Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (62)

Hastings was staring blankly at nothing.

“Are you okay, Nelson?” Ballard asked.

“Yeah,” Hastings said in a flat voice. “I’m just dandy.”

They left him there with his thoughts. Bosch looked around for Rita Ford as they were exiting the house but didn’t see her. It looked like Hastings was on his own for now.





33


THE FIRST THING Ballard did after she and Bosch got back in her city car was call Paul Masser on his cell.

“Paul, I need you to come in,” she said.

“Really?” he said. “It’s Sunday—what’s going on?”

“I need a search warrant and I want it to be ironclad. It can never come back on us in court.”

“And you need this today?”

“I need it ten minutes ago. Can you come in? I’ll have it roughed out for you. I promise, you’ll be in and out.”

“Can’t you just email it to me? I can go over it on my phone?”

“No, I want you at the pod so we can do it together.”

“Uh, okay. Give me an hour and I’ll be there.”

“Thank you. And, Paul, don’t tell anyone on the team that you’re rolling in to work. No one.”

She disconnected before he could ask her what was going on. She started driving down the hill to Sunset.

“You don’t need me for that, right?” Bosch said. “You and Paul will write it up.”

Ballard looked over at him.

“I guess,” she said. “But you’ve written more search warrants than Paul and me combined. Where do you have to go?”

“I was thinking I’d get my car and go sit on Rawls,” Bosch said. “If I can find him.”

Ballard nodded. It was the right move.

“Good idea,” she said. “I can get his home address out of my team files. He also has an office above one of his stores, the first one he opened in Santa Monica. It’s the flagship and he runs all the others from there. You can look that address up. It’s called DGP Mailboxes and More.”

“Got it,” Bosch said. “DGP?”

“I once heard him tell the others in the pod that it stood for Don’t Go Postal, but nobody’s supposed to know that.”

“Nice. Thoughtful. What about his car?”

“I have copies of all the paperwork he filled out when he joined the team, including a description of car and plate number for security at Ahmanson.”

“Good, get that to me, too. Let me out on Sunset and I’ll grab a Lyft back to my place. Save you some driving.”

“You sure?”

“My car’s in the opposite direction of Ahmanson. You need to get there and start writing.”

Ballard had a green light and made the turn from Sunset Plaza onto Sunset Boulevard. She pulled to the curb in front of a real estate office. Bosch paused before getting out as he looked at the glass facade of the business.

“What?” Ballard asked.

“Nothing,” Bosch said. “I worked a case that involved that place when it was a high-end jewelry store. Two brothers were murdered in the back room.”

“Oh, I remember that.”

“That one ended up being about bent cops, too.”

Bosch got out of the city car and looked back in at Ballard before closing the door.

“I’ll call you when I get eyes on Rawls.”

“Roger—I mean, sounds good.”

“That was close.”

“Caught myself.”

“Good luck with the warrant.”

He closed the door, and Ballard pulled back into traffic, drawing a horn from a driver who thought she had cut him off. She checked her rearview and saw Bosch standing on the sidewalk looking at his phone. He was summoning a ride.

An hour later, Ballard was at her workstation at Ahmanson. She was putting the finishing touches on the probable cause statement that would be included in an application for a search warrant allowing her to take a DNA swab from the mouth of Ted Rawls.

Paul Masser arrived. He was wearing shorts and a tucked-in polo shirt.

“Oh, shit, I pulled you off the golf course?” Ballard said.

“Not a big deal,” Masser said. “I was on the seventeenth green at Wilshire when you called. I would have had to walk in from there. So I just played the last hole, took a quick shower, and came directly here.”

He gestured to the golfing outfit he was wearing.

“I got these in the golf shop because I didn’t have anything in my locker to change into.”

“Well, I have the PC statement. I’ll print it and you can start.”

A search warrant was all about the probable cause statement. It had to convince a judge that there was enough legal cause to allow for a search and seizure of a citizen’s property or person. Everything else in a search warrant was largely boilerplate. The judge it was submitted to would likely skip over all of that and go directly to the PC.

“Who’s up today?” Masser asked. “Did you check yet?”

“No,” Ballard asked. “Why don’t you do that while I get this from the printer.”

Masser was inquiring about which judge from the criminal courts division was up on rotation to handle after-hours search warrant requests. This was a key question because judges had particular viewpoints and practices that became known to the trade—the lawyers who appeared before them and the police officers who went to them for search warrant approval. Some judges were fierce defenders of the Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. Others were fierce law-and-order judges who never saw a search warrant application they didn’t like. In addition, they were elected to the bench. While they were charged with wielding their power without personal or political bias, it was a rare judge who didn’t occasionally peek out from under the blindfold at the possible electoral ramifications of a ruling—like whether to allow the state to take a DNA sample from an ex-cop suspected of being a killer.