Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (79)

“I’m going to open it,” she said. “You run video.”

“Got it,” Bosch said.

Ballard put her gloves back on and squatted down next to the crushed box while Bosch hit the record button on the phone.

Other than having its dimensions—16 x 16 x 6—stamped on its side, it was an unmarked cardboard box that appeared to be a match for the one recovered from Rawls’s BMW that Ballard had carried into the homicide archives that morning. It was unsealed, but the top had been crushed, and this forced Ballard to rip its flaps to get it open. Inside, at the top, was a folded piece of clothing. Ballard leaned back on her heels to make sure Bosch got a clear view with the video.

“It looks like a nightgown,” she said. “Let’s get it out of here before we start looking through it. You can kill the video.”

Bosch did so and handed the phone back to Ballard. She then stood up with the box and handed it over the lip to Bosch.

“I’m going to make sure there’s nothing else in here,” she said.

Bosch took the box over to Ballard’s city car and put it down on the hood.

Ballard spent the next five minutes moving debris around in the dumpster so she could determine that nothing else had been deposited by Rawls. After climbing back over the rim and down the ladder, she helped Bosch throw the debris they had removed back into the bin.

She stripped off her work gloves and put them in the back pockets of her overalls. She then pulled a pair of latex gloves from a front pocket and put them on as she walked to her car. She could tell when she had handed the box out of the dumpster to Bosch that there was something heavy beneath the clothing folded on top.

Bosch followed her to the car.

“You want to go through it here or wait?” he asked.

“I want to take a quick look,” she said. “See what we’ve got.”

She handed her phone back to Bosch so he could record her further examination of the box’s contents. She lifted the item of clothing out and confirmed it was a white flannel long-sleeved nightgown with an embroidered fringe at the collar and cuffs. There was no label inside the neckline and there were no other identifiers. It appeared to be clean. No blood or other stains on it.

Ballard shifted position so she could look down into the box.

“Harry, get this,” she said.

Bosch moved in next to Ballard and focused the camera on the box. At the bottom was a pair of pink slippers that looked like stuffed bunnies with the nose at the point of the big toe. Beneath these Ballard could see part of a wooden handle. Holding the nightgown up with one hand, she reached in with the other and pulled out the bunny slippers. At the bottom of the box was a stainless-steel hammer with a polished wood handle.

They both stared down at it for a long moment without speaking.

“Murder weapon?” Bosch said.

“What I was thinking,” Ballard said. “Maybe. Now we just need to find the case.”

She did not touch the hammer because she knew the handle might hold fingerprints and its steel head and claw could hold DNA. She carefully put the slippers down on top of the hammer in their original position, then with both hands held the nightgown up by its shoulders and folded it lengthwise. When she did this, the right sleeve swung against her and she felt the heft of something more solid than an embroidered cuff.

She ran a hand down the length of the sleeve and closed it around something caught inside the cuff. She worked her fingers inside the cuff and pulled out a bracelet. It was a thick, braided metal band with one charm attached, a painter’s palette with six tiny dots of color along the rim and the word GO engraved at center.

“ID bracelet,” Ballard said. “It probably belonged to a boyfriend and was too big for her wrist. It must have slipped off when she took off the nightgown.”

“Or when someone else took it off her,” Bosch said.

“There’s that. Do you think it’s go or G-O?”

“Is that the engraving? It’s too small for me to make out.”

“Yes, G-O. I wonder what it means.”

“You’ll know that when you connect a case to it.”

Ballard nodded and looked down the alley toward the back door of the DGP store.

“So he parks down there, carries a box up here to the farthest trash bin, and then dumps it,” she said. “But then he leaves the second box with his other souvenirs in the BMW and drives off. Does that make sense?”

“No,” Bosch said. “But I’ve been thinking about that.”

“And?”

“Come over here.”

Bosch walked away from the car and headed toward the end of the alley twenty feet away. Ballard put the nightgown back in the box and placed the bracelet on top of it. She then caught up to Bosch. When they got to the end, he pointed diagonally across 17th Street to a 1950s ranch that was the first residential house behind the Montana shopping district.

“That’s the driveway I backed into after I saw Rawls’s car in the alley,” he said. “His car was pointed east, so I thought that when he left, he would come out this way and I’d see him and then follow.”

“That’s where Mrs. Kravitz confronted you?” Ballard asked.

“Yeah. I was looking this way at the alley when the guy came up alongside me, banged his fist on the roof of my car, and started giving me what for. It was a distraction and I took my eyes off the alley to deal with it. He was kind of loud because he was king of the castle and didn’t want me there. So I was thinking … maybe Rawls took the one box down to the dumpster and then he heard the dustup out in the street.”