Desert Star Page 6

  A summary statement from the lead investigator told the story. The victim was murdered in her home, where she lived alone. The crime scene investigators noticed that the toilet seat in the bathroom off the bedroom was up, indicating that a man had used it. While checking the toilet seat and flush handle for fingerprints, a criminalist noticed urine droplets on the rim of the bowl. These drops were reddish brown in color, indicating the possibility of blood cells in the urine. The droplets were collected on swabs, and DNA extraction was conducted the same day because of the fear of possible DNA decay. A partial profile was established and then entered into the CODIS database, drawing no matches.

  The summary went on to state that further analysis and medical consultation by investigators determined that the urine had come from someone who had kidney or bladder disease, causing hematuria, the medical term for blood in the urine.

  Ballard was excited by what she had read and eager to see whether the investigators used the confirmation of kidney disease as an angle of investigation. Had they looked for a suspect among men being treated for kidney disease? She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out two empty binders. She removed all the documents and plastic sleeves from the original murder book, split the stack, and slipped each half onto the rings of a new binder. She then got up and went to the kitchen to get coffee before she settled in to read the case’s investigative chronology.

  Laura Wilson was a young African American woman trying to make it as an actress and living alone in an apartment paid for by her parents back in Chicago. She had moved out to L.A. two years before her death and was in the midst of a promise to herself and her supporters to make it and become self-supporting within five years or to turn around and go home. She was taking acting lessons and routinely auditioning for small parts in films and television shows. She had also joined an acting troupe that worked out of a twenty-seat theater in Burbank. Her apartment was on Tamarind Avenue near the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin. Wilson had joined the organization and was taking classes, also paid for by her parents, in hopes that she would make connections that would help her in the entertainment business.

  She had been found murdered on Saturday morning, November 5, 2005, by a friend she was supposed to go with to a Scientology seminar. The friend found the door to her apartment ajar, entered, and found the victim dead in her bed. Cause of death was determined to be manual strangulation—a silk scarf was knotted around her neck. The body was mutilated postmortem.

  “What is that?”

  Ballard had been so immersed in her reading that she had not noticed that Rawls had come around the pod and was looking over her shoulder.

  “The DNA we got on the Pearlman case was linked to this one from ’05,” she said.

  “Wow, interesting,” Rawls said.

  Ballard closed the binder and swiveled her chair so she could look up at him.

  “What’s up, Lou?” she asked.

  “I’m taking off,” Rawls said. “I gotta put out a fire at my store in Encino. Angry customer says we lost a package containing a priceless antiquity.”

  “That’s gotta hurt. You coming back later this week?”

  “Not sure. I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you when I see you.”

  Rawls walked off and Ballard immediately turned back to the binder, her mind already deeply embedded in the murder of Laura Wilson.

  10

  Bosch recognized Sheila Walsh’s house from the last time he had knocked on the door years before. She answered quickly but clearly didn’t remember him. He was older and grayer and maybe his eyes weren’t as sharp as that last time, but after a long moment, she was able to place him, if not remember his name. She smiled.

  “Detective,” she said. “This is a surprise.”

  “Mrs. Walsh,” Bosch said. “I was hoping you’d remember me.”

  “Don’t be silly, of course I do. And it’s Sheila. Has there been a break in the case?”

  “Can I come in so we can talk?”

  “Yes, yes. Come in, please.”

  Walsh stepped back and let Bosch enter. She looked the same as Bosch remembered her. Now pushing sixty, she had more wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but she was still an attractive woman who looked like she ate about one meal a week. Her thin body, narrow shoulders, and big hair had not changed at all, confirming Bosch’s suspicions back in the day that it was a wig.

  “Can I get you a coffee or a water or something?” she asked.

  “No, I’m fine,” Bosch said. “But we can sit in the kitchen if you want. I remember that was where we sat before.”

  “Sure, let’s go back.”

  She led him through a dining room—which was clearly being used as an office—to a kitchen that had a small round breakfast table with four chairs.

  “Have a seat,” Walsh said. “Has Finbar McShane finally turned up?”

  “Uh, no,” Bosch said. “In fact, that was going to be my first question to you. Have you heard any word about him recently? Anything at all?”

  “Oh, no. If I had, I would have called you. But I thought you told me you were retiring the last time I saw you.”

  “I was. I did. But now I’m back working cold cases and so…I’m looking into the Gallagher Family case again. And trying to find McShane.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, if you ask me, he’s back in Belfast or somewhere over there.”

  “Yeah, that’s the consensus, but I’m not so sure.”

  Bosch looked past her and through a sliding door to the backyard. There was a deck and a small in-ground pool back there. A vegetable garden in long wooden planters had screened canopies over them to keep deer and coyotes and other animals out. The house was in Chatsworth, in the northwest corner of the Valley, and the wildlife came down out of the nearby hills at night. Beyond the planters he could see the rock outcroppings of Stony Point Park in the distance.

