Desert Star

38

Bosch was sitting sideways on the examination bed, not wanting to lie down, because that might lead to him being admitted and spending the night, and he had no intention of staying any longer than the minimum. UCLA Santa Monica might be a great hospital, but he wanted to get home to his own bed.

He needed to call his daughter but he didn’t have his phone. It had flown from his hand when his car was hit from behind. He waited for the ER doctor to come through the curtain, do a final check, and hand him a prescription slip before releasing him.

His injuries were minor, though technically he had been shot. He had bruised ribs, a knee contusion, and a handful of minor lacerations from flying glass, and a bullet had clipped the upper helix of his left ear. It was about as near a miss as he could possibly have had. If the bullet had been an inch more on target, he’d be spending the night in the morgue. For that he was certainly thankful. Otherwise, he was mostly upset. Ted Rawls was dead and whatever secrets he kept had probably died with him.

The wound had been cleaned and stitched closed with black thread by the ER physician, who needlessly warned him not to sleep with that ear on the pillow. Bosch could hear lots of activity and medical talk in the other curtained examination bays, but no one had been in to see him in more than twenty minutes. He decided he would wait another fifteen before he’d part the curtains and tell the supervising nurse he had to get back to work.

But that didn’t happen. Five minutes before his self-imposed deadline, the curtain opened and Maddie entered, still in her uniform. She was far off her beat.

“Dad!”

He stood as she hurried to him. They hugged tightly while he did his best to protect his damaged ear.

“Are you okay? Renée called me.”

“I’m good. Everything’s fine. Really.”

She pulled back and looked first at his face and then his ear.

“That’s gotta hurt.”

“Uh, at first it did, but now it’s okay. The doctor said there aren’t a lot of nerve endings up there.”

The doctor had told him no such thing but Bosch didn’t want his daughter to worry.

“And the guy, he’s dead?” she asked.

“Unfortunately,” Bosch said. “We wanted to talk to him and now...”

“Well, it’s not your fault. Have you talked to FID yet?”

The LAPD’s Force Investigation Division would investigate his actions, even though the shooting was in the city of Santa Monica. SMPD would do its own investigation as well.

“I gave a preliminary interview at the scene,” Bosch said. “But I know there will be more. They’re probably still at the scene, looking for witnesses and cameras and all of that stuff.”

“Do you have to stay overnight?” Maddie asked.

“No. I’ve been waiting for the doctor to come in and discharge me. As soon as he does, I’m out of here. Aren’t you supposed to be on patrol in Hollywood?”

“The captain let me go when we heard what happened. I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“Thanks, Mads. Tell you what, though, my car is still out there at the scene, and I don’t think I’ll be getting it back for a while. If I can get out of here, you think you can give me a lift home?”

“Of course, but Renée is in the waiting room, and she said she was going to need to talk to you after me. Case stuff, she said.”

“Okay, then I’ll get her to drive me and we can talk in the car.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, no worries. And if you have to get back, we can talk later.”

“I’ll check in on you.”

“I didn’t even know you work Sundays.”

“Yeah, I work Thursday to Sunday now.”

“Cool. Maybe we can have lunch tomorrow or Tuesday. I have a feeling my knee will be too sore for me to want to go sit at a desk.”

“Uh, yeah.”

She seemed hesitant to commit.

“I just haven’t seen you very much lately,” Bosch said.

“I know,” she said. “And it’s my fault. I get so busy. But, yeah, let’s do it. I’ll check on you in the morning, and if you’re too sore, we’ll go for Tuesday.”

“I’d like that, Maddie.”

“Bye, Dad. I love you. So glad you’re okay.”

She hugged him again.

“Love you, too,” Bosch said.

“I’ll find Renée and tell her you’re clear,” she said.

And then she was gone.

Bosch now waited for both the doctor and Ballard. He tentatively reached a finger to his ear to see if it could bend without sending sparks of pain shooting through his brain.

“Don’t touch that.”

Bosch turned to see that the ER doc had entered. He went to a sink and washed his hands and then came over to Bosch. He looked at the sutures in Bosch’s ear.

“This is going to look pretty nasty for a while, but something tells me you won’t care,” he said.

“The only thing I care about right now is getting out of here,” Bosch replied.

“Well, you’re free to go. I have a prescription waiting for you at the hospital pharmacy. Take it only to manage pain. If there is no pain, don’t take it. Stay sharp.”

“Got it. And thanks, Doc. I appreciate it.”

“Doin’ my job, just like you were doin’ yours. But you should come back in a couple days and let me look at that, make sure there’s no infection.”

“I will. Thank you. What about the stitches?”

“We’ll check them then, but I think we’ll need to keep them in longer. You don’t want that ear flopping over like my dog’s.”

“Right.”

Ten minutes later, Bosch was in Ballard’s car and they were pulling out of the emergency vehicle parking area outside the ER entrance. He had decided not to pick up the prescription and would manage the pain with over-the-counter measures.

“Let’s get you home,” Ballard said.

“Go by the scene first,” Bosch said. “I want to see it.”

“Harry, they’re not going to want you there.”

“Just a drive-by. It’s five minutes out of the way, tops.”

“All right. But no stopping.”

“Doesn’t FID or Santa Monica want to talk to you?”

“They already did. There will be more tomorrow but I was cleared to leave.”

“Maddie said you had something to tell me.”

“Yeah, the box.”

“What box?”

“There was a box in the trunk of the BMW.”

“The trunk was open when I saw the car in the alley. There could have been a box but I didn’t see it. How big is it?”

“Sixteen by sixteen by six — it said it on the box. It’s a shipping box like they sell in his shop.”

“I could’ve missed it. What’s in it?”

“It’s filled with keepsakes. From his kills. There were more victims, most likely between Pearlman and Wilson, and then afterward. Probably a lot, and we’ll be going through the box for a long time.”

“Damn.”

“And it’s probably why he did himself at the end.”

“Wait a minute, what?”

“He killed himself.”

“No, I hit him. I saw it.”

“You did, but that wasn’t the fatal shot. You knocked him down in front of your car. But then he put the gun in his mouth. It was his last bullet.”

Bosch thought about the shooting. It had been so quick and intense that it was hard for him to remember every microsecond of detail. He knew the first shot from Rawls went through the windshield and ripped through his ear. He returned fire, getting off half a clip. The windshield shattered, allowing his remaining shots to fly true as Rawls continued his charge and fired back. One round hit Rawls in the right shoulder and he went down. He fell out of sight, and Bosch remembered hearing the last shot but didn’t realize it was self-inflicted.

He had opened his door and tumbled out onto the ground. Blood was running down the side of his head, and at the time, he thought he had been more seriously injured than he was. Limping on the injured leg and not being sure of what he had left in his clip, he moved cautiously around his car and came up on the front from the passenger side. He saw Rawls dead on the ground, and he thought he had killed him.

“The FID guys didn’t tell me that,” he said.

“Well, that’s what they told me,” Ballard said.

Bosch went silent and stared out the window as Ballard drove. After a while, she got concerned.

“You doing okay, Harry?” she asked. “Don’t get sick in my car.”

“I won’t,” Bosch said. “I was thinking about that shop and the others Rawls had.”

“What about them?”

“We know he started his business after he left the cops and got a new kidney and a new lease on life, right?”

“Right.”

“So, why that business? What did it have to do with what he was really doing?”

“You think it helped him in some way? Maybe finding victims?”

“I don’t know, but we should look at it. People rent those private mailboxes and most of them are legit, but I would bet some of them aren’t. A lot of them do it because they have secret lives or at least compartmentalized lives. You want to have a place where you can get some things sent to you privately. Stuff you don’t want sent to your home because your wife or your husband might see it.”

“And he had access to all of it,” Ballard said.

“That was what I was thinking. He was on the other side of that wall of private boxes and he could sort of see everybody’s business. I don’t know if that helped him in his own secret life of targeting women, and I guess it’s another thing we’ll never know because he’s dead.”

“I think we’ll find that out when we start identifying other victims. And from what I know, I’m not too upset he’s dead. I know people will think, he got away with it for so long — where’s the justice in that? But I think there are untold lives out there that are now saved.”

“I guess so.”

“It’s not a guess, Harry. It’s the truth.”

They were on Lincoln now, and the intersection where the shooting had gone down was barricaded by traffic control officers. Bosch could see that the green Cherokee had been put on a flatbed for towing to a police yard. As far as he knew, his phone was still in it somewhere.

They were waved by traffic control officers onto a side street and never got close enough for Bosch to see what else was happening inside the orange barricades. Ballard kept driving.

“Have you talked to the councilman yet?” Bosch asked.

“I talked to Hastings,” Ballard said, “so he’d know what’s going on. But I don’t want to talk to Pearlman until we have a dead-bang DNA match to Rawls. Same thing with Laura Wilson’s mother. I’ll go by the coroner’s office in the morning, pick up blood and prints, then go to the lab. Darcy Troy will be standing by to jump on the blood. I don’t really have a go-to in latents, so we’ll see what happens there.”

“And what about the brass? You going to get blamed for having this guy on the Open-Unsolved team?”

“Hell, no. If they try to blame me, I have the emails from Hastings telling me in no uncertain terms to put Rawls on the squad. I’m not worried about that. I’m more worried about you, Harry.”

“Me? Why?”

“I brought you on to the team and, what? In barely a week, you already got shot up and dinged up, plus your car’s wrecked.”

“It’s not wrecked. That thing’s a tank.”

“Well, I hope somebody can find a new windshield somewhere.”

“There are plenty of parts out there.”

“Then, good. I like you in that car, Harry. Like a square peg in a round-hole world.”

Bosch thought about that for a little bit, then told Ballard his plan.

“I think I’m going to take a couple days off. Stay off the knee as much as I can. Then I want to get back on Gallagher.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

39

They made Ballard sit in the waiting room for thirty-five minutes before she finally was told that the councilman was ready for her. It was Tuesday afternoon and the Rawls story had held firm in the news since Sunday night. It was the mystery that kept it afloat. Few of the details had leaked into the public discourse, largely because the LAPD was waiting for the confirmation of genetic linkage between Rawls and the murders of Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson. So far, the story had centered on the fact that an investigator with the Open-Unsolved Unit had exchanged gunfire with a murder suspect on a public street, leaving one man dead and another wounded. No names had been released or had leaked so far. But all of that would change in a few hours when the chief of police held a press conference in the plaza in front of the Police Administration Building. It was Ballard’s job to give the councilman a heads-up on what the chief would be announcing.

She entered Pearlman’s office to find the councilman waiting with Nelson Hastings and Rita Ford. There was a seating area to the right of the councilman’s grand desk that consisted of two couches facing each other with a glass-topped coffee table between them. Pearlman and Hastings anchored the corners of one couch while Ford held a corner of the opposite couch. Ballard was signaled to sit in the remaining corner.

“Detective Ballard, I’ve been waiting for an update,” Pearlman said. “What can you tell us?”

“Thanks for seeing me, Councilman,” Ballard began. “At four o’clock this afternoon, the chief of police will be holding a press conference. He will announce that DNA and a palm print from Ted Rawls have been matched to the murders of your sister and Laura Wilson. This will bring those cases to a close, but investigation of Rawls and evidence gathered from his car and elsewhere is continuing. It is possible that he is linked to other cases as well. Several other cases.”

Pearlman shook his head.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Wow. Is it really over?”

“Yes, sir, as far as your sister’s case,” Ballard said. “The D.A. will review and approve our closing of the case. I know there is no such thing as closure, but maybe this will give you some measure of peace.”

“And the other case?” Pearlman said. “He met her or picked her because he was door-knocking for me?”

“It looks that way,” Ballard said.

There was a pause and then Hastings spoke.

“This cannot come back on the councilman,” he said.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Ballard said.

“That last part, Detective,” Hastings said. “You have no proof that Rawls met or targeted Laura Wilson while knocking on doors for a candidate. You have a campaign button that she could have gotten anywhere. So do not put that conjecture out in the media. If your chief chooses to do so, then he will no longer enjoy the support of this office.”

“I will carry that message to media relations,” Ballard said. “They’ll be putting out the press release after the chief speaks.”

“How are you handling the inclusion of Rawls on the cold case squad?” Hastings asked.

“How do you mean?” Ballard asked.

“I think you can count on some smart reporters asking how Rawls ended up on the squad,” Hastings said. “And a follow-up question will be to ask what kind of background check was conducted.”

“Well, I assume that kind of question won’t come to me,” Ballard said. “But if it does, I’m not going to lie to the media or anybody else. You told me that the councilman wanted him on the team. I spoke to my captain about it and we did what was asked. I still have the emails from you.”

She wanted to make sure he understood that if he tried to throw her or the LAPD under the bus, it would likely backfire on him.

“Yes, the emails were from me,” Hastings said. “I told you to put him on the team. Not the councilman. That is the truth and that is all you have to reveal if asked.”

Hastings was willing to sacrifice himself to protect Pearlman. Ballard saw the valor in that — rare to find in politics. Her respect for Hastings grew in that moment.

“I understand,” she said.

“When does the chief hold his presser?” Ford asked.

“At four,” Ballard said.

“We should hold our own right afterward,” Ford said. “So we’re part of the same news cycle.”

“Excellent idea,” Hastings said. “Detective, a question for you. Would you be willing to stand with the councilman and state that his being instrumental in the reboot of the Open-Unsolved Unit led to the identity of the killer and to solving these two cases?”

“I’d have to get department approval,” Ballard said.

“Then please do,” Hastings said. “We would love to have you, and I’m sure you would want to show your respect for the man who led the charge in reinstating the unit after many years.”

“I’ll check with my captain and let you know,” Ballard said.

Sensing that the meeting was over, Ballard stood up. Pearlman seemed to come out of a daze and stood up as well. It was then that Ballard saw tears on his face. While she had been parrying with Hastings and Ford, Pearlman had apparently been thinking about his lost sister and having to accept that it was someone from his life — a friend — who had killed her.

“Detective, thank you,” he said. “When I pushed for the reinstatement of the unit, it was because I didn’t want my sister’s case forgotten. To know that we have solved the case validates everything I said about the unit’s importance. That’s the message I will convey at my press conference. I can’t thank you enough, and I’ll be sure to say that as well. I hope you will join us.”

He put his hand out and Ballard shook it.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

As she walked the half block down Spring Street from City Hall to the PAB, Ballard reviewed the answers she had given during the intense meeting and believed she had acquitted herself well. She had no intention of asking permission to stand with Councilman Pearlman at a press conference — even if he was going to sing the praises of her and the unit. That would be mixing politics and police work, and that was a recipe for eventual disaster. She would take a pass on that.

When she got to the PAB, she saw a handful of television crews setting up in front of a lectern with a large gold replica of the LAPD badge affixed to it. On the badge was the image of City Hall, the iconic building Ballard had just come from — Old Faithful, as it was called by the denizens of the Civic Center. When the chief took the lectern for the press conference, the twenty-seven-floor tower would be reflected behind him in the glass facade of the PAB. It would be a reminder that politics and police work could never really be separated.

Ballard badged her way into the building and took the elevator to the tenth floor, where a pre — press conference meeting was scheduled in the media relations office just down the hall from the OCP — the Office of the Chief of Police.

The department’s chief spokesperson was a civilian, a former reporter for Channel 5 News named Ramon Rivera. He welcomed Ballard into his office, and she was surprised to see the chief of police sitting there as well. They were going over the statement the chief would read at the press conference. A copy of the statement would be distributed to the reporters.

Ballard sat down and Rivera gave her a copy to read. The statement included the case details Ballard had given Rivera in an earlier phone call. It was a strict recitation of the facts of the case. That would be the easy part of the press conference. The difficult part would be anticipating what questions would be asked and deciding how to answer them.

A year earlier, the chief of police had urged Ballard to return to the department after she had resigned in frustration. It was his promise to give her the assignment of her choosing that had resulted in her getting the job running the reconstituted Open-Unsolved Unit. He now asked her the questions he anticipated the gathered media would hurl at him when he was finished reading the statement.

“Why was Bosch following Rawls by himself?” he asked.

“Following him wasn’t the plan, actually,” Ballard said. “But he had no choice. Bosch saw Rawls’s car outside his place of business. He was keeping watch while I went to see a judge to get a search warrant signed. When Rawls took off before I got there, Bosch had no choice but to attempt a one-car follow. It’s unclear whether Rawls knew he had a tail from the start or spotted Bosch’s car while he was in transit.”

“And you recruited Bosch for the Open-Unsolved Unit?”

“I did. He’s the most experienced detective on the team.”

“Did you know about his issues when he was with the department?”

“Issues, sir?”

“He’d been involved in several previous shootings. He didn’t leave the department on good terms. Some might say he retired before the department retired him.”

“Some of that I knew, yes. But I wanted to put together the best team of volunteers I could find, and he was at the top of my list. We solved this case largely because of moves he made.”

“How would you feel if we had to remove him from the team?”

“I don’t understand. It was his work that led us to Rawls, and now you want to kick him to the curb?”

“I’m not saying that. At least not yet. But we will have a perception problem with the unit when it is revealed that one of your selections was a killer. I’m sure you will agree that it’s not a good look, Detective Ballard. And I’m wondering if we want to start over.”

“You mean clean house?”

“For lack of a better term.”

“First, I want to say that Rawls was not my selection. He was pushed on us by the councilman’s office. I didn’t want Rawls, but Councilman Pearlman’s chief of staff made me take him. I talked to Captain Gandle about it and we agreed to take him on to keep the support of the councilman. But I still don’t see why this should result in cleaning house. We have a good team. We have a former deputy D.A. who is our legal sounding board, an IGG expert, and other capable investigators, with Harry Bosch being the best of the bunch.”

“Well, let’s put that decision aside for now and go down and talk to the media. We’ll see how things go before making any decisions.”

Somehow Ballard felt that a decision had already been made. The chief stood up and Rivera did as well.

“Let me get the handouts from the printer,” he said.

After Rivera left the room, Ballard stood and faced the chief of police.

“Sir, if you decide you need to start over with the unit, then you will have to do that without me. If Harry Bosch goes, I go.”

The chief looked at her for a long moment before responding.

“Are you threatening me, Detective Ballard?” he said.

“Not at all,” Ballard said. “I’m just telling you the facts, sir. If he goes, I go.”

