The Waiting

46

Everyone on the team had already fulfilled their weekly time commitments, but Ballard arrived at Ahmanson to find Hatteras at her desk. Hatteras could always be counted on for three to five days a week, but today Ballard had asked her to come in. She knew Hatteras had worked into the night Wednesday to locate Victor Best, Andrew Bennett, and Taylor Weeks. Ballard had been too tired after returning from Vegas to take her report and asked for a morning meeting instead.

“Colleen, sorry I’m late,” Ballard said. “I got hung up at the lab.”

“You took in the swab from Van Ness?” Hatteras asked.

Ballard put her bag down at her desk.

“I did,” she said. “I’m going to go up and get coffee, then we can talk. You want a cup?”

“No, I’m good,” Hatteras said.

Ballard opened a drawer at her desk and pulled out a coffee mug. It was a memento from her days in the Robbery-Homicide Division. Printed on it was a familiar slogan: LAPD HOMICIDE — OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOUR DAY ENDS.

She headed up to the coffee room on the second floor. While she was pouring, she got a call from Captain Gandle. Reluctantly, she accepted it. Any call with the captain these days felt adversarial.

This one started off no different.

“Ballard, I thought I’d have a report from you on Vegas in my email.”

“Sorry, Captain. We got back late yesterday and I was tired. I’m at the office now and I’ll be writing it up this morning. Right after an interview I’m in the middle of.”

She hoped the lie would keep the conversation short.

“Good,” Gandle said. “I want to see what you’ve got.”

“You’ll get it before lunch,” Ballard promised.

There was a silence, but Gandle didn’t hang up. Ballard guessed that another shoe was about to drop.

“Is there something else, Cap?” she asked.

“Yes, I need to talk to you about something,” Gandle said. “Something that I don’t want to blow up in my face.”

“What? Something in Vegas? Did Van Ness file a complaint?”

“No, nothing from Vegas. I got a call from a reporter at the Times first thing today. The FBI shoot-out at the beach — they won’t let that go because they know Harry Bosch was somehow involved.”

“Okay. What’s that got—”

“The reporter also sent me a video that was taken on an iPhone by one of the bystanders — some kid who was playing roller hockey. He wants me to ID the woman Bosch is talking to at the crime scene tape. He hugs her and puts something in her pocket. That woman looks a lot like you, Ballard, and I want to know what the fuck is going on.”

Ballard was stunned silent.

“Talk to me, Ballard,” Gandle said. “Right now.”

“Uh, I can’t at the moment, Captain,” Ballard said. “I’m in the middle of an interview. But I will.”

“When?”

“Uh, soon. I just need to finish this. How about I go downtown to see you?”

She was trying to buy time to come up with an explanation he’d accept.

“All I can say is this better not be something that detonates in my hands, Ballard.”

“Don’t worry, sir, it’s not,” Ballard said. “But could you send me the video? I’d like to see it before we talk.”

“I’ll send it. And I’ll see you today, Ballard. Today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ballard disconnected. She was in a fog and felt a little dizzy. There was a single table in the coffee room with two chairs. She sat down, put her elbows on the table, and ran her hands through her hair. She had to come up with something to explain why she was in the video but could think of nothing to say other than the truth.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she said to herself.

She felt a pit opening in her chest. It grew wider as she realized that she had recovered her badge only to possibly lose it again — permanently.

47

Still in a fog of misgivings, Ballard returned to the unit to find Maddie Bosch talking to Colleen Hatteras at her station. They both saw Ballard’s approach and judged that something was wrong.

“Are you all right?” Hatteras asked. “I thought you were going to get coffee.”

Ballard realized she had left her cup on the counter in the coffee room.

“Uh, yeah,” she said. “I drank it up there while I took a phone call.”

“Well, if you left your cup there, someone’s going to steal it,” Hatteras said. “I’ll get it for you.”

“Uh, okay. Thank you, Colleen.”

Maddie waited until she was gone before speaking.

