Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (30)

“Gloves don’t work.”

“What?”

“I need to be able to feel her.”

“Put it back in the box. Now.”

Hatteras did as instructed.

“Go back to your workstation,” Ballard ordered.

Hatteras sullenly stepped back from Ballard’s station. She turned and went back to her own.

Ballard threw a glance at Bosch. She looked as upset as he had ever seen her. He moved to his workstation, checked the red tape on the boxes from the Gallagher Family case, and saw that they had not been tampered with. He sat down but noticed that Ballard was still too agitated to sit down.

“Colleen, I want you to go home,” she said.

“What?” Hatteras said. “I’m right in the middle of the ancestry search on this.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to see you anymore today. You need to go and I need to think about this.”

“Think about what?”

“I told you this morning I didn’t want to go down that road, but you went there anyway. This is a team, but I’m in charge of the team, and you directly ignored my order.”

“I didn’t think it was an order.”

“It was. So, go. Now.”

Ballard dropped out of Bosch’s sight as she sat down. He couldn’t see Hatteras but heard her open and sharply close a desk drawer and then roughly pull a zipper closed on what he assumed was a purse. She then popped up into view and headed toward the exit. Ballard said nothing as she passed the end of the pod.

Hatteras was halfway to the aisle that led to the exit when she pirouetted and came back toward Ballard.

“For what it’s worth, he’s close,” she said. “Her killer is very close.”

“Yeah, you said that about McShane, too,” Ballard said. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

“I didn’t say McShane was close. This is so typical.”

“Just go home, Colleen. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Hatteras pirouetted again and headed to the exit. Once she was gone, Ballard sat up straight in her seat so she could look over the partition at Bosch.

“What do I do about her?” she asked.

Bosch shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how valuable the heritage stuff she does is.”

“Very valuable,” Ballard said.

“Can you get anybody else? What about Lilia?”

“Colleen knows it like the back of her hand. But this psychic shit is a problem. Did she open your boxes?”

“No, they’re safe.”

“This is heading toward a bad end. This whole being-in-charge thing is a pain. I just want to follow cases.”

“I get it.”

She slumped down out of sight but before long she stood up again.

“I have to get out of here, Harry,” she said. “I’m going up to the Valley and I need a partner.”

Bosch stood up, ready to go.





17


THEY TOOK BALLARD’S city ride and were all the way onto the 405 North before Bosch asked what they were doing.

“I made a case list at lunch and there’s an interview I want to cross off,” Ballard said. “Due diligence as much as anything and now’s as good a time as any. I needed to get out of there.”

“Cool,” Bosch said. “Who’s the interview?”

“A guy named Adam Beecher. He and Laura Wilson were in the same theater group out in Burbank. Back then, the ODs leaned on the theater director, a guy named Harmon Harris, because they heard he and Wilson had an affair a year before her death. They thought maybe there was bad blood between them. Harris denied the affair and they dropped it when he offered up Beecher as an alibi.”

She knew that Bosch would know that OD was cold case lingo for original detective.

“Beecher confirmed he was with him the night of the crime,” he said.

“Right,” Ballard said. “And I would’ve left it there but I happened to google these guys at lunch, and it turns out that a few years back, Harmon Harris got #MeToo’d out of the business. It was part of an L.A. Times series on the entertainment business. The sexual assault and harassment complaints about Harris came from both men and women. I guess he was a real Hollywood player, and that kind of scratches the I’m-innocent-because-I’m-gay angle.”

“Right.”

“The Times story also reported through anonymous sources that Harris would extort closeted gay actors who came through his classes and theater. He would threaten to derail their careers by spreading word around that they were gay.”

“So you’re thinking maybe the alibi confirmation was extorted from Beecher. Does Harris still run the theater?”

“No, he’s dead. Car accident last year—a month after he was exposed. He hit an abutment on the one-oh-one.”

“Suicide?”

“Most likely. Anyway, like I said, I hope I’m just checking this off a list. I don’t want a ‘cleared other.’ I don’t want to tell Jake Pearlman that we found the killer but he’s beyond the reach of earthly law.”

“I get that. What about the ODs on Wilson? Have you talked to them yet? I saw in the Pearlman chrono that the originals on that case are dead.”