I was going to ask you: How are you and the fireman doing?”

“He’s a paramedic, actually, and he’s gone.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know. I hope it was your call.”

“It was.”

“Too many hours apart?”

“No, the opposite, actually. He was three on, four off, and all he wanted to do when he was off duty was barbecue brisket and sit around watching Chicago Fire reruns.”

“Hmm,” Bosch said.

Ballard knew she could tell Bosch more, but she didn’t go on. She wanted to stay focused on the case and the interview with Adam Beecher.

She pulled over in front of a house built on a lot that sloped so steeply right to left that one side of the house was two stories and the other side just one. The front door was up a curving stone-and-stepped path to the upper level.

“Harry, you going to be all right going up?” Ballard asked.

“Not a problem,” Bosch said. “So this guy’s still an actor?”

“No, not anymore. I looked him up on IMDb and he had a few roles on network TV ten, twelve years ago. His recent credits all say ‘Locations Department’ on various shows shot here in L.A.”

“Must be pretty good at it. This neighborhood is seven figures easily.”

“It could be rented. Shall we?”

Ballard opened her door. The slope was so severe that the door immediately slammed shut under its own weight. She tried again, putting her foot out to push it all the way into a holding position. Bosch struggled to get out as well, and then came around the back of the city car.

“He knows we’re coming?” he asked.

“Nope,” Ballard said. “Wanted it to come out of the blue.”

Bosch nodded his approval.

“Hope he’s home,” Ballard said. “It was a lot easier catching people at home during the lockdown days.”

Ballard got to the front door and then waited for Bosch to catch up. He had taken the steps up slowly and was huffing by the time he reached her.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Never better,” he said.

Ballard punched a Ring doorbell, knowing that they were on camera. It wasn’t long before the door was answered by a man in blue jeans and a denim shirt.

“Mr. Beecher?” Ballard asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

Ballard badged him and identified herself and Bosch as her partner.

“We’d like to come in and ask you a few questions,” she said.

“About what?” Beecher said. “I’m actually working and have a Zoom in, like, twenty minutes that I have to prep for.”

“This won’t take long, sir. May we?”

“Uh, I guess.”

He stepped back and opened the door for them. They entered a neat and expensively furnished living room with a dining area and kitchen beyond and a hallway toward the back of the house. There were large canvases framed in wood on the walls, all studies of the male figure.

“Is this about the robbery?” Beecher asked.

“What robbery is that?” Ballard asked.

“The Tilbrooks next door. Their house got hit a few nights ago. First time out to the movies in more than two years, and their house gets robbed while they’re gone. What a town, right?”

“That would be a burglary and we’re investigating a homicide.”

“A homicide? Shit. Who?”

“Can we sit down, sir?”

“Sure.”

He gestured to the couch and chairs configured around a coffee table that appeared to be a two-inch-thick cut of redwood. There was a small sculpture on the table. An angel sitting in repose, one of his wings broken on the ground at his feet. Ballard sat down in the middle of the couch, on the front edge of the cushion, pulling out a small pad from the pocket of her Van Heusen sport coat. Bosch took a black leather chair off the corner of the coffee table, and that left Beecher the twin in the matching set.

Ballard began the questioning.

“Mr. Beecher, we have reopened an investigation into the 2005 homicide of Laura Wilson. You were acquainted with her, correct?”

“Oh, Laura, yes, we were in theater together. Oh my god, I think about her all the time. It so bothered me that they never caught anybody. I can’t imagine what her family has gone through.”

“You were questioned back then by Detective Dubose. Do you remember that?”

“I do, yes.”

“You told Detective Dubose that you were with Harmon Harris on the night of the murder.”

Ballard watched as Beecher’s face darkened and his eyes flitted away. He obviously didn’t think of Harmon Harris in the affectionate way he thought of Laura Wilson.

“I did, yes,” he said.

“We are here because we want to give you the opportunity to retract that statement if you wish,” Ballard said.

“What do you mean, that I lied?”

“What I mean is, if it wasn’t true that you were with him, then now is the time to set the record straight, Mr. Beecher. This is an unsolved homicide. We need to know the truth.”

“I have nothing to set straight.”

“Are you still in the theater, Mr. Beecher? An actor?”

“I rarely act. I just got too busy with my other work.”

“What work is that?”

“I’m in locations for L.A.-based productions. It’s more work than I can handle, to tell you the truth.”

Ballard noted that he could not acknowledge that he didn’t quite make it as an actor. He claimed something else had pulled him away from that work.

“You know that Harmon Harris is dead, right?” she said.

“Yes,” Beecher said. “That was a tragedy.”

“He drove into a concrete pillar on the freeway a month after being outed as being abusive to his students and employees at the theater. It was a story in the Los Angeles Times. Did you know about that, too?”

Beecher nodded vigorously. His hands were gripped together tightly in his lap.

“Yes, I knew about that,” he said.

“The article anonymously quoted three different men who said that Harris threatened to spread the word in the industry that they were gay if they did not have relations with him. You read that, too, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re gay as well, sir — correct? Your alibi for him was that you spent the night together on the night Laura Wilson was murdered.”

“Yes, all true, but what’s it got to do with the new investigation?”

“Were you extorted in any way by Harris to provide an alibi for him?”

“No, I wasn’t!”

“Were you an anonymous source for that Times article?”

“I was not! I think you really need to go now. I have a Zoom.”

Beecher stood up but Ballard and Bosch did not.

“Please sit down, Mr. Beecher,” Ballard said. “We have more questions.”

“My Zoom is in, like, five minutes,” Beecher complained.

“The sooner you sit down, the sooner you will get to your Zoom.”

Beecher had moved behind his chair and put his hands on it as if for support. He bowed his head and then raised it angrily.

“I want you to leave,” he said.

“Sit down,” Bosch said. “Now.”

Bosch’s first words in the house gave Beecher a jolt and he looked at Bosch as if scared.

“Please,” Ballard offered.

“Oh, whatever,” Beecher said.

He came around the chair and dropped into it.

“Laura’s father died of Covid last year,” Ballard said. “He never saw justice for his daughter. Her mother is still alive and waiting for justice. We need your help, Mr. Beecher. We need the truth.”

Beecher ran both hands through his thick dark hair, messing up what had been a carefully composed front wave.

“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.

Ballard leaned a few inches forward. It was not a denial or an admission that he had lied. But she took it as an indication that there was a new story to be told.

“How so?” she asked.

“Harmon didn’t kill Laura,” Beecher said. “There is no way in the world that happened.”

“Is that why you gave him an alibi?”

“He had an alibi but he couldn’t use it.”

“Which was?”

“He was with someone else, not me. But that person couldn’t go to the police. He was a famous guy and he couldn’t risk it coming out that he wasn’t straight. His career would have been over.”

“You knew this man?”

“At the time I knew of him. A lot of people did. So Harmon made me say I was the one with him that night, end of story.”

“Who was it who was really with him that night?”

“I’m not telling you. It’s the same risk today that it was back then. He’s still a star. I’m not going to ruin his career.”

“We would keep it confidential. We wouldn’t even put it on paper.”

“No. Nothing stays a secret forever, but if I told you, it would be a betrayal. Not just of him, but of all of us.”

Ballard slowly nodded. She instinctively guessed that they had gotten all they could from Beecher. He had admitted that he lied but confirmed the alibi of Harmon Harris.

“Okay, let me ask you this,” Ballard said. “If you weren’t with Harris, how do you know he was actually with this other person? This Mr. X movie star.”

“Because I asked him.”

“You asked Mr. X?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t going to just take Harmon’s word and lie to the cops. I went to him and asked. He confirmed. End of story, and you have to leave now.”

“You know, we could charge you for lying to us back then.”

“After seventeen years? I really doubt that.”

Ballard knew her threat had backfired almost as soon as she said it. She could think of no other way to get the name she needed from Beecher.

“Are you still in touch with Mr. X?” she asked.

“No, not really,” Beecher said. “He’s gotten so big you can’t get near him even to say, ‘Hey, you remember me?’”

“Could you reach out and get him to call us anonymously? I just want to confirm this and move on with the investigation.”

“No. It’s impossible for him to be anonymous. You’d know who you’re talking to within ten seconds.”

Ballard nodded and glanced over at Bosch. It was her signal for him to ask any questions he might be sitting on. But he gave a slight shake of the head. He had nothing to ask that hadn’t already been asked.

“Okay, Mr. Beecher, thank you for your cooperation,” she said. “I’m going to leave you my card, and I hope you’ll call if you think of any further information to share with me.”

“Fine,” Beecher said. “But I don’t think I’ll be calling you.”

All three of them stood up and headed toward the door. Beecher opened it and then stepped back to let Ballard and Bosch out. As Bosch passed him, Beecher spoke.

“You don’t talk too much, do you?” he said.

“I usually don’t have to,” Bosch said.

18

Bosch was listening to the King Curtis live album recorded at the Fillmore West just a few months before he was murdered in 1971. He popped the volume two notches for “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and thought about all the music not recorded by the sax player because of his early demise in a fight in front of his New York apartment. Parker, Coltrane, Brown, Baker — the list of those who left the stage in mid-song was long. It got Bosch thinking about the Gallagher family and all that was lost with them. The kids never even had the chance to leave a song behind.

There was a short honk from outside the house and Bosch lifted the needle off the record and killed the power to the stereo. He grabbed his keys and went out the front door. Ballard was in her city ride at the curb, the passenger door already open. It told Bosch that something had her in a hurry this morning. He got in quickly and pulled his seat belt on.

“Morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said. “Was that Procol Harum you were playing?”

She said it with surprise in her voice as she pulled away from the curb and headed down to Cahuenga.

“Close,” Bosch said. “It was a cover by King Curtis.”

“My father loved that song,” Ballard said. “He’d sit on the beach after surfing and play it on this toy flute he had.”

“First time I heard it was on a harmonica. A guy in Vietnam. It sounded like a funeral song to me. And that guy, he never made it home.”

That ended the conversation and Bosch became self-conscious about the buzzkill. Ballard rescued him by handing him a piece of paper he knew came from her notebook.

“What’s this?”

“My case list. Look it over and pick something to run with. Pick more than one.”

Bosch studied the list. There were several entries but some had already been crossed out as completed.

“ ‘Photo to NH’?” he asked.

“I was supposed to send Nelson Hastings a photo of Laura Wilson,” Ballard said. “But he already asked about her in the office before I got to it.”

“I’d still send it. Sometimes a face is more memorable than a name.”

“Yeah, but no one in the current office was around during that first election. I need to remind Hastings he has to get me the name of the campaign manager. I’ll see if he wants the photo then.”

“ ‘Juanita’ — is that the victim’s mother?”

“Yes, in Chicago. We need to find out what happened to Laura’s belongings, see if the campaign button can be located.”

“Right, how about I talk to her, and I’m also going to get to Dale Dubose.”

“Great.”

“What else?”

“When we get in, I want to call Darcy Troy. She texted me on my way over. She has some preliminary info on our suspect’s health that she wants to share. I didn’t want to do it while driving and because I want you to hear it.”

“That’s why you’re in a hurry?”

“I didn’t say that, but, yeah, I want to find out what she’s got and I want you there. We can go into the interview room and call her. You can deal with Juanita afterward. Cool?”

“Cool.”

They had gotten to the 101 and were heading south, the spires of downtown in the mist ahead. They would end up taking three freeways to get to Westchester and the Ahmanson Center.

“So,” Bosch said. “You’ve had a night to sleep on it. What do you think about Beecher?”

“Well, I really don’t like being unable to confirm his story,” Ballard said. “But he wasn’t going to give up Mr. X and we had no leverage to make him.”

“What’s your gut say?”

“My gut says it’s a true story. And I have to tell you, I went down an internet rabbit hole last night, trying to check associations and crossing points between Harmon Harris and people in the business on the level that Beecher was talking about.”

“Are you going to tell me Brad Pitt is gay?”

“No, I’m going to tell you I wasted two hours that I could have used for sleep. I came up with nothing and nobody I could even hazard a guess at. What’s your gut say?”

“To quote Beecher, I think we’re barking up the wrong tree. We needed to do it, due diligence and all of that, but I don’t see Harmon Harris doing this and I think Beecher was believable.”

“Then we’re done with it. We move on.”

They got to the Ahmanson Center by eight o’clock and were the first members of the OU Unit to arrive at the pod. After a stop at the break room, they took their coffees into the interview room and closed the door so they could talk to Darcy Troy in private.

“Think Colleen’s going to come in today?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t care, as long as she keeps her hands off the property boxes.”

Ballard made the call on her cell and put it on speaker. Troy picked up right away.

“Hey, Renée,” she said.

“Darcy,” Ballard said. “Thanks for running with this. I’m here with Harry Bosch, who is one of the cold case investigators working with me.”

“Hi, Harry,” Troy said.

“Hello,” Bosch said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Oh, we’ve met,” Troy said. “It was many years ago, when I first came on in the DNA lab.”

“Oh, okay,” Bosch said, slightly embarrassed. “Then good to meet you again.”

“So, you have an update for us?” Ballard asked.

“I do,” Troy said. “I would term this preliminary because there’s more we can do, but I knew you were moving quickly, so let me tell you what we’ve got right now. As you know, they really didn’t do much with this when the case first came in, what, seventeen years ago. But there was enough of the sample stored here to allow for further analysis.”

“We got lucky,” Ballard said.

“We did,” Troy said. “So we ran a basic urine cytology test on what we had, and it does show high levels of albumin and renal epithelial cells. These are clear signs of damage somewhere in the kidneys, bladder, or urinary tract. Most of the time it signals what is called clear cell renal cell carcinoma. This man likely had a tumor in one or possibly both kidneys, but of course we can’t be sure, since we don’t have him to examine.”

“Would he have known he had cancer?” Ballard asked.

“He would have eventually,” Troy said. “But we can’t tell what he knew from what we have to go on now.”

“Would it have been fatal?” Ballard asked.

“If untreated, yes,” Troy said. “But if caught early, it can be treated. And if it is contained in only one kidney, the damaged organ can be removed. After all, we have two.”

“What about transplant?” Bosch asked.

“That, too,” Troy said. “But people are not really considered for organ transplant in cases of cancer unless it’s caught super early. Transplant is normally considered where the kidneys are damaged by disease other than cancer. I should say here that I’m not an expert on this by any means. Most of what I’m telling you I researched last night.”

“We really appreciate this, Darcy,” Ballard said.

“We girls have to stick together, Renée,” Troy said. “No offense, Harry.”

“None taken,” Bosch said. “What could be the cause of this cancer?”

“Oh, well, now you’re opening up a whole can of worms,” Troy said. “Again, we have an unknown subject and know nothing of his life and experiences. This could be a hereditary predisposition, or it could have been some sort of toxic exposure. I know you’re trying to identify this guy. I would say that it could be somebody who worked in an industry where there was prolonged exposure to carcinogens. I know that doesn’t really help you, but it’s the best I’ve got considering what we do know — which is not much.”

“Well, we know a lot more than we did before this call,” Ballard said. “You said there’s further work you can do on this?”

“Just a deeper dive into it — more analysis on the specimen we have,” Troy said. “We may be able to narrow down exactly what this person’s illness was. But this time it won’t be quick. I would need to find an oncology lab and send it out. I have to make some calls later but likely it will be County-USC.”

“Really appreciate it, Darcy,” Ballard said again.

“You got it,” Troy said.

All three said their goodbyes and disconnected. Ballard took a drink of coffee and then asked Bosch what he thought of the new information.

“It’s good stuff but it’s sort of after-the-fact,” he said. “Dubose and his partner missed the chance to put together a list of people with kidney disease back at the time of the killing. I don’t see how we could do that now. So after we arrest the guy, we use it to tie him in. But we’ll already be able to do that with DNA.”

“So there’s no way at all to use this to identify him?” Ballard asked.

“That’s the hard part, because we don’t know when he sought treatment, or if he even did seek treatment. Maybe he never knew and got sick and died.”

Ballard nodded.

“What about you?” Bosch prompted.

“I just think there has to be a way to use this as a search tool,” Ballard said. “The others may have some ideas when we bring them up to speed.”

“Maybe Colleen can tell you whether the guy’s dead or alive.”

“Harry, please. It’s not funny. I don’t know what I’m going to do about her. I think I’m going to ask Lilia to take over the hereditary part of this.”

“But you said Hatteras was the best on your team.”

“She is, but I can’t have her disobeying direct orders. The psychic bullshit I can actually deal with. But when I tell her not to handle property and evidence and she does exactly that, then I have to do something.”

“I guess so.”

Ballard stood up, ready to go.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’m going to call Juanita Wilson. Do you have her contacts?”

“I have her number,” Ballard said. “I’ll text it to you.”

They left the interview room and returned to the pod. Hatteras, Masser, Aghzafi, and Laffont were all at their stations. Bosch guessed they were working multiple days because they knew how important this case was to the longevity of the unit. He sat down at his station and made the call to Chicago as soon as Ballard sent him the number for Juanita Wilson. The call was answered right away.

“Mrs. Wilson?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Harry Bosch. I’m with the Los Angeles Police Department cold case squad. You spoke with my colleague Renée Ballard yesterday.”

“Yes. Have you made an arrest?”

“Not yet, Mrs. Wilson, but we’re working very hard on the case. I wondered if I could ask you a few more questions.”

“Yes, of course. I’m just so thankful that there is still an investigation. I thought you people had given up.”

“No, ma’am, we aren’t giving up. I know this must be very difficult for you to be thinking of those horrible times, but do you remember, after your daughter’s death, what happened to all her property and belongings that were here in Los Angeles?”

There was a long silence before Juanita Wilson responded.

“Well, let me see,” she said. “My husband and I went to Los Angeles to bring her home. And when we were there, we were allowed to go into her apartment after the police were all through. We packed all of her things in boxes and shipped them back here. And some of the furniture we put out in front of her building like a little garage sale and we sold it.”

Bosch tried to control his anticipation. But Juanita’s first answer gave him hope.

“How many boxes did you send back to Chicago? Do you remember?”

“Oh, there were quite a few. That’s why we sent them. There was too much to take on a plane.”

“And what happened to the boxes once they were in Chicago?”

“You know, for a long time I couldn’t bear to open them and look through her things. So they were in the closet in her bedroom for the longest time. And then I started taking a look from time to time, you know, just to get a sense of her.”

“Do you still have the boxes?”

“Of course, I couldn’t throw those things away. They were my daughter’s.”

“I understand that. Mrs. Wilson, the crime scene photographer took what we call ‘environmental photographs’ of your daughter’s apartment. These were photos that were not actually of the crime scene but of the rest of the apartment. Like what was on Laura’s refrigerator and in the drawers of her bureau, things like that. And we have one photo that shows a campaign button for a man who was running for city council out here at that time. We think it might be important to the case.”

“How would it be important?”

“Well, I can’t really talk about it at the moment, but I’m wondering if you would be willing to look through the boxes you have and see if you find it. It is probably a long shot, but it would help us if you could. If you give me an email address, I could send you the photo that was taken back then. Is this something you think you can do?”

“I could, yes.”

“When would that be?”

“As soon as I hang up this phone. If you think it will help the investigation, I’m going to do it right now.”

She gave Bosch her email address and he wrote it down.