“Understood. But let’s take things one step at a time. Let’s see how this thing goes and then we can decide the future.”

“Yes, sir.”

40

The LAPD press conference was carried live on KCAL’s 4 p.m. newscast. Bosch watched from his home and had to sit and marvel at how the chief of police managed to tell the story of Ted Rawls with such command authority and yet leave out so many salient details of the story. He spun a tale of a serial killer being identified through DNA by members of the newly re-formed cold case squad and then killing himself as members of the unit closed in. Not mentioned was the fact that the killer was a member of the unit that was closing in on him, or that he had been placed on it by Councilman Jake Pearlman, his longtime friend. Rawls was simply described as a man who made a living from a chain of small businesses. No names of the Open-Unsolved Unit investigators were mentioned, and Renée Ballard, who stood behind the chief at the podium, was not called upon to speak. The chief finished his five-minute reading of a prepared statement by lavishing praise on the unit and Ballard, its lead detective. The upshot of the whole thing was that another serial killer was taken out of play thanks to the hard work and dedication of the OU team as well as the foresight of the administrators who had reconstituted the previously shuttered unit.

Apparently feeling confident in his spinning of half-truths, the chief said he would take a few questions. That was when things didn’t go so well for him. The first question was a softball about why he had decided to reboot the cold case unit. But the second question was a curveball that tailed right into the strike zone.

“My sources tell me that the investigator who exchanged fire with Rawls before he killed himself was none other than Harry Bosch. Bosch was involved in numerous shootings before he retired from the department. Now he’s back, and my question is, were you consulted, and did you approve of Bosch being added to the team?”

The woman who had asked the question was unseen because the camera was trained on the podium and the chief of police. But Bosch thought he recognized her slight Caribbean accent.

The chief tried to deflect.

“As I said in my statement, there are components of the investigation that are continuing. One of those components is the officer-involved shooting, and I am not going to comment on what is an ongoing investigation and personnel matter. That would not be fair at this time. Suffice it to say, our internal investigation will be fully and independently reviewed by the District Attorney’s Office, as is our protocol with all officer-involved shootings.”

As the chief raised his arm to point to another reporter, the original questioner loudly fired a follow-up at him.

“In court documents regarding prior shootings by Harry Bosch, he was described as a ‘gunslinger.’ Did that weigh in the decision to put him on this unit?”

The word gunslinger made the chief blink.

“Uh, I am unfamiliar with that,” he said. “As I just said, I am making no comment at this time regarding the officer-involved shooting. And that’s all I have time for today.”

He quickly turned from the podium and headed across the plaza to the safety of the PAB. Questions shouted after him were neither answered nor acknowledged. Ballard and a tight grouping of media relations people followed in his wake. Bosch had watched Ballard as she turned to follow the chief. He could see dread clearly drawn on her face.

After the press conference, the broadcast switched to a live report from the scene of the Rawls shooting. A female reporter introduced recorded interviews with residents in the normally quiet neighborhood. It was strictly filler, but in her wrap-up the reporter mentioned that Councilman Pearlman had scheduled a 5 p.m. press conference to discuss the case and his personal connection to it.

At 5 p.m. Bosch switched from KCAL, which went to non-news programming, to the start of a news hour on KNBC. The anchor immediately cued up Councilman Pearlman’s live appearance on the granite steps of City Hall behind a podium adorned with the city’s seal.

In a brief address, Pearlman praised the work of the Open-Unsolved Unit, noting that his office had played the key role in reinstating it. He also said that the identification of Rawls as the killer of his sister and Laura Wilson did not bring his family closure, but finally knowing the truth was enough to hopefully bandage the wounds of the past.

He, too, left out many key facts, namely that he and his chief of staff had placed Rawls on the very unit that unmasked him as the killer. He also failed to mention that Rawls had likely chosen Laura Wilson as a victim while knocking on doors in support of Pearlman’s first bid for office in 2005.

The councilman ended his short statement by saying that he would be taking no questions and asking that his and his family’s privacy be respected. Bosch cynically viewed this last part as a means of avoiding inquiries that could result in political damage.

Bosch turned off the screen and sat there thinking about how the truth was always manipulated by those in power. It bothered him to know things that shouldn’t be kept secret.

He thought about the look of dread he saw on Ballard’s face and wondered if she had been forced in some way to stand next to the chief and be part of the manipulation. He wished she had at least called him to give him a heads-up.

It was then that he realized Ballard might have done so but he wouldn’t have known, because his phone was either in direct police custody or still somewhere in his Cherokee after being jarred from his hand when Rawls sent his car into the tailspin. The Cherokee was presumably in a police impound yard.

Bosch got up and went to the kitchen. He used his house phone to call his cell phone number and check for messages. He had two. The first was a heads-up call from Ballard that came in at 2 p.m. and outlined the timing of the two press conferences. The second was a message left just ten minutes earlier from Juanita Wilson in Chicago. She asked him to call her back. Bosch grabbed a pen and Post-it out of a kitchen drawer and wrote her number down.

The landline was a cordless phone. He took it out to the back deck of the house to make the call.

“Mrs. Wilson?”

“Detective Bosch, I’m sorry to disturb you. Thank you for calling me back so quickly.”

“You’re not disturbing me. Did Detective Ballard call you?”

“She did. She told me what happened, that the man who killed my Laura is dead.”

“Yes, he killed himself when we were closing in on him. I’m sorry. I wanted... we wanted to take him alive so he could be punished.”

“Don’t be sorry. I believe he is being punished. He’s in Hell.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Juanita.”

“Juanita.”

“I called because I want to thank you for what you did. Detective Ballard told me. I hope you’re okay and will heal quickly.”

“I’m fine, Juanita.”

“And I want to thank you for the answers. I told you I was holding on for answers.”

“I understand.”

“Thanks to you and Detective Ballard, I can let go now... and I can join Laura and my husband.”

Bosch wasn’t sure what to say. He knew that almost everybody believed in something, holding a hope that there wasn’t just an empty void at the end.

“I understand,” he said.

He looked out across the Cahuenga Pass to his sideways view of the Hollywood sign. He felt the inadequacy of his response to her.

“I’ll let you go now,” Juanita said. “Once again, thank you, Detective Bosch.”

“Harry.”

“Thank you, Harry. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Juanita.”

Bosch clutched the phone in his hand as he thought about Juanita waiting years for answers and then not even getting the full truth of things. A deep font of anger started to well up inside him.

Bosch limped back inside the house and used his laptop to search for a phone number. He called it and asked by name for the reporter whose voice he had heard at the LAPD press conference. As he waited for the transfer, he went back out to the deck. He was staring out across the pass when the voice with a slight Caribbean accent came into his ear.

“Keisha Russell, how can I help you?”

“You called me a gunslinger on live television.”

“Harry Bosch. It’s been a while.”

He remembered how she said his name. It sounded to him like she was taking a bite out of a crisp apple.

“I thought you were in D.C., covering politics.”

“I got tired of the winters. Plus, I almost got killed at the Capitol last year. Decided it was time to come home to my first love, covering crime.”

“I thought covering politics was covering crime.”

“Funny. And funny that you called me. I wanted to call you but couldn’t find anybody around here who would share your number. Did you call just to complain, or is there something you want to say?”

Bosch gave one last thought to holding back, but quickly the images he carried from the case — Sarah Pearlman, Laura Wilson, and even Juanita Wilson — crowded such consideration out.

“You’re being used,” he said. “You were smarter than that last time you were on the beat.”

“Really?” Russell said. “Used by who?”

“The source who told you I was the shooter. They told you about me but not the rest of the story. They’re more concerned with getting rid of me than getting the whole truth out.”

“Is this conversation on the record?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I’m going to have to go. I’m on deadline. If you want to meet after I file, then I’d definitely be up for that. It’s been a long time. Maybe we get a drink and you can school me on who’s who in the zoo.”

It was an old LAPD expression, a caution that was just as useful when answering a code 3 radio call — lights and siren authorized — as when delving into the abyss of department politics. Step one was assessment: determining who’s who in the zoo.

“Maybe after things shake out a little bit,” Bosch said. “If I’m still here.”

“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Russell said. “You may or may not be a gunslinger, but you’re definitely a survivor. Anything you think I really need to know before I file this story?”

“Right now, you only have half the story.”

“Then tell me the half I don’t have.”

“It’s not my place.”

“What if I lay off the gunslinger stuff and keep it on point with what happened Sunday? I do you that favor, what do you do for me?”

“Where did that come from?”

“ ‘Gunslinger’? I had to dig deep. That was a Honey Chandler quote from a motion she filed back in the nineties. Remember her? The actual quote was ‘Bosch is a gunslinger who shoots first and asks questions later.’ She also called you a cowboy in the motion. I love that and I’m definitely going to use it in my story.”

Bosch caught a flash memory of the civil rights lawyer before she was murdered by someone trying to impress him. Honey Chandler had been Bosch’s nemesis, and he didn’t doubt that she would have labeled him a gunslinger in one of her documents or even in open court, but he had respected her in the end.

He dropped his gaze down to the freeway at the bottom of the pass. It was in full rush-hour inertia.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember Chandler. Like I remember you being a reporter who always wanted to get it first but still get it right.”

“That’s a low blow, Harry. It’s always blame the messenger. But I’m asking you to help me get it right. If you don’t want to, then who is to blame?”

Bosch hesitated for only a moment before speaking.

“There was a fox in the henhouse, Keisha.”

That was followed by a long silence before Russell responded.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“You didn’t get this from me,” Bosch said. “Confirm it somewhere else. Rawls was the fox.”

“You’re talking in riddles. What henhouse are we talking about?”

“Rawls was a volunteer for the unit. He was working on the Pearlman and Wilson cases. Right there with us.”

“The Open-Unsolved Unit — are you fucking kidding me?”

“I wish.”

“And they’re trying to hide that to avoid the embarrassment.”

“You wanted to know who’s who in the zoo.”

“So, let me get this straight. Renée Ballard put a serial killer on her own cold case team.”

“No. It wasn’t her call. He wasn’t her choice.”

“Then who?”

“You should maybe call Nelson Hastings at the councilman’s office and ask him that question.”

Bosch could hear Russell’s muffled laugh even though it was apparent she had put her hand over the phone. Then she came back clear.

“This is just too fucking good,” she said.

“Remember, confirm it on your own,” Bosch said. “Not from me.”

“Don’t worry, Harry. I will. You trust me? You used to.”

“That was a long time ago. I’ll know if I can trust you when I read the paper tomorrow.”

“You’ll see it online at ten.”

“I don’t subscribe.”

“Then wait till tomorrow. But let’s get that drink soon.”

“You do this right, and drinks are on me.”

“That’s a deal. And I gotta go. Deadline’s in an hour, and thanks to you, I still have a lot of work to do.”

“Happy hunting.”

Bosch disconnected and looked down into the pass again. Nothing was moving. The city’s arteries were clogged.

41

Ballard wanted to be the first one in to work, but as she entered the archive room, she heard the rhythmic mechanical sounds of a multipage job being printed in the copy room. She looked in and found Bosch sliding documents over the three rings of a binder as more were being printed.

“Harry, what are you doing here?”

He looked at her for a long moment before answering.

“Uh, I work here. Unless I’m fired and they didn’t tell me.”

“No, I meant, I thought you’d take some time. To heal up.”

“Two days was enough. I’m fine. I’m good.”

“Last time I saw you, that knee looked kind of wobbly.”

“I bought one of those compression sleeves at CVS. It works pretty good. But you should see the mark it leaves on my leg.”

Ballard stepped all the way in and looked at the binder. He was obviously putting together a murder book.

“So what’s this?” she asked.

“I’m copying the files I don’t have on the Gallagher Family case,” he said. “I’m going to start back on it.”

“I thought we were clear on copying files, and yet here you are.”

Bosch said nothing as he put a stack of documents back on the rings of one of the original murder books. Ballard put the box she was carrying down on a counter next to the binder Bosch was stacking.

“Talk to me, Harry. What’s going on?”

“Look, I haven’t been in the department for a long time, but I still know how to read the tea leaves. They’re going to tell you to get rid of me. And that’s fine. I don’t want to cause you any more problems than I already have. But when I go, who’s going to work this?”

He pointed to the case’s seven binders on the counter.

“So I figure I’ll take it with me,” he said. “And I’ll keep working it. I’ll call you when I find McShane.”

“Harry, I’m not going to bullshit you and tell you everything is copacetic,” Ballard said. “But I told them, if you go, I go. I said that directly to the chief.”

Bosch nodded.

“I appreciate that,” he said. “I really do. But you shouldn’t have done it. It won’t stop them from doing what they want.”

“We’ll see,” Ballard said.

“We will, and probably pretty soon.”

“What was in the Times this morning doesn’t help. Did you read it?”

“I don’t read the Times.”

“They got a lot that wasn’t said during the chief’s press conference.”

“It’s what they do.”

“This Keisha Russell, the reporter — do you know her?”

“Uh, yeah, but last I heard, she went to the Washington bureau. That was, like, I don’t know, a long time ago. Years. I’m surprised she’s still around.”

“Yeah, well, she is, and she’s in L.A. now, and she laid the whole thing out. Rawls being in the unit, and that the councilman’s office put him there. That’s why I’m in early — because Nelson Hastings called me at six this morning.”

“I bet he was hot. Is that the box from Rawls’s car?”

“He was hot and he still is. And don’t change the subject. Whoever fed Russell that story really put me in deep shit.”

The copy machine finished its job and the room was silent.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bosch finally said. “There was nobody named in the story?”

“ ‘Sources said’ — that was it for attribution,” Ballard said. “And Nelson thinks I’m one of those sources. I mean, she did call me. Three times, in fact. But I never talked to her, didn’t even return the calls to say, how’d you get my number and no fucking comment. Nothing like being blamed for something you didn’t do.”

“I know how that is. I’m sorry. But maybe it’s good that it’s out there and the public knows. Don’t you think?”

“Not if they shutter the unit again. What Pearlman gives, he can also take away. And why not? His sister’s case is solved. He already got what he wants out of it.”

“You really think they’d shut the thing down because of Rawls?”

“You and I have both seen worse decisions made. That’s why you can forget about Gallagher for now.”

“What do you mean?”

Ballard picked up the box again and turned toward the door.

“Rawls is still priority one,” she said. “If we connect him to other cases and start clearing them, then maybe they won’t cut us. And if they try, maybe somebody will leak that to Keisha Russell. Then they’ll look bad and have to back the fuck off.”

Ballard walked out of the room, leaving Bosch there. She had no doubt that he was behind the story in the Times. When she didn’t recognize the name of the reporter that Hastings yelled over the phone at 6 a.m., she did a search on the Times website of Russell’s prior stories and saw that in the nineties she covered the cop shop. Several of her stories were about cases worked by a detective named Harry Bosch. She was annoyed with Bosch. Not so much for what he did — she had to acknowledge that getting the full story out there was something the department should have done in the first place. She just wished he had come to her first and they had planned it together. On top of that, she wished he had owned up to his part in the story. It showed that he did not trust her as much as she had thought.

She took the box to the interview room. It was more than an hour before the other investigators started to trickle into their stations in the pod. By then, Ballard was at hers and Bosch was at his, keeping his head down, even though Ballard knew he was there. Colleen Hatteras was the first of the others to report for work, and she immediately started peppering Ballard and Bosch with questions about Rawls, the shooting, and other aspects of the case. She, too, mentioned the Times story, but her questions mostly came because this was the first time she had seen Ballard and Bosch since the shootout on Sunday. Bosch had been off and Ballard had borrowed a desk at PAB and worked from there Monday and Tuesday so that she could be easily reached by the FID investigators as well as by the media relations people and command staff.

“Colleen, hold on a second,” Ballard said. “I don’t want to have to answer the same questions four times as the others come in. So let’s wait for everybody to get here and then I’ll tell everyone what I know and what I want everybody to be working on this week. Okay?”

“Okay,” Hatteras said. “I get it. But I just want to go on the record and say, I got a bad vibe from Ted Rawls. I didn’t want to say anything before, because he was a colleague. But I felt it when he was here — a super dark aura. I have to admit, I thought it might be coming from Harry, but now I know. It was definitely Ted.”

“Thank god,” Bosch said. “Such a relief to know my aura isn’t super dark.”

Ballard heard Bosch say it but couldn’t see him because of the privacy wall. She leaned down over her desk so Hatteras wouldn’t be able to see her smiling at the rejoinder. Then she got serious.

“Um, you know something, Colleen?” she said. “I’m going to have to write up an after-action report on Rawls and this whole thing. So, I don’t want you to stop with the IGG stuff. Keep working it and see if you can further establish genealogical links. If we can show the value of that in this case, I think it will go a long way with command staff.”

“On it, boss,” Hatteras said. “And now that we know the family tree has Rawls on the L.A. branch, I can start working it back the other way.”

“That’s good, Colleen. Let me know when you have it all together.”

“Roger that.”

Ballard rolled her eyes. Those two words were becoming her biggest pet peeve.

By eight thirty, Masser, Laffont, and Aghzafi were all in place at the pod and Ballard stood up so everyone could see her.

“Okay, guys, listen up,” she began. “First off, I appreciate you all coming in on short notice because I need the whole team on this. We are not finished with what is now known as the Ted Rawls case. When he took his own life Sunday — in fact, one reason he probably did so — there was a box in the trunk of his car. We recovered it and it contains personal items that may have come from other victims. I’m talking about jewelry, hairbrushes, makeup compacts, little statuettes and knickknacks — all kinds of things.”

“Souvenirs,” Hatteras said, stating the obvious.

“Yes, souvenirs,” Ballard said. “And I want all of us to see what we can do to possibly connect these items to other victims. All we know for sure is that he killed Sarah Pearlman in ’94 and Laura Wilson in ’05. That’s a big gap. And it’s a big gap between ’05 and Sunday, when Rawls, thanks to Harry Bosch, was put out of commission.”

“Hear! Hear!” Masser said.

He stood up and raised a hand over the privacy wall, offering Bosch a high five. Bosch obliged, though it appeared to Ballard to be a reluctant and half-hearted effort.

“I’ve spread these items out on the table in the interview room,” Ballard continued. “I want us to go in there, look them over, maybe pick a piece or two, and go to work. I know it is a long shot, but let’s see if we can possibly match some of this property to some cases.”

