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“Good,” Ballard said. “See you Monday, then. They’ll have a pass for you at the front desk and then we’ll get you an ID card. They’ll have to take your photo and prints.”
“Is that desk near a window?”
Bosch smiled when he said it. Ballard didn’t.
“Don’t press your luck,” Ballard said.
2
BALLARD WAS AT her desk, writing a DNA budget proposal, when her phone buzzed. It was the officer at the front.
“I got a guy here, says he was supposed to have a pass waiting. Heron—Her—I can’t say it. Last name is Bosch.”
“Sorry, I forgot to set that up. Give him a visitor pass and send him back. He’s going to be working here, so we’ll have to make him an ID later. And it’s Hieronymus. Rhymes withanonymous.”
“Okay, sending him back.”
Ballard put the phone down and got up to receive Bosch at the front door of the archive, knowing that he would be annoyed with the front-desk snafu. When she got there and opened the door, Bosch was standing six feet back, looking above her head at the wall over the door. She smiled.
“What do you think?” she said. “I had them paint that.”
She stepped out into the hallway so she could turn and look up at the words above the door.
OPEN-UNSOLVED UNIT
Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts
Bosch shook his head.Everybody counts or nobody countswas the philosophy he always brought to homicide work, but it was also his personal philosophy. It wasn’t a slogan and especially not one he liked seeing painted on a wall. It was something you felt and knew inside. Not something advertised, not something that could even be taught.
“Come on, we need something,” Ballard said. “A motto. A code. I want some esprit de corps in this unit. We are going to kick ass.”
Bosch didn’t respond.
“Let’s just go in and get you settled,” Ballard said.
She led the way around a reception counter that fronted the rows of library shelving containing the murder books organized by year and case number. They moved down the aisle to the left of the shelves to the official work area of the reconstituted Open-Unsolved Unit. This was a collection of seven workstations connected by shared partition walls, three on each side and one at the end.
Two of the stations were occupied, the heads of the investigators just cresting the top of the privacy partitions. Ballard stopped at the cubicle at the end of the pod.
“I’m here,” she said. “And I’ve got you set up right here.”
She pointed to a cubicle that shared a partial wall with hers, and Bosch moved around to it. Ballard stepped all the way into hers and folded her arms on the partition so she could look down at his desk. She had already stacked murder books in two separate piles, one big and one small, on the work surface.
“The big pile is Gallagher—I’m sure you recognize that.”
“And this?”
Bosch was opening the top binder in the smaller two-book pile.
“That’s the catch,” Ballard said. “It’s Sarah Pearlman. I want you to start with a review of that.”
“The councilman’s sister,” Bosch said. “You didn’t already look at this?”
“I did, and it looks pretty hopeless. But I want your take on it—before I go back to the councilman with the bad news.”
Bosch nodded.
“I’ll take a look,” he said.
