Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (103)

They stood in front of the rocks, Bosch holding the box with two hands. A dry wind was coming down out of the north, gently moving the petals on the flowers at their feet. Ballard started with an easy question.

“How’d things go with Maddie?”

Bosch seemed to consider an answer for a while before speaking.

“We talked and she now knows what’s going on with me. She’s not happy that I kept it from her, but I think she understands why I did. She said she wanted to move back home to take care of me but I said no. She’s got her own life to live. I just hope I don’t become a distraction that makes her lose focus on the job.”

Ballard nodded.

“She’s a good cop,” she said. “I think she’ll be fine.”

Bosch offered nothing else. Ballard squatted and picked one of the small white flowers. Holding the stem between her thumb and forefinger, she spun it like a pinwheel.

“Why did McShane pick this spot?” she asked. “Was it random?”

“Probably,” Bosch said. “But we’ll never know. One of the known unknowns, I guess.”

“I thought maybe he would have told you.”

Bosch turned his eyes from the rocks to look down at her.

“No, he didn’t,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” Ballard said. “Did he own up to any of it?”

She stood up next to him and he nodded.

“Yeah. All of it. He told me he did it.”

“Under duress?”

Bosch scoffed.

“He had the gun, not me.”

Ballard understood now how it had gone down.

“You know what I think? I think you went there to trade yourself for that confession. You left your bread crumbs and were willing to sacrifice yourself if it meant someone would be able to follow and take him to ground. That we’d get him for you, if not for everything before. But then something happened … and you changed your mind.”

Bosch maintained a silent vigil for almost a minute. Then he nodded toward the two shortest towers of rock.

“They were awake and … aware … when he killed them. Those two kids. It was the question I always carried, and that haunted me more than him getting away with it.”

He stopped there, but Ballard said nothing.

“It’s an angry world,” Bosch said. “People do things you’d never expect. That they’d never expect themselves.”

Ballard nodded.

“I get it.”

“No. I hope you never get it.”

Silence followed. Ballard looked around, checking the distant ridgeline and the salt flats and then bringing her eyes back to the flowers at her feet.

“It’s so easy to forget that there’s great beauty in the desert,” she said.

Bosch nodded.

“And these flowers, they’re amazing,” Ballard said.

“Desert star,” Bosch said. “I know a guy, says they’re a sign of god in this fucked-up world. That they’re relentless and resilient against the heat and the cold, against everything that wants to stop them.”

Ballard nodded.

“Like you,” Bosch added.

Ballard looked at him. He said nothing else. It took her a moment to find her voice.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said. “For telling me the truth.”

They stood silently for a long moment before he spoke again.

“You know I’m not coming back to the unit, right?”

“Yes, I know.”

He opened the top of the wooden box and stepped closer to the rock sculptures. He reached in and took a handful of the gray dust. He held his hand out and let it fall through his fingers. He did it three more times and then he turned the box over and let the rest pour out, a gust of wind taking much of it away and across the land.

“Ashes to ashes,” he said. “Isn’t that what they say?”

He then closed the box, turned, and started walking back to the car.

“I’m ready,” he said.

Ballard followed.

They got in the car and drove off, back to the city.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


The author wishes to thank many for their help and contributions to this novel. They include Asya Muchnick, Emad Akhtar, Bill Massey, Pamela Marshall, Mitzi Roberts, Rick Jackson, Tim Marcia, David Lambkin, Dennis Wojciechowski, Jane Davis, Heather Rizzo, Henrik Bastin, Linda Connelly, Paul Connelly, Terrill Lee Lankford, Shannon Byrne, and William Ahmanson. Any factual shortcuts or mistakes in the politics, procedures, forensics, nephrology, geography, botany, and investigative genetic genealogy are strictly the fault of the author.