She pointed to the archive shelves where all the unsolved cases were kept.

“We all know that there are lots of families out there waiting for answers,” Ballard said. “You all might have a different view, but I would focus on those years between Pearlman and Wilson. We know Rawls got sick after Wilson — he got a kidney transplant — and it may have put him out of the killing business. But I think he was probably active during the years between those two kills. I’ve invited Councilman Pearlman to come here to look at the items in case he can identify something belonging to his sister, but I don’t know if he’ll take me up on that. Meantime, I bagged everything individually yesterday after the lab took swabs and looked for prints. What you have on the table are items that yielded no forensic follow-up. Any questions?”

Laffont raised his hand like he was a student in a classroom.

“Tom?” Ballard said.

“What about his home and office?” Laffont asked. “Anything there?”

“Good question,” Ballard said. “Detectives from RHD spent almost all day Monday searching his house, office, and a storage unit he rented. They found nothing of evidentiary value. Most of you probably know he was married and had a young daughter, and it looks like he kept that part of his life separate. Needless to say, they remain in complete shock about all of this. It looks like Rawls kept his souvenirs in his office in Santa Monica and that was why he was there Sunday — to grab them and go. There was also a packed suitcase in the car. He was about to split.”

“Any idea where he was going?” Aghzafi asked.

“Not at the moment,” Ballard said. “There was nothing on his phone, in his pockets, or in the car indicating where he was going. His passport was in his pocket, so possibly Mexico or Canada. We think he was just trying to get out of Dodge after he realized that we were onto him.”

Ballard looked at everyone, expecting more questions.

“If that’s it, let’s get to it,” she said. “The elephant in the room is that Rawls was one of us, and the optics on that are not good. So let’s get on this and see if we can improve those optics by closing more cases. Let’s show them our value.”

Ballard sat back down while the others stood up to go to the interview room. All except Bosch. He waited till the others had filed into the room to look at the souvenirs, then spoke to Ballard from the other side of the wall.

“Keisha Russell was the one who called me a gunslinger at the press conference,” he said. “So I called her on it. I didn’t know she was back in town and back on the cop shop, and then I hear her voice calling me a gunslinger, just to get a rise out of the chief. And then... I let it slip. I said we had a fox in the henhouse because I knew from that press conference what they were going to do. They were going to just sweep that shit under the rug like they always do and... I didn’t think it out, Renée. I should’ve known it would come down on you, and I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

Ballard nodded slightly. Not because Bosch had confirmed what she already knew, but because he had come clean with her and admitted it. The trust she thought was broken was now restored.

“It’s okay, Harry,” she said. “Just go in there and find something that closes a case for us.”

“You got it, boss,” he said.

She smiled.

42

Bosch stood up and looked over the privacy wall at Ballard. She was working on her computer, her fingers moving at an amazing speed as she typed, but he couldn’t see the screen to know what she was doing. She spoke without taking her eyes off her work, whatever it was.

“Did you find something in there to run with?” she asked.

“No, not yet,” Bosch said. “The others are still in there. I’ll check it out later, see what’s left. I was thinking about taking a drive up to Santa Monica first.”

“I just heard you on the phone asking about some kind of hauling schedule. Is it that?”

“Yeah. There’s something that’s been bothering me about what Rawls was doing Sunday.”

Ballard now looked up at him from her screen.

“What?” she asked.

“All right, just hear me out on this,” Bosch said. “On Sunday, when I drove by the alley and saw his car behind the shop, the trunk was open and he was nowhere to be seen.”

“Yeah, he was inside his office, gathering his souvenirs.”

“Right, we think he was doing that. And you said that after the shootout, the box of souvenirs was found in the trunk of his car and there was also a suitcase there.”

“Yeah, on the back seat.”

“Okay, so why’d he open the trunk before going inside the shop?”

Ballard shrugged.

“Because he knew he was bringing out the box,” she said.

“But would you open the trunk before you went inside?” Bosch said. “Or would you wait till you were coming out with the box? I mean, it wasn’t this big box he’d need two hands to carry.”

“I don’t know, Harry. I think you’re overthinking things.”

“Maybe. But when I saw you with the box today, it hit me. That box could have easily fit in the back with the suitcase or on the passenger seat next to him. Why’d he put it in the trunk?”

“Does it matter? It’s one of those things we’re never going to be able to nail down and know. A known unknown. Every case has them.”

“Yeah, but what if the trunk was open because he was taking things out? What if he was getting rid of stuff? Evidence, other souvenirs. He took it all from his house or his storage unit, wherever he had it, put it in the trunk, then drove to the shop, where the back alley was lined with dumpsters behind the businesses. Maybe I didn’t see him in the alley because my view was blocked by the dumpsters.”

“The hauling schedule. Have those dumpsters been emptied this week?”

“Not till tomorrow.”

“So you’re going to go dumpster diving.”

“It’s going to bother me if I don’t.”

“Let me finish this email and I’ll go with you. I don’t think you should be climbing into dumpsters with those ribs and that knee. And I have CSOs in my car.”

Bosch knew she meant crime scene overalls. Most detectives kept work boots and overalls in their trunk for working messy crime scenes.

“My ribs and the knee are fine,” he said. “But we’re going to need a step stool or a ladder — no matter who goes in.”

“Go check with building maintenance to see what we can borrow,” Ballard said. “I’ll send this email and meet you at my car.”

“On it.”

43

They were searching the fourth of five dumpsters in the alley behind Montana Shoppes & Suites. They had started at the west end of the alley and worked their way east. Nothing relating to Rawls or the case had been found in the first three searches. Ballard, wearing rubber boots and navy blue overalls, was standing waist-deep in a green dumpster located behind a women’s apparel shop. It meant the refuse was largely innocuous and dry. The first dumpster they searched had been filled with coffee grounds and other garbage from the breakfast café that anchored the west end of the plaza.

Each dumpster search required the excavation of three days’ worth of refuse, since they were looking for something that Rawls might have dumped on Sunday.

“There’s nothing here,” Ballard said.

She was using the long handle from a push broom to poke around in the bottom layer of the dumpster. Bosch had borrowed it from the maintenance department along with a stepladder.

“All right, then come on out of there,” Bosch said.

He held his hand up to her. She took off a work glove, grabbed his hand, hoisted her hips onto the steel rim, and swung her legs over to the ladder. Bosch helped her down.

“The things I do for you, Harry,” she said.

“Hey, I didn’t ask you to come out here,” Bosch said. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll do the last one.”

“No, you’ll get your clothes all dirty. I’m just giving you a hard time because we haven’t found shit out here and these CSOs are hotter than hell.”

Once she was off the ladder, Bosch started throwing the bags of trash and other refuse they had removed back into the bin.

Ballard moved on to the final dumpster, carrying the stepladder with her. She put her glove back on, then flipped the heavy plastic cover back and started excavating the top layer of bags and boxes. The east side of the property was anchored by a large home decor store. It sold smaller furnishings like lamps, artwork, and candles. The trash here was similar to the last dumpster’s in that it wasn’t wet, didn’t smell particularly bad, and was easy to excavate. It had largely been deposited in shipping boxes stuffed with form-fitted foam packaging and Bubble Wrap. There were also broken pieces of wooden shipping crates.

Bosch joined her and they quickly emptied the top half of the dumpster, dropping everything they pulled out onto the alley’s asphalt.

“I can’t believe nobody’s come out of one of these places yet to ask what the hell we’re doing,” Ballard said.

“Maybe my pal, the angry homeowner on Seventeenth Street, will come over,” Bosch said.

“Who?”

“Some guy who lives in the neighborhood back here. I posted up in his driveway Sunday when I was waiting for Rawls to make a move. He came out and went full Mrs. Kravitz on me.”

“Mrs. Kravitz?”

“The busybody neighbor on that old sixties show Bewitched. You never watched the reruns when you were a kid?”

“Before my time, I guess.”

“Jeez, I’m old.”

Once they had removed the first layer of debris, Ballard climbed the ladder, put her gloved hands on the rim of the dumpster for support, expertly swung her legs over the edge, and dropped into the bin.

“You’re getting good at that,” Bosch said. “The Olympics are coming to town in a few years. You’re the Simone Biles of homicide.”

“You’re a funny guy, Harry,” Ballard said. “This is just another useful skill I’ll hopefully never need again.”

She started handing boxes over the rim to Bosch, who found places for them on the ground.

She eventually found space for her feet on the floor of the bin and was better able to brace herself to lift the heavier debris. She focused on an open crate in the corner. It held a sculpture of a woman and child that had a one-inch-wide crack running through the plaster. She attempted to lift it but realized it would be too heavy to raise over the rim to Bosch. She instead lifted it slightly and swung it to her left to reposition it. When she turned back to the corner, she saw a crushed cardboard box that had been beneath the sculpture crate.

“Harry,” she said. “Take a look.”

She heard his feet clunk on the steps of the ladder, and then he was leaning over the rim.

“Be careful with that knee,” she said.

She pointed to the crushed box in the corner.

“Same size box as the one in the BMW trunk,” she said.

She took off her gloves and tucked them under an arm. She then pulled her phone out of a zippered pocket in her overalls and opened the camera. She took three photos from three different angles by leaning one way and then the other. Then she opened the video camera and handed the phone to Bosch.

“I’m going to open it,” she said. “You run video.”

“Got it,” Bosch said.

Ballard put her gloves back on and squatted down next to the crushed box while Bosch hit the record button on the phone.

Other than having its dimensions — 16 x 16 x 6 — stamped on its side, it was an unmarked cardboard box that appeared to be a match for the one recovered from Rawls’s BMW that Ballard had carried into the homicide archives that morning. It was unsealed, but the top had been crushed, and this forced Ballard to rip its flaps to get it open. Inside, at the top, was a folded piece of clothing. Ballard leaned back on her heels to make sure Bosch got a clear view with the video.

“It looks like a nightgown,” she said. “Let’s get it out of here before we start looking through it. You can kill the video.”

Bosch did so and handed the phone back to Ballard. She then stood up with the box and handed it over the lip to Bosch.

“I’m going to make sure there’s nothing else in here,” she said.

Bosch took the box over to Ballard’s city car and put it down on the hood.

Ballard spent the next five minutes moving debris around in the dumpster so she could determine that nothing else had been deposited by Rawls. After climbing back over the rim and down the ladder, she helped Bosch throw the debris they had removed back into the bin.

She stripped off her work gloves and put them in the back pockets of her overalls. She then pulled a pair of latex gloves from a front pocket and put them on as she walked to her car. She could tell when she had handed the box out of the dumpster to Bosch that there was something heavy beneath the clothing folded on top.

Bosch followed her to the car.

“You want to go through it here or wait?” he asked.

“I want to take a quick look,” she said. “See what we’ve got.”

She handed her phone back to Bosch so he could record her further examination of the box’s contents. She lifted the item of clothing out and confirmed it was a white flannel long-sleeved nightgown with an embroidered fringe at the collar and cuffs. There was no label inside the neckline and there were no other identifiers. It appeared to be clean. No blood or other stains on it.

Ballard shifted position so she could look down into the box.

“Harry, get this,” she said.

Bosch moved in next to Ballard and focused the camera on the box. At the bottom was a pair of pink slippers that looked like stuffed bunnies with the nose at the point of the big toe. Beneath these Ballard could see part of a wooden handle. Holding the nightgown up with one hand, she reached in with the other and pulled out the bunny slippers. At the bottom of the box was a stainless-steel hammer with a polished wood handle.

They both stared down at it for a long moment without speaking.

“Murder weapon?” Bosch said.

“What I was thinking,” Ballard said. “Maybe. Now we just need to find the case.”

She did not touch the hammer because she knew the handle might hold fingerprints and its steel head and claw could hold DNA. She carefully put the slippers down on top of the hammer in their original position, then with both hands held the nightgown up by its shoulders and folded it lengthwise. When she did this, the right sleeve swung against her and she felt the heft of something more solid than an embroidered cuff.

She ran a hand down the length of the sleeve and closed it around something caught inside the cuff. She worked her fingers inside the cuff and pulled out a bracelet. It was a thick, braided metal band with one charm attached, a painter’s palette with six tiny dots of color along the rim and the word GO engraved at center.

“ID bracelet,” Ballard said. “It probably belonged to a boyfriend and was too big for her wrist. It must have slipped off when she took off the nightgown.”

“Or when someone else took it off her,” Bosch said.

“There’s that. Do you think it’s go or G-O?”

“Is that the engraving? It’s too small for me to make out.”

“Yes, G-O. I wonder what it means.”

“You’ll know that when you connect a case to it.”

Ballard nodded and looked down the alley toward the back door of the DGP store.

“So he parks down there, carries a box up here to the farthest trash bin, and then dumps it,” she said. “But then he leaves the second box with his other souvenirs in the BMW and drives off. Does that make sense?”

“No,” Bosch said. “But I’ve been thinking about that.”

“And?”

“Come over here.”

Bosch walked away from the car and headed toward the end of the alley twenty feet away. Ballard put the nightgown back in the box and placed the bracelet on top of it. She then caught up to Bosch. When they got to the end, he pointed diagonally across 17th Street to a 1950s ranch that was the first residential house behind the Montana shopping district.

“That’s the driveway I backed into after I saw Rawls’s car in the alley,” he said. “His car was pointed east, so I thought that when he left, he would come out this way and I’d see him and then follow.”

“That’s where Mrs. Kravitz confronted you?” Ballard asked.

“Yeah. I was looking this way at the alley when the guy came up alongside me, banged his fist on the roof of my car, and started giving me what for. It was a distraction and I took my eyes off the alley to deal with it. He was kind of loud because he was king of the castle and didn’t want me there. So I was thinking... maybe Rawls took the one box down to the dumpster and then he heard the dustup out in the street.”

“He checks it out, sees it’s you, and figures he’s gotta get the hell out of here.”

“Right, so he runs back to his car, turns it around in the alley, and takes off. But he’s still got the other box in the trunk. I pull out of the driveway, cruise by the alley up here, and that’s when I see him, when he’s pulling out down at the other end.”

They walked back to Bosch’s car in silence. Ballard guessed that they were both rethinking the scenario they had just spun, looking for holes in the logic of it.

“It feels like something is off,” Bosch finally said. “Something missing. Why would he use the dumpsters behind his business? It wasn’t smart. There had to be another reason for him coming here.”

“There was,” Ballard said. “I didn’t tell you this, but RHD interviewed the guy who was working in the shop Sunday. He told them that Rawls came in the back door, said hello, and then went right to the safe in the back room that’s used for keeping backup cash for all the shops. The employee said Rawls took all the money. We know from what was in Rawls’s pockets that it was nine hundred dollars.”

“His go money.”

“Right. But the story he told his employee was that he needed the cash to put down on a car he was buying. So he took what was in the safe and then left by the back door.”

“That works. He goes there to get the cash and dump the boxes of souvenirs. He pulls up, pops the trunk, but goes into the store first to get the money. That’s when I drive by and see the trunk open but no sign of Rawls. Then I go around the block and post up in that driveway. Rawls comes out of his store and takes the first box up the alley to the last dumpster, distancing it from his store just in case. But after he dumps it, he hears the guy yelling at me. Rawls checks it out, sees me, and hauls ass back to his car.”

“He makes a U-turn in the alley so you won’t see him leave and goes out the other end. It works, but we’ll never know for sure. Was he going to put the second box in a different dumpster? Why didn’t he carry both boxes to the dumpster at once? We could spin our wheels on this forever.”

“One of the known unknowns,” Bosch said.

“Exactly.”

“So now what?”

Ballard pointed to the box sitting on the city car’s front hood.

“I want to take this back to Ahmanson and go to work on that bracelet,” she said. “And I’ll get the hammer to forensics.”

“I had a hammer case once. It was the murder weapon, and we recovered it from the L.A. River in a spot where there was actual water in the channel. It had been in there for something like thirty-six hours and looked clean as a whistle. But they still found blood in the wood where it connected to the steel head. The victim’s blood. We made the case.”

“So maybe we’ll get lucky with this one and connect it to a victim. Let’s go back.”

She picked up the box and headed to the trunk.

“When we get back to Ahmanson, I’m going to go,” Bosch said.

Ballard popped the trunk and put the box in. She closed it and moved to the driver’s-side door. She looked at Bosch over the roof of the car.

“Go where?” she asked.

“Sheila Walsh has percolated long enough,” Bosch said. “It’s time I go see her.”

“What about Rawls?”

“I figure you’ve got Rawls covered. You’ve got everybody else working it.”

“You’re going to see Walsh by yourself?”

“Yeah, like before. Better that way.”

Bosch opened his door and got in the car. Ballard did the same.

“What if her son is there?”

“Not a problem. He’s scared of me.”

“Probably with good reason.”

44

Bosch had rented a car on Tuesday, picking it up at Midway after meeting his daughter for lunch at a vegetarian restaurant on Sunset. He had earlier made an inquiry about his own car at the police garage but was told detectives from the Force Investigation Division had not released it yet. The helpful garage attendant also told him that the car was inoperable because the frame had been bent during the accident that preceded the shooting with Rawls. Despite his claim to Ballard that the old Cherokee was invincible, Bosch now knew that he had most likely driven it for the last time.

He pulled up in the rental in front of Sheila Walsh’s house. If she was on the watch for him, she wouldn’t recognize the car. He sat for a minute collecting his thoughts and deciding how he was going to play this. It had been almost a week since Walsh had called him and angrily told him to stay away from her and her son. Bosch needed to put her in a mindset that told her he would not be going away until she broke and revealed whatever secret she knew about Finbar McShane.

He got out and walked up the stone path to the front door. He knocked sharply, the kind of rap that would hopefully startle anyone inside. Nothing happened. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out the paper-clipped packet of documents to have them ready.

Raising his fist to hammer on the door again, he heard Sheila Walsh’s voice from the other side.

“Go away. You’re not coming in.”

“Mrs. Walsh... Sheila, open the door. I have a search warrant here.”

“I don’t care. Go somewhere else with your damn search warrant.”

“Doesn’t work that way. If you don’t open the door, I’m going to kick it in.”

“Sure, an old man like you. Go ahead and try. I’ve got the dead bolt on.”