“Give me ten minutes and then check your email,” Bosch said. “I’ll send you the photo and I’ll circle the button so you will know exactly what we’re looking for.”

He described the pin while looking at the photo of it.

“Send it to me,” Juanita said. “I’ll be waiting.”

“One thing, Mrs. Wilson,” Bosch said. “If we’re lucky enough that the button is still there, I don’t want you to touch it. Just identify it and then call me and we can talk about how to preserve it. But for now, I just want you to look for it but not touch it, okay? That’s important.”

“Okay. You’ll send the email?”

“Yes, I have to scan the photo first, so it might take a few minutes.”

“Good.”

“Thank you.”

Bosch disconnected. He thought there was only a slim chance that Juanita Wilson would find the campaign pin, but he felt his spirits boosted by her willingness to work with him. He believed that positive energy often paid off.

19

Ballard had taken Colleen Hatteras into the interrogation room to speak privately with her about the blurred line between her IGG work and her self-claimed empathic skills. Though this was Ballard’s first position as a supervisor, she instinctively understood the boss-employee paradigm: Praise in public, criticize in private. She knew she had broken that unwritten rule when she had angrily sent Hatteras home in front of Bosch, but now she was calm and playing it right.

“The cases are too important,” Ballard said. “We are dealing with victims and families. I’m sorry, but I can’t risk these cases. If you’re going to stay on the team, then I need you to put that psychic/empath stuff away.”

“I don’t understand,” Hatteras protested. “What is the risk?”

“Colleen, come on. You know what I’m talking about. If we make a case through IGG, then that investigator — most likely you — will have to testify to a jury about how you made the connections and the identification of the suspect. You are a civilian. You’ve never been in law enforcement, and any smart defense lawyer is going to try to destroy your credibility. And if they destroy you, they destroy the case. It’s called ‘killing the messenger.’”

“You are saying I have no credibility because I have these feelings?”

“I’m saying a defense lawyer will challenge your credibility. And even if your feelings have had nothing to do with the case, it doesn’t matter. The lawyer will kill you with the questions. Here’s one: ‘Answer this. Ms. Hatteras: Did you communicate with the victim in this case?’”

Hatteras took a moment to compose an answer.

“No, I did not,” she finally said.

“ ‘But you do call yourself a psychic, don’t you?’ ” Ballard pressed.

“No, I never call myself that.”

“ ‘Really? But don’t you get messages from the dead?’”

“Messages, no.”

“ ‘What about impressions?’”

“Well...”

“ ‘When you held the nightgown worn by the victim of this case on the night of her murder, did you get a psychic impression? Can you share it with the jury?’”

Hatteras pursed her lips and her eyes got glassy as tears started to form. Ballard spoke quietly and sympathetically.

“Colleen, I don’t want that to happen to you. I don’t want it to happen to a case where a family has waited years for justice. I’m protecting you as much as them. You need to keep that part of you out of your work here. You are great at IGG and that’s what I need from you. Do you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“I really need a yes or no, Colleen.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Good. So why don’t you get back to it. I’m going to stay in here and make a call.”

“Sure.”

Hatteras got up and left the room, shutting the door behind her. Ballard looked at the case list she had put down on the table. She crossed a line through the entry about talking to Hatteras and surveyed what was left. The top entry was talking to whoever had been Jake Pearlman’s campaign manager in 2005. She pulled her phone to call Nelson Hastings, but there was a knock on the door before the call went through. She disconnected.

“It’s open.”

Bosch came in and shut the door behind him.

“What did you do to her?” he asked.

“Who?” Ballard responded.

“Colleen. She just walked stiff-legged out of the room. Looked like she was about to cry.”

“I told her she had to stow the psychic shit or she was off the team.”

Bosch nodded as if to acknowledge that it had to be done.

“Must be fun being boss,” he said.

“It’s a blast,” Ballard replied. “What do you need, Harry?”

“To go to Chicago. Juanita found the button.”

“Holy shit, where?”

“She and her husband came out after the murder and cleared Laura’s apartment. They boxed all the personal effects and sent them to Chicago. It’s pretty much been in a box ever since.”

“Did she handle it?”

“Not today, no. I told her not to. And she could not remember ever handling it in the past. So it’s there, and I want to go get it.”

“Why? Just have someone in Chicago PD pick it up.”

“Because that will take forever, first to get them to do it, then to get it shipped here. I know it’s unlikely that there’s a usable print or a dot of DNA on it, but if there is, then you will have chain-of-custody issues at trial. Every Chicago cop involved in the pickup and shipping will have to be brought in to testify. If I go, you just call me. It’s good case management. But really, none of that matters because Juanita told me she wouldn’t let the Chicago police in her house to collect the button. She lives in the fourteenth ward. You remember what happened there?”

“No, what?”

“That was where Laquan McDonald was shot by a cop a few years ago. Remember? Sixteen times in the back. They covered it up until a video came out, and the cop went to prison.”

“Another bad apple making us all look bad.”

Bosch nodded.

“I checked the airlines. I could get there tonight, go see Juanita in the morning, and be back here tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’m never going to get approval or a travel voucher today, Harry. If I put in the request, I’ll be lucky to hear back by the end of the week.”

“I know. I’m going on my own. I already booked it.”

“Harry, hold on. I don’t want you using your own money to—”

“I go, I get the button, you put in an expense request. If you get it, I get made whole. If you don’t, that was my risk, and I’m willing to take it.”

Ballard said nothing. She was thinking and coming to the conclusion that Bosch’s plan was best.

“If I’m gonna go, I need to get to the airport in an hour,” Bosch said.

“That’s not enough time for you to get home, pack clothes, and get back to the airport,” Ballard said.

“I have a go bag in my car.”

“Harry, what are you, seventy? And you drive around with a go bag?”

“I put it in this week. For this job. You never know where it’s going to take you. So we’re good? I’ll need some gloves, tape, and an evidence bag. Probably a print kit, too.”

“Hold your horses. I want to make sure this is legit.”

Ballard got up and went to the door. She called out to Paul Masser and asked him to come to the interview room.

Masser stepped in and Ballard invited him to take the remaining chair. She then ran the scenario of Bosch going to Chicago past him and asked if he, as a former deputy district attorney, saw any procedural or prosecutorial hiccups in the plan.

“Let me think for a second,” Masser said. “On its face it seems... kosher to me. Harry is a volunteer member of the unit. He has immense experience in cases and the finding and collecting of evidence. If the defense tries to challenge this, I think I’d be able to rely on Harry’s experience to head off any suggestion of impropriety or incompetence. Would you go alone?”

Bosch and Ballard looked at each other and then Ballard nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Alone. I don’t want to lose two people on this. Frankly, it’s a Hail Mary.”

“Well, then, I’d ask that you document the evidence collection,” Masser said. “Video it and note the date and time and all of that.”

“Not a problem,” Bosch said.

“Okay, then I think you’re good,” Masser said.

“Great,” Ballard said. “Thanks, Paul.”

Masser got up and left the room.

“I have the gloves and the other stuff in my car,” Ballard said. “I’ll walk out with you.”

Her phone buzzed and she saw on the screen that it was Nelson Hastings.

“Let me take this first,” Ballard said.

“I’ll be at my desk,” Bosch said. “Remember, I need to go.”

Ballard answered as he walked out the door.

“Nelson, I was just about to call you, when I got—”

“The councilman is on his way. Surprise visit.”

Hastings disconnected.

“Shit,” Ballard said.

One of the things that helped Jake Pearlman get elected and then keep his job for a second term was his routine of making so-called surprise visits to people and places in his district. These, of course, were photo ops for the media, which was always invited. And Ballard knew that the heads-up from Hastings was to allow her time to prep for what was actually a no-surprise surprise visit.

She left the interview room to warn the team about what was coming.

20

Because of a massive construction project to build Metro train access to the LAX terminal loop, two of the six parking structures were closed and Bosch had to drive out of the loop, park at a garage on Century Boulevard, and take a shuttle bus back to the American Airlines terminal. He then faced a long security line, and by the time he got to his gate, boarding was well underway, and Bosch was the very last passenger allowed on.

He had hoped for some downtime in the terminal to make some calls and reserve a hotel room for that night, as well as check on the lineups of performers in the Chicago jazz clubs.

His seat was midway through the economy cabin, and there was no room in the overhead bins for his carry-on bag. He stuffed it under the seat in front of his window seat, which left him little room for his feet. Cramped and crammed in, he had to turn sideways in his seat to dig the cellphone out of his pocket. It had been almost three years since he had been on a plane, and he realized he hadn’t missed it at all.

His daughter worked a mid-watch shift, so he believed she would be awake but not working yet. As he was about to call her to inform her of his travels, he received an incoming call from an unknown number.

“Bosch.”

“Leave my son alone.”

It was a woman’s voice and Bosch immediately knew who it belonged to. He turned toward the window and talked softly so as to not be overheard.

“Mrs. Walsh? He—”

“You just leave him out of this, you understand? You punched him! You punched my son!”

“Because he needed to be punched. Look, I know he was the one who broke into your house. He either told you or you figured it out later but by then you’d already called the police. So when McShane’s prints came up, you were happy to lay the burglary off on him so the police wouldn’t come looking for your son.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I think I do, Sheila. And I’m in the middle of something right now but we are going to talk very soon. I want the truth about how McShane’s prints got there.”

“Don’t you come near me, and don’t you come near my son. I have a lawyer and he’ll sue your ass till you have nothing left.”

“Listen to me, Sheila—”

She disconnected.

Bosch considered calling her back but decided to leave it. His approach to her son had obviously spooked her and that’s what he had wanted. He would let that percolate for a while and then he’d come knocking on her door, lawyer or no lawyer.

Bosch looked around. The plane hadn’t moved yet and there were no flight attendants in the aisle to tell him to stop using his phone. He quickly called his daughter.

“Hi, Dad.”

“How’s it going, Mads?”

Just then an announcement came blaring out of an overhead speaker as the plane’s first officer addressed the passengers and gave the details of the flight plan and arrival.

“Sorry, hold on,” Bosch said.

The pilot said it was a four-hour flight that would get in at Chicago O’Hare at 8 p.m. Central Time, with the two-hour time change.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Sorry about that.”

“Are you on a plane?” his daughter asked.

“Yeah, I’m going to Chicago. About to take off.”

“What’s in Chicago?”

“I’m on a case. I sort of got recruited by Renée Ballard for the reboot of the Open-Unsolved Unit.”

“You are kidding me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, I just sort of started this week. I wanted to see how it goes first, then I was going to tell you.”

“Dad, are you sure you should be doing this? I wish you had told me before you agreed to do this.”

“Yes, I’m sure. This is what I do, Mads. You know that.”

“And she already has you going to Chicago on a case.”

“It’s really just an errand. I’m picking up a piece of evidence. I’ll just be gone a night but wanted to check in with you, see how things were going.”

“Is Renée with you?”

“No, going by myself. I’m just making a pickup and then coming back. Nothing dangerous. Not even bringing a gun.”

“You still shouldn’t do this stuff by yourself. Why can’t the Chicago police just send it to you?”

“That’s a long story but, really, it’s not a big deal, Maddie. I’ll be in and out. I wouldn’t even stay over if I could have scheduled it earlier. So never mind me. What’s going on with you? How is SPU?”

She had recently been assigned to the Special Problems Unit at Hollywood Division. The unit followed a law enforcement strategy of attacking hot spots of crime by flooding the problem area with increased patrols and other tactics targeting the specific crime trend. It was a favored assignment among young officers because it wasn’t always uniform duty. It also involved plainclothes surveillance as well as decoy operations. Bosch knew his daughter was particularly proud of getting the assignment less than a year after graduating from the police academy.

“It’s all good,” Maddie said. “I’ve been decoying all week on Melrose. They’re having a problem with drive-by purse snatchers. But so far nothing.”

Bosch pictured his daughter walking the sidewalks of the hip shopping area with a purse loosely slung over her curbside shoulder, waiting for the robbers to drive up, grab it, and go.

“Cool. Just you, or are there other decoys?”

“Just me and a couple follow teams.”

Bosch was glad to hear she was the solo decoy. He didn’t want the follow teams concentrating on anybody else.

The plane jerked as it started to pull back from the gate.

“I think I gotta go, we’re rolling.”

“Okay, Dad. Stay safe and let me know when you’re back.”

“You, too. Shoot me a text when you get the bad guys, okay?”

“Will do.”

They disconnected.

Bosch quickly made one more call, punching in the phone number Ballard had given him for retired detective Dale Dubose in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He knew the call would probably go unanswered, so he wasn’t worried about starting a conversation as the plane was taking off. Most departing planes at LAX taxied for a good fifteen minutes before getting the all clear to take off.

As expected, the call went to voice mail. Bosch cupped a hand over his mouth and the phone so he would not be overheard while he left a message.

“Dale Dubose, it’s Harry Bosch with the cold case unit at LAPD. I need you to call me back about the Laura Wilson case or you’re going to find me at your front door. I’ll give you a day and then I’m coming up there. And I’ll be pretty pissed off if I have to fly all the way up for a conversation that can be handled over the phone.”

Bosch repeated his cell number twice and then disconnected. He hoped the tone of his voice on the message would convey to Dubose that ignoring the call was not an option.

He then turned his phone off and put it back in his pocket.

Fifteen minutes later, the plane was in the air and Bosch was looking down through the window at the cold, dark Pacific as the plane banked after takeoff and started to turn east.

21

After getting the alert from the front desk, Ballard went out to the entrance of the homicide archive to receive Councilman Jake Pearlman and his entourage. They came down the main hallway four wide — two men, two women — plus a pool videographer and two reporters. Ballard had not yet met Pearlman in person, as most of her interactions had been phone calls or Zooms or with Nelson Hastings.

“Detective Ballard?” Pearlman said as he approached.

He reached out his hand and they shook. Pearlman was clean-shaven with curly dark hair. His grip was firm. He was taller and trimmer than she had expected. Her impression from the Zoom videos was that he would be short and squat. This was probably because he used a fixed video camera that caught him from a downward angle. Pearlman wore his standard campaign look — blue jeans, black sneakers, and a white button-down shirt, sleeves haphazardly rolled up to the elbows.

“Welcome to the Ahmanson Center and the homicide archive,” Ballard said. “Thank you for coming.”

“Well, I had to see it,” Pearlman said. “And I had to finally meet you in person.”

The councilman introduced his entourage. Ballard already knew Hastings. He was slightly shorter than Pearlman, with close-cropped brown hair. He carried himself with a precise military bearing. The women were Rita Ford, the councilman’s political adviser, and Susan Aguilar, his policy adviser. Both women were mid-thirties and attractive, dressed in conservative, professional suits. Ballard considered that politics and policy might be the same thing or at least overlap in terms of advisement but didn’t ask the question.

“Well, if you’d like to come back, I’ll show you what we’re doing,” she said.

“Of course,” Pearlman said. “And I want to hear the latest on Sarah’s case. You don’t know what it means to me just to know that progress is being made.”

“I’ll be happy to sit down with you after the walk-through.”

“Then please lead the way.”

They entered the archive and Ballard slowly led the group by the rows of shelved murder books and told them the somber statistics and facts that they already knew, since it had been their pressure on the police department that resulted in the Open-Unsolved Unit being reborn.

Eventually, they came to the pod and Ballard introduced each of the investigators on the team and explained what his or her specialty was. She also pointed to Bosch’s empty spot and noted that their most experienced investigator was in the field, not mentioning that he had extended the field to Chicago.

As she made the introductions, she saw Hastings come up behind the chair where Ted Rawls sat and briefly put his hands on his shoulders. That, plus the fact that Rawls had conveniently arrived at the pod just minutes before Pearlman, confirmed what Ballard already knew: Rawls was tight with Hastings and, by extension, Pearlman. Hastings most likely gave Rawls the same heads-up she had gotten. And he probably got the first call.

The councilman asked a few questions of the investigators, primarily for the video camera, and then Hastings said it was time to move things along.

“The councilman’s schedule is very tight,” he said. “And I know he wanted a few minutes alone with Detective Ballard to get an update.”

Ballard wheeled Bosch’s desk chair around to her pod and invited Pearlman to sit down. Hastings stood a few steps behind them, ever on watch, while Ford and Aguilar engaged Hatteras in a discussion of her role as the team’s investigative genetic genealogy specialist.

While Ballard was worried that Hatteras might start talking about her empathic feelings, she shut out the distraction to focus on her briefing with Pearlman.

“Before I tell you where we are with the investigation, I want to start with a couple questions,” Ballard said. “You don’t remember a young woman named Laura Wilson having any involvement in your 2005 campaign, correct?”

“Yes, that’s what I told Nelson,” Pearlman said. “I don’t remember the name and I don’t remember an African American woman among our volunteers back then. Now I have major support in the Black community, but that first election was, well, not very well-thought-out or executed.”

Ballard opened the Laura Wilson murder book, where she had placed one of the actress’s 8 x 10 headshots with her résumé printed on the back side. She handed the photo to Pearlman.

“That’s Laura Wilson,” she said.

Pearlman took the photo and Ballard studied him for a reaction as he looked at it. She saw no recognition in his eyes and then Pearlman slowly shook his head.

“So sad,” he said. “She was beautiful, but no, I don’t recognize her.”

“Who ran your campaign back then?” Ballard asked.

Hastings stepped in close to the pod and leaned down to speak quietly.

“I thought this was going to be an update from you,” he said. “Not a Q and A. The councilman has to get back to City Hall in an hour.”

“I’m sorry,” Ballard said. “That was my last question, and then I can bring you up to speed.”

“Let’s just proceed with the update,” Hastings insisted.

“It’s all right, Nelson,” Pearlman said. “I wouldn’t call it much of a campaign, but what there was of it was run by our friend Sandy Kramer.”

“Kramer no longer works with you?” Ballard asked.

“No, he left politics a long time ago,” Pearlman said. “Last I heard, he was selling tuxedos in Century City.”

“Do you still have a number for him?” Ballard asked.

“I’m sure we could dig one up for you,” Pearlman said. “I’ll have Nelson look in the old Rolodex. Now, how close are you to cracking this case and bringing some justice to my sister and my family?”

Ballard didn’t tell Pearlman everything about their progress but provided enough details for him to know that the case had the most important thing going for it: momentum.

“We have several irons in the fire and it’s my hope that we will be able to identify a suspect soon,” she concluded.

She knew as soon as she said it that she had just made a political promise and that there would most likely be retribution if she didn’t deliver on it.

“This is good to hear,” Pearlman said. “I look forward to that phone call. I’ve been waiting many years for it.”

Hastings came back to the pod and put a hand on Pearlman’s shoulder, a wordless reminder that they were on the clock. The councilman ignored it and asked another question.

“So, the campaign button,” he said. “Is that just a coincidence? Because it’s sort of weird, you know?”

“Well, we can’t dismiss it yet,” Ballard said. “We have actually located the button and we’re going to see what it brings us. That’s where my in-the-field detective is at the moment.”

“Fantastic,” Pearlman said. “Let me know about that. Meantime, do you have everything you need here? What can I do?”

“I appreciate that, Councilman,” Ballard said. “The one thing I’ve found since we started over here is that we need secured storage. We bring in evidence and property from the old cases and have no place to secure it. We’ve been using the second interview room for some storage, and, of course, this is a police facility, so things should be pretty safe, but most squads have a place to keep things locked up and secure.”

