“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.”