“I’ve been kicking in doors for forty years, Sheila. It’s not about strength. It’s about the placement of the pressure. One of the first things they teach you. You hit the right spot and the lock itself breaks the jamb. It will then cost you three or four hundred dollars to fix it — and you have to figure out a way to secure your house till you get somebody out to do it. Nobody ever thinks about that. They don’t show that part on the TV shows.”

A long moment of silence went by.

Bosch stepped back as he would have if he were going to kick the door in. There was a peephole and he believed she was watching him.

“Stand back,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

At the moment he would have raised his leg and reared back to kick, Walsh’s voice came through again.

“Okay, okay! Don’t kick my door in.”

He waited and heard the locks turn. The door finally opened and Sheila Walsh stood there, pure hatred in her eyes.

“Smart decision,” Bosch said.

“What do you want?” Walsh asked.

“To be honest, I would rather just talk to you than have to search your house. That would take the rest of the day, when we probably could clear this up with a simple conversation.”

She didn’t move.

“A conversation about what?” she asked.

“Do you want to do this out here in front of your neighbors?” Bosch asked. “Or can we sit down inside?”

She stepped back and let him in. Bosch had not lied to her. He did, in fact, have a search warrant, but it was a copy of a warrant from another case and signed years earlier by a judge who was long retired now.

“In here,” Walsh said.

She led him to the dining area instead of the kitchen this time. An open laptop and paperwork were spread on the table. On the wall to the left of it, several unfolded pamphlets and flyers were taped to the sky-blue paint. Bosch saw maps of what looked like the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico as well as photos of cruise ships, floor plans of state rooms, and schematics for entire decks. The dining room was the headquarters of her online travel agency.

“Before I say another word, I want to hear you say you will leave my son alone,” she said. “He’s been through enough and he has nothing to do with this.”

“I can’t make that promise,” Bosch said. “Four people are dead, Sheila. A whole family. And I’m going to find the man who did it. If I have to use your son to get there, I will. It’s as simple as that. But it’s you who controls this. You cooperate, and there will be no need for me to put pressure on your son or tell his employers about his involvement in this.”

“That isn’t right. He isn’t involved!”

“You think it was right that the whole Gallagher family was buried in a hole out in the desert?”

“Of course not. But I had nothing to do with it! You don’t think I feel the horror of that? I do. I think about it every single day.”

“What did Finbar want?”

Her head rocked back in surprise at Bosch’s directness.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Come on, Sheila,” Bosch said. “You know what I’m talking about. Your son was the one who broke in and stole from you. You got lucky when they found McShane’s print and you could lay it on him. But it was your son, not him. McShane was here at some point before the break-in and I want to know why.”

“You’re crazy. You won’t let this go, and this is harassment. I could file a complaint against you.”

“You could. But if you think this is harassment, you haven’t seen anything yet. I’m never going to stop coming here. Not until you tell me what you know.”

She shook her head and then put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands.

“Oh my god, what am I going to do?” she said. “You won’t fucking stop.”

Bosch pulled the paper clip off the documents he had brought. They were folded lengthwise. He thumbed off the last page and slid it across the table to her.

“Open your eyes, Sheila, and take a look at that,” Bosch said. “I think it will help you do the right thing here.”

She dropped her hands to the table.

“The right thing?” she protested. “What are you talking about?”

“Just look at it,” Bosch said.

She pinned the paper to the table with her thumbs and leaned over it to read. Soon she started shaking her head.

“Help me,” she said. “What is this?”

“It’s a copy of a page from the California penal code,” Bosch said. “P-C thirty-two — it deals with the crime of aiding and abetting murder.”

“What?”

It was a shriek more than a question.

“Oh my god,” she followed. “What are you—”

“Look at the last line,” Bosch said. “Read it.”

“I read it. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what you want.”

“It’s the statute of limitations. Three years for aiding and abetting a homicide. What that tells you is that you’re in the clear, Sheila. No matter what you did, you can’t be touched now.”

“You think I had something to do with killing them? Those beautiful children? Are you out of your fucking mind? Get out! Get out of my house!”

She pointed toward the door as she rose from her seat.

“Sit back down, Sheila,” Bosch said calmly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She didn’t move. She held her arm out raised, her finger pointing toward the door.

“I said sit down!” Bosch yelled.

His voice scared her. She dropped back into her seat, her eyes wide with panic.

“Listen to me,” Bosch said, his voice returning to an even tone. “I checked you out eight years ago. Once I figured out the date the Gallaghers disappeared, I confirmed you were on a boat in Cozumel. I got photos, verified witness accounts, credit-card statements, everything. I know that McShane waited until you were gone to do it so there would be no chance of a witness, nobody to call the police. But you know something, Sheila. You know something and now is the time to tell it. You’re in the clear legally. So it’s time to clear your conscience as well. Talk to me, Sheila. You do that, and I leave you — and your son — alone. I’ll be out of your life forever.”

She put her elbows back on the table, gripped her hands in front of her face, and looked down at the photocopy. Soon Bosch saw tears drip onto the paper.

“Time to do the right thing,” Bosch said. “Think about those beautiful children and tell me. What was McShane doing here?”

She worked her fingers against themselves and then looked up over her knuckles at Bosch. For the first time, he saw that they were haunted by something. Something she had been carrying inside.

“He was here,” she said. “He came to see me.”

Bosch nodded. It was a thank-you. It was now time to draw out the whole story.

“When?” he asked.

“Promise me,” Walsh said. “You will leave my son alone.”

“I already told you. You tell me about McShane, and I will leave you and your son alone. That is a promise.”

Walsh nodded but took a long moment to settle herself and compose the story.

“He came because he wanted money,” she finally said. “He said he had lost all of his in a bad investment. He threatened me. I gave him what he wanted, and he went away.”

“Threatened you how?”

“I promise you I didn’t know about Stephen and his family. What happened to them, I mean. But in that year that they were gone — before anyone knew — I figured out what Fin was doing to the business.”

“The bust-out?”

“What’s that?”

“Selling equipment and ordering more to be sold as well. Eventually the business collapses. But before that happened, McShane took off.”

“Whatever it’s called, I knew what he was doing. I worked at Shamrock from the beginning and knew how to read the books. At that time, we didn’t know what had happened to Stephen, but I could see the business wasn’t going to make it. I had my son to think about. So... I told Fin I wanted my cut.”

“And what was your cut?”

“I knew what he was bringing in, because I had seen the purchase orders and I made some calls to our customers to find out what he was selling things for. I told him I knew what he was up to and that I had added it all up and wanted half. Four hundred thousand or he’d go to jail. He gave it to me.”

Bosch said nothing, hoping his silence would keep her talking.

“But then... they were found,” she said. “Up there in the Mojave. And Fin had disappeared. I knew how it would look. Like I had been part of it. I couldn’t tell you what I knew. I couldn’t tell anybody, because I looked guilty.”

Bosch nodded as part of the story fell together after so many years. He thought about Sheila mentioning the arc of the moral universe when he’d been here last. He wondered if she knew then that the arc was bending toward her.

“You said he came back here for money,” Bosch said. “How much did you give him?”

“All four hundred thousand,” Sheila said. “Every cent. I never touched it. I couldn’t after I knew what he did.”

“When exactly did this visit occur? How long before the burglary you reported?”

“A few weeks. Maybe a month.”

“You said a few minutes ago that he threatened you. Exactly how did he threaten you?”

“He said to give him the money, or my son would get a hot shot, and the next time I’d see him, he’d be on a slab at the coroner’s office. He said he’d then tip the police about the money and I would be arrested. I didn’t know about any statute of limits or whatever it’s called. But my son — back then, he needed me. I couldn’t let that happen.”

Bosch nodded and stayed silent.

“But he didn’t have to threaten me,” Walsh said. “Or my son. I didn’t want the money. Not after Mojave.”

Bosch nodded again but this time he spoke.

“Why did you call the police after the burglary?” he asked. “You knew your son did it.”

“I didn’t!” she said. “I had no idea. You think I would call the police on my own son? I didn’t know until Jonathan told me. When he found out I had called the police, he told me and said I had to protect him. When they called and asked about McShane and his prints, I knew how to do it. Just say it was McShane.”

“Where is he, Sheila?”

“My son? You know where—”

“No, McShane. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

“Are you saying you had four hundred thousand dollars in cash under your mattress and you just gave it to him and he left? There had to have been some kind of transfer.”

“It was in Bitcoin. That was how he gave it to me, and that was how I kept it. I transferred it back to him on my laptop right here. And that was when he picked up my paperweight. While he was watching me and showing me how to do it.”

Bosch knew that tracing such a transfer would be almost impossible and would never lead to a physical location.

“What business did he invest in that he lost his half?” he asked. “He had to have told you something.”

“He said, ‘Never invest in a bar,’” Sheila said. “I remember that. That was all.”

“What was the name of the bar?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Where was it?”

“Again, he didn’t say. And I wasn’t really interested in asking. I just wanted him to leave.”

Bosch knew that tracing a bankrupt bar with no name and no location six years or more after the fact would be like trying to trace Bitcoin. Impossible. He now had the fuller story but was no closer to Finbar McShane. He looked down at the old search warrant on the table and started to paper-clip it back together.

“He did say one thing that might help you,” Sheila said.

Bosch’s eyes came up to hers.

“But I want assurances that none of this can ever come back on me or my son,” she said. “And Jonathan can never know what I did.”

She was crying again, this time not trying to hide it with her hands. Bosch nodded.

“The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, Sheila,” he said. “What did McShane say that can help me?”

She nodded and used her hands to dry the tears on her cheeks.

“He looked at my pamphlets up on the wall there and said, ‘There’s only one place in the world where you can see the sunset at dawn.’”

Bosch looked up at the wall but couldn’t make the connection.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “What does it mean?”

“There’s a ship called the Dawn,” she said. “Part of the Norwegian line. It moors in Tampa, Florida, and every week it sails down to Key West, stops for a day, and then navigates out to the Bahamas before turning around and coming back. It’s a popular itinerary. I’ve sold many trips on that boat and made a lot of commissions. I knew exactly what he meant when he said it, because I’d heard that line before. It’s part of the sales pitch. They get great sunsets in Key West. Especially from the deck of the Dawn.”

Bosch looked up at the pamphlets taped to the wall and saw the Norwegian Dawn.

Sheila reached over to one of the stacks of folded pamphlets she had at the side of the table, chose one, and handed it to Bosch.

“Here,” she said. “Take it.”

“Thank you,” Bosch said.

Bosch looked at the pamphlet and opened it. It showed happy people in bathing suits frolicking in the ship’s pool or in colorful boat clothes strolling on the deck. There was even a photo of people lined up at the deck rail and watching a sunset. Key West, Bosch thought. He knew now where he was going to look for Finbar McShane.

45

Ballard cranked the shelves just wide enough apart for her to slip in and move down to the 2002 cases. She ran her finger along the case numbers on the spines of the murder books and then pulled the binder she was looking for.

When she got back to her workstation, Colleen Hatteras was standing there waiting for her.

“What’s up, Colleen?”

“Not much. I was wondering if you need any help with what you’re doing.”

She gestured toward the box on Ballard’s desk. It was the one recovered from the dumpster in the alley behind Ted Rawls’s business in Santa Monica.

“I think I’ve got it,” Ballard said. “There’s not really an IGG angle on this yet.”

“I could make calls if you want me to,” Hatteras said.

“There’s no call to make yet. This is the seventh of seven possible cases. The first six didn’t match up — in my opinion.”

“What exactly are you looking for?”

“A case that matches a missing white nightgown, bunny slippers, and a bracelet. There is also probably going to be blunt force trauma as a cause of death.”

Ballard sat down and opened the murder book she had just retrieved. She then flipped over the table of contents to the initial incident report.

“You want me to back-read?” Hatteras said. “I’m not really doing much. The IGG stuff on Rawls has dried up. I’m just waiting on responses. I could go back to what I was working on before, but I feel bad dropping off Rawls when there are so many unanswered questions.”

“What about the souvenirs? Aren’t you working on those?”

“I was, but I hit a wall. I found no connects to open cases.”

Ballard knew that if she didn’t give Hatteras something to do, she would probably hover over her all day.

“Tell you what,” she said. “While I go through this last case, why don’t you take this and see what you can find out.”

As she spoke, Ballard reached into the cardboard box and retrieved the bracelet that had been found in the sleeve of the nightgown. She had since encased it in a plastic evidence bag. She handed it to Hatteras.

“All right,” Hatteras said. “What are you looking for?”

“Anything and everything,” Ballard said. “Who made the bracelet? Where was it sold? There are initials on the charm. At least, I think they’re initials. I would love to know who did the engraving and whose initials they are. I already ran it through digitized property reports and got no hits. So what’s left is, we try to find out where it came from. I know it’s a long shot, but give it a try, okay?”

“You got it.”

“Thanks.”

Hatteras went away like a dog with a bone, even though Ballard believed it would be a failed mission. But it would be worth it in terms of covering all bases and not having Hatteras constantly interrupting her.

She read the initial summary of the 2002 case she had just retrieved from the archives. The victim’s name was Belinda King. She was only twenty years old when she was murdered. Her naked body was found on the floor of the bathroom of her apartment in the Oakwood section of Venice. She was a student at nearby Santa Monica Community College, studying creative writing. Ballard remembered that Rawls had gone to Santa Monica CC, and it would likely have been just a few years before Belinda King. But that might be no more than a coincidence.

Belinda King matched almost all the parameters Ballard had entered in her search of digital records. She had gleaned these from the items found in the box from the dumpster and the known elements of Ted Rawls’s kill patterns. Ballard believed she was looking for a victim who was young, female, and attacked at night in her home by an unknown intruder who left no DNA. The victim would also have been found naked — considering that Rawls had taken her nightgown — and cause of death was likely blunt force trauma, if not specifically attributed to blows from a hammer. The victim may have also had a boyfriend or fiancé who had given her a charm bracelet. The final box Ballard had to check on the search protocol was that the case had to be open and unsolved.

The search brought back seven hits and the King case was the seventh book Ballard had pulled. The first six were not completely dismissed, but they didn’t feel right to Ballard for various reasons. She was hoping the seventh case would be a conclusive hit, but as she moved on from the written summary to the crime scene photos, she quickly dismissed it as a possible Ted Rawls kill. The victim was found nude and had been beaten to death, but Ballard judged that she was too heavy in the torso to have worn the nightgown comfortably. Additionally, the circumstances of the case led investigators to believe she knew her killer and may have engaged in consensual sex with him before he turned violent. There were no indications of sexual assault.

Disappointed, Ballard leaned back in her chair. She flipped the murder book closed and put it on top of the stack of books from the other cases she had reviewed. She decided she would not return them to the shelves in the archive. She’d have Harry Bosch, with his long experience as a homicide detective, review the cases to confirm or deny her conclusions about each one.

She put the frustrations of a wasted day aside and decided to take one more run through the department’s digitized crime data, this time removing one of the descriptor filters to see if it brought up more matching cases.

The descriptor she dropped was the requirement that matching cases be unsolved. She checked the “All Cases” box, and the new search returned nine more case extracts with matching similarities. Because the Ahmanson archive contained only murder books from unsolved cases, Ballard stayed on the database and reviewed the digital case extracts, ready to write down any victims’ names and case numbers she thought might require a fuller look. This more exacting review would require her to go to the original investigators to pull murder books from closed case files and conduct interviews.

She moved through the nine extracts quickly and didn’t write down a single case citation in her notebook. Though all were similar in methodology to the murders of Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson, they were all closed by conviction following a jury verdict, or in two of the cases, a guilty plea. Ballard knew that any of these could have had a wrongful conviction or even a false confession, but with the abbreviated extracts alone, it was impossible for her to see anything suspicious about the cases. In extract form, they were all cut-and-dried case summaries and mug shots. Nothing else.

Ballard logged off the database and sighed, frustrated with the knowledge that she had been spinning her wheels all day.

She felt the need for Harry Bosch’s supportive words. She knew that she could complain to him about wasting her time and he would come back with wisdom and encouragement. He would remind her that there were always more dead ends in a homicide investigation than there were leads that panned out. To him, that was a basic equation of the job. He had once told her it was like baseball. The best hitters failed more than half the time. It was the same chasing leads in homicide work.

She pulled her phone and called Bosch, but it went straight to voice mail.

“Harry, it’s me. Call me back when you get a chance. I need to talk to you about how fucked up today has been. Bye.”

She stood up and put the phone in her pocket. She saw Hatteras hunched over her desk in the next station in the pod.

“Colleen,” she said, “I’m going to take a walk to clear my head and then get a coffee from upstairs. You want anything?”

“No, I’m fine,” Hatteras said. “You knew this was a locket, right?”

Ballard had already started walking away from the pod when she heard the question. She turned on her heel and moved back toward Hatteras.

“What?” she asked.

“The charm,” Hatteras said. “It has a hinge. It opens and there’s a little photo inside.”

Ballard leaned over Hatteras’s shoulder and saw that the painter’s palette charm did indeed have a hinge that allowed it to be opened like a tiny book. There was a face shot photo of a young man with jet-black hair and a struggling mustache above a wide smile.

“You shouldn’t have taken that out of the evidence bag,” she said.

“I had to,” Hatteras said. “I wouldn’t have gotten it open if it was still in the plastic.”

“I know, but I hadn’t had it processed for prints and DNA.”

“I’m so sorry. I thought you said everything had been run through forensics.”

“But not that. We just recovered it today.”

Hatteras dropped the bracelet on her desk as if it were red hot.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Ballard said. “You’ve handled it.”

Ballard was staring at the small photo. She leaned down to see it closer. The young man looked familiar to her but she couldn’t quite place him.

“Do you by any chance have a magnifying glass, Colleen?”

“No, but Harry does. I saw him using it the other day.”

Ballard went around the pod to Bosch’s station. There was a small magnifying glass on top of a stack of printouts. She grabbed it and returned to Hatteras’s desk.

“Let me look at it,” she said.

Hatteras got up and Ballard sat down. She used the glass to magnify the image in the open locket.

“That’s got to be G-O,” Hatteras said. “Don’t you think?”

Ballard was silent. The young man in the photo she was looking at was clearly Latino, with brown skin, dark eyes, and a full head of swept-back black hair. She now identified the familiarity. She realized she had seen a version of that face just minutes before.

“I think I know this guy,” she said.

