Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (22)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, on Gallagher.”

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

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

“What’s the name?”

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

“Jonathan Boatman, DOB July 1, ’87.”

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

“Who is he?” she asked.

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

“And you never ran him before?”

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

“And what makes you think he didn’t?”

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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