They were searching the fourth of five dumpsters in the alley behind Montana Shoppes & Suites. They had started at the west end of the alley and worked their way east. Nothing relating to Rawls or the case had been found in the first three searches. Ballard, wearing rubber boots and navy blue overalls, was standing waist-deep in a green dumpster located behind a women’s apparel shop. It meant the refuse was largely innocuous and dry. The first dumpster they searched had been filled with coffee grounds and other garbage from the breakfast café that anchored the west end of the plaza.
Each dumpster search required the excavation of three days’ worth of refuse, since they were looking for something that Rawls might have dumped on Sunday.
“There’s nothing here,” Ballard said.
She was using the long handle from a push broom to poke around in the bottom layer of the dumpster. Bosch had borrowed it from the maintenance department along with a stepladder.
“All right, then come on out of there,” Bosch said.
He held his hand up to her. She took off a work glove, grabbed his hand, hoisted her hips onto the steel rim, and swung her legs over to the ladder. Bosch helped her down.
“The things I do for you, Harry,” she said.
“Hey, I didn’t ask you to come out here,” Bosch said. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll do the last one.”
“No, you’ll get your clothes all dirty. I’m just giving you a hard time because we haven’t found shit out here and these CSOs are hotter than hell.”
Once she was off the ladder, Bosch started throwing the bags of trash and other refuse they had removed back into the bin.
Ballard moved on to the final dumpster, carrying the stepladder with her. She put her glove back on, then flipped the heavy plastic cover back and started excavating the top layer of bags and boxes. The east side of the property was anchored by a large home decor store. It sold smaller furnishings like lamps, artwork, and candles. The trash here was similar to the last dumpster’s in that it wasn’t wet, didn’t smell particularly bad, and was easy to excavate. It had largely been deposited in shipping boxes stuffed with form-fitted foam packaging and Bubble Wrap. There were also broken pieces of wooden shipping crates.
Bosch joined her and they quickly emptied the top half of the dumpster, dropping everything they pulled out onto the alley’s asphalt.
“I can’t believe nobody’s come out of one of these places yet to ask what the hell we’re doing,” Ballard said.
“Maybe my pal, the angry homeowner on Seventeenth Street, will come over,” Bosch said.
“Who?”
“Some guy who lives in the neighborhood back here. I posted up in his driveway Sunday when I was waiting for Rawls to make a move. He came out and went full Mrs. Kravitz on me.”
“Mrs. Kravitz?”
“The busybody neighbor on that old sixties show Bewitched. You never watched the reruns when you were a kid?”
“Before my time, I guess.”
“Jeez, I’m old.”
Once they had removed the first layer of debris, Ballard climbed the ladder, put her gloved hands on the rim of the dumpster for support, expertly swung her legs over the edge, and dropped into the bin.
“You’re getting good at that,” Bosch said. “The Olympics are coming to town in a few years. You’re the Simone Biles of homicide.”
“You’re a funny guy, Harry,” Ballard said. “This is just another useful skill I’ll hopefully never need again.”
She started handing boxes over the rim to Bosch, who found places for them on the ground.
She eventually found space for her feet on the floor of the bin and was better able to brace herself to lift the heavier debris. She focused on an open crate in the corner. It held a sculpture of a woman and child that had a one-inch-wide crack running through the plaster. She attempted to lift it but realized it would be too heavy to raise over the rim to Bosch. She instead lifted it slightly and swung it to her left to reposition it. When she turned back to the corner, she saw a crushed cardboard box that had been beneath the sculpture crate.
“Harry,” she said. “Take a look.”
She heard his feet clunk on the steps of the ladder, and then he was leaning over the rim.
“Be careful with that knee,” she said.
She pointed to the crushed box in the corner.
“Same size box as the one in the BMW trunk,” she said.
She took off her gloves and tucked them under an arm. She then pulled her phone out of a zippered pocket in her overalls and opened the camera. She took three photos from three different angles by leaning one way and then the other. Then she opened the video camera and handed the phone to Bosch.