“Renée, what’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Ballard said. “Anyway, nothing to do with what we’re doing. But I thought you were taking today off.”

“There’s something I want to show you. I think it’s another way to take a run at the Black Dahlia case.”

“Okay. Show me.”

They went to Ballard’s desk and Maddie sat down, opened her terminal, waited for the Wi-Fi to connect, then went to a commercial site of something called the Film Forensics Institute.

“What am I looking at here?” Ballard asked.

“This company claims it has the world’s best experts in verifying film and video,” Maddie said. “They can do a comparison for us and confirm that the victim in the Thawyer photos is Elizabeth Short.”

“Or confirm it’s not.”

“Yes.”

“How do we know this place knows what they’re doing? Looks like some kind of a Hollywood thing.”

“They were recently contracted by CNN to ferret out deepfake videos and photos in the presidential campaigns. I called them and they would love this job. They’re getting more and more into law enforcement gigs, the guy said. He could give us police references if we want to check them out. He said that locally, they’ve worked for Beverly Hills PD.”

“And they’re located here?”

“The best film experts in the world are here.”

“How much would it cost?”

“Well, I tried to get the guy to do it gratis but he said we’d have to at least pay the hourly rate of their techs. Two techs separately evaluate ear images and determine if they belong to the same person, then see if they both reached the same conclusion. A hundred an hour each. We would also have to give them credit in any press release that goes out about the case.”

Ballard hesitated.

“I was thinking you could use my pay from the grant,” Maddie offered.

Ballard shook her head.

“No, I don’t want to get crosswise with the union,” she said.

Hatteras appeared and put Ballard’s coffee mug down on the desk. It was steaming with fresh coffee.

She must have heard the tail end of their conversation because she looked at Maddie and said, “You get paid?”

“Uh, well...” Maddie began.

“She gets a stipend,” Ballard said. “I had to do that or the union would block it, and we needed another badge on the team.”

“Oh,” Hatteras said.

“I’d appreciate it, Colleen, if you kept that to yourself,” Ballard said.

“Sure,” Hatteras said. “I always said I would do this work for free.”

“And the city and I owe you our thanks,” Ballard said. “Let’s get back to this. Maddie, what can this private company do with the photos that our own lab didn’t do?”

“He said law enforcement lags behind in the use of identifiers that help in cases like these,” Maddie said.

“Like what?” Ballard asked. “This just sounds like a sales pitch.”

“Like ears,” Maddie said. “There are a number of studies out there that say the lines of the external ear — you know, the lobe, the helix, something called the concha, and various other shapes — all combine to be as unique an identifier as a fingerprint. There is this thing called Cameriere’s ear identification method that can be used to compare and confirm identity.”

“Wow, interesting,” Hatteras interjected.

Ballard realized that Hatteras was still standing behind her listening to the conversation.

“You showed me the file of photos you turned over to our lab,” Maddie said. “It had photos of the Thawyer victim named Betty that showed her right ear, but all the known photos of Elizabeth Short you submitted were headshots that didn’t show much of a side view of either ear. So I don’t think the lab did this kind of comparison.”

“I think I would have heard about it if they had,” Ballard said.

“I went online,” Maddie said. “Even the side-view mug shot of Short taken during her 1943 arrest in Santa Barbara didn’t have it. Her hair is over her ear.”

“So we have nothing to compare?” Ballard asked.

“No, we do,” Maddie said excitedly. “I found several, actually. They’re all from the crime scene on Norton Avenue where the killer left her body. In those photos, her face is turned to the side in the grass and you see her full right ear. But you didn’t include any of those shots in the lab package.”

“Because her face was bloodied and her cheeks were cut through like the Joker in that Batman movie,” Ballard said. “Horrible. And I didn’t think they were good photos for comparison.”

“They weren’t, not for normal facial comparison,” Maddie said. “But now we have clear images of her right ear to compare. I really think it’s worth a shot, and the guy said they would jump on it right away.”

“I think it’s worth a shot too,” Hatteras said.

