Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (15)

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

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

“Detective Harry?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

Bosch looked at her for a long moment before responding.

“Why do you think that?” he asked.

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

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

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

“What was it?” Hatteras asked.

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

“Finbar McShane.”

Bosch nodded.

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

“Weird,” Hatteras said.

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

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

“What are you getting now?”

“What do you mean?”

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

Before Hatteras could muster a response, Ballard broke in.

“Harry,” she said.

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

Bosch looked at her and then back at Hatteras.

“I have work to do,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, hold on,” Ballard said.

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

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

“Thanks,” Bosch said.

He got up and leaned over the partition.

“You going to go see her?” she asked.

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

“You okay going alone?”

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

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