Before Pearlman could respond, Hastings leaned in with a verbal prompt this time.

“Jake, we really gotta go,” he said.

Pearlman stood up and Ballard followed.

“You mean like a safe or something?” Pearlman asked.

“Yes, an evidence safe would be good,” Ballard said.

Pearlman turned to Hastings.

“Nelly, remember that,” he said. “We need to get a safe in here.”

“I’ll remember,” Hastings said.

Pearlman turned back to Ballard and put out his hand. The videographer focused on their hands as they shook.

“Thank you for what you’re doing, Detective,” Pearlman said. “It means a lot to me, but more importantly, it means a lot to this city and this community. We can never forget our victims.”

“Yes, sir,” Ballard said dutifully.

She walked the group out and then returned to her workstation, expecting the others to crowd around and ask questions about the high-powered visit. But only Colleen Hatteras poked her head up over the partition.

“So, how did that go?” she asked.

“I guess okay,” Ballard said. “We just need to break open his sister’s case and then we’re made in the shade.”

“We will.”

“Anything on IGG?”

“I’ve got one hit through GEDmatch so far. A distant cousin to our unknown suspect. I’m going to reach out today, but I’m hoping we get something better. Something closer.”

“Good. Let me know.”

Hatteras dropped back out of sight and Ballard went to work. Not believing that Hastings or anyone else in Pearlman’s crew would move quickly to get her a contact number for Sandy Kramer, Ballard started looking on her own. She guessed that Sandy was a nickname or a diminutive for a given name such as Alexander. As she expected, DMV records didn’t help. There were too many Alexander Kramers for her to confidently pick a winner. There were also several entries under Sandy or other alternatives, like Sandor and Sundeep.

Her next move was to google tuxedo shops in Century City and start making phone calls. When she had exhausted all the internet listings and hadn’t come across a salesman named Kramer, she moved on to Beverly Hills, which was adjacent to Century City.

She hit pay dirt on her third call, this one to a place on Beverly Drive called Tux by Lux. She was told that a salesman named Alexander Kramer was on his day off but would be back at ten the next morning. Ballard guessed that selling tuxedos in Beverly Hills required a more formal name than Sandy.

Ballard disconnected. She planned to be in Beverly Hills the next morning when Kramer came to work.

22

Bosch was squinting through the sharp morning light and a slight hangover, looking for address numbers on a small blond-brick house at the corner of South Keeler and West 43rd Street. He was far from the DoubleTree near the lake, where he had spent the night. And even farther from Los Angeles. He was sitting in the back seat of an Uber in a mixed neighborhood of small homes and one-floor warehouses and manufacturing businesses.

“This has got to be it,” the driver said.

“I don’t see any numbers,” Bosch said.

“Yes, but it’s got to be it. My GPS says so, and this will be the best I can do for you, sir.”

“Okay, I’m getting out here. You want to wait around? I’ll be out in less than thirty minutes and then I go to the American terminal at O’Hare. I’ll pay you to wait. I don’t want to miss my plane.”

“No, man, I don’t wait ’round here.”

“You sure? Fifty bucks, just to wait a half hour. Then the airport run on top of that.”

Bosch saw the driver’s eyes in the mirror. He was considering the offer. The ride app had said his name was Irfan. Bosch wasn’t sure why he was uncomfortable staying in the neighborhood. It was certainly a mid- to low-income neighborhood, but there was nothing that indicated possible danger. No graffiti, no gangbangers hanging on the corners.

“Make it eighty, Irfan,” Bosch said. “Cash.”

The driver looked at him in the mirror.

“Make it a hundred,” he said. “And a five-star rating.”

Bosch nodded.

“Done,” he said. “Now, you want me to rip a hundred-dollar bill in half like they do in the movies? Give you half, I keep half?”

“No, but you pay me as soon as you get back in the car,” Irfan said. “Cash. Or I leave you right here, and good luck to you getting another ride. Nobody will come here and you will miss your plane.”

“Deal. I only have twenties anyway.”

Irfan didn’t appear to see the humor in that. Bosch cracked the door and was about to get out with his backpack, when he hesitated.

“Irfan, what is wrong with this neighborhood that no driver would come out here?” he asked.

“Too many guns,” Irfan said.

Bosch thought that might be an issue for most neighborhoods in most big cities, but he let it go and got out.

The house’s exterior, front lawn, and bushes were kept neat and clean. The blond brick gave a sense of resolute sturdiness, as though the place was a fortress against cold and heat.

Juanita Wilson was expecting him and opened the door before he got to it. She was an old lady and she weakly smiled at him.

“Mrs. Wilson?” Bosch asked. “I’m Harry Bosch. We spoke on the phone.”

“That’s me — Juanita,” she said. “Please come in.”

Bosch entered and lightly shook her hand. She seemed thin and frail and wore a loose housedress to disguise it. Her hair was hidden in a turban-style head wrap made of cloth striped with red, black, and green. Even so, Bosch saw a resemblance to the photo Ballard had of Laura Wilson. The eyes matched.

He thanked her for her help and for allowing him to intrude on such short notice. He explained that the sooner he got back to Los Angeles, the sooner the campaign button could be examined for fingerprints and DNA, and the investigation could proceed. It was for this reason that he had booked a flight that would get him back by midafternoon.

“In other words, I’m in a bit of a hurry,” he said. “I want to get this back and have our techs look at it as soon as possible.”

“I understand,” Juanita said.

She led him through the small house and back to the bedroom that had been her daughter’s. It was small but had a nice glow from the sun through a window with the curtains drawn open.

It looked to Bosch as though half the room had been preserved as Laura had left it, and half had been rededicated as a home office. A folding table with a desk chair held rubber-banded stacks of mail along with other assorted paperwork.

“My husband set up in here after Laura went to L.A.,” Juanita said. “But we kept the rest for her when she would come home to visit or in case she gave up on her dream and wanted to come back. And then... we just left it.”

Bosch nodded that he understood. He saw a cardboard box on the bed and pointed to it.

“Is that where you found the pin?” he asked.

“Yes, right in that one,” Juanita said. “There were some clothes on the top and some scripts I think she was working with at the time. But when I lifted them out, I saw the button right away in a shoebox.”

Bosch pulled out his phone and turned on the video camera.

“Mrs. Wilson, can you show me without touching the button?” he asked.

He followed her on camera as she went to the box, spread the cardboard flaps, and then pointed down into it. He moved in to see that there was a shoebox within the larger box. Its top was off and it was filled with small items that Bosch recognized from the crime scene photo of Laura Wilson’s junk drawer. He brought his phone down and then zoomed in on the campaign button that said “JAKE!”

“If I give you my phone, would you please video me as I retrieve the button, Mrs. Wilson?” Bosch asked.

“If you want,” Juanita said. “I’m not all that good with a camera.”

“It’ll be fine. I just want to be able to document chain of custody.”

“Chain of custody?”

“Who had possession of the item and when. That once it was collected, it was maintained in police control.”

“I understand.”

Bosch handed her the phone and she recorded him putting on rubber gloves from his backpack and opening a plastic evidence bag. He then reached into the box and removed the campaign button from the shoebox. He bagged it, sealed it, and put it in the side pocket of his sport coat.

He reached for the phone, spoke the date and time of day, and then turned the recording off. He played the beginning of the video to check that Juanita had gotten what he needed.

“That should do it,” he said. “Thank you.”

“What else can I do?” Juanita asked.

Bosch hesitated. He had both a print kit and swab kit in his backpack. Ballard had given them to him when she walked him out of the Ahmanson Center. Under evidence protocols, he knew he should take Juanita’s fingerprints and a DNA swab so she could be excluded from anything that might be found on the campaign button. But he was hesitant about putting this frail Black woman through that and possibly making her feel victimized by the investigation of her own daughter’s murder. He decided to pass on the protocols.

“You said you didn’t even touch the button, right?” he asked.

“No, I saw it there and didn’t go near it, like you told me,” Juanita said. “Is something wrong?”

“No, not at all. Everything’s good. Then I think that’s it and I can get out of your hair.”

“What happens now?”

“Well, I go back to Los Angeles and, like I said, I’ll get this into forensics today. If we get lucky, we get a print that is not your daughter’s and run it down, see who handled the button, maybe find out who gave it to her. Either Detective Ballard or I will keep you informed of our progress.”

“Okay. Because I’m not sure how much more I can wait, you know?”

“I know it’s difficult. You have waited a long, long time, and believe me, I know what that’s like.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m on a clock, Detective Bosch. I have cancer. A terminal cancer and I want to know before... the end.”

Bosch realized that she was not an old lady as he had initially thought. She was sick. He guessed that the head wrap probably hid the baldness that was the result of the brutal assault of anticancer treatment. He was immediately embarrassed by his gaffe in saying he would get out of her hair.

“I’m sorry,” Bosch whispered.

“I had given up and was prepared to die,” Juanita said. “Then the woman detective called and it gave me hope. I will hang on, Detective Bosch, until you can give me an answer.”

“I understand. We will move quickly. That’s all I can promise.”

“That’s all I need. Thank you.”

Bosch nodded. Juanita led him back to the front door, where they shook hands and said goodbye. From the front stoop Bosch saw no car waiting for him on the street.

“Shit,” he whispered. “No stars for you, Irfan.”

He walked down the steps and pulled his phone to open the ride app and try to get another car. Movement in his peripheral vision drew his attention and he looked up to see Irfan’s car gliding to a stop at the curb. His window was down.

“I went to refuel,” he called.

Bosch got in the back seat. He handed five twenties over the seat to the driver.

“Hold here for a second,” he said.

Irfan did as instructed. Bosch plugged in his earphones and turned on the music he had downloaded to his phone the night before. He had gone to see the Pharez Whitted Quintet at Winter’s Jazz Club near the Navy Pier. The set had been a tribute to Miles Davis, and Bosch had enjoyed it and stayed too late. But he wanted to hear Whitted’s own music and had downloaded three albums when he got back to his hotel room. Now a song called “The Tree of Life” played in his ears while he looked back at the house Laura Wilson had come from.

Modest was an understatement. He thought about Laura’s humble beginnings in the blond-brick house and the dream that took her to L.A., only to have everything she had and had hoped for taken away. It made Bosch angry. He felt an old familiar fire start to burn inside.

“Okay, Irfan,” he finally said. “Take me to the airport.”

23

Tux by lux was on Beverly Drive south of Wilshire, which put it on the more economical side of Beverly Hills. It looked like a business that moved a lot of product, as opposed to the by-appointment-only salons on Rodeo Drive that catered to clients headed to the Oscars and the Vanity Fair after-party.

Ballard sat in her city ride, sipping her coffee from Go Get Em Tiger, and waited for the front glass door of Tux by Lux to be unlocked for the day. It was 9:50.

Her phone rang and she saw it was Bosch. She took the call but kept her eyes on the glass door.

“Just checking in,” Bosch said. “I have the campaign button and am at the airport ready to board.”

“Sounds good,” Ballard said. “How was Juanita?”

“Fully cooperative but sick. She’s dying.”

“What?”

“Terminal cancer. I don’t know how much time she’s got left, but it didn’t look like a lot. No pressure but she said she’s hanging on because you gave her hope. She wants to live to see somebody get charged.”

“Oh, great, no pressure at all. What kind of cancer?”

“I didn’t ask. The kind that shrivels you up in the end.”

“God. Well, all we can do is do what we can do. I hope we make a case and she’s still alive to know it.”

“You in the car? I hear traffic.”

Ballard told him what she was doing, and as she spoke, she saw a man in his forties come to the glass door of the tuxedo store, unlock it at the bottom, and enter.

“I think he just opened the store,” she said. “I should get in there before any customers do.”

“I’ll let you go,” Bosch said. “But when you get back to Ahmanson, can you prime forensics on what’s coming? Maybe they can send a print car out to do it right there so we know whether this was a complete waste of time.”

“Will do.”

“Good luck.”

They disconnected and Ballard got out of the car. She was pleased that she had not said “Roger that” to Bosch’s request about forensics.

Ballard entered the store, carrying a file with two photos in it. Racks of tuxedos lined the wall on the right, and floor-to-ceiling shelves of white shirts lined the left. There was a mirrored fitting area in the back and a checkout station in front. Two glass cases with bow ties in one and assorted cuff links in the other extended from either side of the cashier’s desk.

There was no sign of the man Ballard had seen unlock and enter the store.

“Hello?” she called out loudly.

“Hello?” a voice came back. “I’ll be with you in one moment.”

Ballard walked over to the glass counter and looked down at the cuff links. They ranged from the tasteful and exquisite to the off-putting and tacky. She was leaning over a pair that were silver silhouettes of a woman posing with arms back and chest out, an image familiar from the mud flaps of 18-wheelers.

“How can I help you?”

Ballard turned and saw the man she had seen unlock the store. She pulled her badge off her belt and held it out to him.

“Renée Ballard, LAPD. I’m looking for Sandy Kramer.”

He raised his hands.

“You got me!”

He then dropped his arms and put his wrists together for the handcuffs. Ballard gave a perfunctory smile. It wasn’t the first time someone she badged had reacted this way, thinking they were being clever.

“I need to ask you some questions about a homicide investigation,” she said.

“Oh, shit, my bad,” Kramer said. “I guess I shouldn’t have been joking, huh? Who’s dead?”

“Is there a place we can talk privately? I’d rather not be in the middle of this when a customer comes in.”

“Uh, we have a break room in the back. It’s kind of small.”

“That will be fine.”

“I don’t have any appointments till eleven. I could just put a sign on the door and lock up. How long will this take?”

“Not that long.”

“Okay, let’s do it.”

He went behind the counter, took out a pad for writing down alteration instructions, and wrote “BACK BY 10:45” on it. Using a piece of hemming tape from a tool basket, he attached the sign to the front glass. He then reached down and locked the door.

“Follow me,” he said.

They went around a curtain in the fitting area and into a space that was half storage and half break room. There was a table with two chairs, and Kramer offered one to Ballard. She pulled it out and sat down. Kramer did the same.

“Now, what murder?” he asked.

“We’ll get to that,” Ballard said. “First, tell me, when was the last time you spoke to Jake Pearlman?”

“Oh my god, is Jake dead?”

His surprise seemed genuine to Ballard. She had wanted to know if he had been tipped to the investigation by Pearlman or anyone else on his team.

“No, he’s not dead,” she said. “Can you remember the last time you talked to him?”

“Uh, well, it’s been a while,” Kramer said. “I called him when he won the election. So that would’ve been four years ago?”

“He got elected six years ago.”

“Wow, time flies. Well, whenever it was, I called and congratulated him. I remember I told him he would be going to a lot of black-tie events now and I offered him a discount here. But that was it. He never took me up on it.”

“What about Nelson Hastings? Did you talk to him lately?”

“Hastings? Forget it. I have no reason to talk to him. I can’t remember the last time.”

“But you know him?”

“More like knew. We all went to school together. Hollywood High — and I do mean high.”

He laughed at his own inside joke. But it was a nervous laugh. Ballard read his tone when he spoke about Hastings as bordering on enmity.

“Did you have a problem with Hastings?” she asked.

“More like he had a problem with me. He wanted Jake to himself and eventually pushed me out. I’m just not that competitive. So now he’s running the Jake show, and I’m here.”

Ballard nodded.

“So, let’s go back to 2005,” she said. “You ran his campaign back then, correct?”

“I did, yeah,” Kramer said. “But I’m not sure I would call it a campaign. That sounds so big and planned — all the things that ours was not.”

“It was a small operation?”

“When Jake ran for president of the senior class at Hollywood High, we probably had a better machine. I mean, the ’05 campaign was held together by spit and Scotch Tape. We didn’t know what we were doing, and it failed as it deserved to fail. Jake stayed in politics, retooled, and then came back and won that seat. I was long gone by then. So tell me who died and what it has to do with me. I’m getting worried here.”

“Laura Wilson died. Was murdered. Does that name sound familiar to you?”

“Laura Wilson — I don’t think so. Let me think for a minute.”

“Sure.”

Kramer seemed to ponder the name, but he didn’t take the minute he’d asked for.

“Are you saying she had something to do with the campaign?” he asked.

“I’m trying to find that out,” Ballard said. “Did you know all the volunteers?”

“Back then, I did, yes. I recruited them. But there were not very many and I don’t remember any Laura Wilson.”

“Let me show you something.”

She opened the file on the table and proffered the 8 x 10 headshot of Laura Wilson. Kramer leaned in to look at it without touching it.

“No, don’t recognize her,” Kramer said.

“Is it possible she could have been a volunteer?” Ballard pressed.

“A Black girl, I would remember. We could’ve used one but we didn’t have any.”

“You’re sure.”

Kramer pointed emphatically at the photo.

“She was not part of the campaign,” he said. “I recruited all the volunteers. She wasn’t one of them.”

“Okay,” Ballard said. “Take a look at this photo.”

She slid an 8 x 10 copy of the photo of Laura’s junk drawer across the table to Kramer.

“You see the campaign button there?” she asked.

“Yep, right there,” Kramer said. “It’s a beauty.”

“Did you have those made?”

“Of course. They were the deluxe — with the freedom ribbons attached. I remember we debated the extra spend but Jake liked the ribbons. Made the button stand out.”

“Who got them?”

“Well, we had them at the office for walk-ins. And we also went door-to-door in the district. We didn’t give everybody a button, but we did give them to people who expressed support for Jake.”

“How many did you have made, do you remember?”

“I think it was a thousand, but we didn’t give them all out. I remember after it was all over, I had a couple bags left and just dumped them. In fact, I think the last time I talked to Nelson was when he called me up and asked for the buttons because Jake was going to make another run at it. I told him I dumped them years ago and he just hung up on me. Great guy, that Nelly.”

“Back in ’05, do you remember if the campaign sent people door-to-door in the Franklin Village area? More specifically, Tamarind Avenue — that neighborhood?”

“If it was in the district, I am sure we did. We went out every night. The whole staff and all the volunteers we could get. We’d meet at that deli on Sunset... I can’t remember the name. It was like a hundred years old, but they closed for good during the pandemic.”

“Greenblatt’s.”

“Right, Greenblatt’s — what a loss. I loved that place. They had a room upstairs and we would all meet there at six every night. We’d order sandwiches and a beer, expensing it to the campaign, and then we’d divvy up the neighborhoods so there wouldn’t be any overlap. We’d hand out buttons and pledge cards and then we’d split up to go knock on doors. Grassroots, man. But the truth was, I didn’t know shit about running a campaign. It was fun, though.”

“Who got Tamarind Avenue?”

“Oh, man, I can’t remember that. All I can tell you is we tried to hit every neighborhood at least twice. But I have no records, and that was way too long ago for me to remember who went where or what street. Are you trying to say someone from the campaign killed this woman?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m really just running down a loose end. This photo is from her apartment. She was murdered there the Saturday before the election, and that button was in her junk drawer. That tells me someone from the campaign probably knocked on her door at some point leading up to the election. It may not mean anything at all, but we have to ask questions and follow leads wherever they go.”

“Got it. I wish I was more help.”

Ballard put the photos back in the file and closed it.

“I take it you’ve talked to Jake and Hastings already,” Kramer said.

“Yes, we have,” Ballard said. “I saw them both yesterday. You really don’t like Hastings, do you?”

“That obvious, huh?”