“I’m going to open it,” she said. “You run video.”
“Got it,” Bosch said.
Ballard put her gloves back on and squatted down next to the crushed box while Bosch hit the record button on the phone.
Other than having its dimensions—16 x 16 x 6—stamped on its side, it was an unmarked cardboard box that appeared to be a match for the one recovered from Rawls’s BMW that Ballard had carried into the homicide archives that morning. It was unsealed, but the top had been crushed, and this forced Ballard to rip its flaps to get it open. Inside, at the top, was a folded piece of clothing. Ballard leaned back on her heels to make sure Bosch got a clear view with the video.
“It looks like a nightgown,” she said. “Let’s get it out of here before we start looking through it. You can kill the video.”
Bosch did so and handed the phone back to Ballard. She then stood up with the box and handed it over the lip to Bosch.
“I’m going to make sure there’s nothing else in here,” she said.
Bosch took the box over to Ballard’s city car and put it down on the hood.
Ballard spent the next five minutes moving debris around in the dumpster so she could determine that nothing else had been deposited by Rawls. After climbing back over the rim and down the ladder, she helped Bosch throw the debris they had removed back into the bin.
She stripped off her work gloves and put them in the back pockets of her overalls. She then pulled a pair of latex gloves from a front pocket and put them on as she walked to her car. She could tell when she had handed the box out of the dumpster to Bosch that there was something heavy beneath the clothing folded on top.
Bosch followed her to the car.
“You want to go through it here or wait?” he asked.
“I want to take a quick look,” she said. “See what we’ve got.”
She handed her phone back to Bosch so he could record her further examination of the box’s contents. She lifted the item of clothing out and confirmed it was a white flannel long-sleeved nightgown with an embroidered fringe at the collar and cuffs. There was no label inside the neckline and there were no other identifiers. It appeared to be clean. No blood or other stains on it.
Ballard shifted position so she could look down into the box.
“Harry, get this,” she said.
Bosch moved in next to Ballard and focused the camera on the box. At the bottom was a pair of pink slippers that looked like stuffed bunnies with the nose at the point of the big toe. Beneath these Ballard could see part of a wooden handle. Holding the nightgown up with one hand, she reached in with the other and pulled out the bunny slippers. At the bottom of the box was a stainless-steel hammer with a polished wood handle.
They both stared down at it for a long moment without speaking.
“Murder weapon?” Bosch said.
“What I was thinking,” Ballard said. “Maybe. Now we just need to find the case.”
She did not touch the hammer because she knew the handle might hold fingerprints and its steel head and claw could hold DNA. She carefully put the slippers down on top of the hammer in their original position, then with both hands held the nightgown up by its shoulders and folded it lengthwise. When she did this, the right sleeve swung against her and she felt the heft of something more solid than an embroidered cuff.
She ran a hand down the length of the sleeve and closed it around something caught inside the cuff. She worked her fingers inside the cuff and pulled out a bracelet. It was a thick, braided metal band with one charm attached, a painter’s palette with six tiny dots of color along the rim and the word GO engraved at center.
“ID bracelet,” Ballard said. “It probably belonged to a boyfriend and was too big for her wrist. It must have slipped off when she took off the nightgown.”
“Or when someone else took it off her,” Bosch said.
“There’s that. Do you think it’s go or G-O?”
“Is that the engraving? It’s too small for me to make out.”
“Yes, G-O. I wonder what it means.”
“You’ll know that when you connect a case to it.”
Ballard nodded and looked down the alley toward the back door of the DGP store.
“So he parks down there, carries a box up here to the farthest trash bin, and then dumps it,” she said. “But then he leaves the second box with his other souvenirs in the BMW and drives off. Does that make sense?”
“No,” Bosch said. “But I’ve been thinking about that.”
“And?”
“Come over here.”
