Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (10)

“On a voluntary basis.”

“Well, anything I can do, you know how to get me.”

“I do.”

Bosch stood up and dusted off his pants. He was done here. Orestes reached down and picked one of the flowers.

“Hard to believe something so beautiful can exist in this place,” he said. “And people say there is no God. You ask me, there’s God right there.”

He turned the stem between his fingers, and the flower turned like a pinwheel.

“You know what that is?” Bosch asked.

“Sure,” Orestes said. “This one’s called the desert star.”

Bosch nodded. He wasn’t convinced that it was God on earth, but he liked that.

They started back toward their vehicles.

“What about McShane?” Orestes asked. “He poke his head up somewhere?”

“Not as far as I know,” Bosch said. “But I haven’t started to look again. I will today.”

“What’s ‘on a voluntary basis’ actually mean, Harry?”

“The cold case unit is run by one sworn officer, and the rest are part-timers and volunteers.”

“You know, you always struck me as the kind of guy who would do it even if they didn’t pay you.”

“Yeah, well, I guess so.”

They got to the road and Orestes studied Bosch’s old Cherokee.

“That thing going to make it?” he asked. “I got five gallons of water if you want to top off the radiator.”

“No, I’ll be fine,” Bosch said. “The engine’s solid but the AC not so much. That’s why I came out early.”

“So, let me know how it goes, yeah?”

“I will.”

Orestes started toward his SUV and threw a line over his shoulder.

“I’d sure like to see this one cleared before I’m done,” he said.

“Me, too,” Bosch said. “Me, too.”





6


BALLARD ENTERED THE homicide archive, expecting to find Bosch at his workstation reviewing the Gallagher books. She was excited to update him on her trip to Piper Tech and then to the DNA lab that morning. But there was no Bosch.

Paul Masser, Lou Rawls, and Colleen Hatteras were at their stations and she greeted them. Rawls was in a day before his assigned day. Ballard took this as a sign that he had caught a break on one of the cases he was working or he was just eager to meet the newest team member, Harry Bosch. She decided that it was likely the latter, as his case work moved at a glacial pace with breaks being elusive. In fact, he was the the first official member of the team but had yet to close a case—even a gimme, like a direct DNA case match.

“I thought we were going to meet the new guy you mentioned in the email Sunday,” Masser said.

“We are,” Ballard said. “Or at least we were. Not sure where he is, but he did say he’d be in. So why don’t we start with updates on cases and then we’ll see where we’re at with him.”

Ballard spent the next hour listening as her volunteer crew spoke about their cases and efforts. She was more than their supervisor. As the only full-time sworn officer on the squad, she was not only in charge of the team but also was each member’s individual partner when it came to making decisions that one day might be questioned in court or reviewed by an appeals panel. When cases eventually made their way into the court system, it was likely that she would become the lead investigator and witness for the prosecution.

Lou Rawls went first and fastest, simply reporting that he was still reviewing the cases in the stack Ballard had given him three weeks before and preparing requests for DNA analysis. It was the exact same report he had given the previous week. Since Rawls was the only one on the squad whom Ballard was forced to take on, she felt no hesitation in expressing disappointment in the slow pace of his work.

“Come on, we gotta get these in,” she said at the end of his report. “We all know the lab is backed up. We need to get cases in the pipeline. The department and the city council are not going to wait around forever. This is a results-based unit. Saying we’re waiting on lab results is a lot better than saying we’re working on it.”

“Well, if we made some progress on Sarah Pearlman, I think we’d all feel less pressure,” Rawls countered.

“We are making progress,” Ballard said. “We’ll talk about that later when Bosch is here. Anything else, Lou?”

“No, that’s it from me,” Rawls said.

He sounded annoyed that Ballard had called him out on his report.

“Okay, who wants to go next?” Ballard said, moving on.

“Just a quick one from me,” Masser said. “I have an appointment this afternoon with Vickie Blodget at the D.A. As you all know, she’s the cold case liaison, and I’ll be asking her to sign off on the Robbins and Selwyn cases. Hopefully you’ll have those in your next report to management and council.”

The cases Masser mentioned were DNA cases that led to suspects who were guilty but would never be prosecuted because of extenuating circumstances, such as the suspect being deceased or already serving a life sentence for other crimes. The cases could not be officially classified as solved or closed without the review and approval of the District Attorney’s Office and their designated reviewer. With Vickie Blodget as their go-to, this had become a rubber-stamp process, but it was still a protocol that had to be followed. These cases would be classified as “cleared other” because of the lack of prosecution involved.