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“Then we run a game on them, too. I have the campaign button. I bring it in, and you hit the roof because I went to Chicago without permission. You’ve already shown that you’re willing to send anybody who fucks up home.”
Ballard paused as she ran a possible scenario through her mind.
“You know, that could work,” she said.
“Wat a minute, Masser knows you sent me,” Bosch said.
“He’s not here. He had to take care of something and left.”
“Then let’s go do it. I want to be on Hastings when he punches out tonight and his weekend starts.”
“There’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“When this started to tumble together with Hastings, I looked him up. Pearlman has a website for his constituents and it has a section on his staff. Photos, mini-biographies, and their scope of duties, all of that. For Hastings, the bio says he’s a disabled vet, and I was thinking about the blood in the urine and the cancer. Kramer told me that when Hastings joined that first campaign, he had just gotten out of the military.”
Bosch thought about this. It could lead to another way to tie Hastings into the case.
“I know a guy at the military archives in St. Louis,” he said. “He can pull his service records and we can see what’s there.”
“So you’ll handle that, too?” Ballard asked.
“I think anything to do with Hastings should be handled away from the pod.”
“Right.”
“What else?”
“That’s it as far as I know.”
“So why don’t you go back to Ahmanson and I’ll comewandering in afterward. I’ll sit here and call St. Louis first. Do we have a DOB for Hastings?”
“I’ll shoot it to you. I pulled it off DMV today because I wanted to know his home address.”
“Did the tuxedo guy say which branch of the military Hastings was in?”
“He said army but that could have just been a general catchall.”
“I’ll tell my contact to start there.”
Ballard was looking down at her phone, pulling up Hastings’s date of birth. After she sent it to Bosch, she looked up through the windshield. She was facing the abandoned mall.
“What’s with this place?” she asked.
“It’s been abandoned for more than twenty years,” Bosch said. “After the aerospace companies moved away from this area and LAX, it fell on hard times. They closed it down and it just sits here empty. They use it to film movies now.”
“Strange—a big empty mall like that.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see you back at Ahmanson.”
“I’ll be there.”
She dropped her car into gear and drove off, cutting across the empty parking lot to the exit.
Bosch pulled his phone and looked among his contacts for the number for Gary McIntyre, an NCIS investigator at the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri. He had made contact with McIntyre on several cases over the years. Bosch knew McIntyre would be willing to help if he was still there.