She got up and went back to her station, handing Hatteras the magnifying glass as she passed.

“You know him?” Hatteras asked.

“I think I just saw him,” Ballard said.

She sat down and quickly rebooted the department’s crime data bank on her screen. She pulled up the last search and quickly scanned through the case extracts she had just finished reviewing. With each one, she went immediately to the mug shot of the defendant convicted in the murder. The seventh extract contained the mug shot of a man convicted of killing his girlfriend in 2009.

“Let me see the locket and the magnifier,” she said.

“Can I touch it?” Hatteras asked.

“You already have. Bring it to me.”

Hatteras brought both items to her. Ballard used the magnifier again to look closely at the face in the locket photo and then turned back to the computer to make the comparison.

She was sure she was looking at different photos of the same young man. In one shot he was smiling, in the other, looking grim. She stood up and signaled Hatteras to switch into her seat. She held out the magnifying glass.

“Colleen, look at the mug shot on the screen and compare it to the photo in the locket,” Ballard said. “Tell me it’s not the same guy.”

Hatteras went back and forth from computer screen to locket three times before rendering a verdict.

“They’re the same,” she said. “Definitely.”

“Okay, let me get to the computer,” Ballard said.

Hatteras jumped up and Ballard quickly took her seat back. She clicked off the photo on the screen and pulled up the details of the convicted killer. His name was Jorge Ochoa, he was thirty-six years old, and he was serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend, Olga Reyes.

“Jorge Ochoa,” Ballard said. “He could have Americanized it. Used the name George.”

“G-O,” Hatteras said. “I think you’re right.”

Ballard scribbled down the case number and the names of the victim and suspect. The extract also contained the location of the crime on Riverside Drive in Valley Village. It was a North Hollywood Division case.

The extract had no crime scene photos, and details were limited. The victim’s cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma but that was a wide catchall classification. Ballard needed the murder book from the case to confirm that it was connected to the items found in the discarded box.

“Colleen, I’m going up to the Valley to pull this case,” Ballard said. “I won’t be coming back today.”

“Can I go with you?” Hatteras said. “I feel like I had something to do with this — whatever it is.”

“You did have something to do with it. You did good work. But this is field work and your job is the IGG work. I’ll see you tomorrow if you’re coming in. I’ll update you then.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Okay, good. And great work, Colleen. Thank you.”

Ballard quickly loaded her laptop and files into her backpack, grabbed her Van Heusen jacket off the back of her chair, and moved toward the exit, leaving Hatteras watching her go.

When she got to the parking lot, Ballard pulled her phone and called Harry Bosch again. She was once more greeted with his outgoing greeting telling all callers to leave a message.

“Harry, me again. Where are you? I think I know who the white nightgown belonged to. Call me back as soon as you get this.”

She put the phone away and jumped into her car.

46

The drive from Miami to Key West was four hours on the Overseas Highway. Along the way, it was mostly mom-and-pop motels, restaurants, sandal factories, and kitschy T-shirt and souvenir shops, all punctuated by long bridges across startling turquoise water on which the sun was reflected in diamonds. Bosch had arrived late to Miami the night before, picked up a rental car, and gotten to Key Largo before he pulled into the parking lot of a motel with a glowing neon vacancy sign and shut things down for the night.

Now it was morning, and his plan was to hit Key West by noon and start looking for Finbar McShane. His starting point would be the Key West Police Department. He had made no advance call and had no appointment. He liked the idea of coming in blind.

Just past Marathon, a backup behind an accident on the Seven Mile Bridge added almost an hour to the drive. It was after 1 p.m. when he pulled into the KWPD parking lot. When Bosch got out of the rental, his injured knee was stiff and throbbing from the long drive. He had not taken any pain medication because he wanted to stay alert while driving, but now he popped the trunk, unzipped the duffel bag he had packed in L.A., and popped two tabs of Advil. He hoped the Advil would be strong enough to reduce the pain soon.

The police department was painted in orange and pink pastels. Its front desk was actually an exterior window behind which an officer sat at a counter. Bosch waited in the sun, second in line behind a man asking how to report the theft of a bicycle. Bosch could feel the humidity coating his skin. The air even felt heavy in his lungs.

Finally it was his turn and Bosch limped up to the window, holding his badge out. There was a speaker and microphone set in the glass.

“Hello,” he said. “I work with the Los Angeles Police Department cold case squad. I’m here on a case and wanted to see if I could speak to somebody in missing persons.”

The glass was tinted almost as dark as a limousine’s rear windows. Bosch could barely make out the outline of someone sitting on the other side but could not tell whether he was talking to a man or woman.

A male voice came through the speaker.

“A missing persons cold case?” he asked.

“Uh, no,” Bosch said. “But I think a missing persons detective will be able to help me locate the individual I tracked here.”

“And your name?”

“Harry Bosch.”

“Did that badge say retired?”

“It did. I work as a volunteer investigator. I previously worked cold cases when I was in the department. They asked me to come back after I retired.”

“Okay, let me call back there. If you wouldn’t mind, step back from the window so others can come forward.”

“No problem.”

Bosch stepped away from the window and posted up on its left side. He turned, looked around, and saw that there was nobody else waiting to come forward.

Five minutes went by slowly. He leaned against the wall next to the window to take weight off his knee. The pills he had ingested had yet to reduce the pain.

No one else approached the window, and the man behind it offered Bosch no information. Bosch could feel his shirt starting to stick with perspiration to his back. He took off his sport coat and held it over his arm.

Finally, there was the metal clack of a heavy door opening, and Bosch saw a man in a guayabera shirt step out but hold the door open. The shirt barely disguised that the man had a gun and badge on his belt.

“LAPD?” he said.

“That’s me,” Bosch said.

“Come on back.”

“Thank you.”

He held out his hand as Bosch approached the door.

“Kent Osborne.”

Bosch shook his hand.

“Harry Bosch,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”

“Gotta make time for the LAPD,” Osborne said. “That’s the big time.”

Bosch smiled uneasily. There had been a slightly sarcastic tone in Osborne’s voice.

Osborne led Bosch to a detective bureau, where he counted desks for sixteen detectives. There were no signs hanging from the ceiling denoting crime sections. Half the desks had men or women sitting behind them, and most of them had eyes on Bosch as he came in.

Osborne’s desk was the last in the first row. He pulled a chair from an empty desk and rolled it over in front of his.

“Have a seat. Are you hurt? You’re limping.”

“I was in an accident Sunday. Messed up my knee.”

“Looks like you messed up your ear, too.”

“Yeah.”

Both men sat down. Osborne checked something on the screen of his desktop computer and then looked at Bosch.

“So, what can I do for you, LAPD?” he asked.

“I don’t know if the guy behind the window explained anything, but I work cold case homicides,” Bosch said. “I’m working a quadruple case — four members of a family murdered with a nail gun and then buried in the desert.”

“That’s gotta hurt.”

Bosch did not acknowledge the poor attempt at gallows humor.

“The case is almost nine years old,” he said. “We recently reopened it and there’s a person of interest. We have a solid witness that puts him here, but that was at least six years ago.”

Osborne frowned.

“Six years in Key West is a long time,” he said. “This town turns over quick. People come and go. Why’d you ask for a missing persons dick?”

Bosch had not heard the term applied to a detective in a long time, and possibly never in the real world.

“Because of the crime in L.A.,” he said. “This guy played a long game. Took a job, worked his way up over the years until he was a valued employee, then killed the owner and his family and looted the business in a classic bust-out scheme. My guess is he came here to do it all again.”

“As far as I know, we got no families murdered here, LAPD.”

“My witness back in L.A. said he invested in a bar in Key West and then the bar went belly-up. I think if he’s here, he’s moved on to something else.”

“And the missing persons part?”

“Do you have a case involving a prominent person — like a business owner — who’s gone missing?”

Osborne leaned back in his chair and swiveled it back and forth as he considered the question.

“Nothing like that, that I know of. Our cases are mostly about bored teenagers going up to Miami, tourists getting so shit-faced at Sloppy Joe’s they can’t find their way back to the motel. Can’t think of a prominent citizen going missing.”

“What about a bar going under six or seven years ago?”

Osborne let out a laugh.

“There isn’t a shortage of those,” he said.

“Nothing comes to mind?” Bosch pressed. “I’m talking something substantial. My guy put four hundred thousand into it and lost it.”

“Tell you what, the guy you should talk to is Tommy over at the Chart Room.”

“The Chart Room. That’s a bar?”

“At the Pier House.”

“The Pier House?”

“You don’t know shit, do you, LAPD? It’s a hotel at the end of Duval. I think you gotta stay there to get into the Chart Room these days. Place was a dive back in the day. Now they keep the riffraff out.”

“And Tommy?”

“He’s been slinging booze there forty years plus. And he knows the local bar trade better than anybody in this building.”

Bosch nodded. He then raised his sport coat up with one hand, reached into a pocket, and pulled out a document he had copied from the Gallagher Family murder book. He handed it to Osborne, who unfolded it. It was a BOLO flyer. At the top it had a California driver’s license photo of Finbar McShane. Below it were four smaller copies of the photo that had been altered by a police artist to show four possible new looks that McShane could have adopted after fleeing. In the altered photos, McShane alternately had a full beard, a goatee, long hair, or a shaved head. Bosch had put out the BOLO on McShane shortly after originally being assigned the case. That made the photos almost eight years old and of questionable value. But it was all he had to offer.

“This your guy, huh?” Osborne said.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Recognize him? Seen him around?”

“Can’t say I have. How old is that BOLO?”

“About eight years. He’d be forty-four now.”

“That’s a long time ago. They couldn’t come up with new stuff?”

“They’re working on it. How would you feel about showing that at roll call? See if any of your street people have seen him.”

“I guess I could do that. It’s a long shot, though.”

“I would appreciate it anyway.”

Osborne grabbed a Post-it pad and put it down in front of Bosch.

“Write your cell number down, and I’ll call you if I come up with anything.”

“I don’t have a phone. I lost it and need to buy one today. I can also call you tomorrow from the hotel.”

Osborne made a face as if to ask, who doesn’t have a cell phone?

“What hotel?” he asked instead.

“I’m going to see if they have a room at the Pier House, I guess.”

“LAPD must have a nice hotel allowance. That place’ll run you at least five hundred a night this time of year.”

Bosch nodded.

“Thanks for your help,” he said. “And the roll call.”

“Not a problem,” Osborne said. “You sure you’re okay, LAPD?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know. You seem kind of shaky there.”

“It’s the humidity. Not used to it.”

“Yeah, we get that a lot ’round here.”

Back in the parking lot, Bosch took a moment before getting back in the rental to look up at the sky. A row of cumulus clouds was moving over the island. Bosch felt that the light was different here, not as soft as in California. There was a bright harshness to it.

He got in the car and thought about Osborne, wondering if he could trust him. He wasn’t sure. He started the engine and pulled out.

47

Ballard held her badge cupped in one hand while she knocked on the door with the other. It wasn’t long before a short woman with the same coloring and features as Jorge Ochoa answered the door.

“Mrs. Ochoa?” Ballard asked.

“Sí,” the woman said.

Ballard immediately wished she had gotten a Spanish-speaking officer to go with her. She could step away and call North Hollywood Division to see if one was available but instead pressed on. She held up her badge.

“La policía. Habla inglés?”

The woman frowned but then turned away from the door and yelled in rapid-fire Spanish back into the house. The only word Ballard identified was policía. The woman then turned back to Ballard and nodded as though she had just fixed the problem. After an awkward and silent minute, a young man appeared behind the woman at the door, his dark hair disheveled from sleep. He was almost a carbon copy of what Jorge Ochoa looked like in the mug shots she had reviewed when reading the murder book.

“What?” he said.

He was clearly annoyed with the early wake-up, even though it was almost noon. Ballard quickly assessed the VB tattoos on his arms and read him as a member of the Vineland Boyz street gang. She knew that a gangster’s day typically started in the p.m. hours. This was early.

“You’re Oscar, right?” Ballard said. “I want to talk to your mother about your brother.”

“My brother’s gone,” Oscar said. “And we don’t talk to cops. Adiós, puta.”

He started to close the door but Ballard reached her hand out and stopped it.

“You call somebody who wants to help your brother a whore?”

“Help him? Shit. You coulda helped him when he said he didn’t do it. But no, you people just threw away the key.”

“I want to show something to your mother. It might be what gets Jorge out of prison. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. But next time you visit your brother, you tell him I was here and you sent me away.”

Oscar didn’t move or speak. Then his mother spoke to him in a whisper. Ballard knew enough Spanish to know she had asked her son what the woman wanted. Mrs. Ochoa had heard Jorge’s name mentioned.

Oscar didn’t answer her. He turned back to Ballard and made room for her to enter.

“Show her,” he said.

Ballard stepped in. She had spent the night before reviewing the murder book she had pulled at North Hollywood station. Her first effort in the morning was to attempt to track down the family of Olga Reyes. But it appeared that her family had left Los Angeles after her murder, and Ballard had not yet been able to locate them. The closest she came was a neighbor who said she thought the family had gone to Texas.

That left the Jorge Ochoa side of the equation, and here she was at his mother’s cookie-cutter house in a post — World War II tract in Sunland.

Ballard was led to a small, modestly furnished living room, where she immediately saw signs that she was on the right track. Several framed paintings and sketches that had the look of prison art hung on the walls. All were on butcher paper and signed in pencil.

“Did Jorge want to be an artist?” she asked.

“He is an artist,” Oscar said. “Show her what you got and then go.”

Ballard was annoyed with herself for not thinking through her question.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell your mother I am going to show her a photo of a piece of jewelry and I want to know if she’s ever seen it before.”

While Oscar made the translation, Ballard swung her backpack off her shoulder and opened it on the floor. She removed a file folder containing an 8 x 10 color photo of the bracelet with the artist’s palette charm, which she had printed at home that morning. She gave the file to Oscar to give to his mother. She wanted him invested in this as well.

Oscar opened the file and looked at the photo with his mother. Ballard watched the woman for a reaction and saw the recognition in her eyes.

“She’s seen it before,” Ballard said quickly.

Oscar and his mother exchanged words and Oscar translated.

“She said it was my brother’s. He gave it to Olga because they were in love. Where did you find it?”

Ballard knew the question had come from him.

“I can’t tell you right now,” Ballard said. “But I think your brother is going to get out of prison with it.”

“How?”

“I think I can prove that somebody else killed Olga.”

Suddenly Oscar’s tough shell cracked and Ballard saw hope and fear in his eyes. He then turned away and translated for his mother.

“Dios mío,” she said. “Dios mío.”

She reached out and grabbed Ballard’s hand.

“Please,” she said.

Oscar’s hard shell slipped back into place.

“You better not be fucking with us,” he said.

“I’m not,” Ballard said. “Ask your mother if she knows where Jorge got the bracelet.”

The exchange in Spanish was quick.

“She doesn’t know,” Oscar said.

“What about the charm?” Ballard asked.

The next exchange didn’t need to be translated. The woman shook her head. Ballard looked at Oscar.

“What about you?” Ballard asked.

“What do you mean?” Oscar asked.

“Was your brother in Vineland Boyz?”

“No, but you people at the trial sure tried to make it look that way.”

“What I’m getting at is, where do Vineland Boyz get their chains?”

Oscar didn’t answer, his hesitation rooted in the gang rule about talking about the gang to the police. It could get him killed.

“Do you know what provenance means?” Ballard asked. “Besides having your mother identify the bracelet as your brother’s, I may need to establish where Jorge got it. Then I would have two confirmations when I go to the District Attorney’s Office.”

“He was not a gangster,” Oscar said. “He was an artist.”

Ballard knew from the review of the case file that the prosecution presented photos of street art attributed to Jorge Ochoa and used it to suggest gang affiliation. It was an underhanded way of tilting a jury’s view of him.

“I’ll leave you my card,” Ballard said. “If you think of anything, maybe a local store where Jorge might have gotten the bracelet, call me.”

“I don’t talk to the policía,” Oscar said.

“Even if it might help your brother prove he didn’t kill Olga?”

Oscar was silent on that question. Ballard looked at his mother.

“Gracias, señora,” she said. “Estaré en contacto.”

As soon as she was back in her car, Ballard pulled her phone and called Harry Bosch. Adrenaline had started coursing through her veins the moment Jorge Ochoa’s mother recognized the bracelet. Ballard needed to tell someone about the twist the case was now taking and Bosch was her first choice.

But the call once again went directly to message.

“Harry, it’s me again. Where the hell are you? Things are happening fast and I need you on Rawls. I’ve connected another case to him, and get this, somebody’s in prison for a murder Rawls committed. I’m sure of it. I need you to call me back as soon as you get this.”

She disconnected and sighed in frustration. But soon her annoyance with Bosch turned to concern. He was old and not in the best health. Besides inflicting the obvious injuries, the crash on Sunday had seemed to take something out of him.

Ballard opened up her contacts list on her phone and called Bosch’s daughter. He had previously mentioned that Maddie was working a mid-watch shift, so she figured she should be neither asleep nor at work.

Maddie Bosch answered promptly.

“Maddie, it’s Renée Ballard.”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Uh, have you talked to your dad lately? We’re supposed to be working on something and I can’t seem to reach him.”

“Well, I saw him Tuesday when we had lunch and then I dropped him off to pick up a rental car. But I haven’t talked to him since then. What’s—”

“I’m sure everything is fine, but I really need to talk to him. Do you mind doing something for me? He once told me that you let him track your phone and you track his. Is it still that way?”

“Yes. So you want me to see where he’s at?”

“That would help, if you don’t mind. I really need him on a case I’m working.”

“Hold on.”

Ballard waited while Maddie used her phone to check her father’s location by tracking his cell phone.

“Um... okay, I have him at the OPG lot at West Bureau. No, wait, that’s old. His phone must be off or the battery’s dead. That’s from Sunday night, and it’s the last location I have.”

Ballard put two and two together. The official police garage would have been where they took Bosch’s car after the Rawls incident Sunday.

“It’s in his car,” she said. “He was talking to me when his car got hit by Rawls, and the phone went flying. His phone must still be in the car and the battery probably died Sunday night.”

“So then where is he?” Maddie asked, starting to sound worried.

The middle ground between concern and panic had entered Ballard’s thinking.

