AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He’s not a traveler.”
“He’s still here.”
Bosch nodded.
“Most likely,” he said.
After eating, they left the restaurant and walked down to Tamarind Avenue. They turned right and walked up the street, which was lined on both sides by two-story postwar apartment buildings with names like the Capri and the Royale. Ballard located Laura Wilson’s apartment building—the Warwick—halfway up the block on the east side.
She and Bosch stood side by side and looked silently at the facade of the structure. It was a Streamline Moderne design andpainted in shades of aqua and cream. It looked aerodynamic and safe. There was no hint of the violence that had occurred there so many years before.
Ballard pointed up at the windows on the left side of the second floor.
“Her place was second floor at the front,” she said. “That corner.”
Bosch just nodded.
“I’m going to put everybody on the team on this tomorrow,” Ballard said. “We need to get this guy.”
Bosch nodded again.
“You okay putting McShane on hold for a bit?” Ballard asked.
“No,” Bosch said. “But I’ll do it.”
12
FROM HIS POD, Bosch watched Ballard rally the team into focusing on the Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson cases. She had told him the night before at Birds that she planned to call in everyone but Rawls because she didn’t want him leaking everything they were doing to Nelson Hastings. Instead, she would text Rawls and tell him to take the day off if he still needed time to put out the fire at his business. Based on what she knew of his work ethic as an investigator, Ballard predicted the response from Rawls would be a thumbs-up emoji and he would not show up. So far she had been right.
Ballard gave assignments to each investigator in the pod, hoping that with many fresh eyes, they would break new ground in terms of finding the nexus where the two victims crossed paths with the same killer. The two young women were separated by age, race, financial status, and experience but somewhere in their lives there was a connection. Ballard put Bosch on crime scene review, while others on the team were assigned to review statements from family, friends, and witnesses. Tom Laffont would handle the medical lead. It did not seem that the original detectives had pursued the potential angle of investigation that the blood in the urine gave them. Blood in the urine was anindication of possible kidney or bladder disease that was either being treated or would reach a point that it needed to be treated.
“It also means our suspect might be dead,” Laffont cautioned.
“That may be the case,” Ballard said. “But we still need to identify him and clear these cases. I don’t have to remind you all that Councilman Pearlman is our patron saint on the city council. If we can get answers as to what happened to his sister, we’re going to be able to keep this unit alive for years to come.”
While Bosch didn’t like the political machinations inherent in the case, he wholly understood a family’s need for answers. It had taken him more than thirty years to get answers about his own mother’s killing when he was a boy. The answers did not provide closure but there was a resolution to his efforts. In that regard he fully understood what Jake Pearlman was looking for and needed. The fact that he was wielding his political power to get it was understandable. If he’d had that kind of juice, Bosch would have done the same in his mother’s case. Instead, he had used the power of his badge.
Ballard had come in early and made individual packages of copies pertaining to each investigator’s assignment. She handed them out at the end of the meeting, including giving Harry an inch-thick printout containing copies of the forensic reports and crime scene photos from the Wilson case.
Before starting in on the assignment, Bosch wanted to do something that had nagged at him since interviewing Sheila Walsh. He had been awake most of the night with thoughts that he had blown the Gallagher Family case by missing something about the break-in at her home.
Once Ballard was sitting down again at her station, Bosch got up and came around to the end of the pod.
“I need to run a name for criminal history,” he said. “Can you do it?”
“On the Wilson case?” she asked. “Already?”
“No, on Gallagher.”
“Harry, I want you working on Wilson and Pearlman. I thought we agreed on this last night, and I just finished telling everybody how important it is to us.”
“I’m going to start on it today, but I stayed up all night thinking about this, so I just want to put it in motion and see what I’ve got to come back to after Wilson. Okay?”
“What’s the name?”
Bosch was holding the fingerprints report from the Sheila Walsh break-in. Ballard opened up the portal to the National Crime Information Center database and he read the name he wanted checked for a criminal record.
“Jonathan Boatman, DOB July 1, ’87.”
