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“Colleen, hold on a second,” Ballard said. “I don’t want tohave 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 waitingfor 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?”
Laffont raised his hand like he was a student in a classroom.
“Tom?” Ballard said.
“What about his home and office?” Laffont asked. “Anything there?”
“Good question,” Ballard said. “Detectives from RHD spent almost all day Monday searching his house, office, and a storage unit he rented. They found nothing of evidentiary value. Most of you probably know he was married and had a young daughter, and it looks like he kept that part of his life separate. Needless to say, they remain in complete shock about all of this. It looks like Rawls kept his souvenirs in his office in Santa Monica and that was why he was there Sunday—to grab them and go. There was also a packed suitcase in the car. He was about to split.”
“Any idea where he was going?” Aghzafi asked.
“Not at the moment,” Ballard said. “There was nothing on his phone, in his pockets, or in the car indicating where he was going. His passport was in his pocket, so possibly Mexico or Canada. We think he was just trying to get out of Dodge after he realized that we were onto him.”
Ballard looked at everyone, expecting more questions.
“If that’s it, let’s get to it,” she said. “The elephant in the room is that Rawls was one of us, and the optics on that are not good. So let’s get on this and see if we can improve those optics by closing more cases. Let’s show them our value.”
Ballard sat back down while the others stood up to go to the interview room. All except Bosch. He waited till the others had filed into the room to look at the souvenirs, then spoke to Ballard from the other side of the wall.
“Keisha Russell was the one who called me a gunslinger at the press conference,” he said. “So I called her on it. I didn’t know she was back in town and back on the cop shop, and then I hear her voice calling me a gunslinger, just to get a rise out of the chief. And then … I let it slip. I said we had a fox in the henhouse because I knew from that press conference what they were going to do. They were going to just sweep that shit under the rug like they always do and … I didn’t think it out, Renée. I should’ve known it would come down on you, and I fucked up. I’m sorry.”
Ballard nodded slightly. Not because Bosch had confirmed what she already knew, but because he had come clean with her and admitted it. The trust she thought was broken was now restored.
“It’s okay, Harry,” she said. “Just go in there and find something that closes a case for us.”