“I don’t know,” Ballard said. “Does he still have a landline at the house?”

“He does,” Maddie said. “Let me call it, and either he or I will call you right back.”

They disconnected and Ballard sat in the car and waited, knowing that her next move would be dictated by who called her back.

When the call came in a minute later, it was from Maddie.

“He didn’t answer. I left a message but now I’m worried.”

“When do you go in today?”

“I’m actually off.”

“Do you have a key to Harry’s house? I think we should check it out.”

“I have a key. When?”

“I’m up in the Valley. I could get there in about thirty minutes tops.”

“Okay, it will take me the same. I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay. If you get there first, maybe you should wait for me before going in.”

“We’ll see.”

“Well, I’m on my way.”

They disconnected and Ballard started the car. Her tires squealed on the asphalt as she pulled out. She wanted to get to Bosch’s house before his daughter did.

48

Bosch sat on the bed with his bad leg up. He had a bag of ice on his knee and it seemed to ease the discomfort the second dose of Advil hadn’t yet reached. He was in his room at the Pier House and studying the tourist map of Old Town that he had received from the front desk clerk when he checked in. Clearly marked on it were the sunset viewing spots and the wharves where the cruise ships docked. He planned to check these out in his needle-in-a-haystack search for Finbar McShane.

His room had a small balcony and a view of the turquoise water. His eyes were drawn to it because he was so used to the coldly forbidding blue-black water of the Pacific. He now saw a large catamaran cruising slowly by, seemingly every inch of deck space occupied by a passenger. Painted along the side of the hull was a phone number for reserving a spot on a sunset cruise.

Before coming to his room, he had used a resort map, also given to him at check-in, to locate the Chart Room, and learned it did not open until five. He planned to be there then, with the hope of talking to the bartender before the place got crowded.

He had an hour to wait, so he decided to use the time walking through Old Town and showing around the BOLO flyer with the many possible faces of Finbar McShane on it. He got up and put the bag of ice in the bathroom sink. The ice and the painkiller had combined to make the knee feel usable — for a while.

He left the room and the hotel and started making his way up Duval Street, stopping at Sloppy Joe’s and other bars and asking bartenders if they recognized the man in the photos.

He got no takers. But he did get the idea that most of the bartenders and waitresses he showed the flyer to had fled from something themselves before landing in Key West. A bad life, a bad relationship, a bad crime — it didn’t matter, but it made people hesitant to finger a fellow traveler on the runaway trail. Bosch didn’t mention to any of those he spoke to that the man on the flyer was the only suspect in the killing of a whole family. He didn’t want to upset their romanticized version of running away from the past.

He got back to the Pier House by five and went directly to the Chart Room, which was tucked into a first-floor hallway in the main wing of the hotel. A man with gray hair pulled back into a ponytail was unlocking the door when he got there.

He entered and Bosch followed him in. The bar was small, about the size of a hotel room, because that was clearly what it had once been. There was a six-stool bar on the left side and there were a few small tables and sitting spots on the right. It looked to Bosch like the place would be over capacity with just twenty people.

Bosch took the first stool and waited for the man with the ponytail to come around behind the bar. It was all dark wood, with lights under the three tiers of liquor bottles, creating an amber glow. There were many photos pinned on the walls, almost all of them yellowed by time. There were no windows with a view of the water. This was a place for worshipping alcohol, not the setting sun.

“That looks like it hurts,” the bartender said.

He pointed at Bosch’s ear.

“It’s not bad,” Bosch said.

“Fishhook?” the bartender asked.

“I wish.”

“Bullet, then.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know fishhooks from Key West. Bullets from Vietnam.”

“Right. Who were you with over there?”

“Marines One-Nine.”

“The walking dead.”

Bosch knew about the walking dead. The First Battalion, 9 Marines took more casualties than any other unit during the war, hence the name they came to be known by.

“What about you?” the bartender asked.

“Army,” Bosch said. “First Infantry, engineer battalion.”

“The tunnels.”

“Yeah.”

The bartender nodded. He knew about the tunnels.

“You in the hotel?” he asked.

“Room two-oh-two,” Bosch said.

“Don’t look much like a tourist.”

“I guess I gotta get some shorts and sandals and maybe a Hawaiian shirt.”

“That’ll help.”

“Are you Tommy?”

The bartender stopped his busy work behind the bar getting ready for the night and looked directly at Bosch.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“No, first time in Key West,” Bosch said. “Over at the police station, I was told that you were the man I needed to talk to.”

“About what?”

“The bar trade in Key West. I’m trying to locate a bar that closed down six, maybe seven years ago.”

“What was it called?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t have a name.”

“Seems kind of fuzzy. You a cop?”

“Used to be. Now I’m just trying to find a guy who came here from L.A., invested in a bar, and then lost it all. My name’s Harry, by the way.”

He offered his hand across the bar top. Tommy wiped his hand on a bar towel and shook it.

“How long you been here, Tommy?” Bosch asked.

“Put it this way: longer than anybody else,” Tommy said. “This guy you’re looking for — he’s got a name, right?”

“He does, but I don’t think he’s using it here. Finbar McShane. He’s Irish.”

Bosch studied his eyes to see if there was any flare of recognition. There was.

“The Irish Galleon,” Tommy said.

“What’s that?” Bosch asked.

“That’s the bar. Two Irish guys opened it about eight years ago. Well, one guy did and then the other guy came over and they were partners. Like we needed another Irish pub in Key West. Fixed it up outside so it looked like a Spanish galleon, you know? The place lasted a couple years and then it got shuttered. They lost their asses, left a shitload of creditors that never got paid.”

Bosch knew there would be records of ownership with state and local agencies monitoring alcohol licensing, maybe a bankruptcy filing as well. Getting the name of the bar was a good lead.

“Did you know them — the partners?” he asked.

“No, they were outsiders, not locals,” Tommy said.

“What about their names?”

“Nah, not sure I ever knew the names of those guys.”

“Who would?”

“That’s a good question. Let me think. You going to drink or just ask questions?”

“Bourbon.”

“I’ve got Michter’s, Colonel Taylor, and a little bit of Blanton’s left.”

“Blanton’s, neat.”

“That’s good, because I’m still waiting on my ice.”

Tommy used the hand towel to polish a rock glass and then poured a generous shot of Blanton’s. He put the glass down in front of Bosch. It looked like there was enough left in the round bottle for one more shot.

“Slainte,” he said.

“Cheers,” Bosch said.

A man entered the bar, carrying a large stainless-steel bucket full of ice. He hoisted it over the bar and Tommy took it and poured it into a bin. He handed the bucket back.

“Thanks, Rico.”

Tommy looked at Bosch and pointed to the ice bin.

“I’m good,” Bosch said.

Tommy held up a finger like he wanted to pause everything while he considered a new idea.

“I think I know somebody,” he said. “You’re going to take care of me for this, right?”

“I am,” Bosch said.

He watched as Tommy pulled a corded phone out from under the counter, dialed a number, and waited. Bosch then heard Tommy’s side of a brief conversation.

“Hey, remember the Irish Galleon? What happened with those two guys?”

Bosch wanted to take the phone and ask the questions, but he knew that was probably a quick way to end the call and Tommy’s cooperation.

“Oh, right, yeah, I think I heard something about that,” Tommy said. “What were their names?”

Bosch nodded. It was turning out he didn’t need to coach Tommy.

“And where did Davy go?” Tommy asked.

The call ended a few seconds later, and Tommy looked at Bosch but didn’t report what he had just heard. Bosch got the message and reached into his pocket. He had hit an ATM for four hundred dollars at the airport before takeoff the day before. The money had come in denominations of fifties and twenties. He now peeled four fifties off the fold of cash and put them down on the bar.

“The original owner was Dan Cassidy,” Tommy said. “But he left the island after they closed the bar down.”

“Where did he go?” Bosch asked.

“My guy didn’t know. His friend from Ireland that he took on as a partner was Davy Byrne, but everybody thought that was bullshit.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was an alias, clear as day. Davy Byrne’s was the name of a pub in Ulysses, the Joyce novel about Dublin. Supposedly it’s a real place over there, still in business after a hundred years. So people around here thought he was like an IRA guy or something who came here and changed his name because he was too hot to handle back there.”

Bosch didn’t say that the Troubles were largely in Northern Ireland, not Dublin.

“Did your guy say whether he ever met him?” he asked instead. “Think he could pick him out in a photo?”

“He didn’t say but I doubt he ever did meet him,” Tommy said. “He’s got the Bud distributorship for all of Monroe County. So he knows what’s going on in every bar in the Keys, but he hasn’t driven a delivery route himself in years. He did say these guys stiffed him for a couple grand’s worth of beer when they shut it down.”

“You have a cell phone?”

“Sure.”

“Can you take a photo of this and shoot it to your friend anyway? You never know.”

Bosch unfolded the BOLO flyer on the bar top. Tommy looked at it for a long moment. Then he slid it down the bar until it was directly under one of the pendant lights, took a cell phone out of a pocket, and took a photo of the flyer. He handed the flyer back to Bosch.

“Los Angeles Police Department,” he said. “I thought you weren’t a cop anymore.”

“I’m not,” Bosch said. “That’s old. From a case I had when I was still carrying the badge.”

“He’s like the one that got away or something? The white whale, ‘Call me Ishmael,’ and all of that?”

“Moby-Dick, right?”

“Yep. First line of the book.”

Bosch nodded. He had never read the book but he knew who wrote it and that Moby Dick was the original white whale. Between the references to Joyce and Melville, he got the idea that he might be talking to the most well-read bartender in Key West. Tommy seemed to know that was what he was thinking.

“When it’s slow in here, I read,” he said. “So, what did he do? Your white whale.”

“He killed a family of four,” Bosch said.

“Shit.”

“With a nail gun. The girl was nine and the boy thirteen. Then he buried them in a hole in the desert.”

“Oh, man.”

Tommy put his hand down on the fifties and slid them back across the bar top toward Bosch.

“I can’t take your money. Not for something like that.”

“You’re helping me here.”

“I’m sure no one’s paying you to chase this guy down.”

Bosch nodded. He understood. He then asked the most important question.

“Did your friend the beer distributor say whether Davy Byrne is still on the island?”

“He said, last he heard, Davy was working on the old charter docks. But that was a few years back when he heard that.”

“Where are the old charter docks?”

“Right below the Palm Avenue Causeway. You got a car?”

“I do.”

Tommy pointed toward the back of the bar.

“Easiest way is to take Front Street out of Old Town and get on Eaton,” he said. “Eaton becomes Palm Avenue. You go over the bridge and there’s the marina. You can’t miss it.”

“How many boats are we talking about out there?” Bosch asked.

“There’s a lot. My buddy didn’t know which boat this guy was supposedly working.”

“Okay.”

“And if I were you, I’d go now. This part of town is going to start filling up for sunset. Traffic will be a bitch and you’ll never get out of here.”

Bosch lifted his glass and took the first and last sip from it. The bourbon was sweet on his tongue but fire in his throat. He realized he probably should have ordered something that would have gone down easier, like a port or a cabernet.

“Thanks for your help, Tommy,” he said. “Semper fi.”

“Semper fi,” Tommy said, apparently accepting the Marine salutation from a non-Marine. “Those tunnels, man... What a fucked-up place.”

Bosch nodded.

“What a fucked-up world,” he said.

“It’s an angry world,” Tommy said. “People do things you’d never expect.”

Bosch took two of the fifties off the bar top and put them in his pocket. He slid the other two back toward Tommy.

“Finish off the Blanton’s for me,” he said.

“Glad to,” Tommy said.

On his way out, Bosch held the door for a couple in shorts, sandals, and Hawaiian shirts on their way in.

49

Ballard was leaning against her car in front of Bosch’s house, thinking about the last conversation they’d had. Bosch had said he was going to do the follow-up interview with Sheila Walsh about the Gallagher case. He had hoped she would trade protecting her son for revealing what she knew about Finbar McShane. Ballard decided that if she didn’t find Bosch by the end of the day, then she would locate Sheila Walsh and pay her a visit as well.

Maddie Bosch’s car came around the bend and she pulled into the empty carport. Ballard met her at the front door.

“I knocked,” Ballard said. “No answer.”

“Then I hope he’s not in there,” Maddie said.

“Why don’t you let me do a quick circuit before you come in?”

“I’m a big girl, Renée.”

“Just wanted to make the offer.”

“I get it. Thank you.”

Maddie took a set of keys out of her pocket and unlocked the door. Without hesitation, she pushed it open and entered ahead of Ballard.

“Dad?”

There was no answer. Ballard stepped into the living room and looked around to see if anything seemed out of place. She checked Bosch’s stereo and saw that the record on the turntable was the King Curtis album he had been playing when she picked him up the week before. She guessed that his joining the cold case squad had fully consumed him to the point where he hadn’t had time to listen his music.

“Dad, you here?”

Nothing.

“I’ll check the back,” Maddie said.

She disappeared down the hallway while Ballard went into the kitchen to check the sink and trash can for any signs of life. Both were clean and empty. Ballard went back to the living room and stepped into the dining room, where two neat stacks of documents sat on the table. She moved around behind it and leaned over to read what Bosch was last working on here. She could hear Maddie’s steps on the wood floor and knew she was continuing to move about — a sign that her father was not back there.

Soon Maddie emerged from the bedroom wing of the house.

“He’s not here,” she said.

“The kitchen is clean and the trash can is empty,” Ballard said. “Like he didn’t want to leave anything that would stink up the house while he traveled.”

“But where would he go?”

“That’s the question. Do you know what sort of suitcase he has?”

“Oh, yeah. He has one suitcase. It’s old and beat up, with wheels that barely turn anymore.”

“Why don’t you see if it’s here.”

“I’ll check his closet.”

Maddie went back down the hallway and Ballard leafed through one of the two stacks on the table. They were documents from the Gallagher Family case.

Ballard noticed that the table had a drawer, most likely to hold silverware or napkins if it was used as an eating table instead of a worktable. She reached down and slid it open. It contained mostly utensils from to-go meals as well as some pens, paper clips, and Post-it pads. There were also several loose pills in the drawer and an envelope with Maddie written on it. Curious, she lifted out the envelope and saw that it was sealed. She then picked up one of the pills. It was light blue and disk-shaped. There was no brand stamp or other identification other than the number 30 imprinted on it. She guessed that this meant the pill was a 30-milligram dose.

She heard Maddie’s steps coming back down the hallway. Without giving it much thought, Ballard palmed the pill and closed the drawer as Maddie came into the room.

“The suitcase is there,” Maddie said. “But he also has this duffel bag that he uses for short trips. That’s gone. He went somewhere without telling me.”

“Has that happened before?” Ballard asked.

“Well, not that I know of. He called me last week when he was just going to Chicago for one night. But who knows — he could have made lots of trips without telling me. There’s no way for me to know.”

“Right.”

“But now I don’t feel good about us being in here invading his privacy. I think we need to leave.”

“Sure. I have an appointment downtown I’ve got to get to.”

Maddie pulled her keys and stepped back so Ballard could go out first before she locked the door. Once she was outside, Ballard turned back to Maddie.

“I’m sorry if I overreacted, Maddie. It’s just that we were in the middle of a case and, with him getting banged up Sunday, I was a little worried about him sort of disappearing without a word. But I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

Maddie nodded.

“Sure,” she said, but she seemed unconvinced.

“How did he seem when you saw him Tuesday for lunch?” Ballard asked.

“Uh, okay. Normal. I mean, he was still sore from the crash, his knee was hurting him, but he was Dad. He was talking about wanting to get back to work on a case. The usual stuff for him.”

“And nothing from him since that lunch?”

“No. Should I be worried, Renée?”

“I don’t really know. Last we talked, he was going to see a witness that he had spoken to before but who was not going to like seeing him. And that was it.”

“Maybe we have to go see that witness.”

“We?”

“I’m off today. But I’m a cop and he’s my father. Who was the witness?”

“Wait a minute. Let’s not jump the gun here. Maybe he—”

“Who’s jumping the gun? You said he went to see a witness — in a murder investigation, I assume. And no one has heard from him since. What’s wrong with this picture?”

“Okay, look, I have to go downtown for a meeting at the D.A.’s office. Let me do that, and then I’ll run down a location on the witness. If your dad doesn’t show up by then, we’ll go see her tonight.”

Maddie said nothing and Ballard could tell she was frustrated by the delay.

“What you should do,” Ballard said, “is go back inside and write a note to your dad that says he needs to call you as soon as he gets home. Just in case he’s just out of pocket without a phone and we’re worrying over nothing. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” Maddie said sullenly.

“Okay, then I’m going to go, and let’s keep each other in the loop. You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“Good. I’m sure everything’s fine. I’ll talk to you later.”

They went their separate ways, Ballard to her car and Maddie back into the house.

Ballard drove down the hill and jumped on the Hollywood Freeway. She headed south to downtown.

Checking the time on the dashboard, she saw that she could just make it to the SID lab before her appointment at the District Attorney’s office. She wanted to find out what the pills she had found loose in Bosch’s worktable drawer were and what he would be taking them for. She knew she was committing a breach of Bosch’s privacy that was far beyond what his own daughter had objected to earlier. But there was something going on with Bosch and she needed to find out what it was.

50

The parking at Charter Boat Row was wide open. All the action for the day was complete and most of the boats had been buttoned up for the night. Bosch walked along the seawall, reading the names of the boats and the signs showing contact information and charter availability. The boats ranged from thirty-foot open fishers to deep-sea cruisers with multiple decks, cabins, and lookout towers.

Near the end of the row, a man was using a hose to spray the decking of a large cruiser with an open salon and room for a large fishing party. It was low tide, so the boat and the man were below Bosch and the seawall. Eventually the man looked up and saw Bosch. He wore a salt-crusted baseball cap that said DECK DOCTOR on it. He pointed to the faucet where the hose he was using was attached.

“Hey, pal, can you turn the water off for me?” he called up.

Bosch walked over and turned off the hose.

“You get back in late?” Bosch asked casually. “Everybody else is gone.”

“I don’t go out,” the man said. “I just clean boats.”

“Got it. Deck Doctor. Do you clean Davy Byrne’s boat?”

The man shook his head.

“Uh, he doesn’t have a boat,” he said. “The CJ is Henry Jordan’s.”

