“I just sent the latest victim a Lambkin questionnaire,” Ballard said. “I hope to get it back tomorrow or Sunday. I have to talk the first two victims into doing it, because Lisa thought it was too much to ask of them at the time. The first rape was back at Thanksgiving and I doubt the victim will have as good a memory now as she would’ve if she’d been asked to do it in the first place.”
“Now I’m getting annoyed with this Lisa,” Bosch said. “That was lazy. Are you going to send it to the other two now?”
“No, I want to call and talk to them first. I’ll do that after I leave here. Did you know Lambkin when he was in the department?”
“Yeah, we worked some cases. He knew what he was doing when it came to assaults like this.”
“Is he still in town?”
“No, I heard he retired out of state and has never come back. Somewhere up north.”
“Well, we still use the cross-referencing survey with his name on it. I guess that’s some kind of legacy. You want what I’ve got on Javier Raffa?”
“If you’re willing to share.”
“You have a printer?”
“Down here.”
Bosch reached down to one of the bottom shelves of the bookcase behind his chair. He brought up a boxlike printer that looked like it might have been put into service in the previous century.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ballard said.
“What — this?” Bosch responded. “I don’t do a lot of printing. But it works.”
“Yeah, probably five pages a minute. Luckily I don’t have much to share. Give me the connector thing and plug it in. You have paper?”
“Yes, I have paper.”
He handed her the connector to her laptop. While he plugged the printer in and loaded paper, she pulled up the case file on her screen and started sending the documents she had put together on her last shift into the print queue. She wasn’t wrong. The printer was slow.
“See, I told you it works,” Bosch said. “Why do I need a fancy-ass printer?”
He seemed proud of his techno-stubbornness.
“Maybe because I’d like to get to work sometime tonight,” Ballard said. “I still haven’t even looked at the stuff from your case.”
Bosch ignored her and took the first two pages — the only two pages so far — out of the printer’s tray. Ballard had sent him the two-page incident report first, followed by the Investigative Chronology, witness statements, and the crime scene map. She wasn’t sure what he could do with it all but the chrono was most important because it contained step-by-step summaries of the moves Ballard had made through the night. Though she didn’t hold out any hope of being able to keep the case much longer, she knew that if Bosch could come up with a line of investigation that led from the Raffa case back to his old case, the killing of Albert Lee, then she might have something to bargain with when the powers that be came to take Raffa from her.
She waited patiently for the pages to print but she was feeling anxious about not getting to the station and showing her face, let alone tackling the work that was waiting for her on the Midnight Men cases.
“You want something to drink? I could brew some coffee,” Bosch said. “This could take a while.”
“Will the coffee be faster than this printer?” Ballard asked.
“Probably.”
“Sure. I could use some caffeine.”
Bosch got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Ballard stared at the decrepit printer and shook her head.
“After you came by here this morning, you didn’t get any sleep, did you?” Bosch called from the kitchen.
The printer was not only old, it was loud.
“Nope,” Ballard called back.
“Then I’ll use the heavy-duty stuff,” Bosch said.
Ballard got up and went to the slider leading to the deck.
“Can I go on the deck?”
“Sure.”
She opened the door and stepped out. She removed her mask so she could breathe freely. At the railing she saw sparse traffic down on the 101, and it was clear that the multilevel parking garage at Universal City was empty. The amusement park was closed due to the pandemic.
She heard the printer stop. Putting her mask back on, she went inside again. After making sure everything had printed, she disconnected her laptop and shut it down. She stood up and was about to tell Bosch never mind the coffee, when he came out of the kitchen with a steaming cup for her.
“Black, right?” he asked.