Bosch walked away from the car and headed toward the end of the alley twenty feet away. Ballard put the nightgown back in the box and placed the bracelet on top of it. She then caught up to Bosch. When they got to the end, he pointed diagonally across 17th Street to a 1950s ranch that was the first residential house behind the Montana shopping district.
“That’s the driveway I backed into after I saw Rawls’s car in the alley,” he said. “His car was pointed east, so I thought that when he left, he would come out this way and I’d see him and then follow.”
“That’s where Mrs. Kravitz confronted you?” Ballard asked.
“Yeah. I was looking this way at the alley when the guy came up alongside me, banged his fist on the roof of my car, and started giving me what for. It was a distraction and I took my eyes off the alley to deal with it. He was kind of loud because he was king of the castle and didn’t want me there. So I was thinking…maybe Rawls took the one box down to the dumpster and then he heard the dustup out in the street.”
“He checks it out, sees it’s you, and figures he’s gotta get the hell out of here.”
“Right, so he runs back to his car, turns it around in the alley, and takes off. But he’s still got the other box in the trunk. I pull out of the driveway, cruise by the alley up here, and that’s when I see him, when he’s pulling out down at the other end.”
They walked back to Bosch’s car in silence. Ballard guessed that they were both rethinking the scenario they had just spun, looking for holes in the logic of it.
“It feels like something is off,” Bosch finally said. “Something missing. Why would he use the dumpsters behind his business? It wasn’t smart. There had to be another reason for him coming here.”
“There was,” Ballard said. “I didn’t tell you this, but RHD interviewed the guy who was working in the shop Sunday. He told them that Rawls came in the back door, said hello, and then went right to the safe in the back room that’s used for keeping backup cash for all the shops. The employee said Rawls took all the money. We know from what was in Rawls’s pockets that it was nine hundred dollars.”
“His go money.”
“Right. But the story he told his employee was that he needed the cash to put down on a car he was buying. So he took what was in the safe and then left by the back door.”
“That works. He goes there to get the cash and dump the boxes of souvenirs. He pulls up, pops the trunk, but goes into the store first to get the money. That’s when I drive by and see the trunk open but no sign of Rawls. Then I go around the block and post up in that driveway. Rawls comes out of his store and takes the first box up the alley to the last dumpster, distancing it from his store just in case. But after he dumps it, he hears the guy yelling at me. Rawls checks it out, sees me, and hauls ass back to his car.”
“He makes a U-turn in the alley so you won’t see him leave and goes out the other end. It works, but we’ll never know for sure. Was he going to put the second box in a different dumpster? Why didn’t he carry both boxes to the dumpster at once? We could spin our wheels on this forever.”
“One of the known unknowns,” Bosch said.
“Exactly.”
“So now what?”
Ballard pointed to the box sitting on the city car’s front hood.
“I want to take this back to Ahmanson and go to work on that bracelet,” she said. “And I’ll get the hammer to forensics.”
“I had a hammer case once. It was the murder weapon, and we recovered it from the L.A. River in a spot where there was actual water in the channel. It had been in there for something like thirty-six hours and looked clean as a whistle. But they still found blood in the wood where it connected to the steel head. The victim’s blood. We made the case.”
“So maybe we’ll get lucky with this one and connect it to a victim. Let’s go back.”
She picked up the box and headed to the trunk.
“When we get back to Ahmanson, I’m going to go,” Bosch said.
Ballard popped the trunk and put the box in. She closed it and moved to the driver’s-side door. She looked at Bosch over the roof of the car.
“Go where?” she asked.
“Sheila Walsh has percolated long enough,” Bosch said. “It’s time I go see her.”
“What about Rawls?”
“I figure you’ve got Rawls covered. You’ve got everybody else working it.”
“You’re going to see Walsh by yourself?”
“Yeah, like before. Better that way.”
Bosch opened his door and got in the car. Ballard did the same.
“What if her son is there?”
“Not a problem. He’s scared of me.”
“Probably with good reason.”