“The CJ,” Bosch said. “Which one is that?”

“About nine or ten down. You walked right by it. Calamity Jane.”

“Oh, right, I saw it.”

“Davy might act with the tourists like he owns it, but Henry kept a majority ownership. I know that for a fact.”

“So Davy’s just an investor?”

“More like an employee. But you’d have to ask Henry about that when he gets back.”

“Back from where?”

“No idea. Can you hand me down the charge line?”

Bosch looked around and saw a thick yellow electric cord coiled and left on a hook attached to a steel girder. The girders supported the corrugated shade structure that ran the length of the boat row. One end of the cord was attached to a high-voltage plug. He unhooked the coil, fed some of it out, and then tossed the rest down to the Deck Doctor. The man walked the other end over to an electric attachment port beneath the gunwale and plugged it in. Bosch assumed it would recharge the boat’s batteries and other electric devices.

“So,” Bosch said. “How long has Henry been gone?”

“Almost a year, I guess,” the Deck Doctor said. “He supposedly took Byrne’s money and said, ‘See ya.’ He and the wife took off on a trip around the world and left Davy to run the boat, live on the floater, everything. A sweet deal, you ask me, but that’s none of my business.”

“What’s a floater?”

“Houseboat. On the other side of the causeway, there’s the marina on Garrison Bight. That’s where all the floaters are, including Henry’s. A lot of the guys with boats here live over there, get to walk to work.”

Bosch nodded.

“Sweet,” he said. “You don’t know which one is Henry’s floater, do you?”

“You mean the address? No,” the Deck Doctor said. “But his is the one with the smiley-face pirate on the roof.”

Bosch wasn’t sure what that meant but didn’t ask for clarification.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” the Deck Doctor said. “You some kind of cop or something?”

“Or something,” Bosch said. “How long have you been doing this, working on the boats?”

“The quick answer is all my life. But if you mean here on the charters, I’ve had my cleaning business about eight years.”

“How long has Davy Byrne been around?”

“Here? He definitely showed up after me. Maybe six years ago. I remember because old Henry was looking for a partner, and I was trying to scrape the cash together. But then Davy Byrne came along and beat me to it. To this day, I don’t know how. He supposedly lost his ass on that pub he ran before he showed up here.”

“I heard about that.”

“Yeah, he couldn’t run a bar right, then he shows up here and thinks he knows all about charters and catching fish.”

Bosch nodded. He now had a solid grasp on the Deck Doctor’s sour grapes.

“So, you said Henry’s been gone almost a year?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t know, at least eight or nine months,” the Deck Doctor said. “Supposedly they’re hitting all seven continents. But that’s according to Davy Byrne.”

“Listen, thanks for your help. Can you do me a favor? If you see Davy, don’t mention me.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t talk to that guy.”

Bosch walked back down the row to his car. He saw that the sun was riding low in the sky. It would be sunset soon. He had planned to be at the Mallory docks, Key West’s sunset mecca, for the island’s signature moment, but he was juiced by the idea that he might know where Finbar McShane was. There would be another sunset tomorrow. If he was still here to see it.

The parking lane was one-way. It took him on a swing under the causeway and then out at the entrance to another marina. He saw boat ramps and, beyond them, the houseboats grouped together on the water like a floating village. Most of them had smaller runabouts with outboards attached to back-door docks and decks. The houseboats were painted in pastels, two-story structures sitting on barges and lashed together to create a community.

From Bosch’s angle of view he counted eight houses extending out into Garrison Bight. The second-to-last house had a sloping gray roof with a large yellow smiley face painted on it. It had a black eye patch and a red bandanna with a skull-and-crossbones pattern. The siding of the house was a matching yellow, and a small outboard boat was tied up to its back porch.

The parking lot in front of the floaters was crowded. Bosch had to park in the next lot down and walk back. His knee was beginning to hurt again but he had left the bottle of Advil in the hotel room. By the time he got to the ramp down to the floaters, he was limping.

There was no security gate on the gangway leading down to the floaters. Bosch held the railing and carefully stepped down the steep ramp until he was on the wide and level concrete pier that connected all of the houseboats.

He casually walked down the pier like a tourist marveling at this floating neighborhood. He spent equal time checking out each residence on either side of the pier as he moved. When he came to the yellow house that was second from the end, he saw that the sliding door on a second-floor balcony was open with a screen pulled closed across it. He could hear music coming from inside — a reggae beat, but it wasn’t a song he could identify.

Bosch used his injury to his advantage here. He stopped and leaned against a light pole at the end of the pier. He raised his left leg, bringing his foot up and down as if working out a stiff joint. And he studied the yellow floater. He saw that the decking extended down the right side of the house, offering a narrow access to the back deck and the skiff tied up to it. He also noted the double locks on the front door.

Satisfied with the intel he had gathered, Bosch headed back to the gangway. He had seen enough. He believed that the man he had been chasing for many years was inside the yellow house. He needed to go back to his hotel room. He needed to take more Advil and work out the plan for when he would come back under the cover of night.

51

Ballard had been ten minutes late to her four o’clock appointment with Vickie Blodget, the prosecutor assigned to handle cases from the unit. Ballard had always had an easy and open relationship with Blodget, but she was off her game in giving the case overview, leaving out details and delivering them out of order. She had been in a fog since leaving the lab. The Olga Reyes case had been pushed out of her brain by Ballard’s need to find Harry Bosch.

“Let me make sure I understand the chain on this,” Blodget said. “Bosch saw Rawls put the box in the dumpster, but then you waited three days to go retrieve it? Why?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant, and I’m sorry if I’m confusing you,” Ballard said. “Bosch did not see him dump the box. It just came to him later that Rawls might have been in the process of dumping evidence when he saw Bosch and decided to make a run for it. So, in other words, he dumped the box, saw Bosch, then ran back to his car and took off.”

“But why did you wait three days to go back? See, that’s a problem. If he didn’t see Rawls dump the box, we’re going to have a difficult time linking it.”

“Well, who else could it be? The dumpster is literally sixty feet from the back door of a serial killer’s business. Bosch got banged up pretty good in what happened Sunday. He fucked up his knee and ribs in the crash, not to mention a bullet whizzing by his head and clipping his ear. It took him a couple days to put two and two together, and then we went dumpster diving.”

Blodget nodded as she wrote a short note on a legal pad.

“Well, that’s the thing,” she said. “Those three days. It could have been anybody who dumped the box. As you know, the shootout with Rawls hit the media in a very big way. Somebody could have seen the story and then gone down there to dump the box, hoping it would be found and linked to Rawls.”

The fog was burning away. Ballard stared at Blodget incredulously.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “What is going on here? This kid’s been in prison for thirteen years. I mean, he’s not even a kid anymore. He shouldn’t be there.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure about that?” Blodget asked.

“Yes, I am. Jorge Ochoa is innocent.”

“It was a DNA match.”

“Yeah, and she was his girlfriend. That was his defense: they had sex that night, he went home, and the killer came next. And now we know that’s what happened. It was Rawls, not Ochoa. The murder weapon was in the box. You have the autopsy report right there in front of you. Blunt force trauma, circular impacts to the skull, one inch in diameter. Those were hammer blows, Vickie. It’s obvious.”

“I know all of that, Renée. That’s not the point. We need linkage to Rawls. Were there any prints on the box? Anything that directly ties it or its contents to him?”

“No, I had it processed. No prints, no fibers, no DNA from Rawls. But remember, he was getting rid of the box. He would have made sure it was clean and not traceable to him. The only flaw in the plan was that we were onto him and Bosch was watching. He didn’t count on that until he saw Bosch and tried to flee.”

“There are just too many holes in it. I can’t take it across the street. Not yet. I need you to get more evidence.”

Blodget’s office was in the Hall of Justice, which was directly across Temple Street from the downtown criminal courthouse, where the elected D.A.’s office was located on the sixteenth floor.

“You said Bosch got into an argument with a resident there,” Blodget said. “Did you talk to this man? Did he see Rawls dump the box?”

“I doubt he had an angle on it,” Ballard said. “But no, we haven’t talked to him. I didn’t think it was necessary when the rest is so obvious.”

“And nothing in property or evidence storage from the case?”

“No. After Ochoa lost his last appeal, there was an evidence disposal order from the court. There is nothing but what you have right there. No crime scene to go back to, no witnesses to show photos of Rawls to. Just the box.”

Blodget nodded and wrote something down.

“Then there’s nothing I can do at the moment,” she said. “I’m sorry, Renée.”

“This is because of the recall, isn’t it?” Ballard said.

The district attorney was facing a recall election because his liberal policies of making it more difficult to send offenders to prison had resulted in a surge in crime stats across Los Angeles County. New directives from the sixteenth floor, which did not require bail for most crimes, prevented prosecutors from adding penalty enhancements for use of guns in the commission of crimes, and deferred prosecution for misdemeanors and even some violent felonies, had created a revolving-door justice system. The media routinely reported on suspects freshly released from jail without bail or without being charged and then committing exactly the same types of crimes — sometimes within hours.

Though the D.A. attempted to blame this on the Covid pandemic and the need to lessen crowding in jails during the crisis, he had lost the support of the law enforcement agencies in the county as well as a significant percentage of the populace. A well-funded recall campaign was underway. A story about the D.A.’s Office putting an innocent man in prison — even though it was long before the current D.A. was elected — was not going to help him keep his job.

“Look, I’m not going to deny the reality of what is happening across the street,” Blodget said. “But I know how this will go. I go over there with this case as it is, and they’ll kill it and Ochoa never gets free.”

“So you’re telling me to wait until after the recall,” Ballard said. “Make Jorge Ochoa wait up there in Corcoran for another six months for something he didn’t do, never mind all the years he’s already spent there.”

“What I’m telling you is that if I take it across the street right now and it gets rejected, then good luck taking it a second time, no matter who is in the corner office on sixteen.”

Ballard nodded and held her tongue. She knew Blodget was not her enemy. The situation was what it was. And she needed to keep Blodget on her side because there would be future cases with issues that would come in wobbling. She would need Blodget then.

Ballard also knew this was not the only place she could take the case. There was an alternate way to free Jorge Ochoa if she wanted to risk it.

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for hearing me out. But I’ll be back with this one when the time and evidence is right.”

“I hope you do bring it to me, Renée,” Blodget said.

Ballard got up to leave.

As she left the Major Crimes Unit, her cheeks grew hot with humiliation as she thought about the meeting earlier that day at the house where Jorge Ochoa grew up. The distrust that Jorge’s brother had voiced about the police and the justice system had just been validated. Ballard had promised to stay in touch with Jorge’s mother and brother, but now she had no idea how she would ever be able to face them again.

Waiting for the elevator, Ballard checked her phone and saw she had no signal. This was not surprising. The Major Crimes Unit was located in the former jail at the top of the Hall of Justice. Though renovated into offices years earlier, the floors and walls were still concrete and reinforced with steel to prevent escape. The structure was notorious for knocking out cell service. It wasn’t until Ballard stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor that her texts and voice mail messages came through. There were several from Maddie Bosch.

There were also two voice mails but Ballard didn’t bother to listen to them, deciding to quickly call back instead as she headed down Spring Street to the PAB. Maddie picked up the call right away and spoke as if they were already in mid-conversation.

“This is weird. After I went back into the house to write my dad a note, I found this envelope in a drawer with my name on it. So I opened it, and it was this long letter to me about how good a person I am and how I’m strong and what a good cop I’ll be. Like stuff he wanted me to know after he’s gone, you know?”

Ballard knew exactly what the note was meant for but didn’t want to make Maddie any more upset than she was.

“Well, Maddie,” she said. “Maybe it was just something he—”

“And then I fucking missed a call from him,” Maddie interjected. “I was so stressed about this note I found and I couldn’t get you, so I went and I worked out at the station, and he called while I was in the shower afterward.”

“Did he leave a message?”

“Yes. He said he was in Key West and he was fine. But it was kind of weird.”

“What do you mean? How was it weird?”

“Well, not like him. He was saying he was fine and he was working a case and that he loved me very much. He just didn’t sound right. He said I was the best thing that ever happened in his life. And then with the note I found... I don’t know. I’m really worried.”

“Do you have the number he called from on your phone?”

“Yes, I called it back as soon as I heard the message. It’s a hotel in Key West, and I asked for Harry Bosch’s room and they put me through. But he didn’t answer. I’ve called three times and he doesn’t answer.”

“What’s the hotel?”

“It’s called the Pier House.”

“Okay, I’m on it, Maddie. I’ll call you back as soon as I know something.”

“And listen, there’s one more thing that adds to the weirdness of what’s going on with him.”

“What?”

“I was looking for paper to write a note on and I opened a drawer in his worktable. That’s where I found the note to me. But there were also some loose pills in there. And the unit I’m on now, we’ve backed up enough narco operations for me to know counterfeit fentanyl when I see it. I don’t know where he got it or why, but he has fucking fentanyl in that drawer.”

It was a confirmation of the information Ballard had gotten earlier at the lab.

“Okay, Maddie, try to stay calm,” Ballard said. “There’s gotta be an explanation for that. And he’ll tell us once we find him. So let’s just calm down until we get to that point.”

“Okay, I’ll try,” Maddie said. “But please find him. And let me know what I can do to help. I mean it.”

“I understand. And I will.”

Ballard disconnected, then immediately did an internet search on her phone for the Key West Police Department. She called the main number, identified herself, and asked for the commanding officer on duty. She told a lieutenant named Burke that she needed an emergency welfare check on a guest at the Pier House. She gave him Bosch’s details and asked for a callback as soon as he was checked on.

Not knowing how long it would take the KWPD to react, Ballard next called the Pier House and talked to the man in charge of the hotel’s security. She explained the situation and asked him to go to Bosch’s room for a welfare check. He in turn explained that their policy did not allow them to force entry into a possibly occupied guest room without the police being present.

“Well, they’re on their way,” Ballard said.

She disconnected and felt useless waiting on word from people three thousand miles away. She opened a search window on her phone and tried to figure out how fast she could get to Key West. Fifteen minutes later, she had just reserved a rental car to go with the red-eye flight to Miami that she had booked when a call came in with a 786 area code.

“It’s Bob Burke, KWPD.”

“Did you check his room?”

“We did, but it was empty. Bosch is not there and there’s no indication of anything amiss. Two shirts on hangers in the closet, a toothbrush, a duffel bag. His wallet is in a drawer next to the bed. One of my guys asked around, and the bartender in the Chart Room said Bosch was in there earlier and had an expensive shot of bourbon. I don’t know if it helps, but the bartender said he was asking about an Irish guy named Davy Byrne. That ring any bells?”

Ballard hesitated. It sounded like Bosch might have located Finbar McShane, or at least the alias he was using.

“Uh, the name isn’t right,” she said. “But he was tracking a suspect in a cold case we’re working out here. The suspect’s Irish.”

“Well, maybe he found him,” Burke said. “But there’s no sign of foul play in his room. I’ll do some digging around here, check with our dayside people to see if they know anything about this.”

“Please do, and call me as soon as you know something. I’m flying out tonight and will be on the ground in Miami at dawn.”

“You got it. And, oh, I nearly forgot this. There was one other thing with the room. There was an envelope on the desk. It was sealed and addressed to someone named Renée. Does that mean—”

“Yes, that’s me. Why would he have a note there for me? I’m in L.A.”

“That I don’t know. Maybe he knew you’d be flying out.”

That suggestion gave Ballard pause. Was Bosch manipulating her from three thousand miles away?

“None of this is adding up,” she said. “Another thing is, why would he go out without his wallet? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It was in a drawer. Maybe he forgot it. Maybe he didn’t want to risk losing it.”

Neither possibility seemed plausible to Ballard. Her anxiety about Bosch was growing.

“Could you go back in and open the envelope addressed to me?” she asked.

“Uh, no, we’re not going to do that without being able to show cause,” Burke said. “Right now, we have no crime and no evidence of a crime. We can’t go beyond the welfare check we already conducted. I’m sure I don’t need to school you on the Fourth Amendment and unlawful search and seizure.”

“You don’t, Lieutenant. It’s just that—”

“I’ll get back to you if I learn anything from our dayside team. Okay, Detective?”

“Okay. Thank you.”

Ballard disconnected and checked the time. Her red-eye was scheduled to take off in four hours. That left enough time for her to track down Sheila Walsh and find out what had sent Bosch to Key West.

52

Bosch sat in the parking lot at Garrison Bight and watched the floating houses in darkness. The full moon above cast a line of undulating yellow reflection on the water, like a pathway to the house with the smiley-face pirate on the roof. He watched the lights inside the houses go out one by one. The house where Davy Byrne lived was the last to go dark.

Bosch watched and waited for another hour, the bourbon from hours earlier still backing up like fire in his throat. He contemplated his plan and the risks involved, knowing that one way or another, there would be justice before dawn for Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and his young son and daughter.

Finally, at 3 a.m., he got out of his car and walked toward the gangway leading down to the floating homes. He was wearing clothes as dark as the sky. His hands were gloved and he carried a screwdriver he had bought at the CVS across Front Street from the Pier House.

The gangway was slick with moisture caused by the night’s dropping temperature. He gripped the handrail and moved down it slowly and carefully, mindful that any misstep would set off a flare of pain in his knee. He was managing it at the moment with a fresh dose of painkillers.

Once he was on the concrete pier, he expected to be exposed by motion-sensitive lights on the houses, but no light flashed on. He suspected that the gentle movement of the floating homes would be a constant trigger and that had led to the banishment of such basic security measures.

When he got to the second house from the end, he crossed the gangway onto the foredeck without hesitation. He stopped there and waited and listened, attempting to determine if his arrival had been noticed.

Nothing happened, and he moved to the side deck that led to the rear of the house. He had brought the screwdriver so he could pop the sliding door on the rear deck and gain entrance, but when he got to the back, he saw that the slider had been left open a foot and that a screen door was the only thing between him and entrance to the house.

The screen door was locked, but he used the screwdriver to easily poke a hole through the screening. Then his fingers tore it wide enough to fit his hand through. He reached in, unlocked the door, and then carefully and quietly slid it open.

He slipped into the home. Stepping out of moonlight, he found complete darkness inside. He waited a few moments for his eyes to adjust. He saw a large flat-screen TV attached to a wall and a couch set against the wall opposite, a low table in front of it. Beyond the room where he stood was a dining room and a pass-through window to a kitchen. The glow from a digital clock on a microwave told him it was now 3:10.