“Yes. But at one time you all were good friends?”

“We were, yeah. We were tight as a fist, we used to say. But Nelson got between me and Jake and pushed us apart. It started during that campaign, and then after we lost, I got blamed. Not by Jake but by Nelson, and that always rubbed me wrong, because he was only the driver. He didn’t write positions, didn’t strategize media buys. He did nothing except drive, and then he dumps it all on me, that I was the reason we lost.”

Ballard froze. She tried not to show what was going on behind her eyes, but she was sure that when she had spoken to Hastings about the 2005 campaign and the button in Laura Wilson’s drawer, he had said the election was before his time on Pearlman’s staff.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Nelson Hastings was Pearlman’s driver during the 2005 campaign? He was around back then?”

“Yeah, he was there,” Kramer said. “He had just gotten back from Afghanistan and was out of the army and Jake said he needed a driver. We didn’t pay him anything. He was a volunteer.”

“Did he do any of the knocking on doors?”

“We all did that. Even Jake. It was required.”

Adrenaline was beginning to course through Ballard’s blood. She had caught a discrepancy, possibly even an outright lie, in the net she had thrown. She felt the investigation suddenly had a solid new direction.

“Before I leave, I just want to ask you something,” she said. “Back in high school, did you know Jake’s sister?”

“Sure,” Kramer said. “We all did. Sarah. That was horrible, just horrible.”

“You were around the family when she was murdered?”

“Yeah, I was over there. Jake was my friend. But what could you say, you know? It was just a nightmare.”

“Who else among his friends was there for him?”

“Well, there was me. And Nelly. Another guy, named Rawls, who became a cop was part of our group.”

“Rawls, was he part of that tight fist you mentioned?”

“He was. And so, yeah, we tried to do what we could, but we didn’t know how to help. We were just kids.”

“I understand that. Did the police back then talk to you all?”

“I think so. They talked to me, that’s for sure. I had gone out on one date with Sarah, but it was a long time before. But they still gave me the third degree. Are these cases somehow connected? Sarah and the girl who had the button?”

“We don’t know. It’s probably just a grim coincidence. I was curious about it. It’s still a big thing for Jake.”

“And always will be, I’m sure. Sarah was great. She was smart and beautiful and had a lot going for her. I never understood why someone would want to take all of that away.”

Ballard nodded.

“Well, it’s almost time for your appointment,” she said. “I think I’ll let you get ready for that. I appreciate your time, Mr. Kramer. Could you do one thing for me?”

“Sure,” Kramer said. “What do you need?”

“I need you to keep this conversation between us. Is that a problem?”

“Not at all, Detective.”

Ballard gave Kramer her cell number and told him to call if he thought of anything else she should know. She was almost hyperventilating by the time she got back to her car. She started the engine and cranked up the air conditioning. She composed herself and then reached over to the passenger seat to get her case list. She studied it for a moment, trying to modulate her breathing. She focused on one entry on the paper.

She realized that she had never done that. And that raised a big question.

She checked the dashboard clock, did the math, and realized that Harry Bosch was in the air and it would still be a few hours until she would be able to talk to him. She knew she had much to do before then.

She dropped the car into drive and pulled away from the curb.

24

Bosch drove into the north parking lot of the Hawthorne mall and easily spotted Ballard’s city ride. It was the only vehicle in the vast sea of asphalt that surrounded the abandoned mall. He drove directly to her and parked so that their driver’s-side windows faced each other and they could talk without getting out of their vehicles. In LAPD slang, it was called a “69 meeting” because of the positioning of the cars.

Bosch’s window was already down because the old Cherokee’s air-conditioning did little to effect climate change in the car. Ballard’s window glided down upon his arrival.

“Harry, how was the flight?”

“Fine. I listened to some good music. So what’s with the code sixty-nine?”

“I didn’t want to talk at Ahmanson. Rawls was in today and he’s a pipeline to Hastings and Pearlman. In fact, he’s been coming in a lot this week and I think that’s because Hastings wants to know what moves we’re making.”

“Really? Can’t Hastings just call you anytime he wants?”

“He could, yeah. But he wants to hide how closely he’s paying attention, because Hastings is our guy.”

“What do you mean? The killer?”

“I’d bet my badge on it, Harry. We get his DNA, and it’s going to match.”

“Tell me how you got there.”

Ballard recapped the interview she conducted that morning with Sandy Kramer and how one of her very last questions to the tuxedo salesman revealed that Hastings had lied to her when he said that the Laura Wilson murder occurred before his time working for Jake Pearlman.

“He’s been with Pearlman all along,” she said. “And that’s not a little lie. That is a lie meant to throw me off. That makes it a big lie.”

“Okay, I get it,” Bosch said. “That’s suspicious, but it doesn’t get you to handcuffs. You have anything else?”

“I do. After talking to Kramer, I started going back over my interactions with Hastings on this case. He’s always been the point man. He’s the one who calls and wants updates, supposedly for Pearlman. But now I think he was trying to see how close we were getting to him.”

“Still no handcuffs.”

“Look at this.”

She handed a piece of notebook paper to him. Bosch looked at it and realized it was her case list.

“Your list,” he said. “I already saw this.”

“I know,” Ballard said. “But I never sent Hastings a photo of Laura Wilson and didn’t scratch it off the list.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Okay, I’ve had two phone conversations with Hastings this week about the Wilson case. I’ve been going over the first conversation in my head. I asked him if he knew the name Laura Wilson and to check what campaign records there might be about her working as a volunteer or making a donation or whatever. I also asked him to check with the staff, including the councilman. I am ninety-five percent sure I never said Laura was Black. The plan was to scan a photo and send it to him. But I never did. I forgot.”

“Okay.”

“So then in the next conversation, he reports back that there are no records and nobody, including Jake, can remember a Laura Wilson being a volunteer or otherwise. And then to underline this, he said that Jake said he would have remembered if he had an African American woman on staff or as a volunteer.”

“But you’re sure you hadn’t told him Laura was Black.”

“Exactly. And then when Jake came by the unit yesterday, he said the same thing: that he would have remembered an African American on the campaign.”

Bosch nodded. Ballard had told him before he’d left for the airport that she had been tipped that Pearlman was on his way for a surprise visit to the unit.

“Could Hastings have figured out she was Black on his own?” he asked.

“Well, anything’s possible,” Ballard said. “But I didn’t tell him. I’m sure of it.”

“Other than that, how was the surprise visit?”

“He and his entourage were there for about thirty minutes tops. I showed them around, they took some video, and I got about five minutes with Pearlman to ask about Laura. And that’s another thing, Hastings kept interrupting and saying Jake had a tight schedule and had to go. Another sign he’s trying to block the investigation. He clearly didn’t want me asking Pearlman questions.”

Bosch could tell by her urgent tone that Ballard was flying on adrenaline. He was beginning to feel the charge, too.

“What do you think, Harry?” Ballard asked. “What are the moves?”

“Simple. We get his DNA,” Bosch said. “That’s what you’re thinking, right? If the DNA matches, game over. Handcuffs.”

Ballard nodded.

“We do it on the down-low,” she said. “Surreptitious collection. We can’t let anybody know about this. Rawls is a leak right back to Hastings, and the more people who know, the more things that can go wrong. That’s why I wanted to meet you off-site.”

“Got it,” Bosch said.

They both were silent for a long moment until Bosch spoke again.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“You’ll do what?” Ballard asked.

“Follow Hastings and get his DNA.”

“By yourself?”

“You can’t do it. You have to run the unit and Hastings knows you. He doesn’t know me. I wasn’t there for the surprise visit. I’ll watch him and make the collection. If it’s a match, we run a game on him. We bring him in for an update on the case and get him on record saying he didn’t know Wilson and had never been to her apartment.”

“Good. That sounds right. How do I explain you not being at the pod working the case? When you stop showing up, the others will ask me.”

“Then we run a game on them, too. I have the campaign button. I bring it in, and you hit the roof because I went to Chicago without permission. You’ve already shown that you’re willing to send anybody who fucks up home.”

Ballard paused as she ran a possible scenario through her mind.

“You know, that could work,” she said.

“Wat a minute, Masser knows you sent me,” Bosch said.

“He’s not here. He had to take care of something and left.”

“Then let’s go do it. I want to be on Hastings when he punches out tonight and his weekend starts.”

“There’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“When this started to tumble together with Hastings, I looked him up. Pearlman has a website for his constituents and it has a section on his staff. Photos, mini-biographies, and their scope of duties, all of that. For Hastings, the bio says he’s a disabled vet, and I was thinking about the blood in the urine and the cancer. Kramer told me that when Hastings joined that first campaign, he had just gotten out of the military.”

Bosch thought about this. It could lead to another way to tie Hastings into the case.

“I know a guy at the military archives in St. Louis,” he said. “He can pull his service records and we can see what’s there.”

“So you’ll handle that, too?” Ballard asked.

“I think anything to do with Hastings should be handled away from the pod.”

“Right.”

“What else?”

“That’s it as far as I know.”

“So why don’t you go back to Ahmanson and I’ll come wandering in afterward. I’ll sit here and call St. Louis first. Do we have a DOB for Hastings?”

“I’ll shoot it to you. I pulled it off DMV today because I wanted to know his home address.”

“Did the tuxedo guy say which branch of the military Hastings was in?”

“He said army but that could have just been a general catchall.”

“I’ll tell my contact to start there.”

Ballard was looking down at her phone, pulling up Hastings’s date of birth. After she sent it to Bosch, she looked up through the windshield. She was facing the abandoned mall.

“What’s with this place?” she asked.

“It’s been abandoned for more than twenty years,” Bosch said. “After the aerospace companies moved away from this area and LAX, it fell on hard times. They closed it down and it just sits here empty. They use it to film movies now.”

“Strange — a big empty mall like that.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll see you back at Ahmanson.”

“I’ll be there.”

She dropped her car into gear and drove off, cutting across the empty parking lot to the exit.

Bosch pulled his phone and looked among his contacts for the number for Gary McIntyre, an NCIS investigator at the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri. He had made contact with McIntyre on several cases over the years. Bosch knew McIntyre would be willing to help if he was still there.

The call was answered by a female voice.

“I was calling Gary McIntyre,” he said.

“Gary’s not here anymore,” the woman said. “This is Investigator Henic. How can I help you?”

“This is Harry Bosch, Los Angeles Police Department. I usually deal with Gary. I need to get the service package for a suspect we have out here in a double homicide investigation.”

“Gary’s been gone a long time. What was your name again?”

“Harry Bosch.”

“Let me see if he’s got your name in the contacts he left me.”

“It should be there.”

Bosch heard typing on a keyboard, then a few moments of silence before Henic reported her findings.

“He’s got you down here as working for San Fernando PD.”

“I was there for a couple years, then I came back to the LAPD. I work cold cases now.”

“How can I help you?”

“I want to get the package for a guy named Nelson Hastings, DOB three-sixteen-seventy-six.”

“Okay, I’ve written it down.”

Now came the hard part. Bosch needed the information sooner rather than later and had to finesse Henic’s cooperation.

“Did you say your name is Henic?” he asked. “I want to update my contacts.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Could you spell it? I want to make sure I have it right.”

“Hotel-Echo-November-India-Charlie.”

“Thanks. How about a first name?”

“Sarah with an h.”

“So, Sarah with an h, what kind of time frame are we talking about on this? I’ve got a clock on this case.”

“Well, you’re on the list. We usually take these in the order they come in. What sort of a clock?”

“If we’re right about this guy, he’s a serial killer. We need to take him down before he kills somebody new. And I need the military history to see if he can be placed in certain locations during certain years. We get that, and we can start pulling the net closed and get him off the street before he hurts somebody else. Nobody wants that on their conscience. You know what I mean?”

There was a beat of silence before Henic responded.

“I get it,” she finally said. “Give me twenty-four hours, and I’ll get back to you. Gary has your number and email on here. Those are still good?”

“Still good,” Bosch said. “So... tomorrow’s Saturday. Does that twenty-four hours carry over to Monday, or do you think I’ll hear something tomorrow?”

“I’m on duty tomorrow. You should hear from me.”

“Many thanks, Sarah with an h.”

Bosch disconnected and started his car. He then headed across the parking lot and back to the Ahmanson Center.

25

Ballard was back at her workstation, writing up notes on her conversation with Kramer, when Bosch came up behind her chair and put down the evidence bag with the campaign button sealed in it.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Evidence,” Bosch said. “You need to get that into the print lab as soon as you can.”

“I know what it is. How did you get it?”

“I didn’t want to wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. I went to Chicago and got it.”

Now Ballard raised her voice.

“You went to Chicago?”

“I just said I did.”

Ballard threw the pen she was holding down on the desk. It was a move that, along with her raised voice, was certain to draw attention in the pod.

“Harry, follow me.”

She got up and walked to the interview room for a private conversation. Bosch followed, head down, like a condemned man. They entered and Ballard closed the door loudly. She immediately brought a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh.

“That was so good,” she whispered. “They were all watching.”

“Well, you do need to get that button into forensics,” Bosch said.

“I will. Did you call your guy in St. Louis?”

“I did but he’s not there anymore. It’s a she now. I talked to her and she promised to get back within twenty-four hours. We’ll see. My other guy would have dropped everything, and he trusted me enough not to redact stuff. We’ll see with this new one.”

“Okay, let me know what you hear. You ready to go back out there?”

“Yeah. But you should raise your voice one more time, don’t you think?”

Ballard smiled and brought her hand up again before it turned into a laugh. Then she dropped the hand and spoke loud enough to be heard through the door.

“Go home. Now!”

Bosch nodded and whispered.

“That should work.”

He opened the door and walked out, adopting the same head-down countenance. Ballard watched from the doorway as he bypassed his workstation and headed straight for the exit. She shook her head as though frustrated to the limit by Bosch’s infraction.

After Bosch was gone, she returned to her workstation but stayed standing as she put her laptop and the evidence bag in her backpack. She was aware that Colleen Hatteras was watching her.

“Colleen, if anybody’s looking for me, I’m going downtown to the lab,” she said.

“Okay,” Hatteras said. “Are you coming back?”

“Probably not.”

“I wanted to give you an IGG update.”

“Did you make a connection?”

“No, not yet.”

“Then let’s see where you are Monday morning. I need to get to the lab.”

Hatteras frowned. She wanted the moment.

“Maybe something will break by then, Colleen,” Ballard said. “We’ll talk first thing Monday.”

“Fine,” Hatteras asked. “Did you just fire Bosch?”

She blurted out the last part and Ballard was pleased to know that the interview room play had worked.

“I’m not sure yet,” she said.

“I think he’s a good man at heart,” Hatteras said. “I feel it.”

“Well, he’s got to be a better team player or he’s out.”

“I’m sure he will be. My sense is he knows that.”

“Then, good.”

Ballard threw a backpack strap over her shoulder and looked at the others in the pod. They all had their heads down and were acting like they were deep in work and had not been listening to the skirmish with Bosch.

“Hey, everybody,” she said. “I just want to say I appreciate all the hours and days put in this week. It’s been above and beyond the call and you should know it does not go unnoticed. Have a good night.”

With that she turned and headed to the exit.

26

Bosch positioned his car at the curb on Los Angeles Street, a half block from the exit gate at the City Hall parking garage. Ballard had also run a DMV vehicle registration on Nelson Hastings and passed on the descriptors and license plate number of his personal vehicle. Unfortunately, Bosch was waiting for a black 2020 Tesla Model 3 and was well aware that the color, make, and model he was looking for was very popular on the streets of L.A. He would need to confirm he had the right car by license plate number and had already followed two cars out of the garage, only to catch up and then eliminate them.

It was now 6:40 p.m. He had been waiting and watching for two hours and was worried that he had missed Hastings’s exit. He pulled his phone, did an internet search, and then made a call. A woman answered.

“Councilman Jake Pearlman’s office, how can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, is Nelson still there?” Bosch asked.

Bosch said it in a casual voice that he hoped suggested familiarity.

“He is here but he’s in a meeting with the councilman,” the woman said. “Can I take your name and ask what this is regarding?”

“Uh, it’s just a streetlight issue,” Bosch said. “He knows about it. I’ll call back Monday.”

He disconnected. At least he knew he had not missed Hastings’s exit. He settled in for a longer wait, keeping an eye on his sideview mirror for a traffic cop who had already told him once he was in a no-parking zone and needed to move on.

Twenty minutes further into the vigil, Bosch got a call and recognized the 208 area code for Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He accepted the call.

“This is Bosch.”

“It’s Dubose. You left me a message.”

“I did. And my partner left two before that. Made us wonder why retirement up there keeps you so busy you can’t find time to return a call from your old department.”

“Fuck my old department, Bosch. It never gave one shit about me. I’m returning the calls now. What do you want?”

“I want to solve the Laura Wilson case.”

“We worked Wilson hard. But sometimes the breaks don’t go your way. We never solved it, end of story.”

“Not for her family. The story doesn’t ever end.”

“Yeah, that’s too bad. But everything we did, everything we knew about the murder, is in the book. I got nothing to add. Goodbye.”

“Don’t hang up.”

“I can’t help you, Bosch.”

“You don’t know that. Not until you hear me out. There’s another murder.”

Dubose said nothing and Bosch waited.

“When?” Dubose finally said.

“It was eleven years before, actually,” Bosch said. “We just connected it through DNA.”

“Where?”

“Hollywood Division. The foothills, like Wilson.”

“Black girl?”

“White. Does that make a difference?”

“No, I was just trying to get the details.”

“Did you think race had something to do with Wilson’s murder?”

“Not that we knew.”

“Did it play a part in the investigation?”

“What are you saying, Bosch?”

“Nothing. I’m just asking questions. Tell me something about the investigation that’s not in the murder book.”

“There’s nothing.”

“There always is. Reports not written, dead ends not explained. Why didn’t you run with the blood in the urine?”

“The what?”

“You heard me. You got the DNA off blood in the urine. It meant there was disease but there’s nothing in the book about a follow-up.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? What were we supposed to do? That could have meant anything. A solid punch in the gut will put blood in your piss. What, we were supposed to go to every hospital and dialysis clinic in the city and say, ‘Give us a list of your patients’? Fuck you, Bosch. We did the due diligence on the case and—”

“Nelson Hastings. That name ever come up?”

“Nelson... who?”

“Hastings. The name’s not in the book. He was around thirty at the time, just out of the military. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No, never heard of him.”

“Think you’d remember if he had come up?”

“If he came up, then his name would be in the book. We left nothing out. Are we done?”

“Yeah, sure, Dubose. We’re done.”

“Good.”

Dubose disconnected.

Bosch had kept his eyes on the garage exit during the call. He never saw a black Tesla emerge. He now started to grind on the conversation with Dubose. The fact that the retired detective had brought up checking hospitals and dialysis clinics told Bosch that Dubose and his partner had probably considered such an avenue of investigation and had dismissed it. His upset with Bosch was probably based in his guilt for not pursuing it. The stone left unturned — Bosch knew that detectives carried such guilt and regret all the way to the grave.

He was about to call Ballard and tell her about the call from Dubose, when he saw a quick procession of cars come out of the City Hall garage. The third one in line was a black Tesla. Bosch put down his phone, pulled his car away from the curb, and followed. There was a red light at 1st Street and he caught up, confirming the license plate number. It was Hastings’s car, but the glass was tinted too dark for him to be able to confirm it was the man whose photograph was on the staff page of the city councilman’s website.