Ballard turned to take in Hatteras again.

“Colleen,” she said, “why don’t you go to your pod and get ready to walk us through what you found yesterday.”

“No need,” Hatteras said. “I’m ready to go. I was waiting for you.”

“Well, go over there and we’ll join you in a minute, okay?”

“Okay.”

She said it like a child being sent to her room and walked away with her head down. Ballard turned her attention back to Maddie.

“Okay, go ahead with it,” she said. “Quietly. And I want you to write up some kind of confidentiality agreement and get Camerero or whatever his name is to sign it. I don’t want word of this leaking out.”

“No, Cameriere is the guy who invented the comparison index. The guy I talked to at FFI is named Ortiz, first name Lukas.”

“Okay, well, you can tell Mr. Lukas Ortiz to put a rush on it and that we’ll pay his people by the hour.”

“Okay, cool. I’m excited. I think it’s going to work.”

“That’s only going to be half the battle. Even if they call it a complete match, we’ll still need to convince the district attorney,” said Ballard.

“If this is as good as fingerprints, he’ll have to sign off.”

“Maybe. But this was good, you coming up with this, Maddie. Get it going.”

“I’ll head there now.”

48

No video from the roller-hockey player had come in from the captain. Ballard tried to push the problem she was facing with him out of her mind as she pulled her chair around the raft and sat down next to Hatteras.

“Finally,” she said. “Colleen, show me what you’ve got on our boys from St. Vincent’s.”

“Well, good and bad news,” Hatteras said. “I’m pretty sure I located all three. The bad news is that Weeks is in Hollywood Forever.”

“He’s dead?”

“Died in a car accident three years ago.”

“Where?”

“He hit a tree on Los Feliz Boulevard driving home after a concert at the Greek. I found a story in the Pasadena Star-News. I guess because he grew up there and had sort of made good in Hollywood, they ran a story.”

“What did he do in Hollywood?”

“He was a producer of independent films. None that I ever heard of, but stuff that made the festival circuits.”

“Can you pull up the story? I’d like to read it.”

“I have a printout.”

Hatteras opened a file folder and took out a sheet of paper. Ballard scanned the story and noted that there had been a female passenger in the car who survived but sustained critical injuries. Her name was not given in the article. At that time, the accident was under investigation by the LAPD traffic division.

“Then there’s this,” Hatteras said.

She handed Ballard another document from the folder, a printout of a four-page lawsuit against the estate of Taylor Weeks filed by Amanda Sheridan, the passenger in the car crash. Her lawsuit said Weeks was driving under the influence of alcohol and Ecstasy at the time of the crash and had refused Sheridan’s repeated requests to pull over and let her drive. According to the lawsuit, an angry Weeks yelled, “How about if I pull over here?” and drove intentionally into an oak tree ten feet off the road, killing himself and seriously injuring Sheridan.

“This is good stuff, Colleen,” Ballard said. “They would have drawn blood during the autopsy, and it should still be at the coroner’s office if this lawsuit is still active.”

She flipped to the front page of the lawsuit to check the court stamp.

“Filed in September of ’22,” she said. “It’s probably still winding its way through the courts. I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to get his DNA.”

“I was hoping that would be the case,” Hatteras said.

“I have to go downtown in a bit. I’ll go by the coroner’s office and see what they have.”

“You have to see the captain?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Is something wrong? I feel like there is.”

“Everything’s fine, Colleen. Nothing for you to worry about.”

Hatteras was the last person Ballard wanted to confide in about her predicament. She changed the subject.

“What about Bennett and Best? You found them?”

“Yes. Van Ness had the wrong island — Victor Best is currently the head chef of a restaurant in Kona on the Big Island. I don’t have his home address but I have the restaurant’s.”

She started typing on her computer.

“Good,” Ballard said. “Did you look for any news stories on serial rapists over there?”

“I did but didn’t find anything. But here is the restaurant.”

