The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(25)

Margaret came back into the room with a glass of water. Bosch thanked her and reached into his pocket for a prescription bottle.

“I hope that’s not that oxycodone that’s in the paper all the time,” Margaret said.

“No, nothing that strong,” Bosch said. “Just to help with the swelling.”

“Are you finding anything?”

“In this? Not really. It looks like old records of the people he put in prison. Did he ever say he was afraid that one of them might come looking for him?”

“No, he never said that. I asked him about it a few times but he always said we had nothing to worry about. That the baddest people were never getting out.”

Bosch nodded.

“Probably true,” he said.

“Then I’ll leave you to it,” Margaret said.

After she left the room, Bosch considered the documents in front of him. He decided he wasn’t going to spend two hours looking at every piece of paper from the box. He was confident that the contents were unrelated to Hilton. He started checking through a final sampling of papers just to make sure and came across a copy of a sixty-day summary report on a murder case that he recognized.

The victim was a nineteen-year-old student at Los Angeles City College named Sarah Freelander. She was found raped and stabbed to death in the fall of 1982. She had disappeared somewhere between the school on the east side of the 101 freeway and her apartment on Sierra Vista on the west side of the freeway after attending a night class. Her apartment was thirteen blocks from the school and she commuted by bike. Her roommate reported her missing but she was young and there was no indication of foul play. The report was not taken seriously.

Thompson and Bosch were called in when her body and bike were found beneath a stand of trees that lined the elevated freeway beyond the outfield fence of a ballfield at the Lemon Grove Recreation Center.

The small park ran along Hobart Boulevard on the west side of the freeway and was equidistant from Melrose Avenue to the south and Santa Monica Boulevard to the north, the two streets with freeway underpasses that Sarah likely would have chosen between for her ride home from school. They worked the case hard and Bosch remembered coming to Jack’s home office to get away from the station to discuss ideas and possibilities. John Jack had the internal fire going. Something about the dead girl pierced him and he had promised her parents he would find the killer. That was when Bosch first saw the fierceness his mentor brought to the job and to his search for the truth.

But they never cleared the case. They found a credible witness who saw Sarah on her bike riding toward the Melrose underpass but never were able to pick up her trail on the other side. They keyed on a fellow LACC student who had been rejected a month before when he asked Sarah for a second date. But they never broke him or his alibi, and the case eventually went nowhere. Yet John Jack always carried it with him. Even when their partnership was long over and Bosch would run into him at a retirement party or a training session, John Jack would bring up Sarah Freelander and the disappointment of not finding her killer. He still thought it was the other student.

Bosch put the summary back in the box and used the packing tape from the desk drawer to reseal it. He returned it to its place in the closet and left the room. He found Margaret sitting in the living room staring at the flames of a gas-powered fireplace.

“Margaret, thank you.”

“You didn’t find anything?”

“No, and there’s no other place in the house where he would have kept anything regarding the murder book, right? Anything in the garage?”

“I don’t think so. He kept tools in the garage and fishing poles. But you’re welcome to look.”

Bosch just nodded. He didn’t think there was anything here to find. Ballard might have been right: John Jack hadn’t taken the murder book to work it. There was something else.

“I don’t think I need to,” he said. “I’m going to go but I’ll circle back if anything comes up. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Margaret said. “I just get a little wistful and a little teary at night. I miss him.”

She was all alone. John Jack and Margaret had not had children. John Jack had once told Bosch he could not bring a child into the world he saw as a law officer.

“Of course,” Bosch said. “I understand. If you don’t mind, I’ll check in on you from time to time, see if you need anything.”

“That’s nice, Harry. In a way, you’re the closest we got to having a son. John Jack didn’t want us to have our own. Now I’m left alone.”

Bosch didn’t know what to say to that.

“Well, uh, if you need anything, you call me,” he mumbled. “Day or night. I’ll let myself out and lock the door.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

Back in his car, Bosch sat there and decompressed for a few minutes before calling Ballard to tell her that Thompson’s home office was a dead end.

“Nothing at all?”

“Not even a scratch pad. I think you’re right: he didn’t take the book to work it. He just didn’t want anyone else to work it.”

“But why?”

“That’s the question.”

“So, what are you doing tomorrow? Want to go with me out to Rialto?”

“I can’t. I have court in the morning. I might be able to go later. But what’s in Rialto? That’s a drive.”