The Tesla turned right on 1st and headed north and out of downtown, the driver choosing surface streets over the rush-hour-choked Hollywood Freeway. One-car follows were always difficult, especially when the one car was a thirty-year-old Cherokee with distinctive square body styling. Bosch hung back as much as he could but knew that if he missed one traffic light, he could easily lose Hastings. Bosch had gotten his home address from Ballard, but he was hoping there would be a stop-off somewhere along the way that would result in a DNA deposit on a coffee cup, food wrapper, or pizza crust. Shed skin cells contained the needed DNA. All Hastings had to do was handle an object and leave it behind for collection.

The Tesla eventually made its way up to Sunset Boulevard and then headed west toward the descending sun. Bosch knew from the data Ballard had sent that Hastings lived on Vista near the lower entrance to Runyon Canyon Park. He was disappointed that home appeared to be the Tesla’s destination. That meant there would likely be no DNA collection this night.

But then the Tesla drove past Vista without making the turn. A few blocks later, it stopped at the curb in front of the Almor Wine & Spirits shop. Bosch pulled to the curb a half block back and watched as a man jumped out of the car and went quickly into the store. Bosch pulled up and into the parking lot on the side where the Tesla driver wouldn’t see his car when he left. Bosch put on a Dodgers cap, got out, and went into the shop. The hat would give him some degree of camouflage, but he was banking on Hastings’s not having seen him before or having looked up a photo when he learned from Ballard about the latest addition to the Open-Unsolved Unit. Even if he had looked at a photo, it would be an old one from Bosch’s LAPD file.

Once in the store, Bosch confirmed the driver was Hastings and was at least momentarily relieved that he hadn’t blown the surveillance.

Hastings was standing in front of the red-wine racks. Bosch moved into the shop and stood near a floor display of white wines. Over the top of the display, he saw Hastings reach for a bottle of red and hold it in his palm while he read the back label. He soon put the bottle back on its shelf and picked up another. He read the back label of this one as well and seemed to like what he saw. He turned and went to the counter to purchase it.

Bosch noted the location of the first bottle Hastings had handled. He knew he could come back for it. But at the moment he wanted to be in place to continue following Hastings. He turned and left the shop to return to his car.

Bosch knew it was likely that Hastings was simply headed to his nearby home to start off the weekend with a bottle of wine. But he couldn’t risk losing him if not. It was important to know where Hastings was located, should it be decided to confront or even arrest him during the weekend. Bosch had to see the surveillance through.

A few minutes later, Hastings left the shop, carrying his bottle by the neck. He did not look back in Bosch’s direction and hopped into his car. Bosch could only see the back end of the Tesla past the front corner of the shop. When it disappeared as Hastings moved back into traffic, Bosch drove out of the lot and followed.

Hastings didn’t go home. He continued west on Sunset, crossing Fairfax and Crescent Heights and then cruising the length of the Strip until he got to Sunset Plaza and turned north again into the hills. He soon made a turn onto St. Ives and immediately parked at the curb in front of a house.

Bosch drove past St. Ives and several homes up the hill before making a U-turn and coasting back down to the corner. He held in a position where he had a narrow and partially hidden view of the Tesla and the entrance to the house it was parked in front of. He waited and watched but Hastings didn’t get out of the car. Bosch began to wonder if this was a ploy by Hastings to determine whether he was being followed.

But then the house’s garage door started to open and Bosch saw a car coming up Sunset Plaza with its turn indicator flashing. He quickly slapped down his window visor and rubbed his forehead with a hand in front of his face as the car turned in front of him onto St. Ives. He zeroed in on the license plate as it passed and watched as the car pulled into the garage. Hastings got out of his car and walked toward the garage, bottle of wine in hand. Hastings entered, and a few moments later the garage closed.

Bosch quickly grabbed a pad and pen out of the center console and wrote the license plate number down. He then called Ballard.

“Harry.”

“Where are you?”

“Home. What’s up?”

“Can you run a plate for me? Hastings didn’t go home. He bought a bottle of wine and brought it to a house above Sunset Plaza. I saw a car pull into the garage and I got the plate.”

“Give it to me and I’ll call you back.”

Bosch disconnected after reading the number off his pad. He checked the house and saw no activity behind the drawn curtains. His gut told him that Hastings had arrived for a romantic dinner with someone and was probably in for the night. Bosch knew that there was a possibility that Ballard would want to continue the surveillance in the morning and possibly through the weekend.

He knew from memory that there was a Midway car rental on Sunset near Book Soup. He looked it up on his phone and called to reserve a car. He knew it would be pressing his luck to continue following Hastings with a 1992 hunter green Cherokee. He needed to switch things up.

Ballard had called while he was on the phone with Midway and he had ignored it. He called her back after securing the rental reservation.

“Is that house you’re talking about on St. Ives?” she asked.

“Yep,” Bosch said. “What did you get?”

“The plate is registered to Rita Ford on St. Ives. She’s Pearlman’s political adviser. Short, white, long dark hair — that her?”

“I didn’t see her, because she pulled into the garage. Just got the plate.”

“Well, looks like we have a little interoffice relationship going. I wonder whether Pearlman knows. It could blow up on him if it ever goes sideways or becomes public knowledge.”

Bosch didn’t offer an opinion. He didn’t care about something that to him amounted to gossip.

“My gut tells me that Hastings is in for the night,” he said. “He may go home later but my guess is probably not. Not if they’re drinking a bottle of wine.”

“Good point,” Ballard said.

“So, you want me to stay or pick it up in the morning? I just rented a car. I’ll have a different look tomorrow in case you’re worried about the Cherokee.”

“That’s smart. You make the call. Leave if you want to.”

“I saw him holding a bottle of wine in the shop. I could go back and get it, drop it off so you can have them look for a palm print in the morning.”

“Wow, yes. Go get that bottle, Harry, and let’s hope nobody beat you to it.”

Bosch hesitated for a moment but then put words to something else he had been contemplating.

“And, you know, since he’s here with her...”

He stopped.

“What?” Ballard asked.

“I was thinking about his house,” Bosch said. “Maybe I could see if there’s something there.”

“Harry, don’t even think about it. You’re not a private eye anymore and we need to do this by the book. There are rules to surreptitious collection. The item collected must be discarded in public. Don’t go into his house. I mean it.”

“What if I swing by and just check the trash cans? The courts have ruled that trash is fair game.”

“If it’s out on a public street. So Harry, don’t go near his house. I want to hear you say you won’t.”

“I won’t go by his house, okay? It was just a suggestion.”

“A bad one.”

“Okay, so you’ll be home? I’m going to go get that bottle of wine.”

“I’ll be here.”

Twenty-five minutes later, Bosch pulled up in front of Ballard’s apartment complex in Los Feliz. Ballard was waiting in the street because he had given her a heads-up call. She had her dog, Pinto, on a leash at her side.

Bosch handed the bottle of Portlandia Pinot Noir out the window to her. It was in a brown paper bag from Almor Wine & Spirits.

“Tell them there could be a palm print on the front label,” he said. “He held it in his palm when he was reading the back label.”

“Got it.”

She opened the bag, pulled the bottle up by the neck, and studied the front label.

“Looks like good stuff,” she said.

“Must be,” Bosch said. “But too expensive for him. He went with something cheaper.”

“Rita Ford is not worth the good stuff — I wonder if she knows that.”

“There’s probably a lot she doesn’t know about Hastings.”

“Thanks for this, Harry. I’ll see who’s working tomorrow and take it in first thing. Maybe they’ll have something on the campaign button by then.”

“Let me know.”

“And I’ll add this to your expense report.”

She smiled and Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, put it on there,” he said.

Ballard stepped back and Bosch drove off.

He was in his daughter’s neighborhood. He decided to drive by her house, even though he assumed she was still working her mid-watch shift. The small house she shared with her boyfriend was dark. Bosch idled for a few moments and then drove on, pulling his phone up to call her.

The call went to message.

“Hey, Mads, just wanted to let you know I’m back in L.A. I’m around if you need anything or want to grab a coffee or a beer or dinner. Be safe. I love you.”

He disconnected, knowing she probably wouldn’t call him back or take him up on his offer. He continued driving into the night.

27

Ballard got into the car, lowered the window, and composed herself.

“Shit,” she said.

She pulled her phone and called Bosch. He answered right away and Ballard could hear traffic noise in the background.

“Harry, it’s me. Where are you?”

“In my rental, following Hastings to City Hall.”

“City Hall — are you sure? It’s Saturday.”

“I won’t be sure till he gets there, but it looks like he’s heading downtown. He left Rita Ford’s place about eight, went home, and then came out a little while later in casual Saturday clothes.”

“What does that mean?”

“Jacket, dress shirt, no tie.”

“No other stops?”

“Not so far. Anything from the lab?”

“I just left. And it’s not good.”

“No prints on the button?”

“No, there’s a print. But it belongs to Laura Wilson.”

“Okay. What about the wine bottle? Did you—”

“It’s a smudge. It’s useless.”

“What about DNA?”

“I dropped the bottle and the pin off at serology. Darcy’s off but I called her. She said she’d come in to swab them. But don’t get your hopes up. She said we got lucky with the windowsill palm print because the guy was probably nervous and sweating. I doubt Hastings broke much of a sweat picking out a bottle of wine.”

Bosch didn’t respond.

“Are you there, Harry?”

“Yeah, I’m just thinking. You don’t want to go through his trash until it’s out on the street. So maybe we should bring him in.”

“What, arrest him? We have nothing.”

“No, bring him back to Ahmanson. I don’t know, we make something up, tell him he needs to come in for an update.”

“And you’re sure he’ll come running all the way out to Westchester on his day off?”

“You tell him it has to be in person because of something sensitive we discovered about the councilman. We know his number one priority is protecting Pearlman. He’ll come. And then we put him in a chair with arms so we get his palms when he gets up. We give him a cup of coffee, put some snacks and a pack of gum on the table. We give him some kind of document to read, not keep. You know, we carry out the charade, then he leaves and we hopefully have a palm print and his DNA.”

Ballard considered the idea for a few moments.

“What do you think?” Bosch prompted.

“That could work, but if he’s the guy, he’ll know if we are feeding him a bullshit story,” Ballard said. “We need to come up with something important enough to draw him out, but then he’s also got to believe what we tell him.”

“You said Hastings and the tuxedo guy don’t talk, right?”

“Kramer. And yeah, not in years. Hastings pushed him out of the Pearlman universe and Kramer’s still bitter.”

“Okay, so that’s where we build the story. It’s something Kramer told you. An accusation or just some sort of story that will hurt Pearlman politically if it comes out. We phony up an affidavit from Kramer.”

Ballard nodded as Bosch talked, even though they were on their phones.

“And it will be unlikely that Hastings checks it out with Kramer, because they don’t talk,” Ballard said. “We could say Kramer kept records from that first campaign and there’s something there connecting Pearlman to Laura Wilson. It could be a note or a phone message or something. We’ll think it through before we meet.”

She started the car and headed back toward the 10 freeway.

“So you’ll set it up?” Bosch asked.

“I’ll try to get him out to Ahmanson today,” Ballard said. “It’ll be good that it’s Saturday. No one else around. I’ll tell him we need to keep it private.”

“But what if he wants you to come to him? What’s the fallback position?”

“I’ll just say no. Pearlman might be coming in on a Saturday, too. So it’s gotta be Ahmanson. If he balks at Ahmanson, I’ll suggest a coffee shop and I’ll be late so he’ll get a head start drinking his coffee and will toss the cup when we’re finished talking.”

“Good. He just pulled into the City Hall garage. You want me to stay with him, just in case he comes back out?”

“No, let’s meet at Ahmanson and work out the story. We can set up the meet.”

“I don’t think he ever saw me on his tail. But just in case, I don’t think I should be part of the meeting with Hastings. I’ll hang back.”

“Yes, play it safe.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there.”

Ballard disconnected. It took her forty minutes to cut through downtown and then out to Westchester. When she finally got to the pod, she found Colleen Hatteras at her station.

“Colleen, it’s Saturday. What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to work on this before the update Monday.”

“What update?”

“Remember, we were going to meet first thing to go over the IGG stuff on Pearlman-Wilson?”

“Oh, right.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Just... work. I had to go by the lab this morning and I was going to write up some reports and check on a few things. Let me go get a coffee and then we can talk IGG. I’ll get you out of here so you can enjoy your weekend.”

“Uh, okay. I’d probably have more information by Monday but now is good. How was the lab? Good news?”

“No, not good news. That’s why I’m hoping IGG is going to come through.”

“What about Harry? Is he coming back?”

“Actually, he is. I talked to him and he sees the light. Everything’s fine now.”

“Good. I like Harry. He’s a good soul.”

“Yeah. I’ll be back. Set up what you want to show me.”

Ballard left her backpack on the floor next to her chair and went to the break room. No coffee had been made, which was good. It gave her a legit reason to stay away from Hatteras and the pod. She started brewing a pot and then pulled out her phone to text Bosch.

Once the glass pot was filled, Ballard poured herself a cup and returned to the pod. Colleen had already pulled a second desk chair over to her station so Ballard could sit next to her and view her screen.

“Give me another minute,” Ballard said. “I have to write a quick email.”

Ballard pulled her laptop out of her backpack and opened it on her desk. She then composed a bait email to Hastings that she hoped would lead to an in-person meeting.

She read the email over and realized the reference to City Hall revealed that she knew he was working there on a Saturday. She edited it out and then sent it to Hastings. She then grabbed a notebook and a pen to take over to the IGG briefing with Hatteras. But before she could even get up from her chair, she received a cell phone call from Hastings.

“Detective Ballard, what are we talking about here?” he asked.

“Uh, I don’t want to discuss it on the phone,” Ballard said. “Can we meet today?”

“I’m at work today. You’ll need to come downtown.”

“No, I don’t want to be in City Hall for this. There may be others around and I don’t—”

“I understand. I can leave the office at two. You know the Grand Central Market on Broadway?”

“Sure. I can meet you there.”

“There’s a G&B Coffee right at the Hill Street side entrance. Meet me there at two fifteen.”

“Okay.”

“You’re sure we can’t discuss this on the phone right now?”

“I’d rather not. You’ll understand why.”

“Okay, then. See you at two fifteen at G&B.”

He disconnected. Ballard sat for a moment, feeling the rising pressure of having three hours to come up with a story that would not make Hastings suspicious of the need for a face-to-face meeting.

“Are you ready?” Hatteras said from the other side of the partition.

“Coming,” Ballard said as she got up from her station.

She walked around to the next cubicle and sat down next to Hatteras, who had her laptop connected to a 28-inch LG screen. This allowed her to work on a large digital canvas when looking at DNA family trees and toggling through the color-coded graphics of a person’s chromosomes and estimated geographic ancestry.

“You seem tense,” Hatteras said.

“Don’t try to read me, Colleen,” Ballard replied, bristling. “I’m not in the mood. Just tell me what you’ve got.”

Hatteras nodded and looked hurt.

“Fine,” she said. “So, we have previously discussed the IGG basics, right? Centimorgans, shared matches, most recent common ancestors — all of the things we use to find potential ancestors to our sample DNA?”

“Yes, I remember all of that. But I’m not a geneticist or a genealogist, so please just keep this simple and tell me whether you’re narrowing in on any potential relatives for our suspect.”

“Well, we’re getting closer. I can say that.”

For the next twenty minutes, Hatteras went through her IGG findings and what they could mean. The DNA profile obtained from the palm print found on the windowsill in Sarah Pearlman’s bedroom had been uploaded to GEDmatch’s database. GEDmatch then generated comparisons with hundreds of thousands of other users’ raw autosomal DNA data files, which had been uploaded to various consumer genealogy platforms such as 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and more.

So far, there were four hits to users who shared at least some DNA with the man who had left his partial palm print on the sill.

“That means we’re now up to four possible leads to our suspect,” Hatteras said. “The next move would normally be to start building a family tree around one or all of them to see how they might be related to him. But here’s where we got lucky. One of these people has already started a family tree and it’s available to us. It also seems to include the other three people whose matches came up. When you start to build a family tree, you can either keep it private or put it out there for other users who may be looking for you to see. This one is public — at the moment.”

Hatteras pointed to her big screen. A genetic family tree looked more like a corporate flowchart than an actual tree. This one was labeled Laughlin Family Tree, and the section Hatteras had enlarged was shaped like an hourglass composed of male and female ancestor icons with names, birth and death years, geographic locations, and in some cases thumbnail images. Some icons appeared blank, as relatives on the distant branches of the tree had not yet been identified. It was most definitely a work in progress that had stalled because of a lack of new connections.

“That doesn’t look like it shows anyone in L.A.,” Ballard said.

“I said we got lucky, but not that lucky,” Hatteras said. “This tree reflects a distinctly Midwest settlement of the family. It shows known genetic relatives in Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, and places in between. But hold on, all is not lost. Judging by the number of centimorgans these people share, I’m guessing these are second or third cousins to our unknown suspect. And some of these unknowns you see at the top here could well be the family member who headed off to the West Coast.”

“But wouldn’t you have gotten a hit from out here?”

“Only if a relative out here submitted their DNA and allowed it to be shared with GEDmatch. We can only work with what’s been entered into the DNA platforms. That’s why a personal connection is important. You can directly ask if they’ve heard in family lore about someone like a grandparent or great-uncle having moved out here a while back.”

“Have you made contact yet with any of them?”

“I’ve messaged all four of the matches through the GEDmatch portal and have gotten responses from three. This is quite good, because you’d be amazed by how many people don’t respond or respond once and then just ghost you because you’re law enforcement connected. It’s kind of ironic, because on most of these platforms, you have to click a box that opts you in to law enforcement searches. But then when you come calling, some of them ignore you. So three out of four is not bad at all.”

“So then, the three who responded — what did they say when you asked about the West Coast?”

“That’s what I was checking for today. I’ve only gotten one reply so far to that question and it was a negative.”

“Meaning what?”

“That she knew of no relatives in Los Angeles or California. But she did say she would try to find out.”

“That’s not a lot of help.”

“Actually, in a way it is. We can definitely get an informative read off what we have here. These four DNA relatives are in a fairly tight geographic cluster. Not a lot of spreading out across the country over the decades, as is usually the case. So what this tells me is we are likely looking for a family member who moved away to the West Coast at least a generation or two ago. Because we have two crimes separated by eleven years, it leads me to conclude that this wasn’t a tourist, but more likely a resident here but with roots in the Midwest.”

“Okay. So how will the person who responded to you try to find out more if it’s not on here?”

“If you look at the tree, this is the one who answered me. Shannon Laughlin. You can see here that she has one living grandparent. It’s her grandmother on her mother’s side. Edith McGrath. She will likely go to her and ask if anybody she knows of in her line — a brother, cousin, anybody — moved west.”

Ballard felt the phone in her pocket vibrate.

“Hold on a second,” she said.

She pulled the phone and checked the text. It was from Bosch.

Ballard quickly typed a response.

She put the phone away and turned her attention back to Hatteras.

“So, you’ll follow up with Shannon Laughlin about her grandmother?”

“I will.”

Ballard pointed to the screen.

“And meantime, all we know for sure is that our suspect will have Midwestern roots,” she said.

