Bosch was sitting sideways on the examination bed, not wanting to lie down, because that might lead to him being admitted and spending the night, and he had no intention of staying any longer than the minimum. UCLA Santa Monica might be a great hospital, but he wanted to get home to his own bed.
He needed to call his daughter but he didn’t have his phone. It had flown from his hand when his car was hit from behind. He waited for the ER doctor to come through the curtain, do a final check, and hand him a prescription slip before releasing him.
His injuries were minor, though technically he had been shot. He had bruised ribs, a knee contusion, and a handful of minor lacerations from flying glass, and a bullet had clipped the upper helix of his left ear. It was about as near a miss as he could possibly have had. If the bullet had been an inch more on target, he’d be spending the night in the morgue. For that he was certainly thankful. Otherwise, he was mostly upset. Ted Rawls was dead and whatever secrets he kept had probably died with him.
The wound had been cleaned and stitched closed with black thread by the ER physician, who needlessly warned him not to sleep with that ear on the pillow. Bosch could hear lots of activity and medical talk in the other curtained examination bays, but no one had been in to see him in more than twenty minutes. He decided he would wait another fifteen before he’d part the curtains and tell the supervising nurse he had to get back to work.
But that didn’t happen. Five minutes before his self-imposed deadline, the curtain opened and Maddie entered, still in her uniform. She was far off her beat.
“Dad!”
He stood as she hurried to him. They hugged tightly while he did his best to protect his damaged ear.
“Are you okay? Renée called me.”
“I’m good. Everything’s fine. Really.”
She pulled back and looked first at his face and then his ear.
“That’s gotta hurt.”
“Uh, at first it did, but now it’s okay. The doctor said there aren’t a lot of nerve endings up there.”
The doctor had told him no such thing but Bosch didn’t want his daughter to worry.
“And the guy, he’s dead?” she asked.
“Unfortunately,” Bosch said. “We wanted to talk to him and now…”
“Well, it’s not your fault. Have you talked to FID yet?”
The LAPD’s Force Investigation Division would investigate his actions, even though the shooting was in the city of Santa Monica. SMPD would do its own investigation as well.
“I gave a preliminary interview at the scene,” Bosch said. “But I know there will be more. They’re probably still at the scene, looking for witnesses and cameras and all of that stuff.”
“Do you have to stay overnight?” Maddie asked.
“No. I’ve been waiting for the doctor to come in and discharge me. As soon as he does, I’m out of here. Aren’t you supposed to be on patrol in Hollywood?”
“The captain let me go when we heard what happened. I’m so glad you’re all right.”
“Thanks, Mads. Tell you what, though, my car is still out there at the scene, and I don’t think I’ll be getting it back for a while. If I can get out of here, you think you can give me a lift home?”
“Of course, but Renée is in the waiting room, and she said she was going to need to talk to you after me. Case stuff, she said.”
“Okay, then I’ll get her to drive me and we can talk in the car.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, no worries. And if you have to get back, we can talk later.”
“I’ll check in on you.”
“I didn’t even know you work Sundays.”
“Yeah, I work Thursday to Sunday now.”
“Cool. Maybe we can have lunch tomorrow or Tuesday. I have a feeling my knee will be too sore for me to want to go sit at a desk.”
“Uh, yeah.”
She seemed hesitant to commit.
“I just haven’t seen you very much lately,” Bosch said.
“I know,” she said. “And it’s my fault. I get so busy. But, yeah, let’s do it. I’ll check on you in the morning, and if you’re too sore, we’ll go for Tuesday.”
“I’d like that, Maddie.”
“Bye, Dad. I love you. So glad you’re okay.”
She hugged him again.
“Love you, too,” Bosch said.
“I’ll find Renée and tell her you’re clear,” she said.
And then she was gone.
Bosch now waited for both the doctor and Ballard. He tentatively reached a finger to his ear to see if it could bend without sending sparks of pain shooting through his brain.
“Don’t touch that.”
Bosch turned to see that the ER doc had entered. He went to a sink and washed his hands and then came over to Bosch. He looked at the sutures in Bosch’s ear.
“This is going to look pretty nasty for a while, but something tells me you won’t care,” he said.
“The only thing I care about right now is getting out of here,” Bosch replied.
“Well, you’re free to go. I have a prescription waiting for you at the hospital pharmacy. Take it only to manage pain. If there is no pain, don’t take it. Stay sharp.”
“Got it. And thanks, Doc. I appreciate it.”
“Doin’ my job, just like you were doin’ yours. But you should come back in a couple days and let me look at that, make sure there’s no infection.”
“I will. Thank you. What about the stitches?”
“We’ll check them then, but I think we’ll need to keep them in longer. You don’t want that ear flopping over like my dog’s.”
“Right.”
Ten minutes later, Bosch was in Ballard’s car and they were pulling out of the emergency vehicle parking area outside the ER entrance. He had decided not to pick up the prescription and would manage the pain with over-the-counter measures.
“Let’s get you home,” Ballard said.
“Go by the scene first,” Bosch said. “I want to see it.”
“Harry, they’re not going to want you there.”
“Just a drive-by. It’s five minutes out of the way, tops.”
“All right. But no stopping.”
“Doesn’t FID or Santa Monica want to talk to you?”
“They already did. There will be more tomorrow but I was cleared to leave.”
“Maddie said you had something to tell me.”
“Yeah, the box.”
“What box?”
“There was a box in the trunk of the BMW.”
“The trunk was open when I saw the car in the alley. There could have been a box but I didn’t see it. How big is it?”
“Sixteen by sixteen by six—it said it on the box. It’s a shipping box like they sell in his shop.”
“I could’ve missed it. What’s in it?”
“It’s filled with keepsakes. From his kills. There were more victims, most likely between Pearlman and Wilson, and then afterward. Probably a lot, and we’ll be going through the box for a long time.”
“Damn.”
“And it’s probably why he did himself at the end.”
“Wait a minute, what?”
“He killed himself.”
“No, I hit him. I saw it.”
“You did, but that wasn’t the fatal shot. You knocked him down in front of your car. But then he put the gun in his mouth. It was his last bullet.”
Bosch thought about the shooting. It had been so quick and intense that it was hard for him to remember every microsecond of detail. He knew the first shot from Rawls went through the windshield and ripped through his ear. He returned fire, getting off half a clip. The windshield shattered, allowing his remaining shots to fly true as Rawls continued his charge and fired back. One round hit Rawls in the right shoulder and he went down. He fell out of sight, and Bosch remembered hearing the last shot but didn’t realize it was self-inflicted.
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.
“I think I’m going to take a couple days off. Stay off the knee as much as I can. Then I want to get back on Gallagher.”
“Sounds like a plan.”