Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (76)

“You really think they’d shut the thing down because of Rawls?”

“You and I have both seen worse decisions made. That’s why you can forget about Gallagher for now.”

“What do you mean?”

Ballard picked up the box again and turned toward the door.

“Rawls is still priority one,” she said. “If we connect him to other cases and start clearing them, then maybe they won’t cut us. And if they try, maybe somebody will leak that to Keisha Russell. Then they’ll look bad and have to back the fuck off.”

Ballard walked out of the room, leaving Bosch there. She had no doubt that he was behind the story in the Times. When she didn’t recognize the name of the reporter that Hastings yelled over the phone at 6 a.m., she did a search on the Times website of Russell’s prior stories and saw that in the nineties she covered the cop shop. Several of her stories were about cases worked by a detective named Harry Bosch. She was annoyed with Bosch. Not so much for what he did—she had to acknowledge that getting the full story out there was something the department should have done in the first place. She just wished he had come to her first and they had planned it together. On top of that, she wished he had owned up to his part in the story. It showed that he did not trust her as much as she had thought.

She took the box to the interview room. It was more than an hour before the other investigators started to trickle into their stations in the pod. By then, Ballard was at hers and Bosch was at his, keeping his head down, even though Ballard knew he was there. Colleen Hatteras was the first of the others to report for work, and she immediately started peppering Ballard and Bosch with questions about Rawls, the shooting, and other aspects of the case. She, too, mentioned the Times story, but her questions mostly came because this was the first time she had seen Ballard and Bosch since the shootout on Sunday. Bosch had been off and Ballard had borrowed a desk at PAB and worked from there Monday and Tuesday so that she could be easily reached by the FID investigators as well as by the media relations people and command staff.

“Colleen, hold on a second,” Ballard said. “I don’t want to have to answer the same questions four times as the others come in. So let’s wait for everybody to get here and then I’ll tell everyone what I know and what I want everybody to be working on this week. Okay?”

“Okay,” Hatteras said. “I get it. But I just want to go on the record and say, I got a bad vibe from Ted Rawls. I didn’t want to say anything before, because he was a colleague. But I felt it when he was here—a super dark aura. I have to admit, I thought it might be coming from Harry, but now I know. It was definitely Ted.”

“Thank god,” Bosch said. “Such a relief to know my aura isn’t super dark.”

Ballard heard Bosch say it but couldn’t see him because of the privacy wall. She leaned down over her desk so Hatteras wouldn’t be able to see her smiling at the rejoinder. Then she got serious.

“Um, you know something, Colleen?” she said. “I’m going to have to write up an after-action report on Rawls and this whole thing. So, I don’t want you to stop with the IGG stuff. Keep working it and see if you can further establish genealogical links. If we can show the value of that in this case, I think it will go a long way with command staff.”

“On it, boss,” Hatteras said. “And now that we know the family tree has Rawls on the L.A. branch, I can start working it back the other way.”

“That’s good, Colleen. Let me know when you have it all together.”

“Roger that.”

Ballard rolled her eyes. Those two words were becoming her biggest pet peeve.

By eight thirty, Masser, Laffont, and Aghzafi were all in place at the pod and Ballard stood up so everyone could see her.

“Okay, guys, listen up,” she began. “First off, I appreciate you all coming in on short notice because I need the whole team on this. We are not finished with what is now known as the Ted Rawls case. When he took his own life Sunday—in fact, one reason he probably did so—there was a box in the trunk of his car. We recovered it and it contains personal items that may have come from other victims. I’m talking about jewelry, hairbrushes, makeup compacts, little statuettes and knickknacks—all kinds of things.”

“Souvenirs,” Hatteras said, stating the obvious.

“Yes, souvenirs,” Ballard said. “And I want all of us to see what we can do to possibly connect these items to other victims. All we know for sure is that he killed Sarah Pearlman in ’94 and Laura Wilson in ’05. That’s a big gap. And it’s a big gap between ’05 and Sunday, when Rawls, thanks to Harry Bosch, was put out of commission.”

“Hear! Hear!” Masser said.

He stood up and raised a hand over the privacy wall, offering Bosch a high five. Bosch obliged, though it appeared to Ballard to be a reluctant and half-hearted effort.

“I’ve spread these items out on the table in the interview room,” Ballard continued. “I want us to go in there, look them over, maybe pick a piece or two, and go to work. I know it is a long shot, but let’s see if we can possibly match some of this property to some cases.”

She pointed to the archive shelves where all the unsolved cases were kept.

“We all know that there are lots of families out there waiting for answers,” Ballard said. “You all might have a different view, but I would focus on those years between Pearlman and Wilson. We know Rawls got sick after Wilson—he got a kidney transplant—and it may have put him out of the killing business. But I think he was probably active during the years between those two kills. I’ve invited Councilman Pearlman to come here to look at the items in case he can identify something belonging to his sister, but I don’t know if he’ll take me up on that. Meantime, I bagged everything individually yesterday after the lab took swabs and looked for prints. What you have on the table are items that yielded no forensic follow-up. Any questions?”