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“Fire away,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“I’m going to ask Mr. Bosch to start off,” Ballard said. “He knows some of these cases better than anyone else.”

“I’m sure he does,” Novak said. “They stick in his craw for years and years. Don’t they, Bosch?”

Bosch ignored the question. He kept his eyes focused on Novak’s and didn’t look away.

“Lorraine Henderson,” he said. “Why did you kill her?”

Novak smirked again.

“Who the hell is Lorraine Henderson?” he asked.

“Was Lorraine Henderson. You killed her at MacLaren and left her body by the back wall.”

“Bosch, you’re a sad man. Eaten up inside over somebody nobody gave a shit about. Only you.”

“What about Charles Lamb? When we were in the hollow, you admitted it.”

“I said what you wanted to hear. I was afraid for my life.”

“So you lied? You didn’t kill him? Is that what you’re saying now?”

“Sure, I killed the kid. I bashed his head in and took his radio. That make you feel better, Bosch? Knowing it but not being able to do a damn thing about it?”

“What about Wonderland? Was that you doing Eddie Nash a solid?”

“Eddie Nash was my father’s friend, not mine. If I did anything back then, I did it for my father.”

“So were you there? In that house?”

Novak shook his head.

“You think you’re gonna put every murder in the city on me, don’t you, Bosch?”

Ballard put her hand on Bosch’s arm to stop him from answering.

“We have DNA on the pipe we found hidden in your warehouse,” she said. “It matches one of the victims in the Wonderland house. We also destroyed your alibi for that night.”

The first part of Ballard’s statement fell under the police-deception rule. The DNA found in the pipe threads did not match any victim in the Wonderland case. That was why it was important for Ballard to tell the lie. She carried a badge and could legally use deception as a tool during an interview with a suspect. Bosch had no badge and could not. This moment went down exactly as they had planned it.

“But you didn’t find my DNA or prints on that pipe,” Novak said. “Now, did you?”

“Well, we found it in a warehouse you owned and had access to,” Ballard said.

“A lot of people had access to that place. Anybody could have hidden it there.”

“But because you own the warehouse, you own the pipe.”

The exchange was important because it revealed that Novak knew about the pipe and the fact that it did not carry his prints or DNA. And while he claimed the pipe could not be connected to him, he did not contradict her statement that it had DNA from the Wonderland slaughter on it. If he’d known that the pipe had not been used at Wonderland, he would have called Ballard on the lie.

“Tell us about Alexi Berghoff,” Ballard said.

“A Russian pimp,” Novak said. “We used to call him Alexi Jerkoff. Then he disappeared, I think. Haven’t seen him for a while now.”

Berghoff was a career criminal with human-trafficking, drug-dealing, and assault charges on his record. He was missing and presumed dead, especially since the DNA from the threads of the pipe matched his genetic profile in the CODIS database.

“Are you the one who made him disappear?” Ballard asked.