“You can’t do it. You have to run the unit and Hastings knows you. He doesn’t know me. I wasn’t there for the surprise visit. I’ll watch him and make the collection. If it’s a match, we run a game on him. We bring him in for an update on the case and get him on record saying he didn’t know Wilson and had never been to her apartment.”

“Good. That sounds right. How do I explain you not being at the pod working the case? When you stop showing up, the others will ask me.”

“Then we run a game on them, too. I have the campaign button. I bring it in, and you hit the roof because I went to Chicago without permission. You’ve already shown that you’re willing to send anybody who fucks up home.”

Ballard paused as she ran a possible scenario through her mind.

“You know, that could work,” she said.

“Wat a minute, Masser knows you sent me,” Bosch said.

“He’s not here. He had to take care of something and left.”

“Then let’s go do it. I want to be on Hastings when he punches out tonight and his weekend starts.”

“There’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“When this started to tumble together with Hastings, I looked him up. Pearlman has a website for his constituents and it has a section on his staff. Photos, mini-biographies, and their scope of duties, all of that. For Hastings, the bio says he’s a disabled vet, and I was thinking about the blood in the urine and the cancer. Kramer told me that when Hastings joined that first campaign, he had just gotten out of the military.”

Bosch thought about this. It could lead to another way to tie Hastings into the case.

“I know a guy at the military archives in St. Louis,” he said. “He can pull his service records and we can see what’s there.”

“So you’ll handle that, too?” Ballard asked.

“I think anything to do with Hastings should be handled away from the pod.”

“Right.”

“What else?”

“That’s it as far as I know.”

“So why don’t you go back to Ahmanson and I’ll come wandering in afterward. I’ll sit here and call St. Louis first. Do we have a DOB for Hastings?”

“I’ll shoot it to you. I pulled it off DMV today because I wanted to know his home address.”

“Did the tuxedo guy say which branch of the military Hastings was in?”

“He said army but that could have just been a general catchall.”

“I’ll tell my contact to start there.”

Ballard was looking down at her phone, pulling up Hastings’s date of birth. After she sent it to Bosch, she looked up through the windshield. She was facing the abandoned mall.

“What’s with this place?” she asked.