“That’s correct,” Hatteras said. “And I’m going to keep at it.”

“And how are you identifying yourself with these people?”

“I’m saying I’m a genealogist looking at cold cases for the police department. As you know, there’s a lot of anti-police sentiment out there lately, so I’m just trying to tread slowly and gently and hopefully gain their trust. It’s better, I think, that I don’t outright say I’m LAPD.”

“I think that’s fine. But keep in mind you aren’t actually LAPD. You’re a civilian volunteer.”

“I understand.”

“Okay, Colleen, good stuff. Keep at it and let me know when you make the next link.”

Since the meet with Hastings was now going to be downtown, Ballard did not see the need to get Hatteras out of the building. She could work here all day if she wanted.

“I will,” Hatteras said. “And, um, Renée?”

“What?” Ballard said.

“Is there anything going on that the rest of us should know about? Feels a little bit like high school, the way you and Harry have kind of teamed up and are whispering all the time. And like that fight you two supposedly had yesterday. That felt like a show you put on for all of us.”

“No, Colleen, there’s nothing anybody else needs to know. There are just some things about the case that are sensitive... politically. Plus, Harry Bosch and I have worked cases going back several years, so we have a shorthand and a level of trust that is already built in. Is that okay?”

“Uh, sure, yes. I was just curious. I didn’t mean—”

“Okay, well, you just do what you do and get me some results, Colleen. And thanks for updating me. I’m going to head out now.”

“I thought you said you had some reports to write.”

“I changed my mind. I’ll do it from home. You should go home, too. It’s the weekend, Colleen.”

Ballard got up and went back to her workstation, returned her laptop to her backpack, and then headed toward the exit. She did not look back at Hatteras but had the feeling that she was being watched the whole way.

28

Bosch was at the table, looking at his phone, when Ballard entered the second-floor break room. He spoke first.

“Did you bait Hastings? Is he coming in?”

“No, we’re meeting downtown at two fifteen. Grand Central Market. What did you get from military archives?”

“I just emailed two files to you. Open up the one called ‘St. Louis.’”

Ballard sat down and opened her laptop. While she put in her password and went to her email, Bosch told her what Henic had sent him. He tried to contain the energy that he felt building inside.

“The new woman at the military archives in St. Louis called the old guy I used to deal with,” he said. “He vouched for me, said I was good people. So I got the whole military file on Hastings, no redactions.”

Ballard was across the table from him and looking at her screen.

“Okay, what am I looking for?” she asked.

“First, you have his postings, and then on page four you have a field action report,” Bosch said. “He lost part of his foot in Afghanistan. And that’s what got him his disabled vet status. Honorably discharged in ’04.”

“So he was here for Wilson.”

“Right.”

“He’s missing half his foot...”

“He must have a prosthetic. From what I saw last night and today, he’s got no limp.”

Ballard was squinting as she looked at her screen.

“You need glasses, Renée,” Bosch said.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “What was it, IED?”

“Doesn’t say in the field action report. When I was in Vietnam, some guys shot themselves so they could get the hell out of there.”

“In the foot?”

“Most of the time.”

“They must’ve really wanted out. Is that what you think Hastings did?”

“I have no idea. I was just talking about Vietnam.”

“Whether he did or he didn’t, what’s that got to do with Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson?”

“Nothing. Now open the second file.”

While Ballard did so, Bosch told her how he got the second file.

“Remember I said I got the military file without redactions? Hastings’s Social Security and military serial numbers were in the first file. I used them to access his VA file, and that’s what you have there.”

“Goddamn, Harry, we shouldn’t have this. We should have gotten a search warrant first.”

“No one’s ever going to know we got it, and it will never come up in court. Scroll through it until you get to 2008.”

“Shit, I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

It was Ballard’s last protest before following his directions. Bosch got up and came around the table to be able to see her screen.

“Okay, 2008,” Ballard said. “Says he came into the Westwood VA hospital for urinalysis. I can’t read these results.”

“They don’t mean anything,” Bosch said. “Since ’08, he has come in annually for a urinalysis test.”

“Is this about kidney disease?”

“It’s about this.”

Bosch leaned over her shoulder and pointed to a word in the treatment notes from Hastings’s 2008 visit.

“Nephrectomy,” she said. “What is that?”

“I had to look it up,” Bosch said. “It’s the surgical procedure for removing a kidney.”

Ballard turned from the screen to look at him.

“Harry,” she said. “It’s him.”

29

Ballard stood on the sidewalk on 1st Street near the corner of the Grand Central Market building. She was in a blind where Hastings would not be able to see her. It was 2:25 and she was waiting on the go-ahead from Bosch. An earlier text from him reported that he was in place and had eyes on Hastings, who had ordered and received a coffee and was looking at his phone while waiting for her.

The key was to make sure Hastings didn’t leave with his coffee cup. They needed that for his DNA.

Ballard paced in a small pattern next to the wall of the GCM’s parking garage while going over the story in her head. The news that Hastings had had a kidney removed in 2008 shot new momentum into the quiet investigation she and Bosch were conducting. The stakes had grown exponentially in the last few hours and she was now sure that she would be sitting very soon having coffee with a serial killer. She had to be careful not to stir any suspicion in Hastings, nothing that would cause him to flee or otherwise act out after their conversation.

At 2:31 the green-light text came in from Bosch.

She put her phone away and immediately rounded the corner onto Hill Street. The open entry to the massive gathering of food and beverage stalls and butcher and produce shops was on the left. Across the street was the lower landing of Angels Flight, the block-long funicular that carried passengers up and down steep Bunker Hill. Ballard could see Hastings at a small stainless-steel table with his back to her approach.

She tapped him on the shoulder.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Airport traffic. Do you want a top-off?”

She had to ask the question even though she was hoping for a no.

“I shouldn’t even be drinking coffee this late in the day,” Hastings said. “It’ll have me up all night.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back,” Ballard said.

There was no line for midafternoon coffee. Ballard quickly ordered a cup of plain black coffee at the counter. As she waited, she casually looked around and saw Bosch at a table by the neon mural on the east wall of the market. He was in Hastings’s blind, even though there was no evidence to suggest Hastings knew who Bosch was.

Coffee in hand, Ballard sat down at the table with Hastings. She noticed that his cup was almost empty. The barista had written “Nelson” on the side of the paper cup, which would make it easy to identify should he throw it in the trash. But like her own cup, it had a corrugated paper sleeve around it. While that would be an impediment to collecting fingerprints from the cup, she anticipated that they would still be able to collect Hastings’s DNA through saliva and epithelial cells.

“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” she said.

“Not a problem,” Hastings said. “So, what’s so important you could only tell me face-to-face?”

Ballard nodded and took a sip of hot coffee to buy some time as she mentally went over the script she had worked out with Bosch.

“As I said, it’s a delicate matter,” she said. “I’m well aware that the Open-Unsolved Unit is in existence only because of Councilman Pearlman and that any perceived hint of scandal could hurt him as well as the unit.”

“What perceived hint of scandal, Detective?” Hastings pressed.

“I talked to Sandy Kramer. And while it was pretty clear that there is no love lost between you two, Kramer is still loyal to Jake Pearlman.”

“Exactly right, no love lost. Why would you talk to that asshole?”

“This is a homicide investigation. It goes where it goes.”

“You talked to him about the girl with the button in her drawer?”

“The woman, yes. Laura Wilson.”

“The woman. Okay, what did Kramer say?”

“Well, when I asked him about Laura and showed him the photo, he said he remembered her.”

“That’s it?”

“No. He said he thought she might have volunteered and that I should ask Jake because he knew her, too.”

Hastings immediately pushed his cup to the side of the table like he was finished with it. And he shook his head.

“No way,” he said. “I would have seen it. I don’t know what he is now, but Kramer was a drunk back then. That was why he eventually had to go when Jake got serious about politics.”

“How can you know for sure?” Ballard asked. “You weren’t there then.”

“I was there, and I’m telling you, there was no Laura Wilson.”

“You told me that the 2005 election was before your time with Pearlman.”

“No, what I said, or at least what I meant, was that it was before my time as chief of staff. I was there back then. I was Jake’s driver. I had just gotten out of the VA and needed to restart my life, and he said he needed a driver. Believe me, if Laura Wilson was part of the campaign, I would have known, because first of all, it was a small operation, and second, she was Black.”

Ballard paused for a moment. She did not recall the exact words of the phone conversation earlier in the week when Hastings used the phrase before my time. But he had just corrected the record and it matched what Kramer had told her. This caused her to go temporarily off script.

“When I talked to the councilman about Laura, he said he didn’t know her,” Ballard said. “But somehow he knew she was Black before I even showed him her photo.”

“That’s because I told him,” Hastings said.

“Okay, and how did you know? I never got around to sending you the photo.”

“I know you didn’t. But I did what any good chief of staff would do. I don’t go into any meeting with my boss without being prepared. You didn’t send me a photo, and so I went online and googled ‘Laura Wilson murder Los Angeles.’ And what came up? A photo of her that ran in the Times. Poor kid finally got famous as a murder victim. There was a whole story on it.”

Ballard had seen the newspaper clipping, including the photo, in the Laura Wilson murder book. Hastings had again talked his way out of one of the inconsistencies that had bred her suspicion. She felt the interview falling apart and Hastings doing the one thing she didn’t want. He was growing suspicious. She tried one more time to put him on the defensive.

“When I asked you if Pearlman had a campaign manager on that first run for office, you said you’d get me the name and contact,” she said. “But you knew right then it was Kramer and didn’t tell me. Why?”

“I just told you why,” Hastings said. “Kramer’s an asshole. A drunk. And I was concerned that he’d be vindictive because of the way we moved him out of the picture. It turns out my concerns were well founded. He’s given you a line of bullshit that has taken you completely off course.”

“I told you, it goes where it goes. If Kramer is lying I’ll deal with him.”

“What’s this really about, Ballard? Are you trying to make some kind of a play at Jake? Are you trying to threaten him? Is it you or the department?”

“I can assure you, it is no play. It is no threat. I am conducting a full field investigation. No stone left unturned. Why do you think I wanted to meet away from my team and yours? I thought you would appreciate—”

“Then what does Sandy Kramer want?”

Before Ballard could answer, a man came to the table. He wore an apron and gloves and carried a trash can. He wore a mask over his mouth and nose as other employees in the market still did.

“Finished, sir?”

He pointed to Hastings’s coffee cup. Ballard looked up and saw that the man behind the mask was Bosch. Hastings barely looked up at him.

“Take it,” he said. “I’m done.”

The second sentence was directed at Ballard. Bosch took the coffee cup in his gloved hand and walked away from the table. Hastings fixed Ballard with a hard stare.

“You know what?” he said. “I don’t even care what Sandy Kramer wants. Fuck him and fuck you, Ballard, if you think you’re going to make a move against Jake or me. This is weak and I’m out of here.”

He got up and started walking way.

“You have this completely wrong,” Ballard called after him.

He didn’t stop.

30

Bosch grabbed the key off the rear tire of Ballard’s Defender, unlocked the vehicle, and placed the evidence package on the back seat floor. He relocked the vehicle and put the key back. He was heading back to the market when he got a call from Ballard.

“He left,” she said. “Where are you?”

“By your car,” Bosch said. “I put the cup on the floor in the back seat.”

“I went off script and he got mad. He headed back through the market. Can you pick him up?”

“Hold on.”

Bosch changed directions on 3rd Street. Instead of going up to Hill, he went down to Broadway and waited at the corner to see if Hastings emerged from the south side of the block-long food court.

“I don’t have him,” he said.

“He should be coming out,” Ballard said. “He just walked away less than a minute ago.”

Bosch knew that there were no through-aisles in the market. It was a maze of crowded shops and food concessions, and Hastings would need to move around people and shift from one aisle to another as he made his way through. Not enough time had passed for him to get to Broadway.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Ballard said. “Let’s just see if—”

“Got him.”

Hastings had left the market and was jaywalking across Broadway. Bosch could see he was talking and then he reached up to his ear. Bosch saw the earbud and knew he had been on a call.

“He just made a call,” Bosch said.

“He’s probably trying to find Kramer,” Ballard said. “This whole thing just blew up.”

“He looks pretty hot.”

“You’re going to stay with him? He may try to confront Kramer.”

“I got him. Wherever he goes.”

“Okay, let me get to my car and head to the lab. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to catch Darcy while she’s there. You stay with Hastings and I’ll call you back.”

She disconnected without waiting for Bosch’s reply. Bosch hung back nearly half a block as he followed Hastings on the four-block walk back to his office in council chambers. Hastings walked down 3rd to Spring and turned left. As he turned the corner, Bosch saw him reach up to the earbud again. He was getting a call.

Bosch picked up his pace, falling into a trot until he reached the corner. He made the turn and walked briskly to catch up close enough to overhear Hastings’s part of the phone conversation.

At the 2nd Street intersection, Hastings had to stop and wait for a green light. The Civic Center was largely deserted because it was a weekend and all the city offices and courts were closed. But Bosch was able to use two pedestrians who were waiting for the light as camouflage when he caught up to Hastings.

At first Hastings stood silently, like he was listening or waiting for someone to speak. Then he started speaking in tight, angry bursts. Because he was aware that others were waiting to cross with him, he dropped his voice so low that Bosch heard nothing. But as soon as the light changed and he stepped into the crosswalk, his voice returned to its sharp tone of command.

And Bosch was able to hear almost every word he said.

“Listen, motherfucker, you call her back and tell her you lied.”

There was another pause during which Hastings flung a hand out in a dismissive gesture.

“Bullshit — you’re the liar. You call her back and tell her what I told you, or I will destroy you. You understand, asshole?”

There was a beat of silence and then Hastings signed off with one word.

“Good.”

Hastings put his finger to his ear to end the call and continued toward City Hall. Bosch once again held back and finally stopped the tail when he watched Hastings go up the stone steps of the historic building. He called Ballard to report on what he had seen and heard.

“He’s back at City Hall,” he said. “Along the way, I think he had somebody find Kramer and put him on a call. He never used the name but he was angry and told somebody to ‘call her back’ and change the story.”

“It was Kramer,” Ballard said. “He just called me and said he just talked to Hastings. He was going apeshit.”

“So was Hastings. You straighten Kramer out?”

“I did. I explained that we were just trying to get a rise out of Hastings. I think he’s cool with it. He doesn’t like the guy, remember?”

“How far did you go off script?”

“I’m pulling in at the lab and I’ve got Darcy Troy waiting for me. Let me drop this off and then I’ll call you back. Or if you want, we can meet somewhere.”

“I could eat. Meet me at Traxx.”

“Is that back open?”

“Yeah. You want anything?”

“I’ll get something to drink when I get there. I already ate.”

It took Bosch ten minutes to get over to Union Station and the restaurant inside its huge waiting hall. It was after the lunch rush and the restaurant wasn’t crowded, but the waiting hall was packed with travelers embracing a postpandemic world, whether the threat of the pandemic was actually over or not.

Bosch was halfway through a grilled cheese sandwich and a side of fries when Ballard slid into the window booth across from him. She took a french fry off his plate in the same fluid motion. Bosch pushed his plate toward the middle of the table.

“Dig in,” he said. “I can’t eat all of this.”

She took another fry as the waitress came to the table.

“I just want an iced tea and some ketchup,” she said.

Bosch let her settle for a moment before going right to the case.

“So Darcy has the cup?”

“She does. She’s putting a rush on it. I think I’ve used up the next three months of favors with her. Especially getting her to come in today.”

“It’ll be worth it when we bag this guy. When will she know?”

“She’s hoping the sequencing is done by tomorrow, and then she’ll put it into CODIS and see if it draws a match.”

“She can’t directly compare what we get from the cup to what they got from the palm print?”

Ballard shook her head.

“Legal protocol handed down by the D.A.’s Office,” she said. “Makes it harder to challenge in court if you don’t go outside the bounds of usual procedure. Skipping it and going to a one-to-one comparison can look like the fix was in. A defense lawyer like your brother, Mickey, could blow that up in court.”

“Half brother. So tomorrow we’ll know.”

“If we’re lucky.”

Bosch nodded and took another bite of his sandwich. He spoke with his mouth full.

“So you went off script with Hastings.”

“Yeah. He sort of got to me when he knocked down all three strikes I had against him.”

“What strikes?”

“He corrected what he meant when he said the Wilson murder was before his time with Pearlman. He now says he meant before his time as chief of staff. He acknowledged today that he was Pearlman’s driver back then. So I went off script when I asked him how he knew Wilson was Black when I didn’t tell him.”

“And?”

“He had an answer for it. I didn’t send him a photo, so he googled her and found a Times story on her murder that had her photo. He was right. The same clip is in the murder book.”

“Look, none of that matters now with the missing kidney. The DNA match will come back and we take him down.”

“I know, I know, but he’s good. He shifted the conversation, so when I got back on script and brought up Kramer and him not giving me the name of the campaign manager when he clearly knew it, he went ballistic.”

“Yeah, I heard Hastings’s side of it. What did Kramer tell you he said to Hastings on the call?”

“He told me he denied saying that Pearlman knew Laura Wilson, but Hastings didn’t believe him. He just yelled and threatened to destroy him.”

“I think you need to call him.”

“Who?”

“Hastings. Tell him that Kramer just called you and changed his story. Maybe that will calm him down. We kind of left Kramer’s ass blowin’ in the wind on this. Hastings should know there is no threat.”

“Like, now?”

“Yeah, call him, see if he answers. We have to give Kramer some cover.”

Ballard pulled her phone and called Hastings. He answered and she quickly explained that she now knew that the information she had received about Pearlman knowing Wilson was wrong. She apologized for not confirming or debunking the intel before bringing it to him. She then listened quietly for almost a minute as Hastings had his say and disconnected without giving her a chance to respond.

“Sounded like that went well,” Bosch said.

“Right,” Ballard said. “Let’s just say that I hope we get that DNA back before he can have me fired Monday.”

Bosch nodded.

“Let’s hope Darcy comes through,” he said.

Ballard leaned back and looked out the window into the waiting hall. Union Station was one of the city’s lasting beauties.

“Think how many people have come through this place to get to this city, Harry,” she said. “People like Laura Wilson, bringing their hopes and dreams.”

“She came from Chicago by train?” Bosch asked.

“She kept a journal. It was in the murder book. She took the train to save money. It took two days and she saw the Rocky Mountains. Then she got here and got killed. How fucking unfair was that?”

“Murder is never fair. I’d like to read that journal.”

“I have it at my desk at Ahmanson.”

Bosch joined her in looking out the window into the hall. Dozens of people from all walks of life moved across the Spanish-tile floor, either heading away from L.A. or having arrived at their destination, suitcases and dreams in hand. He pictured Laura Wilson arriving and moving wide-eyed through the great hall to the doors that opened to the City of Angels. She could not have known that it was her final destination.

31

The ocean was as smooth as a fitted sheet on a bed. Ballard had brought both surfboard and paddleboard with her so she would be ready for any kind of surface. She had found a parking spot on the Pacific Coast Highway at the west end of La Costa Beach in Malibu and was close enough to the water to be able to tell it was a paddle day. This was good. It meant Pinto would get to ride with her rather than being leashed to a tent pole while she rode the bigger waves.

It was a Sunday but early enough that the beach was not crowded. Ballard opened the Defender’s hatch and sat on the tail while working on her wet suit. Pinto was still in his travel crate next to her.

