Desert Star Page 4

  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.

  The DNA match in the Robbins case led to a man who had died in prison in Colorado, where he had been serving a life sentence for another murder. The Selwyn case was also a DNA match but the suspect was still alive. He was seventy-three years old and on death row at San Quentin. He was never going to see freedom. Though Ballard had gone up to San Quentin to interview him and get a confession, the killer denied his involvement. Since his DNA had been found inside the body of his thirteen-year-old victim, Ballard was undeterred. She had no doubt he was the killer, and she was asking the D.A. to file charges but defer the prosecution. It was the most efficient way to proceed, given that the killer would never get off death row—at least not alive. This decision was agreed to by the family of the victim, who were not interested in rehashing the horrible death of their loved one forty-one years later.

  “As soon as Blodget signs off, I want the families informed,” Ballard said. “Will you handle that, Paul?”

  “Gladly,” Masser said. “I have the contacts in the files.”

  Even though on the face of it, the perpetrators of these crimes had escaped true justice, Ballard had found that those calls to the victims’ loved ones were still very much needed. To give final answers to the mystery and pain that had in many cases accompanied a family for decades was the noble calling of the unit. Ballard had told the people on her team that this was their mandate and duty and not to be taken lightly.

  “Okay,” Ballard said, again moving on. “Colleen, where are we with Cortez?”

  “Still working social,” Hatteras said. “Growing the tree. Getting close.”

  Ballard nodded. Hatteras was working a genealogy case—a 1986 rape and murder with DNA extracted from swabs in the rape kit for which no match was found in the state and national databases. The next step was submitting the evidence to genealogy databases and attempting to identify relatives of the original DNA depositor. Hatteras called this process “watering the tree” and so far this had led to a young woman living in Las Vegas who Hatteras believed might be a distant relative of the killer. Before reaching out directly to the woman, Hatteras was now engaged in the social media sleuthing that would help grow the family tree, leading her from branch to branch and eventually to the identity of a suspect.

  “When do you expect to make direct contact with the descendant?” Ballard asked.

  “By the end of the week,” Hatteras said. “You get me a ticket to Vegas and I’ll go connect the dots.”

  “When you’re ready, I’ll put in the request,” Ballard said.

  She then started to end the meeting.

  “Okay, everybody, good work,” she said. “Keep at it and remember to give me your hours. Even though you’re not getting paid for your work, we need to track hours for the bosses. They love knowing how much they’re getting for free.”

  “So that’s it?” Rawls said. “We have to wait for the new guy to come in to get the download on this new lead the lab’s got on Pearlman?”

  The question revealed that Rawls had already heard from Nelson Hastings, Councilman Pearlman’s chief of staff, whom Ballard had updated during her drive in from downtown. On the call, she had only told Hastings there was a new lead on the Pearlman case but couldn’t discuss it until she had results from the lab. She was tempted now to give a response that would lay out Rawls as a direct and unauthorized conduit to the councilman’s office. But she decided to hold back on that confrontation and wait for a better time.

  “Well, it’s a wait-and-see situation,” she said. “But thanks to some out-of-the-box thinking by our newest team member, we have a pretty solid genetic lead. This morning down at the Piper Tech print archives, I pulled a card containing the partial palm print believed since day one to have been left by the suspect. I took it to the lab, and they pulled back the tape, swabbed the print, and got DNA. Not a lot but enough to send through the databases. Hopefully we get lucky.”

  “Wow,” Masser said. “Be great if it hits.”

  Ballard’s attention was drawn past Masser to the aisle next to the case shelves. Harry Bosch was walking toward the pod. He was wearing dusty blue jeans, lace-up work boots, and a denim shirt with perspiration stains under the arms.

  “And speak of the devil,” Ballard said.

  7

  Bosch approached the cold case pod with the eyes of four people, three of whom he didn’t know, cast upon him.

  “Harry,” Ballard said. “I was just updating the team on Pearlman. They got DNA off the palm print and we put a rush on matching. We should know yea or nay on a match by the end of the week.”

  “That’s good,” Bosch said.

  He held up a hand to the strangers in the pod he had not yet met.

  “Hey, everybody,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” Ballard said. “This is Harry Bosch.”

  As Bosch moved to his workstation, Ballard went around the pod, introducing Masser, Rawls, and Hatteras. Masser and Rawls nodded to him, while Hatteras stood and extended her hand over the privacy partition to shake his. She held it after the shake for an awkward two seconds like she was trying to get some sort of read off him, then released it. This prompted Rawls to stand and extend a hand.