A website for a restaurant called Olu Olu came up on the screen. It showed outdoor seating with a stunning ocean view. Hatteras opened a pull-down menu and clicked on Who We Are. A photo and bio of the restaurant manager appeared. She scrolled down to the next photo, and Ballard was looking at a man wearing a white chef’s jacket and smiling warmly at the camera.

“That’s Victor Best,” Hatteras said. “Head chef and kitchen manager.”

Ballard leaned in to read the two-paragraph bio of Best.

“‘Nearly twenty years of experience in restaurants in Hawaii,’” she read out loud. “If that’s true, he would’ve been over there when the last attack occurred here. Van Ness said the same thing.”

“So we scratch him off the list?” Hatteras asked.

“Not yet. We still need to confirm. Bios like this are exaggerated. And Van Ness was wrong about the island, so he could be wrong about the timing too.”

“Got it.”

Ballard stared at the photo of Best. He had a shaved head, a wide smile, and a deep tan. She could see how the kid in the yearbook photo had grown into the man on the screen. The eyes were the same, a deep brown so dark that she could barely see the ring around each iris. She wondered if she was staring at the eyes of a rapist-murderer.

Hatteras interrupted her thoughts by asking, “Did you ever live in Kona?”

“Uh, no, I never lived on the Big Island. I lived in Maui, and I went to J-school in Oahu.”

“J-school?”

“Journalism. I was a reporter for a while before I was a cop.”

“Interesting. I didn’t know that.”

The mention of her past suddenly gave Ballard an idea for how she might be able to learn when Best left California for Hawaii.

“Colleen, how did you find him?” she asked.

“It was easy,” Hatteras said. “I just googled ‘Victor Best Hawaii,’ and this page on the restaurant site came up. I wish it were always this easy.”

Ballard kept her plan for Best to herself and moved on with the report from Hatteras.

“Okay, what did you find on Andrew Bennett?”

“It was not as easy with him. As you can imagine, there are a lot of Andrew Bennetts out there. Again, based on what Maddie said Van Ness told you, I made Orange County one of my parameters and found four Andrew Bennetts in the county. I went through them and locked in on one down in Laguna Beach. He works for a real estate firm that has bios of its sales reps on its website. His bio says he was born in California, and then I just did a comparison to the yearbook. Take a look.”

Hatteras pulled up a photo of a smiling Andrew “Andy” Bennett on a real estate firm’s website, then put up next to it an enlarged photo she had scanned in of the Andy Bennett from the yearbook. There was no doubt that the agent was the Andy Bennett who had graduated in 1999 from St. Vincent’s in Pasadena. Unlike Victor Best, who had lost hair and added sun wrinkles around the eyes, Bennett looked like he had found the fountain of youth or a good plastic surgeon. There were no wrinkles, and he still had a full head of hair. Ballard realized the style had not changed either. His jet-black hair was still parted cleanly on the left. He was smiling broadly and standing by a SOLD sign in front of a house.

“I wonder how old this photo is,” Ballard said. “He looks like he’s about thirty.”

“I know,” Hatteras said. “I tried to find more photos but struck out. The California Department of Real Estate database has no record of complaints against him, and he’s been licensed since 2007.”

“I’ll run his DMV and hopefully we come up with a home address. But shoot me his office address on a text.”

“I already ran his DMV records and got the address. I’ll send it to you.”

“How did you run his DMV?”

“I used your password.”

“Colleen, how do you have my password?”

“Anders gave it to me.”

“What?”

“I think it’s yours. That’s what he said.”

“This can’t be happening. Look, whatever he gave you, do not use it again. You understand? That could bring the whole unit down. I’ll talk to Anders, but don’t use it anymore.”

“Okay, sorry. I didn’t know it was such a big deal. The other day you had me run a check on your screen because you were still logged in. I didn’t see the difference. I just thought you gave it to him.”

“No, I didn’t. He hacked it and I’ll take care of that with him. What you need to know is that the department is very serious about unauthorized users running DMV checks.”

“Like what you asked me to do the other day?”

Ballard was getting exasperated.

