Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (63)

Ballard came back from the printer and handed Masser the two-page PC statement just as he was hanging up his desk phone.

“Judge Canterbury is up,” he said. “And that is not good. He’s very strict on search and seizure.”

“I’ve heard,” Ballard said. “I might have another way to go.”

Most detectives worked on establishing a relationship with a go-to judge whom they could count on to be sympathetic when it came to questions of probable cause. It was a form of judge shopping, but it was practiced widely. Ballard, from her years on the midnight shift at Hollywood Division, had woken more than a few judges up in the middle of the night to get a search warrant signed. She had a few names on her contact list that she could call if she and Masser didn’t want to go to Judge Canterbury.

Ballard pointed to the document now in Masser’s hands.

“You’re going to be upset by what you read,” she said. “And I don’t want you repeating any of it to anybody. Clear?”

“Yes, clear,” Masser said. “Now I can’t wait.”

She left him at his workstation and went back to hers. While Masser was going through the PC document, she opened one of the original murder books from the Pearlman case and started leafing through the transcripts from the interviews conducted by the original detectives. Her memory was correct. There were apparently no interviews with Nelson Hastings or Ted Rawls. And this carried through to the original lab reports. Neither one of them had ever had their palm print compared to that found on the windowsill in Sarah Pearlman’s bedroom.

This was a serious flaw in the original investigation. Hastings and Rawls were close friends of Jake Pearlman’s and were acquainted with his sister. They should have been interviewed and printed—as Kramer had been. The fact that they weren’t interviewed contradicted what had appeared to Ballard to be a tight and thorough investigation. Since the ODs on the case were no longer available, Ballard felt there was only one person she could talk to for clarification of this issue.

She called Nelson Hastings.

“Did you arrest him?” he asked immediately.

“No, and we’re not there yet,” Ballard said. “We are proceeding carefully.”

“Then, what do you need from me?” Hastings asked.

“I’m reviewing interview transcripts from the original investigation. There is no interview with you or Ted Rawls. I don’t understand that. You were Jake’s friends and I assume you both knew Sarah. Do you remember this? Why didn’t they interview you?”

“I was out of town with my parents when the murder happened,” Hastings said. “They talked to my parents and confirmed it, so they never talked to me. And Ted wasn’t around then.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he was around, but he wasn’t as tight as Jake, Kramer, and I were. He was sort of the new guy. It was our senior year and we were all about to graduate. We had gotten our college acceptance letters and the three of us got into UCLA. Then that summer, we heard Ted got in, too, so we kind of started including him in stuff. We took him under our wing because we’d be going to college together. Only that didn’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, I changed my mind, joined the army, and never went to UCLA. And neither did Ted. Something happened and he ended up going to Santa Monica Community College, and then he joined the cops out there.”

“Could it have been a lie about getting into UCLA? He only said he got in so he could get close to you guys?”

“I don’t know, maybe. You mean like he glommed on to us so he’d hear stuff about Sarah and the investigation? That’s sick.”

“It’s possible. But at the time of the murder, he wasn’t close enough to Jake that the detectives would want to talk to him?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Did he know Sarah?”

“He could have. She went to an all-girls school, so she’d come to our dances and events to meet boys. Jake would bring her. So Ted could have known her, or at least known who she was, from that.”

Ballard noticed that Masser was now standing next to her. She saw that he had red-lined her probable cause statement. She held a finger up, indicating she was almost finished with her call.

“I have one more question,” Ballard said. “In ’05, Rawls was a cop in Santa Monica. He wasn’t part of the Pearlman campaign, was he?”

There was another silence before Hastings answered.

“You’re thinking about the campaign button,” Hastings said. “The answer is yes. He was a volunteer. Kramer recruited him. He’d work his shift for Santa Monica and then come meet us at Greenblatt’s, where we would gather all the volunteers before going out to canvass. He did that several times. Knocked on doors.”

“So he could conceivably have knocked on Laura Wilson’s door and given her the button,” Ballard said.

It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” Hastings said.

“Thanks for your time,” Ballard said. “I’ll be in touch.”

She disconnected and held out her hand to Masser for the document.

“You don’t have it, Renée,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She looked at the printout. He had drawn a red box around the statement of facts in support of the search.