BALLARD HAD BEEN ten minutes late to her four o’clock appointment with Vickie Blodget, the prosecutor assigned to handle cases from the unit. Ballard had always had an easy and open relationship with Blodget, but she was off her game in giving the case overview, leaving out details and delivering them out of order. She had been in a fog since leaving the lab. The Olga Reyes case had been pushed out of her brain by Ballard’s need to find Harry Bosch.

“Let me make sure I understand the chain on this,” Blodget said. “Bosch saw Rawls put the box in the dumpster, but then you waited three days to go retrieve it? Why?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant, and I’m sorry if I’m confusing you,” Ballard said. “Bosch did not see him dump the box. It just came to him later that Rawls might have been in the process of dumping evidence when he saw Bosch and decided to make a run for it. So, in other words, he dumped the box, saw Bosch, then ran back to his car and took off.”

“But why did you wait three days to go back? See, that’s a problem. If he didn’t see Rawls dump the box, we’re going to have a difficult time linking it.”

“Well, who else could it be? The dumpster is literally sixty feet from the back door of a serial killer’s business. Bosch got banged up pretty good in what happened Sunday. He fucked up his knee and ribs in the crash, not to mention a bullet whizzing by his head and clipping his ear. It took him a couple days to put two and two together, and then we went dumpster diving.”

Blodget nodded as she wrote a short note on a legal pad.

“Well, that’s the thing,” she said. “Those three days. It could have been anybody who dumped the box. As you know, the shootout with Rawls hit the media in a very big way. Somebody could have seen the story and then gone down there to dump the box, hoping it would be found and linked to Rawls.”

The fog was burning away. Ballard stared at Blodget incredulously.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “What is going on here? This kid’s been in prison for thirteen years. I mean, he’s not even a kid anymore. He shouldn’t be there.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure about that?” Blodget asked.

“Yes, I am. Jorge Ochoa is innocent.”

“It was a DNA match.”