“Look, that was different,” she said. “And I’m not going to argue about it with you. Just don’t do it anymore. It’s actually illegal. It could get both you and me in trouble.”

“Okay, fine,” Hatteras said. “No more.”

“Send me Bennett’s address and then at least it will look legal.”

“Will do. Are you going to go down to Laguna to see him?”

“Eventually. Probably. Tell you what, see if you can find out if he has any open houses this weekend.”

“Ooh, that would be cool. You posing as a potential buyer to observe him. Before he knows you’re a cop.”

“Maybe.”

Ballard knew what was coming next and was not wrong.

“If you go down, can I tag along?” Hatteras asked. “Wait, don’t answer. I know it’s a no. Never mind.”

Ballard was relieved that she didn’t have to lower the boom one more time. Hatteras was self-editing.

“Colleen, you might want to think about taking a break and going home,” she said. “You’ve been here every day this week. I really don’t want you to burn out. You’re too valuable to the team.”

Ballard left Hatteras with that to think about and rolled her chair back to her desk, where she saw her coffee, now cold, waiting for her. That was two cups fallen by the wayside. Before she went upstairs for another refill she might actually drink, she checked her email.

First in the queue was the email that had just come in from Hatteras with Andrew Bennett’s DMV record. Though he sold homes in pricey Laguna Beach, he lived in Laguna Hills, a suburb west of Laguna Beach with lower housing costs because of its distance from the Pacific. The driver’s license had been issued three years ago, and the photo was of the same man in the one Hatteras had pulled up of Bennett in front of the SOLD sign. Bennett still looked younger than his years.

After writing down the pertinent information in a notebook she kept on her desk, Ballard signed in to the California DMV database. Through the interagency portal, she was able to pull up Victor Best’s Hawaii driver’s license records. These showed that Best had not been licensed in the state until 2008, with an address first in Oahu and then on the Big Island in subsequent renewals. But Best not getting his Hawaii driver’s license until after the Pillowcase Rapist’s L.A. rampage had stopped didn’t necessarily mean anything. He could have moved there years earlier and simply waited until his California license expired before getting the Hawaii license. The information was useful but it didn’t move the needle on Best. Ballard needed to know more precisely when he had left California for Hawaii. Ballard was also aware that no matter when Best moved to Hawaii, it was not a solid alibi. He could have gone back and forth between Hawaii and California and committed the Pillowcase crimes.

To help narrow his location history down, she pulled up the website of the Pasadena Star-News and scrolled through its pages until she saw the byline of a reporter named Claudia Gimble. She didn’t need to write the name down.

Ballard straightened up to look over the divider and saw that Hatteras was still at her desk. She didn’t want to make her next call with Colleen eavesdropping, so she stood up, coffee mug in hand. “You’re still here,” she said.

“I’m going to go,” Hatteras said. “Just finishing up a few things.”

Ballard held up her mug.

“I’m going up for a refill, and then I’m heading downtown. So I’ll see you tomorrow or maybe even Monday.”

“What about Laguna Beach?”

“I haven’t decided on Laguna Beach. Going down there and back would take up a whole day and I’m not sure I want to invest that kind of time yet. There’s still a lot to do here. I’ll let you know when I go.”

“Okay, fine.”

“I’ll see you, Colleen.”

“See you.”

Ballard went up to the coffee room and found the urn empty. She had to brew a fresh batch. By the time she got back to the unit, there was no sign of Hatteras. She was finally alone. She sat down at her desk, blocked the ID on her phone, and called Olu Olu in Kona. It was three hours earlier in Hawaii, but Ballard was hopeful that as head chef and kitchen manager of a restaurant that was open for lunch and dinner, Best would be there.

The call was answered by a woman who said that Victor was in his office and that she’d put the call through. He answered right away.

“This is Victor.”

Ballard quickly put her phone on speaker and pulled out her mini-recorder. As she spoke she started a new recording.