  “That was smart thinking on the palm print,” he said.

  “Oh, I bet somebody here would have thought of it,” Bosch said.

  “The councilman will be impressed,” Rawls said.

  “Well,” Ballard said, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves till we see where the matching goes.” r />
  Bosch remembered that Rawls was the one Ballard hadn’t chosen for the team. He quietly sat down at his station, and Rawls and Hatteras did the same as Ballard continued.

  “So, we were sort of having a team meeting, Harry,” she said. “What I like to do is talk about the cases we’re all working, because we all come from different places and departments and agencies, and I think it’s good to put everything on the table. You never know where a good idea might come from. Like you with the palm print.”

  “Okay,” Bosch said.

  He felt uncomfortable with all eyes still on him. It felt like he was about to get called on in class and hadn’t done the homework.

  “So,” Ballard said, “I know you haven’t started yet on the Gallagher case, but why don’t you give a general summary of the earlier investigation and your thoughts on where you might want to go with it.”

  “Uh, okay,” Bosch said hesitantly. “I guess, first of all, I don’t call it the Gallagher case. I call it the Gallagher Family case because it’s a quadruple killing, a whole family: mother, father, nine-year-old daughter, and thirteen-year-old son.”

  “How awful,” Hatteras said.

  “Yeah, it gets pretty bad,” Bosch said. “It takes a certain kind of killer to take out a whole family like that.”

  Bosch paused for a moment to see if there were any other comments, then continued.

  “The Gallaghers lived in the Valley—sort of on the border between Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys. And it was thought at first that their disappearance was voluntary. None of the neighbors saw them go, but once it was established that they were gone, it was thought that they just up and left because of business and financial issues. You know, pulled up stakes and just split.”

  “A family business?” Masser asked.

  “Not really,” Bosch said. “Mr. Gallagher—Stephen Gallagher—was an industrial contractor. He had a couple of pretty big warehouses and an equipment yard up on San Fernando Road in Sylmar, and he rented out cranes and hydraulic lifts and all kinds of equipment used in heavy construction. One of the warehouses was just for scaffolding and that sort of stuff.”

  “And then they were found dead,” Hatteras said. “I remember this now. Out in the desert. And that’s where you’ve been this morning.”

  Bosch looked at her for a moment and then nodded.

  “Yeah, a year later they were found. A geologist from Cal State Northridge and his students were up there in the Mojave on some kind of climate change study and they found the boy’s body. What was left of it. The grave had been disturbed by animals. Coyotes or whatever. That led to all four being discovered and eventually identified as the Gallaghers. They used dental records—the boy, Stephen Jr., had braces.”

  “So wouldn’t it be a San Bernardino County case?” Masser asked.

  “Actually, the location was Inyo County and it was a joint investigation,” Bosch said. “I was on the first Open-Unsolved Unit back then, and we got the case because it was believed that after a year, the trail was cold. I was the lead. I worked it pretty hard but never broke it open. Then I retired and the case basically went on a shelf…

  “But now I’m back and on it again. And, yes, I went up there this morning.”

  Bosch looked at Ballard to see if he had said enough.

  “Why did you go up there?” she asked.

  He knew that she already knew the answer. He didn’t like being put on the spot like this—discussing or justifying his moves.

  “I just thought it was the place to start,” he said. “To try to get momentum going again. While I was there, the investigator I worked with from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department showed up. There’s been nothing happening on it from their end either.”

  “Can you tell us about Finbar McShane?” Ballard asked. “The more the group knows, the more we might be in a position to have ideas.”

  “Stephen Gallagher was born in Ireland,” Bosch said. “Dublin. He met an American woman visiting from L.A.—Jennifer Clarke—and they came back here and eventually married and he started his business. So then at some point he hired another Irish guy, named Finbar McShane. He was from Belfast in Northern Ireland and it was never established if they knew each other previously. McShane wasn’t a partner but he was running the business with Stephen. After the Gallaghers disappear, McShane keeps the business going and piece by piece he starts selling off the equipment. To make this short, a year later the bodies that were never supposed to be found are discovered. And guess what? McShane is gone and the warehouses and the equipment yard are empty. It was a classic bust-out operation.”

  “What’s that mean?” Hatteras asked. “A ‘bust-out’?”

  “It’s like a scheme,” Bosch said. “A con in which you hollow out a business by ordering products and selling them and basically selling everything until there’s nothing left and it collapses, leaving all your suppliers unpaid and on the hook for the losses.”

