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He had opened his door and tumbled out onto the ground. Blood was running down the side of his head, and at the time, he thought he had been more seriously injured than he was. Limping on the injured leg and not being sure of what he had left in his clip, he moved cautiously around his car and came up on the front from the passenger side. He saw Rawls dead on the ground, and he thought he had killed him.
“The FID guys didn’t tell me that,” he said.
“Well, that’s what they told me,” Ballard said.
Bosch went silent and stared out the window as Ballard drove. After a while, she got concerned.
“You doing okay, Harry?” she asked. “Don’t get sick in my car.”
“I won’t,” Bosch said. “I was thinking about that shop and the others Rawls had.”
“What about them?”
“We know he started his business after he left the cops and got a new kidney and a new lease on life, right?”
“Right.”
“So, why that business? What did it have to do with what he was really doing?”
“You think it helped him in some way? Maybe finding victims?”
“I don’t know, but we should look at it. People rent those private mailboxes and most of them are legit, but I would bet some of them aren’t. A lot of them do it because they have secret lives or at least compartmentalized lives. You want to have a place where you can get some things sent to you privately. Stuff you don’t want sent to your home because your wife or your husband might see it.”
“And he had access to all of it,” Ballard said.
“That was what I was thinking. He was on the other side of that wall of private boxes and he could sort of see everybody’s business. I don’t know if that helped him in his own secret life of targeting women, and I guess it’s another thing we’ll never know because he’s dead.”
“I think we’ll find that out when we start identifying other victims. And from what I know, I’m not too upset he’s dead. I know people will think, he got away with it for so long—where’s the justice in that? But I think there are untold lives out there that are now saved.”
“I guess so.”
“It’s not a guess, Harry. It’s the truth.”
They were on Lincoln now, and the intersection where the shooting had gone down was barricaded by traffic control officers. Bosch could see that the green Cherokee had been put on a flatbed for towing to a police yard. As far as he knew, his phone was still in it somewhere.
They were waved by traffic control officers onto a side street and never got close enough for Bosch to see what else was happening inside the orange barricades. Ballard kept driving.
“Have you talked to the councilman yet?” Bosch asked.
“I talked to Hastings,” Ballard said, “so he’d know what’s going on. But I don’t want to talk to Pearlman until we have a dead-bang DNA match to Rawls. Same thing with Laura Wilson’s mother. I’ll go by the coroner’s office in the morning, pick up blood and prints, then go to the lab. Darcy Troy will be standing by to jump on the blood. I don’t really have a go-to in latents, so we’ll see what happens there.”
“And what about the brass? You going to get blamed for having this guy on the Open-Unsolved team?”
“Hell, no. If they try to blame me, I have the emails from Hastings telling me in no uncertain terms to put Rawls on the squad. I’m not worried about that. I’m more worried about you, Harry.”
“Me? Why?”
“I brought you on to the team and, what? In barely a week, you already got shot up and dinged up, plus your car’s wrecked.”
“It’s not wrecked. That thing’s a tank.”
“Well, I hope somebody can find a new windshield somewhere.”
“There are plenty of parts out there.”
“Then, good. I like you in that car, Harry. Like a square peg in a round-hole world.”
Bosch thought about that for a little bit, then told Ballard his plan.