  “I get stuck thinking about the break-in you had three years after the murders,” Bosch said. “It puzzles me. What was he looking for here?”

  “Well, that’s a mystery that will last until you find him,” Walsh said. “Because I’m just as baffled as you are. I didn’t have anything of his. I didn’t know anything about the case beyond what I told the police.”

  Bosch reached into the inside pocket of the sport coat he had put on after showering in the locker room at Ahmanson. He pulled out a document, unfolded it, and looked it over before speaking.

  “This is the incident report,” he said. “Written before the fingerprints were identified as McShane’s. Says the burglar ate food out of the refrigerator, took a box of old record albums, then lifted money and an iPhone out of your purse.”

  “That’s right,” Walsh said.

  “Rifled through the desk in the home office and moved the paperweight—a glass Waterford globe—and looked through your mail.”

  “Right, but not a desk. I use my dining room table as a desk. And I had the paperweight on my pile of to-do stuff. Bills and mail. At the time, I was learning to be an online travel agent. You know, after Shamrock was gone, I had to do something. So I had documents and cruise brochures in the stack, too. Stuff I needed for online training.”

  “Why would McShane be interested in that?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. But he would not have known what was in that pile until he checked it, right?”

  Bosch nodded and looked back at the incident report. It was a question among many that had nagged him about the case. What was McShane looking for?

  “It’s the only place his prints were found,” he said. “There were his, your son’s, and yours. That’s it.”

  “I remember that,” Walsh said. “I remember I also had that theory I told the officers about back then.”

  “Which was?”

  “You know, the paperweight was Waterford glass. It’s made in Ireland. He was from Ireland. Maybe he picked it up because of that.”

 
Bosch nodded as he thought about that theory.

  “Right, that’s in the report,” he said. “But Waterford is in Ireland and McShane was from Northern Ireland. And if he knew it was Waterford or it had some kind of nostalgic value to him, why didn’t he take it?”

  “Well…I don’t know,” Walsh said. “Maybe only he knows.”

  “Maybe.…So, how’s your son doing?”

  “He’s good. He moved out to Santa Clarita, works at a golf course up there.”

  “Good. Is he an instructor or—”

  “No, he doesn’t even play golf. Thinks it’s too boring. But he likes the outdoors. He’s a greenskeeper at Sand Canyon. It’s a good job. Early to work and he gets off before the traffic builds up.”

  Bosch nodded and decided to end the small talk.

  “Mrs. Walsh, I appreciate your time, especially with me showing up out of the blue,” he said. “But I would really like to go back to the year of the murders and pick your brain again about what was happening with the business and in the office between Stephen Gallagher and Finbar McShane. Do you mind? Can you give me a few more minutes?”

  “If you think it will help,” Walsh said. “But my memory of it is probably not what it was back then.”

  “That’s okay. It’s sort of funny, because sometimes after a good chunk of time goes by, people remember some things they didn’t mention before and forget some of the things they said. So it helps to sift through everything again. I think that family, especially those two kids, deserves it.”

  “Of course they do. That’s why I’m willing to help. I think about those kids all the time. Horrible.”

  “Thank you. I want to go back to the period before the murders, when it seemed that there was a strain in the relationship between Gallagher and McShane. I remember you told me that there had been arguments between them.”

  “Yes, there were. But it was always behind closed doors. You know, I could hear raised voices but not always what exactly was being said. Like that.”

  “How frequent were the arguments?”

  “Well, for a while it seemed like every day.”

  “But the company—according to the books we looked at—was doing well, right? Before the Gallaghers disappeared, I mean.”

  “It was. We were busy all the time. I know that one of the things Fin wanted was to hire more people and, you know, expand. Maybe open another yard and fill it with equipment. He said more inventory would mean more business.”

  “But Stephen didn’t want to expand.”

  “No, he was very conservative. He built the company from nothing. So he was cautious, and Fin always wanted to do more. They argued, but Stephen owned the business and had final say. Who would have thought it would lead to what happened? Those poor, poor kids. I mean, if it was a business dispute, why did they have to be killed like that?”

  They were going over well-trod ground, but Bosch needed to walk the case again to get his footing. He questioned Walsh for another half hour, and she never complained or tried to cut it short. She also provided nothing new in terms of significant case information. But her story of the final days of Shamrock Industrial Rentals had not changed in the years since Bosch had last heard it, and there was a significance to that.

  He finished the interview with questions about the months after the disappearance of the Gallagher family when she and McShane attempted to keep the business afloat while they ostensibly waited for the family and the business owner to return. She once again said she had not known that McShane was running ads on Craigslist and selling off equipment rather than renting it out. That is, until he, too, disappeared, leaving the company with a virtually empty warehouse and equipment yard.

  “He tricked me like he tricked everybody,” she said. “We were used to having the scaffolding and the cranes and all the equipment gone for long periods of time because they were used in long-term projects. I had no idea the stuff was never coming back because he sold it.”

