Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (56)

At 2:31 the green-light text came in from Bosch.

He’s halfway through his cup. You’re good to go.



She put her phone away and immediately rounded the corner onto Hill Street. The open entry to the massive gathering of food and beverage stalls and butcher and produce shops was on the left. Across the street was the lower landing of Angels Flight, the block-long funicular that carried passengers up and down steep Bunker Hill. Ballard could see Hastings at a small stainless-steel table with his back to her approach.

She tapped him on the shoulder.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Airport traffic. Do you want a top-off?”

She had to ask the question even though she was hoping for a no.

“I shouldn’t even be drinking coffee this late in the day,” Hastings said. “It’ll have me up all night.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back,” Ballard said.

There was no line for midafternoon coffee. Ballard quickly ordered a cup of plain black coffee at the counter. As she waited, she casually looked around and saw Bosch at a table by the neon mural on the east wall of the market. He was in Hastings’s blind, even though there was no evidence to suggest Hastings knew who Bosch was.

Coffee in hand, Ballard sat down at the table with Hastings. She noticed that his cup was almost empty. The barista had written “Nelson” on the side of the paper cup, which would make it easy to identify should he throw it in the trash. But like her own cup, it had a corrugated paper sleeve around it. While that would be an impediment to collecting fingerprints from the cup, she anticipated that they would still be able to collect Hastings’s DNA through saliva and epithelial cells.

“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” she said.

“Not a problem,” Hastings said. “So, what’s so important you could only tell me face-to-face?”

Ballard nodded and took a sip of hot coffee to buy some time as she mentally went over the script she had worked out with Bosch.

“As I said, it’s a delicate matter,” she said. “I’m well aware that the Open-Unsolved Unit is in existence only because of Councilman Pearlman and that any perceived hint of scandal could hurt him as well as the unit.”

“What perceived hint of scandal, Detective?” Hastings pressed.

“I talked to Sandy Kramer. And while it was pretty clear that there is no love lost between you two, Kramer is still loyal to Jake Pearlman.”

“Exactly right, no love lost. Why would you talk to that asshole?”

“This is a homicide investigation. It goes where it goes.”

“You talked to him about the girl with the button in her drawer?”

“The woman, yes. Laura Wilson.”

“The woman. Okay, what did Kramer say?”

“Well, when I asked him about Laura and showed him the photo, he said he remembered her.”

“That’s it?”

“No. He said he thought she might have volunteered and that I should ask Jake because he knew her, too.”

Hastings immediately pushed his cup to the side of the table like he was finished with it. And he shook his head.

“No way,” he said. “I would have seen it. I don’t know what he is now, but Kramer was a drunk back then. That was why he eventually had to go when Jake got serious about politics.”

“How can you know for sure?” Ballard asked. “You weren’t there then.”

“I was there, and I’m telling you, there was no Laura Wilson.”

“You told me that the 2005 election was before your time with Pearlman.”

“No, what I said, or at least what I meant, was that it was before my time as chief of staff. I was there back then. I was Jake’s driver. I had just gotten out of the VA and needed to restart my life, and he said he needed a driver. Believe me, if Laura Wilson was part of the campaign, I would have known, because first of all, it was a small operation, and second, she was Black.”

Ballard paused for a moment. She did not recall the exact words of the phone conversation earlier in the week when Hastings used the phrase before my time. But he had just corrected the record and it matched what Kramer had told her. This caused her to go temporarily off script.

“When I talked to the councilman about Laura, he said he didn’t know her,” Ballard said. “But somehow he knew she was Black before I even showed him her photo.”

“That’s because I told him,” Hastings said.

“Okay, and how did you know? I never got around to sending you the photo.”

“I know you didn’t. But I did what any good chief of staff would do. I don’t go into any meeting with my boss without being prepared. You didn’t send me a photo, and so I went online and googled ‘Laura Wilson murder Los Angeles.’ And what came up? A photo of her that ran in the Times. Poor kid finally got famous as a murder victim. There was a whole story on it.”

Ballard had seen the newspaper clipping, including the photo, in the Laura Wilson murder book. Hastings had again talked his way out of one of the inconsistencies that had bred her suspicion. She felt the interview falling apart and Hastings doing the one thing she didn’t want. He was growing suspicious. She tried one more time to put him on the defensive.

“When I asked you if Pearlman had a campaign manager on that first run for office, you said you’d get me the name and contact,” she said. “But you knew right then it was Kramer and didn’t tell me. Why?”