Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch, #24; Harry Bosch Universe, #37)

by Michael Connelly

Shelves on each side were lined with murder books. Some new blue and some faded, a few of the cases contained in white binders. He stepped into the aisle and walked slowly past the books, running the fingers of his left hand along the plastic bindings as he passed. Each one the story of a murder left unsolved. This was hallowed ground to Bosch. The library of lost souls. Too many for him and Ballard and the others to ever solve. Too many to ever soothe the pain.

There was only silence in the library of lost souls.

there is no God. You ask me, there’s God right there.” He turned the stem between his fingers, and the flower turned like a pinwheel. “You know what that is?” Bosch asked. “Sure,” Orestes said. “This one’s called the desert star.” Bosch nodded. He wasn’t convinced that it was God on earth, but he liked that.

“You think you’ll catch him this time?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m hoping we do. It’s why I came back.” “‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’” “MLK, right? Let’s hope he was right.”

He turned KJazz on the radio and caught the Shelly Berg Trio’s take on “Blackbird,” the old Beatles song. He turned it up. It was good driving music.

Bosch was listening to the King Curtis live album recorded at the Fillmore West just a few months before he was murdered in 1971. He popped the volume two notches for “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and thought about all the music not recorded by the sax player because of his early demise in a fight in front of his New York apartment. Parker, Coltrane, Brown, Baker—the list of those who left the stage in mid-song was long.

had gone to see the Pharez Whitted Quintet at Winter’s Jazz Club near the Navy Pier. The set had been a tribute to Miles Davis, and Bosch had enjoyed it and stayed too late. But he

wanted to hear Whitted’s own music and had downloaded three albums when he got back to his hotel room. Now a song called “The Tree of Life” played in his ears

He drove directly to her and parked so that their driver’s-side windows faced each other and they could talk without getting out of their vehicles. In LAPD slang, it was called a “69 meeting” because of the positioning of the cars.

He put KKJZ on the radio and caught an Ed Reed cover of the old Shirley Horn song “Here’s to Life.” Reed sang it slowly, his voice carrying the experience of his years.

The KJazz presenter sent out best wishes to Ron Carter on his eighty-fifth birthday celebrated at Carnegie Hall in New York in the past week. He then played “A Song for You,” a cover off Carter’s At His Best album, released when the great bass player was a young fifty-nine years old.

“Bourbon.” “I’ve got Michter’s, Colonel Taylor, and a little bit of Blanton’s left.” “Blanton’s, neat.”

when he had told her of his plan to go to the desert to scatter the ashes, she had immediately asked if she could join him. And now they were there, at the hallowed ground where she knew Bosch had drawn the fire and the drive to take the case to its end—to a place where he had done the wrong thing for the right reason.

“Why did McShane pick this spot?” she asked. “Was it random?” “Probably,” Bosch said. “But we’ll never know. One of the known unknowns,

Those two kids. It was the question I always carried, and that haunted me more than him getting away with it.” He stopped there,

Ballard looked around, checking the distant ridgeline and the salt flats and then bringing her eyes back to the flowers at her feet. “It’s so easy to forget that there’s great beauty in the desert,” she said. Bosch nodded. “And these flowers, they’re amazing,” Ballard said. “Desert star,” Bosch said. “I know a guy, says they’re a sign of god in this fucked-up world. That they’re relentless and resilient against the heat and the cold, against everything that wants to stop them.”