  “What do you remember about the day McShane disappeared?” Bosch asked.

  “It was more like days. He didn’t show up one day and then he called and said he was sick. He said he’d probably be out a couple days.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  “No, a couple days went by and he was still a no-show, and I had a customer come in who was having an issue with a JLG lift he said Fin sold him. He said Fin gave him a warranty and he wanted it fixed. That’s when I found out he was selling stuff. I called his number and the line was dead. Disconnected. I got suspicious, checked the bank accounts, and found they were empty. He took everything and disappeared.”

  “You called the police.”

  “I called the missing persons guy that I had called when the family disappeared and he said he would look into it. And then those bodies were found up there in the desert and you took over the case. Did you ever find out where he transferred the money to?”

  Bosch shook his head. He didn’t like being the one answering questions, but this one he answered.

  “It was converted to cryptocurrency,” he said. “Bitcoin was pretty new back then but we couldn’t trace it after that. It was gone.”

  “Too bad,” Walsh said.

  “Yeah, too bad. So, I’m going to leave you alone now. Thank you for your time. If you have a piece of paper, I’ll leave you my cell number in case you think of anything else. I don’t have business cards.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sometimes a conversation like this can spark new memories.”

  Walsh got up from the table and opened a drawer below the kitchen counter. She took out a pad and pen and Bosch gave her the number.

  “You think you’ll catch him this time?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m hoping we do. It’s why I came back.”

  “‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’”

  “MLK, right? Let’s hope he was right.”

  Bosch left the house and Walsh closed the door. Bosch paused on the front step. Back when Bosch was a young detective going through two packs of smokes a day while working in the Homicide Special unit downtown, he had a routine he’d follow when he left someone’s home after an interview. You never knew how an unanticipated visit from a police detective would affect a witness or suspect. He would stand just outside the front door and take out his cigarettes. He would then light up a smoke with a lighter that was always slow to spark. And he would turn slightly as if to block the wind, but he was really turning an ear toward the door. He would listen in hopes of hearing words spoken inside after his departure. On more than one occasion he picked up tense, sometimes angry voices. One time he even heard someone inside say, “He knows we did it!”

  It had now been decades since his last smoke. Instead of a pack of cigarettes, he pulled out his phone while standing on the porch outside Sheila Walsh’s home. He checked to see if any messages had come in while he had been conducting the interview. There was only one and it was a text from Ballard:

  I have news. Call me when you’re clear.

  He turned slightly to see if there was anything to hear. He heard Walsh’s voice. It was a one-sided conversation indicating that she had made a phone call.

  “That detective who was on the Gallagher case was just here,” she said. “He just showed up out of the blue…”

  He heard nothing else as the voice trailed off and Walsh apparently walked deeper into the house and away from the front door.

  Bosch stepped off the porch and headed to his car. He smiled as he remembered the case in which he had heard the confession from the front stoop. Now he wondered whom Sheila Walsh had called and whether it could be Finbar McShane.

  11

  Ballard got to Birds before Bosch. He was coming all the way from the far corner of the San Fernando Valley and it would take a while, even in reverse rush-hour traffic. She ordered a beer but held off on a food order. She was going through the chrono from the Laura Wilson murder book that she
had copied before leaving. She knew she was breaking the no-copying rule, but she felt it was her rule to break.

  This was her third read-through of the forty-five-page case chronology. Now that the Wilson murder had been connected to the Pearlman case, Ballard needed to know it like it was her own. The place to get that knowledge was the chrono, which was a meticulously detailed account of the original investigators’ work. Though their investigation did not lead to an arrest and prosecution, the path they took would be very informative.

  As a young would-be actress, Laura Wilson had myriad interactions with people across the city as she went to one cattle-call audition after another at studios and production facilities from Culver City to Hollywood to Burbank. It was her job to build a social network in the entertainment industry that could alert her to possible jobs in her chosen profession. In addition to that pattern, she was a frequent visitor to Scientology facilities and events in Hollywood. She was also attending a twelve-student acting class twice a week, and once a month her acting troupe put on shows at its theater in Burbank. These activities added to her many personal interactions, any one of which could have been with her killer.

  As expected, the chrono detailed the investigators’ efforts to get some kind of handle on the young woman’s life. The detectives broke her interactions into groups they dubbed Hollywood, Scientology, and Other. Two former boyfriends, one in L.A. and one back in Chicago, were questioned and cleared by alibis. The investigators spent weeks and then months on the interviews, running records checks, and leaning hard on acquaintances who had criminal records. Still, no person of interest ever emerged and the case eventually went cold.

  The last inputs to the chrono were annual due diligence entries that simply stated that the case remained open pending new information.

  Ballard clipped the pages of the chrono back together and left it on the table. She was sure Bosch would want to take it with him to read when he got home. She was pulling her phone to call him and see how far out he still was, when she received a call from Nelson Hastings.