Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (47)

Bosch could tell by her urgent tone that Ballard was flying on adrenaline. He was beginning to feel the charge, too.

“What do you think, Harry?” Ballard asked. “What are the moves?”

“Simple. We get his DNA,” Bosch said. “That’s what you’re thinking, right? If the DNA matches, game over. Handcuffs.”

Ballard nodded.

“We do it on the down-low,” she said. “Surreptitious collection. We can’t let anybody know about this. Rawls is a leak right back to Hastings, and the more people who know, the more things that can go wrong. That’s why I wanted to meet you off-site.”

“Got it,” Bosch said.

They both were silent for a long moment until Bosch spoke again.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“You’ll do what?” Ballard asked.

“Follow Hastings and get his DNA.”

“By yourself?”

“You can’t do it. You have to run the unit and Hastings knows you. He doesn’t know me. I wasn’t there for the surprise visit. I’ll watch him and make the collection. If it’s a match, we run a game on him. We bring him in for an update on the case and get him on record saying he didn’t know Wilson and had never been to her apartment.”

“Good. That sounds right. How do I explain you not being at the pod working the case? When you stop showing up, the others will ask me.”

“Then we run a game on them, too. I have the campaign button. I bring it in, and you hit the roof because I went to Chicago without permission. You’ve already shown that you’re willing to send anybody who fucks up home.”

Ballard paused as she ran a possible scenario through her mind.

“You know, that could work,” she said.

“Wat a minute, Masser knows you sent me,” Bosch said.

“He’s not here. He had to take care of something and left.”

“Then let’s go do it. I want to be on Hastings when he punches out tonight and his weekend starts.”

“There’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“When this started to tumble together with Hastings, I looked him up. Pearlman has a website for his constituents and it has a section on his staff. Photos, mini-biographies, and their scope of duties, all of that. For Hastings, the bio says he’s a disabled vet, and I was thinking about the blood in the urine and the cancer. Kramer told me that when Hastings joined that first campaign, he had just gotten out of the military.”

Bosch thought about this. It could lead to another way to tie Hastings into the case.

“I know a guy at the military archives in St. Louis,” he said. “He can pull his service records and we can see what’s there.”

“So you’ll handle that, too?” Ballard asked.

“I think anything to do with Hastings should be handled away from the pod.”

“Right.”

“What else?”

“That’s it as far as I know.”

“So why don’t you go back to Ahmanson and I’ll come wandering in afterward. I’ll sit here and call St. Louis first. Do we have a DOB for Hastings?”

“I’ll shoot it to you. I pulled it off DMV today because I wanted to know his home address.”

“Did the tuxedo guy say which branch of the military Hastings was in?”

“He said army but that could have just been a general catchall.”

“I’ll tell my contact to start there.”

Ballard was looking down at her phone, pulling up Hastings’s date of birth. After she sent it to Bosch, she looked up through the windshield. She was facing the abandoned mall.

“What’s with this place?” she asked.

“It’s been abandoned for more than twenty years,” Bosch said. “After the aerospace companies moved away from this area and LAX, it fell on hard times. They closed it down and it just sits here empty. They use it to film movies now.”

“Strange—a big empty mall like that.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll see you back at Ahmanson.”

“I’ll be there.”

She dropped her car into gear and drove off, cutting across the empty parking lot to the exit.

Bosch pulled his phone and looked among his contacts for the number for Gary McIntyre, an NCIS investigator at the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri. He had made contact with McIntyre on several cases over the years. Bosch knew McIntyre would be willing to help if he was still there.

The call was answered by a female voice.

“I was calling Gary McIntyre,” he said.

“Gary’s not here anymore,” the woman said. “This is Investigator Henic. How can I help you?”

“This is Harry Bosch, Los Angeles Police Department. I usually deal with Gary. I need to get the service package for a suspect we have out here in a double homicide investigation.”

“Gary’s been gone a long time. What was your name again?”

“Harry Bosch.”

“Let me see if he’s got your name in the contacts he left me.”

“It should be there.”

Bosch heard typing on a keyboard, then a few moments of silence before Henic reported her findings.