She was just about to slide her phone into its waterproof case, when it started to buzz. The caller was Darcy Troy and Ballard’s pulse quickened.

“Darcy, give me the good news,” Ballard said.

This was met with silence.

“Darcy? Hello?”

“I’m here. And I don’t have good news, Renée. We got a good sample from the cup, and I’m sorry but it is no match to the two previous cases.”

Now it was Ballard who went silent. She had fully invested in Hastings as their guy.

“Renée, you still there?”

“I don’t understand. He’s the guy. He lost a kidney. He’s been shaky on his stories. I can’t believe this. Are you sure, Darcy? Could there be some kind of mistake?”

“No, no mistake. I’m sorry. But what do you mean when you say he lost a kidney?”

“We have his VA records. Three years after the Laura Wilson murder, he had a radical neph-whatever-you-call-it.”

“Nephrectomy. Removal of a kidney. But that doesn’t mean he had kidney disease. He could have donated a kidney. I mean, I’d have to look at the medical records or get somebody more qualified to look, but—”

“Oh, shit. We didn’t — I need to call Harry Bosch. Darcy, you’re a genius. I’ll call you later. And thanks so much for giving up your weekend for this.”

Ballard disconnected. She immediately called Bosch and started unzipping her wet suit as she waited for him to answer.

“Ballard. What’s up?”

“Good and bad news. The DNA from Hastings does not match the case DNA.”

“Is that the good or bad news?”

“The bad. The good news is that he could have donated a kidney to a friend or relative. And that person would be the one with kidney disease and could be our new suspect.”

Bosch was silent.

“Harry?”

“Just thinking. We don’t have much of a choice. We have to go to Hastings.”

“Follow the kidney.”

Ballard smiled but heard no reaction from Bosch.

“That was supposed to be funny, Harry.”

“Yeah, I know. So, where are you?”

“Well, I was about to go paddling. I’m in Malibu.”

“Do you want to wait till tomorrow?”

“Not really. We have new momentum. Let’s go see him.”

“If we can find him.”

“Well, we know where he lives and works and where he’s been shacking up. I can also just call him.”

“I think it would be better if he doesn’t know we’re coming. You never know, he could call somebody if he knows why we’re coming.”

“Agreed.”

“When?”

“I can get back in an hour. I’ll change, drop off the dog, and then come get you. Let’s say noon.”

“I’ll be ready.”

They disconnected and Ballard finished peeling off her wet suit. She looked at Pinto in his crate.

“Sorry, boy,” she said. “Mom’s gotta go to work. We’ll come back next week and get on the water. I promise.”

She threw her wet suit into the back of the SUV and put her sweats back on over her one-piece. She turned and looked back at the ocean. She saw the silhouette of Catalina emerging on the horizon through the marine layer. It was going to be a clear and hot day.

“Damn,” she said.

32

Ballard and Bosch went to Hastings’s house first and found no one home. From there, they went west to Sunset Plaza and the home of Rita Ford. The black Tesla that Bosch had previously followed was there, parked in the same spot at the curb on St. Ives as before.

“Bingo,” Bosch said.

They pulled into the driveway and parked. Rita Ford answered the door.

“Detective Ballard, this is a surprise,” she said. “What brings you here?”

“We need to see Nelson Hastings,” Ballard said.

“Why do you think he would be here?”

Ballard pointed out to the street.

“Because that’s his car and because we know he is,” she said. “We need to talk to him, Rita. It’s important.”

“Just a moment,” Ford said.

She closed the door. Ballard looked at Bosch. They were expecting a cold welcome.

When the door reopened, Hastings was standing there.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“We need your help,” Ballard said.

“You want my help? Jesus Christ, one minute you have me down as suspect number one, and now you want my help?”

“What makes you say we suspected you?”

“Come on, Detective. That charade yesterday where you tell me a bullshit story from Kramer after trying to catch me in lies from my earlier statements? I’m not stupid. You’ve got it in your head that someone from Jake’s circle killed Laura Wilson and Sarah Pearlman and that someone was me.”

“We don’t think that, Nelson. Can we come in? We really need you to help us with this.”

Hastings pointed at Bosch.

“And you, I know who you are,” he said. “You followed me from G&B’s. Yeah, I saw you. My guess is you’re Bosch. Well, you fucked up, Bosch, along with her, and tomorrow you’ll both be gone.”

“I fucked up,” Bosch said. “Not Renée. And if you let us in, we can explain it and you can help us catch the murderer of your friend’s sister.”

Hastings shifted his stare from Bosch to Ballard but didn’t move or say anything. Then the stare came back to Bosch. Hastings shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was about to do and stepped back from the door.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s how long you have to convince me not to have you both fired and maybe even prosecuted.”

Bosch almost told him he couldn’t be fired because he was a volunteer, and that any effort to charge him or Ballard with a crime would be laughed out of the D.A.’s Office along with Hastings.

But he let it go. They followed Hastings into the house, and he led them to a living room furnished in bright oranges and yellows. Rita Ford was sitting on the couch upholstered in white-and-yellow stripes.

“We need to talk privately with Nelson,” Ballard said.

“Fine,” Ford said in an insulted tone.

She got up and left the room. Hastings gestured to the now empty couch, and Bosch and Ballard sat down. The room had a glass wall with a view that extended over the top of the Sunset Boulevard shops a block below and out across West Hollywood.

Hastings stayed standing, arms folded tightly across his chest.

“So,” he said. “Just so we are clear, you two detectives have obviously been following me, investigating me, and suspecting me of murdering my best friend’s sister. Do you admit that?”

“I would like to know how you know all of that,” Ballard asked levelly.

“What does that matter?” Hastings said. “Is it true, or are you going to sit there and deny it.”

“Hastings, why don’t you sit down and cool off,” Bosch said.

“Don’t fucking tell me what to do, old man,” Hastings shot back.

“Look, we’re sorry if you got your feathers ruffled because we were just doing our jobs,” Bosch said. “Sure, we were looking at you, and for good reasons that we can tell you about if you’re interested in listening. So again, why don’t you sit down and help us catch a killer. Wouldn’t your best friend want that?”

Hastings held up his hand to stop all discussion. He briefly closed his eyes and went through some sort of internal calming exercise. He then opened his eyes and sat down on a chair with puffy orange cushions.

“What do you want?” he said.

Bosch looked at Ballard and nodded. She was lead.

“You had a kidney removed in 2008,” she said. “Why?”

Hastings shook his head like he couldn’t comprehend what the question had to do with the subject at hand.

“First of all, how do you know that?” he asked.

“We’re detectives, Mr. Hastings,” Ballard said. “We find things out. You lost a kidney. Why?”

“Okay, look, I didn’t lose a kidney,” Hastings said. “I gave it away.”

Ballard nodded.

“Sorry, poor choice of words,” she said. “You gave someone a kidney. That was a very unselfish thing to do. It must have been someone very close to you. A family member?”

“I’m surprised you don’t already know,” Hastings said. “I gave it to Ted Rawls.”

In the movies, the detectives always look at each other to underscore for the viewer the significance of a witness’s revelation. Ballard and Bosch couldn’t help exchanging a look, and this underscored the significance for Hastings.

“What?” he said. “Are you saying Ted’s the one? No way.”

“We’re not saying that,” Ballard said. “I just didn’t know that Ted had that kind of a health situation. If I had, I would have questioned why the councilman wanted him on our team.”

“The guy wanted to be a cop his whole life,” Hastings said. “LAPD wouldn’t take him but Santa Monica did. Then he gets sick and is forced to quit his chosen profession. So yeah, I gave him a kidney. I had an extra one.”

“What sort of issue did he have with his kidneys?” Ballard asked.

“Cancer,” Hastings said. “Took both kidneys, his spleen. He almost died. But he fought his way back, started a small business, and built it up. He’s amazing. But he never gave up on the dream of being a detective. So when he saw the press conference on TV where Jake announced the reboot of the cold case team, he came to me and said, ‘Put me on.’ I talked to Jake and we agreed. Jake went to you with it.”

“And he conveniently left out his medical history,” Ballard said. “You must have known that the LAPD would not have accepted the liability of that.”

“Jake didn’t want to give you any reason to push back on him,” Hastings said. “So Ted got added to the team. And now you’re saying he had something to do with Sarah and the Wilson girl? That is ridiculous.”

“Again, we’re not saying that,” Ballard said.

“Then what are you saying?” Hastings said. “Why all these questions about Ted?”

Ballard paused for a moment and looked back at Bosch. He knew she was trying to decide whether to trust Hastings not to pass on what she told him to his friends Jake Pearlman and Ted Rawls. Bosch nodded, giving her the go-ahead from his view of things.

“I told you that DNA from the Laura Wilson case matched her killer to the Sarah Pearlman case,” Ballard said.

“Yes, you told me,” Hastings said. “And Wilson had a ‘JAKE!’ button. It’s thin, Detective Ballard.”

“The DNA sample from the Wilson case came from blood found in urine on the toilet seat in her apartment,” Ballard said. “The blood also told us something else. That the killer had kidney disease.”

As staunch a defender of Rawls as he was, even Hastings blinked at the revelation. He was quiet for a few moments and then spoke in a reserved voice.

“So when you found out I was missing a kidney...,” he said, his voice trailing off.

“Plus, I thought you had lied when you told me that the ’05 campaign was before your time,” Ballard said.

Hastings nodded.

“And I knew Laura Wilson was Black before you told me,” he said.

Ballard let him sit with that for a moment and then continued.

“When was the last time you talked to Ted Rawls?” she asked.

“Uh, yesterday,” Hastings said. “He... I called him because I was upset about our conversation. He told me it was probably a setup, that you were getting my DNA. And I remembered the guy there who came up and took my cup. You, right?”

He looked directly at Bosch, who nodded.

“I’m sorry I called you an old man,” Hastings said. “That wasn’t cool at all.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bosch said. “I am an old man.”

“What else did Ted tell you?” Ballard asked.

“I don’t really remember,” Hastings said. “I kind of went dark when he said, ‘She’s looking at you, man, and you’d better be careful.’”

“Anything else that you can remember?” she pressed.

“No, I just wanted to get off the phone,” Hastings said. “I was so angry once I realized what that meeting between us had really been about.”

“Who else have you talked to about this?” Bosch asked. “Did you tell the councilman?”

“No, I was going to tell him all about it tomorrow when I told him you needed to be fired,” Hastings said. “I talked to Rita about it, but she hasn’t told anyone.”

He held Ballard’s eyes for a long moment.

“You can’t talk to anybody else about this,” Ballard said. “Not the councilman and certainly not Ted Rawls. Rita, too.”

“We keep quiet while you do what?” Hastings asked.

“Continue the investigation,” Ballard said. “We’re very close, and you and the councilman will be the first we call when we get there.”

“What if Ted calls me?” Hastings said. “What do I say?”

“Just don’t take the call,” Bosch said. “If you talk to him, he might be able to read that you know something.”

“My god,” Hastings said. “I really can’t believe this.”

Ballard stood up and Bosch did the same. He knew that she understood that they had to get moving on Rawls — if it wasn’t already too late.

Hastings remained seated and looked like he was deep in thought.

“I just realized something,” he said.

“What?” Ballard asked.

“That I gave my kidney to the guy who killed Sarah,” Hastings said. “And Laura Wilson and who knows who else. I kept this guy alive to do that.”

“Nelson, we don’t know that yet,” Ballard said. “We are working this one step at a time. You’ve been very helpful but we need to continue our work. I promise I will personally keep you in the loop.”

Hastings was staring blankly at nothing.

“Are you okay, Nelson?” Ballard asked.

“Yeah,” Hastings said in a flat voice. “I’m just dandy.”

They left him there with his thoughts. Bosch looked around for Rita Ford as they were exiting the house but didn’t see her. It looked like Hastings was on his own for now.

33

The first thing Ballard did after she and Bosch got back in her city car was call Paul Masser on his cell.

“Paul, I need you to come in,” she said.

“Really?” he said. “It’s Sunday — what’s going on?”

“I need a search warrant and I want it to be ironclad. It can never come back on us in court.”

“And you need this today?”

“I need it ten minutes ago. Can you come in? I’ll have it roughed out for you. I promise, you’ll be in and out.”

“Can’t you just email it to me? I can go over it on my phone?”

“No, I want you at the pod so we can do it together.”

“Uh, okay. Give me an hour and I’ll be there.”

“Thank you. And, Paul, don’t tell anyone on the team that you’re rolling in to work. No one.”

She disconnected before he could ask her what was going on. She started driving down the hill to Sunset.

“You don’t need me for that, right?” Bosch said. “You and Paul will write it up.”

Ballard looked over at him.

“I guess,” she said. “But you’ve written more search warrants than Paul and me combined. Where do you have to go?”

“I was thinking I’d get my car and go sit on Rawls,” Bosch said. “If I can find him.”

Ballard nodded. It was the right move.

“Good idea,” she said. “I can get his home address out of my team files. He also has an office above one of his stores, the first one he opened in Santa Monica. It’s the flagship and he runs all the others from there. You can look that address up. It’s called DGP Mailboxes and More.”

“Got it,” Bosch said. “DGP?”

“I once heard him tell the others in the pod that it stood for Don’t Go Postal, but nobody’s supposed to know that.”

“Nice. Thoughtful. What about his car?”

“I have copies of all the paperwork he filled out when he joined the team, including a description of car and plate number for security at Ahmanson.”

“Good, get that to me, too. Let me out on Sunset and I’ll grab a Lyft back to my place. Save you some driving.”

“You sure?”

“My car’s in the opposite direction of Ahmanson. You need to get there and start writing.”

Ballard had a green light and made the turn from Sunset Plaza onto Sunset Boulevard. She pulled to the curb in front of a real estate office. Bosch paused before getting out as he looked at the glass facade of the business.

“What?” Ballard asked.

“Nothing,” Bosch said. “I worked a case that involved that place when it was a high-end jewelry store. Two brothers were murdered in the back room.”

“Oh, I remember that.”

“That one ended up being about bent cops, too.”

Bosch got out of the city car and looked back in at Ballard before closing the door.

“I’ll call you when I get eyes on Rawls.”

“Roger — I mean, sounds good.”

“That was close.”

“Caught myself.”

“Good luck with the warrant.”

He closed the door, and Ballard pulled back into traffic, drawing a horn from a driver who thought she had cut him off. She checked her rearview and saw Bosch standing on the sidewalk looking at his phone. He was summoning a ride.

An hour later, Ballard was at her workstation at Ahmanson. She was putting the finishing touches on the probable cause statement that would be included in an application for a search warrant allowing her to take a DNA swab from the mouth of Ted Rawls.

Paul Masser arrived. He was wearing shorts and a tucked-in polo shirt.

“Oh, shit, I pulled you off the golf course?” Ballard said.

“Not a big deal,” Masser said. “I was on the seventeenth green at Wilshire when you called. I would have had to walk in from there. So I just played the last hole, took a quick shower, and came directly here.”

He gestured to the golfing outfit he was wearing.

“I got these in the golf shop because I didn’t have anything in my locker to change into.”

“Well, I have the PC statement. I’ll print it and you can start.”

A search warrant was all about the probable cause statement. It had to convince a judge that there was enough legal cause to allow for a search and seizure of a citizen’s property or person. Everything else in a search warrant was largely boilerplate. The judge it was submitted to would likely skip over all of that and go directly to the PC.

“Who’s up today?” Masser asked. “Did you check yet?”

“No,” Ballard asked. “Why don’t you do that while I get this from the printer.”

Masser was inquiring about which judge from the criminal courts division was up on rotation to handle after-hours search warrant requests. This was a key question because judges had particular viewpoints and practices that became known to the trade — the lawyers who appeared before them and the police officers who went to them for search warrant approval. Some judges were fierce defenders of the Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. Others were fierce law-and-order judges who never saw a search warrant application they didn’t like. In addition, they were elected to the bench. While they were charged with wielding their power without personal or political bias, it was a rare judge who didn’t occasionally peek out from under the blindfold at the possible electoral ramifications of a ruling — like whether to allow the state to take a DNA sample from an ex-cop suspected of being a killer.

Ballard came back from the printer and handed Masser the two-page PC statement just as he was hanging up his desk phone.

“Judge Canterbury is up,” he said. “And that is not good. He’s very strict on search and seizure.”

“I’ve heard,” Ballard said. “I might have another way to go.”

Most detectives worked on establishing a relationship with a go-to judge whom they could count on to be sympathetic when it came to questions of probable cause. It was a form of judge shopping, but it was practiced widely. Ballard, from her years on the midnight shift at Hollywood Division, had woken more than a few judges up in the middle of the night to get a search warrant signed. She had a few names on her contact list that she could call if she and Masser didn’t want to go to Judge Canterbury.

Ballard pointed to the document now in Masser’s hands.

“You’re going to be upset by what you read,” she said. “And I don’t want you repeating any of it to anybody. Clear?”

“Yes, clear,” Masser said. “Now I can’t wait.”

She left him at his workstation and went back to hers. While Masser was going through the PC document, she opened one of the original murder books from the Pearlman case and started leafing through the transcripts from the interviews conducted by the original detectives. Her memory was correct. There were apparently no interviews with Nelson Hastings or Ted Rawls. And this carried through to the original lab reports. Neither one of them had ever had their palm print compared to that found on the windowsill in Sarah Pearlman’s bedroom.

This was a serious flaw in the original investigation. Hastings and Rawls were close friends of Jake Pearlman’s and were acquainted with his sister. They should have been interviewed and printed — as Kramer had been. The fact that they weren’t interviewed contradicted what had appeared to Ballard to be a tight and thorough investigation. Since the ODs on the case were no longer available, Ballard felt there was only one person she could talk to for clarification of this issue.

She called Nelson Hastings.

“Did you arrest him?” he asked immediately.

“No, and we’re not there yet,” Ballard said. “We are proceeding carefully.”

“Then, what do you need from me?” Hastings asked.

“I’m reviewing interview transcripts from the original investigation. There is no interview with you or Ted Rawls. I don’t understand that. You were Jake’s friends and I assume you both knew Sarah. Do you remember this? Why didn’t they interview you?”

“I was out of town with my parents when the murder happened,” Hastings said. “They talked to my parents and confirmed it, so they never talked to me. And Ted wasn’t around then.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he was around, but he wasn’t as tight as Jake, Kramer, and I were. He was sort of the new guy. It was our senior year and we were all about to graduate. We had gotten our college acceptance letters and the three of us got into UCLA. Then that summer, we heard Ted got in, too, so we kind of started including him in stuff. We took him under our wing because we’d be going to college together. Only that didn’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, I changed my mind, joined the army, and never went to UCLA. And neither did Ted. Something happened and he ended up going to Santa Monica Community College, and then he joined the cops out there.”

“Could it have been a lie about getting into UCLA? He only said he got in so he could get close to you guys?”

“I don’t know, maybe. You mean like he glommed on to us so he’d hear stuff about Sarah and the investigation? That’s sick.”

“It’s possible. But at the time of the murder, he wasn’t close enough to Jake that the detectives would want to talk to him?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Did he know Sarah?”

“He could have. She went to an all-girls school, so she’d come to our dances and events to meet boys. Jake would bring her. So Ted could have known her, or at least known who she was, from that.”

