Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (20)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have news. Call me when you’re clear.



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

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

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

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





11


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who told you that?” Ballard asked.

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

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

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