On the right he saw the form of a set of stairs leading to the second level. He took a step toward the stairs but stopped when he heard a voice from behind.

“Don’t fucking move.”

Bosch froze. A light came on behind him. He raised his hands to shoulder height and slowly turned. He dropped the screwdriver down his sleeve as he did so.

A man sat on a stuffed chair in the corner next to the sliding door. Bosch had entered and walked right by him in the dark. The man was holding a gun pointed at Bosch’s chest.

It was Finbar McShane. Bosch easily recognized him from the photos on the BOLO sheet in his back pocket. He had a full beard now that had gone to gray and a shaved scalp that was darkly tanned from days on the open water on the Calamity Jane. He had obviously been waiting in the dark for Bosch.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter who I am,” Bosch said. “Who told you I was coming?”

Bosch hoped it hadn’t been Tommy, the bartender at the Chart Room.

“Nobody had to tell me,” McShane said. “I saw you out there today, trying to look like a tourist in your cop clothes. I know tourists and I know cops.”

“I’m not a cop. Not anymore.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means this is over. There are others and they know I’m here. They’ll follow. You’re done... McShane.”

The use of his real name put a momentary alarm in his eyes, but then it was quickly gone, replaced by the confidence of knowing he had the gun and the upper hand.

“Turn around. All the way around.”

Bosch was wearing black jeans and a maroon dress shirt. He hadn’t planned on working under cover of night when he had packed for the trip. He turned, keeping his hands up, showing he had no weapon. He came all the way around and they were looking at each other again.

“Let’s see your ankles,” McShane said.

Bosch nodded. McShane was playing it smart, not coming close to Bosch, in case he was hiding a weapon. Bosch reached down and pulled the legs of his pants up, careful to keep the screwdriver from falling out of his sleeve. He showed that he wore no ankle holster.

“No weapon,” McShane said. “You came to kill me and you didn’t bring a weapon?”

“I didn’t come to kill you,” Bosch said.

“Then what? Why are you here?”

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Say what, motherfucker? Stop talking in riddles.”

“That you killed the Gallagher family.”

“Jesus Christ... you’re from L.A. Well, you came a long way for nothing, old man. To end up at the end of an anchor chain in forty feet of water.”

“Is that what happened to Henry Jordan and his wife? You wrapped them in chains, put them in the water? How about Dan Cassidy? Is he down there, too?”

Now Bosch saw a momentary look of surprise on McShane’s face.

“Like I said, there are people who know all about you,” Bosch said. “And they’re coming right behind me. This time you don’t get away.”

“Really? You think?”

“I know. So you have a choice. Tell me about the Gallaghers and we go back to L.A. Or you make your move here and try to run.”

McShane laughed.

“Boy, I guess that’s what you call a no-brainer,” he said.

“I doubt you’ll get much further than Marathon,” Bosch said.

“Yeah? Well, you got some balls, old man, I’ll give you that. But I also got news for you, I’m not going back. And what makes you think I’d even try to drive out of here?”

“Because before I came here, I visited your boat. Calamity Jane? It’s not going anywhere with water in its fuel tanks.”

“You’d better be bluffing, you fuck.”

“I guess you could take a plane, but that’s so easily tracked. The Overseas Highway is your only real choice and that’s a long drive. They’ll pick you up before you get to the mainland.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

Bosch didn’t answer. He just stared at the gun, ready for it, ready for the end. McShane stood up, keeping it aimed at his heart.

“So you’re wearing a wire, then? Sent in here to get me to confess? Open your fuckin’ shirt.”

Bosch lowered his right hand and started unbuttoning his shirt.

“No, no wire,” he said, opening his shirt. “Just you and me. I want to hear you say it. Then do what you have to do.”

McShane took a step closer.

“I’ll give you what you want, old man. I’ll tell you. But they will be the last words you ever hear.”

“Were they asleep?”

“What?”

“Emma and Stephen Junior. The kids. Were they asleep when you killed them? Or did they know what was coming?”

“Would that make it better for you? If they were asleep, if they didn’t know.”

“Were they?”

“No, they were on their knees. And they knew what was coming. Just like their parents. What do you think of that?”

McShane’s eyes were bright with the memory, and in his dark pupils Bosch saw an emptiness that was void of all humanity. A deep rage welled up in him as he flashed on photos he had once carried of Emma and Stephen Jr. A primal scream for justice came from the darkest folds of his heart.

McShane seemed to sense what was coming and lurched toward Bosch, raising the barrel of the gun toward his face.

“Turn around. Get up against the fucking wall.”

Bosch was ready for it. He dropped his hands and dipped his shoulders to the right as if about to turn as instructed. But then he took a half step back to his left, dropping the screwdriver out of his sleeve and into his hand.

As McShane came in close, Bosch shot his right hand out to grab the gun and deflect its aim upward. At the same moment, he brought his left arm up and drove the screwdriver into McShane’s ribs.

McShane’s body tensed with the impact and he groaned. Still holding him close, Bosch pulled the screwdriver back and then savagely drove it in a second time, this thrust delivered at a new and upward angle. He threw his full weight into McShane and rode him four feet back and crashing into the wall.

He pinned him there, holding the hand with the gun up and keeping pressure on the screwdriver. He felt McShane’s sticky and warm blood on the hand that gripped the tool.

Leaning into McShane, Bosch was close enough now to feel his last, desperate breaths on his face. He had not killed a man so close since the tunnels of fifty years before. He held McShane’s eyes as he felt the tension and strength in his body weaken and start to ebb away with his life.

McShane’s grip on the gun weakened and finally released. The weapon bounced off Bosch’s shoulder and clattered to the floor. Then McShane started to slide down the wall, his eyes holding a surprised look in them.

Bosch let him go and he dropped into a sitting position, propped against the wall, still pierced by the screwdriver. His blood soon flowed down his body and to the floor.

Bosch kicked the gun across the floor, stepped back, and watched McShane bleed out, his eyes losing their focus and finally staring blankly at nothing at all.

53

The red-eye landed at Miami International at 6 a.m. and Ballard was on the road to Key West within an hour, a large coffee in the cup holder of her rental car. Her biggest concern at the moment was staying alert during the four-hour drive and keeping the rental between the lines on the Overseas Highway. The plane from L.A. had been full and she had booked one of the last seats. She’d been assigned a middle seat in economy and ended up bookended by two men who had no trouble falling asleep and snoring for the whole flight.

She, in turn, didn’t sleep a wink. Instead, she thought about Harry Bosch and what he might be doing so far from home.

Halfway down the archipelago to her destination, she moved out of range from the Miami radio stations and ended up listening to a Florida Keys weather station, which repeated the same news every fifteen minutes. An unusual pre — hurricane season storm had formed off the coast of Africa and was heading toward the Caribbean. The anchor at the weather station in Marathon said they were watching this development closely.

She was less than ten miles from Key West and about to call the KWPD, when her phone buzzed. It was a call from L.A., where it was not yet 8 a.m. She took the call.

“This is Renée Ballard.”

“Mick Haller. You left me a message last night.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Sounds like you’re driving. Can you talk?”

“I can talk. I’m a detective with the LAPD. I’ve worked with Harry Bosch.”

“My brother from another mother. I know who you are, Ballard. Is this about Harry? Is he all right?”

She didn’t want to get into the possibility that Bosch was not all right.

“It’s about a case I think you should take on,” she said.

“A little unusual to get a referral from the police,” Haller said. “But go ahead, talk to me.”

“Let me start by saying this is a nonreferral referral. You can’t say I tipped you to the case.”

“I understand.”

“I need to hear you say it.”

“It’s a nonreferral referral. If I move forward with whatever it is you’re about to tell me, your involvement ends with this call and I will not reveal it to anyone. Good?”

“Good.”

“Then talk to me. I have to get ready for court.”

“Olga Reyes. LAPD case number zero-nine-dash-zero-four-one-eight. You should write it down. She was murdered in 2009. Her boyfriend, Jorge Ochoa, was wrongfully accused and convicted of murder.”

“A habeas case. You know how hard a habeas case is?”

“But you’ve gotten innocent men out. Harry told me.”

“Yeah, once in a blue moon.”

“This is a blue moon, then. Ochoa is innocent, and the LAPD and the D.A.’s Office know it. They’re sitting on it because of the recall election.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Are you still there?” Ballard asked.

“I’m here,” Haller said. “Go on.”

“I run the Open-Unsolved Unit. You heard about the Ted Rawls case?”

“Of course. I also heard it was Harry who was on one side of that gun fight. I’ve left him five messages this week, but he hasn’t called me back.”

“He probably didn’t get them. His phone is still in evidence. Anyway, Ochoa was convicted of killing his girlfriend. It was a slam dunk DNA case. Only he didn’t kill her. Rawls did.”

“So the shorthand is, you found evidence linking Rawls to Olga Reyes and the D.A.’s sitting on it.”

“You’re good.”

“Good and pissed off. This guy Jorge is where now?”

“Corcoran.”

“Okay, what do I subpoena? Who do I subpoena?”

“You subpoena me and all evidence related to the Olga Reyes case. I gave you the number. We found items missing from the Reyes crime scene in a dumpster behind Rawls’s business office. He had just dumped it when he saw that Harry was watching him. The rest you know from the news.”

Haller made a slight whistling sound, then spoke.

“What’s the evidence?”

“Her nightgown and a bracelet Jorge gave her. I went to see his mother and she confirmed the bracelet.”

“That’s how I get into this. I go see the mother, sign her up, and take it from there. Nobody will ever know the tip came from you.”

“I appreciate that. Also, we have the murder weapon, a hammer. Rawls kept it all. You can match the hammer to the autopsy report.”

“You’re putting this on a silver platter for me. You got the mother’s name and address handy?”

“As soon as I’m off the road, I’ll send them to you.”

“Okay, then. I think I’m good to go.”

“Thank you for doing this.”

“A pleasure, Detective Ballard. You’ll be hearing from me, and if I get this into court and put you on the stand, you may regret this phone call.”

“I’m not worried about that. If you treat me as a hostile witness, it will be good cover. But you’ll also be calling Harry Bosch. He worked this with me.”

“I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

After disconnecting, Ballard called the KWPD to arrange for an officer to meet her at the Pier House so she could have the door to Bosch’s room opened by security. She wanted to read the note he had sealed and addressed to her. She believed it would give her insight into where Bosch was and what he was up to.

When she got to the Pier House fifteen minutes later, there was already a KWPD car in the parking lot. Ballard parked next to it and entered the lobby and found two uniformed officers waiting for her with the resort’s head of security. She showed her badge and credentials, and the resort security man, Munoz, said he had a key card to Bosch’s room ready to go. They all walked out a rear door of the lobby and onto a pathway through a maze of lush tropical trees and plants, around a pool, and toward a building containing four floors of rooms.

They squeezed into a small elevator, because the security man said it was closer than the stairs to room 202.

At the door of the room, the security man knocked and leaned his head toward the doorjamb to listen.

“Resort security,” he called out. “Mr. Bosch? Security.”

He waited a few seconds and then knocked again. He pulled a key card from his pocket to unlock the door.

“Security,” he said. “We are opening the door.”

54

Bosch was so deeply asleep that the first knock on the door barely penetrated his dream about the tunnels. He was moving endlessly through a dark and tight space with no beginning and no end.

On the second knock, he opened his eyes. He was on a bed in a strange room. It was dark, the curtains drawn, save for the light from the bathroom. He heard the click from the room’s door. He sat up.

“Don’t shoot!” he called out. “Don’t shoot!”

They opened the door, came in, and walked down the entrance hallway and into the room.

He saw it was Ballard, along with a man in a suit and two uniformed officers.

“Harry,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Renée,” he said. “What are you — you came.”

She didn’t answer him. She turned to the men behind her and held her hands up in a stay-back gesture.

“He’s fine,” she said. “False alarm. Everything’s okay. You can all—”

“Are you sure, ma’am?” the suit said. “He looks confused.”

“You woke me up,” Bosch said. “Yeah, I’m confused.”

He checked his hands and clothes for blood but all were clean. He had fallen asleep in his clothes. His hair was still slightly damp from the shower after the long night’s cleanup.

The older of the two officers pushed past Ballard and entered the bedroom. He turned on the lamp on the bedside table and looked at Bosch, who was now sitting on the side of the bed. Bosch’s feet were bare and he was wearing a clean long-sleeved shirt and pants. He had not packed anything to sleep in.

“Sir, are you all right?” the officer asked.

“I’m fine,” Bosch said. “I’m just not used to people coming into my room in the middle of the night.”

“Sir, it’s almost noon. Have you ingested any drugs or alcohol?”

“No, nothing. I’m fine. I’m just... tired. I stayed up too late.”

“Would you like medical attention?”

“No, I don’t want medical attention.”

“Are you planning to harm yourself or others?”

Bosch forced a laugh and shook his head.

“Are you kidding? No, I have no plans to ‘harm’ anyone, including myself.”

“Okay, sir, we’re going to leave you with your colleague. Is that okay?”

“That’s okay. That would make me happy.”

“Okay, sir, you have a good day.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry for the callout. I’m just a deep sleeper, I guess.”

The officer turned and headed to the door, followed by his partner. He had a radio mike on his shoulder. He turned his mouth toward it and reported to dispatch that they were clearing this scene without incident. The man in the suit followed the officers out.

“Thanks, guys,” Ballard called after them. “Sorry for the false alarm.”

Bosch heard the door shut. He waited for Ballard to speak first.

“Harry, what the fuck?”

“What? What are you doing here?”

“Like them, making sure you’re okay.”

“You flew across the country to make sure I was okay?”

“I think you wanted me to. The Sheila Walsh interview. The call to Maddie. You were leaving bread crumbs.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

Bosch stood up and looked around for his socks and shoes. They were on the floor by a chair in the corner. He walked over, sat down, and started putting them on.

“You found McShane, didn’t you?”

Bosch didn’t answer. He concentrated on the task of tying his shoelaces. He then stood up and pulled the curtain open. He squinted at the harsh sunlight reflecting like cut diamonds off the water and into his eyes.

“Where’s the note you left for me?” Ballard asked.

Bosch looked back at her. She was still standing by the door from the entry hall, like she didn’t want to come all the way into his room.

“What note?” he said.

“This wasn’t the first wellness check on you, Harry. They came in last night. You were gone but your wallet was in the drawer, and there was an envelope with my name on it on the desk. Bread crumbs.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.”

“There’s no note, Renée.”

She was silent and Bosch knew that she had figured out everything.

“Then I guess that means you did find him. What happened?”

Bosch looked back out at the water.

“Let’s just say the case is closed,” he said. “And leave it at that.”

“Harry,” Ballard said. “What did you do?”

“It’s closed. That’s all you need to know. Sometimes...”

“Sometimes what?”

“Sometimes you do the wrong thing for the right reason. And this was that time and this was that case.”

“Oh, Harry...”

Bosch read her disappointment and anguish all in the way she said his name. He still couldn’t turn to face her.

“Would it help you to know I had no choice?” he asked.

“No, not really,” Ballard said. “Whatever happened, however it happened, you put it in play.”

Bosch nodded. He knew that was true.

“Can we just talk about something else?” he said.

“Like what?” Ballard said. “Like about your little blue pills?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The knockoff fentanyl I found in the drawer at your house. That your daughter also found.”

Bosch turned away from the view and looked at her.

“You were in my house?”

“You were missing in action. I was worried. So was Maddie. She found the pills and the note you left for her.”

“Shit, that’s been in there for a long time. Months.”

“Well, she read it and is understandably upset. Add in the pills, and it’s a goodbye note. What’s going on with you, Harry?”

“I’ll talk to Maddie. She wasn’t supposed to find that note for at least a few months.”

“What does that mean?”

Bosch moved over and sat down on the end of the bed.

“Your empath, Colleen? She was right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About the dark aura she thought at first was coming from me.”

“Tell me what that means.”

“I told you about that case I had, where I found the missing cesium.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well, it’s come back around. The pills they were giving me only delayed things. It’s in the marrow now.”

There was a long pause before Ballard reacted.

“I’m sorry, Harry. Are they still treating you?”

“I’ve had some radiation, yeah.”

“What is the prognosis? How long before—”

“I haven’t asked, because I don’t want to know. I keep those pills in the drawer for when it’s time for the end of watch.”

“Harry, you can’t do that. Maddie doesn’t know any of this?”

“No, and I didn’t want her to.”

Bosch looked up and over his shoulder at her.

“Okay,” Ballard said. “But you need to tell her. In fact, we need to call her right now to tell her I found you and you’re okay.”

“We can call her but she doesn’t need to know about this other stuff,” Bosch said. “She’s starting her life and she shouldn’t have to worry about me.”

“This really fucking sucks.”

“It is what it is. I take those pills out of the drawer every morning. Then I put them back at the end of the day. When it’s the right time, I won’t.”

“You can’t do that, Harry.”

“If I don’t, it’s going to get messy. I don’t want that. I want Maddie to have the house and a life without any ghosts.”

“But that’s exactly what you’ll be leaving her. A ghost.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this anymore, Renée. I’ll talk to Maddie when I get back to L.A. Right now, I need to make a call.”

“A call to who?”

“Stephen Gallagher’s sister in Ireland.”

“What will you tell her?”

“Not much. Just that justice is done, and I’ll leave it at that. I think they’re five hours ahead of us over there. I don’t want to wait too long. It should be daylight for her when I call.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m going to drive back to Miami and try to catch a plane home.”

“Will you at least text your daughter and tell her you’re okay?”

“I don’t have a phone. Why don’t you text her and say I’ll talk to her tomorrow. I have to think of what to say.”

“All right, Harry. I’ll do that.”

“Thank you. What about you? You just got here. You want to go back with me?”

Ballard looked past him and out at the water.

“I was thinking of sticking around for sunset,” she said. “They’re supposed to be awesome here.”

Bosch nodded.

“That’s what I hear,” he said.

“Tell me one thing,” Ballard said. “Off the record or whatever way you want to.”

“I’ll try.”

“Did you come here to kill him?”

Bosch was silent for a long time before he answered.

“No,” he finally said. “That wasn’t the plan at all.”