Ballard noticed that Masser was now standing next to her. She saw that he had red-lined her probable cause statement. She held a finger up, indicating she was almost finished with her call.

“I have one more question,” Ballard said. “In ’05, Rawls was a cop in Santa Monica. He wasn’t part of the Pearlman campaign, was he?”

There was another silence before Hastings answered.

“You’re thinking about the campaign button,” Hastings said. “The answer is yes. He was a volunteer. Kramer recruited him. He’d work his shift for Santa Monica and then come meet us at Greenblatt’s, where we would gather all the volunteers before going out to canvass. He did that several times. Knocked on doors.”

“So he could conceivably have knocked on Laura Wilson’s door and given her the button,” Ballard said.

It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” Hastings said.

“Thanks for your time,” Ballard said. “I’ll be in touch.”

She disconnected and held out her hand to Masser for the document.

“You don’t have it, Renée,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at the printout. He had drawn a red box around the statement of facts in support of the search.

“What’s wrong with it?” she asked.

“It’s weak,” Masser said. “The DNA collected in the Wilson case indicated kidney disease. Rawls got a kidney from Hastings because he had kidney disease, but there is no linkage between Rawls and Wilson. Her having a campaign button from Pearlman is nothing. It could be happenstance. There were probably thousands of those buttons. And I’m afraid that’s how Canterbury or any other judge will look at this. You’re asking for a swab of his DNA, to search his home, his car, even his desk here. You want the moon, Renée. And I’m sorry, but if I was still a D.D.A., I wouldn’t let you go with this to a judge.”

“Well, that’s what you’re here for.”

“Let’s just look at the DNA. Have you thought about surreptitious collection?”

“He’s a cop and he already knows we did that with Hastings. He’ll be too careful now. I mean, go look at his desk. It’s so clean it looks like nobody sits there. He probably came in here yesterday and cleaned it after he figured out what we were doing with Hastings.”

“Well, this is all hard for me to wrap my head around. Are you sure you’re looking at the right person?”

“We’re sure he’s a suspect, but that’s what we need the search warrant for. To gather evidence that either proves or disproves the suspicion.”

“We?”

“Harry Bosch is working this with me. He should be watching Rawls right now. So... what if...”

She didn’t finish because she was still thinking it out.

“What?” Masser said.

“That was Hastings I was just talking to,” Ballard said. “He confirmed that Rawls was a volunteer with the campaign back in ’05. He knocked on doors and handed out those pins.”

“Did Hastings say he knocked on Laura Wilson’s door or was even in her building? Anything that directly connects Rawls to Wilson?”

“No, nothing that close. He did join Jake Pearlman’s social circle almost immediately after his sister’s murder.”

Masser shook his head.

“These are pluses to the document,” he said. “But it’s not enough to get it by Canterbury. Do you have a go-to judge you could take it to? My go-to retired two years ago.”

Ballard thought for a moment before answering. She had a judge in mind, but it was complicated. Judge Charles Rowan was often more interested in Ballard as a woman than as a detective. Going to his house to get a search warrant signed would require a dance that she wasn’t keen on or proud of. Prior to Rowan, she’d had a female go-to with whom no dance was required. But Carolyn Wickwire had lost reelection when a popular ex-prosecutor ran against her, claiming she was weak on crime.

“I have a judge I could go to, I think,” Ballard finally said.

“Well, let’s add in what you got from Hastings and pad this a little bit,” Masser said. “And we’ll see what happens.”

34

Ted Rawls’s flagship DGP store was on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Bosch cruised by slowly and saw a man inside the front room of the shop, using a key to open a mailbox. Bosch checked his rearview and then pulled to a stop to watch for a moment. He had already cruised by Ted Rawls’s home on nearby Harvard Street but there appeared to be no one home.

The DGP shop was on the ground level of a two-story structure called simply enough the Montana Shoppes & Suites. It was a block long with retail shops running side by side on floor one and small offices on the second level. Staircases at the east and west ends allowed for access to the walkway that ran the length of the building in front of the offices.

The DGP store was divided into two sections. Up front behind the plate glass window was the bank of private mailboxes accessible to customers 24/7 through a front door with a key card lock. Beyond the mailbox room was the shipping and packaging center with a counter and displays of cardboard boxes and shipping materials.

Bosch watched the man take a small package out of his mailbox, close it, and then leave. He then saw a man appear from the back of the business and take a seat behind the counter. It wasn’t Ted Rawls, but this didn’t mean Rawls was not there or in the office he kept directly above the store.

Bosch started cruising again and turned left on 16th Street. He then took another left into the alley that ran behind the shopping center. He cruised slowly, reading the names of the businesses stenciled on the rear doors. There were no cars in the alley and No Parking signs were spaced every fifty feet or so, as were dumpsters pushed up against the rear walls of the businesses. Bosch checked for security cameras but did not see any back here.

When he got to the door marked dgp, he slowed even more and looked up at the windows of the office on the second floor. They offered no clue as to whether Rawls was in. Venetian blinds had been pulled tightly closed behind the glass.

He picked up speed and continued to the end of the alley at 17th Street, then turned left and drove back out to Montana. He saw a streetside parking place opening up and quickly claimed it, swinging the Cherokee in behind a compact van. The spot gave him a solid view of the shops and the walkway to the offices on the second floor. He decided it was the best he could do for the moment. Rawls knew him. He couldn’t go into the DGP store or the office without possibly revealing himself to the suspect. He decided he would wait until he heard from Ballard about the search warrant and learned what the next move should be.

He put KKJZ on the radio and caught an Ed Reed cover of the old Shirley Horn song “Here’s to Life.” Reed sang it slowly, his voice carrying the experience of his years.

He had to turn the radio down when his phone buzzed and he saw it was Ballard.

“Harry, what’s happening?” she asked.

“I haven’t found Rawls yet,” Bosch said. “Looked like nobody was home at his house. No car, no sign of life. Now I’m watching the office on Montana. I haven’t seen him or his car. How about you? Sounds like you’re driving.”

“I’m heading to Brentwood.”

“What’s in Brentwood?”

“Charlie Rowan. I’ve got the search warrant app. Masser helped me write it.”

Bosch knew she was talking about Los Angeles County superior court judge Charles Rowan.

“Is Rowan up on rotation, or is he your judge?” he asked.

“My go-to,” Ballard said. “Masser thinks it’s going to be a squeaker, and I’m hoping I can use my charms with Rowan to push him across the finish line.”

“Yeah, I remember back in the day, he had a reputation. You want me to meet you there?”

“Thanks, Harry, but you’re not my father. Dealing with guys like Rowan is nothing new. I can handle him.”

“Sorry I asked.”

“I can come to you afterward. Brentwood’s nearby.”

“We have to figure out if Rawls is even here. He may have figured out from what Hastings told him that we were only a few moves away from getting to him.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Once I get this signed, we’ll knock on doors and figure out if he’s flown the coop.”

“Okay, I’ll be here.”

They disconnected. Bosch looked across the street at the DGP store. He had a viewing angle through the front window to the shipping counter, where it looked like the employee was reading a book while waiting for the next customer.

Bosch liked the vantage point he had and wasn’t sure the parking space would be available if he left it to drive another circuit around the building. Montana was a major shopping area and parking spaces weren’t left open for long. But that back door bothered him. He didn’t know whether there was an interior stairway that connected the shop with the office above it. Either way, it was impossible for a single set of eyes to keep a complete watch on the business and office. He was hoping Ballard would get there soon with a signed search warrant.

35

Judge Charles Rowan’s eyes lit up when he saw Ballard at his front door.

“Renée! My favorite detective in all the City of Angels. How are you, my dear?”

“I’m doing fine, Judge. How are you?”

“Better now that I get to look at you. What have you brought for me?”

He actually took a step back to better appraise her, his gaze lingering on her for too long. Ballard was disgusted but maintained her all-business front.

“I think you know,” she said. “I’ve got a search warrant app on a case that is breaking as we speak. Can I tell you about it?”

“Of course,” Rowan said. “Come in, come in.”

Rowan stepped further back but opened the door only enough for Ballard to pass close by him as she entered. Her discomfort level went up another notch.

Rowan was well into his sixties, easily two decades older than Ballard. He had a full head of silver-gray hair and a matching beard. His prodigious ear hair was a match in color as well.

She had been in Rowan’s home before and knew he lived alone after several failed marriages. She also knew to turn to the right, where the dining room was located, as opposed to the living room, where the judge might try to sit too close to her on the couch.

“Don’t you want to be comfortable in the living room?” Rowan asked.

But Ballard was already to the dining room.

“The table here is fine, Judge,” she said. “My partner is sitting on a location by himself and I don’t want to leave him hanging. It could get dangerous. So, if I could get you to take a look at this, I’ll be able to get back out there.”

“Of course,” Rowan said. “But first things first. What can I get you? A glass of iced tea, a Chardonnay, what would you like?”

“Really, Judge, what I would like is for you to read the warrant and hopefully find that everything adds up and is in order.”

She gave him the most winning smile she could manage under the circumstances. She then put the warrant application down on the table and pulled out the chair for him. She was going to remain standing.

Rowan looked at her and seemed to get the message that this wasn’t going to turn into a social visit. He moved to the chair and sat down.

“Well, let me see what you have here,” he said.

“I can talk you through it,” Ballard said. “But if you just want to read it, everything is right there.”

“Did you go through the District Attorney’s Office with this?”

“Not exactly. I’m now running the cold case unit, Judge, and we have a retired deputy D.A. assigned to the unit who reviews and helps us write our warrants. He came in from home today to work on this because he knew time was of the essence.”

“Really? What’s this deputy’s name?”

“Paul Masser. He worked in Major Crimes at the D.A.’s.”

“I know him. A capable prosecutor.”

“He is.”

“So... let’s see.”

The judge started reading the first page and Ballard felt her guts tighten. The first four pages of the application were standard boilerplate legalese that was virtually the same on every warrant a judge was presented with. Rowan could have flipped through these to the meat of the application — the case summary and probable cause statement — but he wasn’t doing that, and Ballard had to believe it was because she had deflected his attempt to turn this into a social visit, if not something more.

Still, she said nothing for fear she might anger the judge and cause him to reject the warrant. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other and just watched.

Rowan remained silent until he flipped to the third page and spoke without looking up from the document.

“Are you sure I can’t get you something, Renée?”

“No, Judge, I’m fine. My partner’s waiting out there.”

“I understand. I’m going as fast as I can. I have to be thorough. I don’t want this to come back and bite me in appellate court should I see fit to sign it and send you on your way.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Charlie. We’re old friends, Renée.”

“Charlie... then.”

Finally, he got to the statement of facts regarding the case and then the PC statement. Ballard checked her watch. She was worried about what was going on with Bosch as he waited for her to get to Montana Avenue.

“Checking your watch does not help,” Rowan said. “You may be in a hurry, but I can’t be. Not when we are considering the search and seizure of a man’s properties and body.”

“I understand, sir,” Ballard said. “I mean, Charlie.”

She was now sure that Rowan was going reject the warrant because she had rejected him. She was chasing down a serial killer, and this judge would be so petty as to thwart that effort because his pride was bruised. Ballard wished she had just taken her chances with Canterbury.

“Renée, would you go into the living room?” Rowan suddenly asked.

“Uh, why, Charlie?” Ballard asked.

“Because in the living room is a door to my home office. On the desk you will find my stamp and its ink pad. Would you retrieve them so I can sign and seal this search warrant?”

“Of course.”

Surprised and relieved, Ballard quickly crossed the entry hall and went through the living room to a set of double doors that opened to an office. She spotted the stamp that carried the seal of the superior court sitting on an ink pad on the desk.

On the way back to the dining room, she heard her phone buzz. It was Bosch. She didn’t take the call. She wanted to get the search warrant signed and stamped and then get away from the judge. She’d call Bosch back after.

36

The KJazz presenter sent out best wishes to Ron Carter on his eighty-fifth birthday celebrated at Carnegie Hall in New York in the past week. He then played “A Song for You,” a cover off Carter’s At His Best album, released when the great bass player was a young fifty-nine years old.

The song went eight minutes long, and when it was over, Bosch turned off the radio so he could call Ballard again and see if she was heading to Montana Avenue yet. But before he could make the call, he saw the light inside the DGP store change. The far recesses of the store behind the shipping counter were momentarily illuminated, and Bosch guessed that someone had just opened the back door of the shop and let in daylight. He immediately started the engine and pulled out of the coveted parking space.

This time he drove by the western entrance to the alley rather than turning in. This gave him a two-second glimpse down the straightaway, and he saw a car parked about halfway down the alley, which put it in the vicinity of the DGP store. The car had its trunk open, preventing Bosch from identifying its make or seeing whether the plate number matched Rawls’s.

He continued on to Idaho Avenue, took a left through a residential neighborhood, and drove down to 17th, where he turned left again and came up on the other end of the alley. This time he could see the distinctive BMW grille and the metallic-blue paint finish on the hood. Ballard had earlier texted him a description of a blue 2021 BMW 5 Series with a vanity plate reading DGP1. The car was too far down the alley for him to read the plate on the front bumper, but he could tell that it was only four characters long. He felt confident that it was Rawls’s BMW and that he was inside the shop.

Because the BMW was pointed east, Bosch assumed that Rawls would drive out of the alley on the east side when he left his business. He put his car in reverse and backed down 17th Street and into the driveway of the first home south of the alley. The spot gave him a direct view of the alley’s exit.

He had just put the transmission into park when a call came in from Ballard.

“Rawls is here,” he said. “His car is in the alley behind the shop and I think he might be about to take off. Where are you? Do you have the warrant?”

“I got it signed,” Ballard said. “I’m just leaving now.”

“If he takes off, it’s going to be tough to run a one-car follow on a guy probably looking for it.”

“I understand. I’m on my way.”

Bosch disconnected and focused his attention on the alley exit. He didn’t like not having eyes directly on the BMW, but he also didn’t want to leave his vehicle and risk being seen by Rawls or losing him if he drove off and Bosch was separated from his car.

Because he was looking to the right through the windshield, he didn’t see the man come up on his left side and rap his fist on the roof of the car. Bosch startled and turned.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said. “But do you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

“Uh, I’m waiting for somebody,” Bosch said.

Bosch turned from him to check the alley, then looked back.

“Someone living in this neighborhood?” the man asked.

“It’s not really any of your business,” Bosch said.

“Well, I’m going to make it my business. This is my driveway, and I want to know why you’re sitting in it.”

“Sorry about that. I’ll move out onto the street.”

He started the engine.

“That’s not good enough,” the man said. “If you’re hanging around here, then I need to know why or I’m going to call the police.”

“Mister, I am the police,” Bosch said.

He turned from the man and dropped the car into gear. He drove out onto the street and took a right. He cruised slowly past the alley and took a quick glance toward the BMW.

It wasn’t there.

His eyes were drawn to a set of brake lights flaring at the far end of the alley as a car turned right onto 16th Street.

“Shit,” Bosch said.

He hit the gas and drove up to Montana. At the stop sign he crept the car out into the intersection and looked down to his left. He saw the blue BMW pull out onto Montana and head west. Bosch did the same and started to follow, maintaining a block-and-a-half distance from the BMW. He guessed that Rawls was heading to Lincoln Boulevard, which in turn would take him to the 10 freeway and then anywhere he wanted to go.

He called Ballard again.

“He’s on the move,” he said. “I think he’s heading to the freeway.”

“Where should I go?”

“If he gets on the ten, he’ll be heading toward the four-oh-five.”

“I’m right by the four-oh-five.”

“So jump on and head south. I’ll call you back when we’re heading that way. If we pull this off, you take lead. I think he made me.”

“How do you know?”

“He turned around in the alley so he didn’t have to drive by my location.”

“Shit.”

“One-car follow, what can I tell you.”

“I know, my fault.”

“No, not your fault. It just is what it is.”

“What if he’s just going home?”

“That would be perfect but I don’t think it’s happening. The college streets are east of here. He’s taking a roundabout way if that’s where he’s going.”

Up ahead, Rawls turned south onto Lincoln as predicted. Bosch reached the intersection, and as he made the same turn, he didn’t see the BMW ahead. As he passed through the next intersection, he slowed and quickly looked one way and then the other. The BMW was nowhere to be seen.

“Shit,” he said. “I think I already lost him.”

“What?” Ballard said. “Where?”

“He turned onto Lincoln, and when I followed, he was gone. I’m checking side streets but don’t see his car anywhere.”

“We need to get that swab.”

“I know that. So now it’s my fault.”

“I’m not blaming you, Harry. I’m just pissed. Where do you think he was going?”

“The freeway, and from there, who knows? Maybe he’s going to the airport, or he could be driving south to Mexico or north to Canada.”

Bosch had now passed through three intersections and had not seen the blue BMW.

“Where should I go now?” Ballard asked.

“Keep going to the four-oh-five and head south. I’ll do the—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. His phone flew out of his hand as he felt a sharp impact on the rear corner of the car. Suddenly he was in a counterclockwise spin. The Cherokee slid sideways through an intersection and then sheared off a stop sign before slamming into a parked car and coming to an abrupt stop.

Bosch was stunned for a moment and then a sharp pain in his right knee cut through the fog and brought clarity. He grabbed his knee and looked around, trying to get his bearings and determine what had just happened. Through the windshield he saw the blue BMW he had been looking for. It was sitting in the middle of Lincoln, its front passenger-side headlight shattered from the impact.

Bosch quickly formed an understanding of what had happened. Rawls had hit his car from behind with a PIT maneuver — a pursuit tactic designed to spin a car out by clipping the rear corner, changing the direction of its momentum, and swinging it into an out-of-control fishtail.

Only slightly damaged, the BMW didn’t take off. It sat motionless in the middle of the street until the driver’s door was suddenly flung open and Rawls got out. He came around the front of the car, and at first Bosch thought he was going to check the damage to his car. But he didn’t even glance at the BMW’s front end. Instead, he calmly started walking toward Bosch’s car.

Bosch could see that he was carrying a gun down at his side.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Bosch said.

He leaned across the center console and groaned as he felt pain in his ribs. He opened the glove box, reached in, and wrapped his hand around his own gun. Leaning back into his seat, he held the gun on his thigh. He had no idea what kind of confrontation was about to occur.

Rawls continued to advance, and as he got closer, he suddenly raised his gun up into a ready-fire position.

“No, no, no, no,” Bosch said.

He raised his gun to aim, but Rawls fired first, and Bosch felt a searing pain spark through his brain.

37

Bosch’s voice was cut off by a loud crashing sound followed by the squeal of tires on asphalt and then a final sound of crunching metal.

“Harry!” Ballard yelled into the phone.

She got no response.

“Harry? Are you there?”

There was still no answer, and then she heard his voice, but it was muffled and distant. She couldn’t make out the words.

“Harry? Can you hear me?”

Then she heard him clearly, though it was also obvious he was not talking into the phone.

“No, no, no, no...”

And then came the shots. Clear, sharp reports. First one shot, followed by the shattering of glass, then a hail of gunfire. Too many shots in too few seconds to count. And then a final shot, muffled and spaced long enough after the others to be the coup de grâce, the kill shot.

“Harry!” Ballard yelled.

She yanked the wheel of her car into a U-turn. She hit the siren and code 3 lights hidden in the front grille and took off toward Santa Monica.