  “You ever watch The Sopranos?” Rawls asked. “Great show. They did it all the time.”

  “So McShane is your suspect,” Masser said, attempting to get back to Bosch’s story. “Any estimate on how much selling all the equipment brought in?”

  “We were able to track the sales,” Bosch said. “It was just over eight hundred thousand.”

  “Four lives for eight hundred K,” Rawls said.

  “If he did it,” Hatteras said.

  “Tell them about the letter,” Ballard said.

  “We got a letter addressed to the LAPD, supposedly from him,” Bosch said. “He claimed he was innocent and that he left because he didn’t want to be falsely accused.”

  “Postmark?” Hatteras asked.

  “It was local,” Bosch said. “We put flags on his passport. If he left the country and got back to Belfast or anywhere else, then he did it without his passport.”

  “I think he’s still here,” Hatteras said. “I can feel it.”

  Bosch looked at her, then turned his eyes to Ballard.

  “Talk about the evidence,” Ballard said. “How were they killed?”

  “They were executed,” Bosch said. “With a nail gun from one of Gallagher’s warehouses. It was in the grave with them. And there was evidence that the grave had been dug with an excavator.”

  “What the heck is an excavator?” Masser asked.

  “It’s got two wheels and it can be towed on the back of a pickup,” Bosch said. “I’ve got a picture here somewhere I can show you. The point is, the grave wasn’t dug with a shovel. It was too precise, and it was clear that some solid rock had been split by something with more force than a shovel or a pickax. The grave was close enough to the paved road up there that he could have backed in there with the excavator and used it to get in and out pretty quickly. And one of the first machines McShane sold after the family disappeared was an excavator. We can prove that.”

  Bosch pulled open one of the murder books on his desk and started leafing through it, looking for the photo of the excavator. He spoke as he searched.

  “We were able to trace that sale, and the buyer let us examine the excavator. There was still a piece of rock lodged in one of the tire treads that matched the creosote at the gravesite.”

  “All four were in one grave?” Rawls asked.

  “Yes,” Bosch said. “It would have been the fastest way to do it. The hole was about six by four and then four feet deep. The parents were dropped in first, then the children on top of them. Along with the nail gun.”

  He found a brochure from Shamrock Industrial Rentals that showed the excavator in question. He handed it over the partition to Masser.

  “But that was the only link we ever made to McShane, and it wasn’t enough for an arrest warrant,” Bosch said.

  “You went to the D.A. with this?” Masser asked. “I would have been tempted to file.”

  “I did, and I guess I wish I’d come to you,” Bosch said. “The filing deputy I brought it to said he wanted more. McShane selling the excavator was no
t proof he used it to bury the family. There were holes in the linkage. The equipment yard was unguarded at night. Someone could have used Stephen Gallagher’s keys to open the yard and take the excavator for the night.”

  “That’s a hell of a stretch,” Masser said.

  “I felt the same,” Bosch said. “But I didn’t get to make the call. I was told to get more evidence…and I didn’t. So plan B was to find McShane, stick him in a room, and get him to cop-out. But that never happened and he’s still in the wind. That’s where it stands.”

  Finished with his summary, Bosch waited for more questions and suggestions from the others. There was only silence until finally Hatteras asked, “Do you still have the original letter McShane wrote expressing his innocence?” she asked.

  “We do,” Bosch said. “It’s handwritten on letterhead from the company.”

  “I meant, do you have it there, or is it in evidence archives?” Hatteras said. “I’d like to see the original.”

  “It’s here,” Bosch said.

  He opened the thickest murder book because he knew it contained the plastic sleeves holding the photos from the case. The letter was sealed in one of the sleeves. He opened the binder’s rings, slipped out the sleeve with the McShane letter, and handed it to Hatteras.

  She looked at it for a moment, holding the sleeve at the edges with two hands.

  “Can I take it out?” she asked.

  “Why?” Bosch asked. “It’s evidence.”

  “I want to hold it,” Hatteras said.

  “It was processed back then, right?” Ballard said.

  “Yes,” Bosch said. “No prints, but the signature was matched to McShane’s. He sent it.”

  “I mean, she can take it out,” Ballard said. “It’s been processed.”

  “I guess,” Bosch said. “Whatever.”

  He watched Hatteras open the sleeve and slip the document out. She then held it the same way with two hands, no gloves. But she wasn’t reading it. Bosch saw that her eyes were closed.

  Bosch turned to Ballard, a puzzled look on his face. Before either could speak, Hatteras did.