The Dark Hours (Harry Bosch #23)(29)

“You want to run it by me, since your partner is gone?” Bosch asked.

“What, are you like my favorite uncle that I never had?” Ballard asked. “Are you going to give me a dollar bill for candy when I leave?”

“Uh …”

“I’m sorry, Harry. I don’t mean — I’m just out of sorts with Lisa. I’m mad at myself for letting her skate like that.”

“That’s okay. I get it.”

“Can I still use your Wi-Fi?”

She opened her laptop and Bosch walked her through connecting to the Internet. His password to the Wi-Fi account was his old badge number, 2997. Ballard pulled up a blank copy of the Lambkin survey and sent it to Cindy Carpenter, getting her email off the report Black had sent her. She hoped Carpenter wouldn’t ignore it.

“You know what will teach your partner a lesson?” Bosch said. “Bagging these assholes before she gets back.”

“That’s highly unlikely. These guys … they’re good. And they just changed the game.”

“Tell me how.”

Ballard spent the next twenty minutes updating Bosch on the case, all the while thinking she should be updating Lisa Moore in such detail. When she was finished, Bosch had the same conclusion and opinion as Ballard. The investigation needed to shift. They had been wrong about the Midnight Men and how they acquired their victims. It was not the neighborhood that was chosen first. It was the victims. They were picked and then followed to their neighborhoods and homes. All three women had crossed the perpetrators’ radar somewhere else.

Ballard now had to find that crossing point.

“I just sent the latest victim a Lambkin questionnaire,” Ballard said. “I hope to get it back tomorrow or Sunday. I have to talk the first two victims into doing it, because Lisa thought it was too much to ask of them at the time. The first rape was back at Thanksgiving and I doubt the victim will have as good a memory now as she would’ve if she’d been asked to do it in the first place.”

“Now I’m getting annoyed with this Lisa,” Bosch said. “That was lazy. Are you going to send it to the other two now?”

“No, I want to call and talk to them first. I’ll do that after I leave here. Did you know Lambkin when he was in the department?”

“Yeah, we worked some cases. He knew what he was doing when it came to assaults like this.”

“Is he still in town?”

“No, I heard he retired out of state and has never come back. Somewhere up north.”

“Well, we still use the cross-referencing survey with his name on it. I guess that’s some kind of legacy. You want what I’ve got on Javier Raffa?”

“If you’re willing to share.”

“You have a printer?”

“Down here.”

Bosch reached down to one of the bottom shelves of the bookcase behind his chair. He brought up a boxlike printer that looked like it might have been put into service in the previous century.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ballard said.

“What — this?” Bosch responded. “I don’t do a lot of printing. But it works.”

“Yeah, probably five pages a minute. Luckily I don’t have much to share. Give me the connector thing and plug it in. You have paper?”

“Yes, I have paper.”

He handed her the connector to her laptop. While he plugged the printer in and loaded paper, she pulled up the case file on her screen and started sending the documents she had put together on her last shift into the print queue. She wasn’t wrong. The printer was slow.

“See, I told you it works,” Bosch said. “Why do I need a fancy-ass printer?”

He seemed proud of his techno-stubbornness.

“Maybe because I’d like to get to work sometime tonight,” Ballard said. “I still haven’t even looked at the stuff from your case.”

Bosch ignored her and took the first two pages — the only two pages so far — out of the printer’s tray. Ballard had sent him the two-page incident report first, followed by the Investigative Chronology, witness statements, and the crime scene map. She wasn’t sure what he could do with it all but the chrono was most important because it contained step-by-step summaries of the moves Ballard had made through the night. Though she didn’t hold out any hope of being able to keep the case much longer, she knew that if Bosch could come up with a line of investigation that led from the Raffa case back to his old case, the killing of Albert Lee, then she might have something to bargain with when the powers that be came to take Raffa from her.

She waited patiently for the pages to print but she was feeling anxious about not getting to the station and showing her face, let alone tackling the work that was waiting for her on the Midnight Men cases.

“You want something to drink? I could brew some coffee,” Bosch said. “This could take a while.”

“Will the coffee be faster than this printer?” Ballard asked.

“Probably.”

“Sure. I could use some caffeine.”

Bosch got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Ballard stared at the decrepit printer and shook her head.

“After you came by here this morning, you didn’t get any sleep, did you?” Bosch called from the kitchen.