Bosch came out of the glass doors of the Medical Examiner’s Office and found Ballard waiting for him, leaning on the front wall.
“Is it her?” she asked.
Bosch nodded somberly.
“But I knew it would be,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Ballard said.
He nodded his thanks. He noticed that her hair was wet and slicked back. She noticed him noticing.
“I was on my board this morning when you left the message,” she said. “First time I’ve been able to get out on the water after my shift in a while.”
“I heard that you do that,” he said.
“Every morning if I can,” she said.
They started walking down the steps toward the parking lot.
“You check the newspaper this morning?” Ballard asked.
“Not yet,” Bosch said. “What did they have?”
“They had a story about the SIS thing up in the Valley. But it happened so late they didn’t get many details in. There will probably be a fuller story online today and in the paper tomorrow.”
“Yeah. SIS means headlines. They’ll be all over it for days. Anything about Dillon?”
“Not in the paper. But I got a call last night from Valley Bureau.”
“What did they say?”
“They were looking for guidance on the Daisy Clayton case—they knew I had been working it. They said they picked up a guy who they think was good for her killing, among others. They were tipped to him by someone calling himself a concerned citizen. Like Batman or something. Identity unknown.”
“Did they say whether they can make a case?”
“They said the taped confession was no good but otherwise they had enough probable cause to get a judge to give them a search warrant for the truck inside the warehouse.”
“That’s good. Hopefully, they’ll find—”
“They already did. Prints and DNA. If they get matches to any missing women, then Dillon goes down. Probably not for Clayton, though. That’ll be a long shot after so many years.”
“I guess all that matters is that he’s taken off the board.”
Ballard nodded.
“Funny thing,” she said. “While they were at the warehouse, a car pulls up and then takes off. The guy I’m dealing with, Detective Palmer, he has patrol chase the car down and guess who’s in it?”
“No idea,” Bosch said.
“George Bender and a couple bouncers from his joint on the strip. Sarah Bender’s father—who we had just talked about last night.”
“Strange.”
“Even stranger is that he says he was told by an anonymous caller that the guy in the warehouse killed his daughter. They check his trunk and find a chain saw. Just sitting in his trunk. A frickin’ chain saw.”
Bosch shrugged but Ballard wasn’t finished.
“Makes me think this Batman guy was trying to play both ends against the middle,” she said. “Palmer even said that his caller told him to hurry because he had competition. So I’m glad you called me today, Harry, because I wanted to ask you what the fuck you were doing last night.”
Bosch stopped so he could turn and face her. He shrugged.
“Look, I was following the plan and then I started thinking about Elizabeth, okay?” he said. “It’s like he murdered her too, if you ask me. So I got angry and I made a call. But then I corrected it. And everything turned out okay.”
“Barely,” Ballard said. “It could easily have gone the other way.”
“And would that have been so bad?”
“That’s not the question. The question is, is that how we do things?”
Bosch shrugged again and continued toward his car.
“Was that why you wanted to meet?” Ballard said. “To explain calling Bender?”
“No,” Bosch said. “I actually wanted to talk about something else.”
“About what?”
“I was thinking that we worked pretty well together. Like, we were a good team on this.”
They stopped at the Cherokee.
“Okay, we were a good team,” Ballard said. “What are you saying?”
Bosch shrugged.
“That maybe we keep working on cases together,” he said. “You know, you find them, I find them. I’m outside, you’re inside. We see what we can get done.”
“And what then?” she said. “You do your Batman thing and decide who we call at the end of the case?”
“No, I told you. It was a mistake and I corrected it. That won’t happen. You can call the shots on that stuff, if you like.”
“What about money? I get paid and you don’t? We split my check? What?”
“I don’t want your money or anybody else’s. My pension’s probably higher than your paycheck anyway. I just want what you’ve got, Renée. Not too many have it.”
“Not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. You know. You have that thing—maybe one in a hundred have it. You’ve got scars on your face but nobody can see them. It’s because you’re fierce. You keep pushing. I mean, I’d be dog food right now if it wasn’t for what you’ve got. So let’s work together. Let’s work cases. Badge, no badge, it doesn’t matter. I’m past all of that now anyway. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left, but whatever I have, I want to use it to go out there and find people like Dillon. And one way or another, take them off the board.”
Ballard had her hands in her pockets. She was looking down at the asphalt when Bosch said all those things about her. Things she knew were true. Especially about the scars.
She nodded.
“Okay, Harry. We can work cases. But we bend the rules. We don’t break them.”
Bosch nodded back.
“That sounds right,” he said.
“Where do we start?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just call me when it’s time. I’ll be around.”
“Okay, I’ll send up a signal.”
They shook hands on it and went their separate ways.