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“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 endof 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.”
“He checks it out, sees it’s you, and figures he’s gotta get the hell out of here.”
“Right, so he runs back to his car, turns it around in the alley, and takes off. But he’s still got the other box in the trunk. I pull out of the driveway, cruise by the alley up here, and that’s when I see him, when he’s pulling out down at the other end.”
They walked back to Bosch’s car in silence. Ballard guessed that they were both rethinking the scenario they had just spun, looking for holes in the logic of it.
“It feels like something is off,” Bosch finally said. “Something missing. Why would he use the dumpsters behind his business? It wasn’t smart. There had to be another reason for him coming here.”
“There was,” Ballard said. “I didn’t tell you this, but RHD interviewed the guy who was working in the shop Sunday. He told them that Rawls came in the back door, said hello, and then went right to the safe in the back room that’s used for keeping backup cash for all the shops. The employee said Rawls took all the money. We know from what was in Rawls’s pockets that it was nine hundred dollars.”
“His go money.”
“Right. But the story he told his employee was that he needed the cash to put down on a car he was buying. So he took what was in the safe and then left by the back door.”
“That works. He goes there to get the cash and dump the boxes of souvenirs. He pulls up, pops the trunk, but goes into the store first to get the money. That’s when I drive by and see the trunk open but no sign of Rawls. Then I go around the block and post up in that driveway. Rawls comes out of his store and takes the first box up the alley to the last dumpster, distancing it from his store just in case. But after he dumps it, he hears the guy yelling at me. Rawls checks it out, sees me, and hauls ass back to his car.”
“He makes a U-turn in the alley so you won’t see him leave and goes out the other end. It works, but we’ll never know for sure. Was he going to put the second box in a different dumpster? Why didn’t he carry both boxes to the dumpster at once? We could spin our wheels on this forever.”
“One of the known unknowns,” Bosch said.
“Exactly.”
“So now what?”
Ballard pointed to the box sitting on the city car’s front hood.
“I want to take this back to Ahmanson and go to work on that bracelet,” she said. “And I’ll get the hammer to forensics.”
“I had a hammer case once. It was the murder weapon, and we recovered it from the L.A. River in a spot where there was actual water in the channel. It had been in there for something like thirty-six hours and looked clean as a whistle. But they still found blood in the wood where it connected to the steel head. The victim’s blood. We made the case.”
“So maybe we’ll get lucky with this one and connect it to a victim. Let’s go back.”
She picked up the box and headed to the trunk.
“When we get back to Ahmanson, I’m going to go,” Bosch said.
Ballard popped the trunk and put the box in. She closed it and moved to the driver’s-side door. She looked at Bosch over the roof of the car.
“Go where?” she asked.