“Hello, Mr. Best. This is Claudia Gimble with the Pasadena Star-News in California. I was wondering if you had a few minutes for an interview.”

“Interview? For what?”

“As you probably remember from growing up here in Pasadena, we’re a small community paper and we’re doing a story on the twenty-fifth reunion of the St. Vincent’s class of ’99. Would this be a good time to ask you a few questions?”

“That’s a story? Or is this some kind of a prank?”

“No, sir, not a prank. It’s a feature, a where-are-they-now story, which people love to read. And I wanted to talk to you because you living all the way over in Hawaii makes you one of the most far-flung and exotic members of the class of ’99. My first question is, what made you make the move to Hawaii?”

“Look, I’m not sure I want to be involved in this... feature. Who else have you talked to from the class?”

Ballard recited three names of female classmates from the yearbook. She knew it was a risky maneuver; Best might be in contact with one of the randomly chosen women. But Best’s response didn’t indicate that he was.

“All right, I guess,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, let’s see,” Ballard said. “When did you move to Hawaii and why?”

“Uh, that would have been... 2003, and to be honest, I did it for a job. I went to the CIA — the Culinary Institute of America, not the spy agency — and the job here was a referral from the school. It was a sous-chef gig in Oahu and I thought, why not? It’s an adventure, right? And I’ve been here ever since. About nine years ago I moved from Oahu to the Big Island to work at a new restaurant, and it’s doing very well. And I can tell you this: I’m never leaving Hawaii. In fact, I’m looking for investors so I can open my own restaurant.”

“That’s great. Do you get back to Pasadena very often?”

“Hate to say it but no. My parents followed me over here when my dad retired, so there isn’t a big reason to go back.”

“What about for the twenty-fifth reunion?”

“Uh, I’m thinking about it, yeah. Not sure if I can swing it. We’re pretty busy here.”

Ballard suddenly heard typing and realized it wasn’t coming from Best’s side of the call.

“Mr. Best, can I put you on hold for a moment?” she said quickly. “It won’t be long.”

“Uh, sure,” Best said.

Ballard put her phone on mute and paused the recorder. She stood up and looked over the divider. Hatteras was at her workstation, typing something on her computer.

“Colleen, I thought you left,” she said, unable to hide her irritation.

“No, I was just putting murder books back on the shelves,” Hatteras said. “That is so cool how you got him talking. Like you’re undercover. I love it.”

“Look, you need to go home. You’re throwing off my concentration, Colleen, and this conversation is not something I want you hearing, because that could be an issue down the line.”

“Really? How? I’m just listening and learning.”

“I don’t want to get into it, but if this guy ends up being the guy, you could be called as a witness to the conversation. I don’t want that, you understand?”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll just finish this email and send it and then I’m leaving.”

“That would be good.”

Hatteras moved her eyes back to the screen and the now-familiar pouting look returned to her face. Ballard sat back down, started the recorder again, and took her phone off mute.

“Sorry about that, Mr. Best,” she said. “Where were we?”

49

Ballard’s first stop after leaving the west side was Harry Bosch’s house up in the hills. She hadn’t called, emailed, or texted ahead of her arrival. Any one of those would have left a trail. She had thought about making an end-around play by calling Maddie Bosch and having her check to make sure her father was home, but that would have left a trail of its own. It would also bring Maddie into the matter, giving her knowledge of the badge-recovery scheme that she would be better off without. So Ballard turned her phone off and drove up Woodrow Wilson to the Bosch house unannounced. She knew there would be Ring cameras in the neighborhood and other ways to document her visit, but she counted on Internal Affairs making only a lazy effort from a desk to investigate possible collusion between her and Bosch. They’d check phone and email records but would likely not go out and knock on doors.

She was in luck. Bosch was home and welcomed her in.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he closed the front door. “You could’ve just called instead of driving all the way up here.”

“No, I didn’t want to call,” Ballard said. “And you’ll understand when you hear why.”

They spent the next half hour working out a story. Then Bosch disappeared into his bedroom to get something from a drawer that he believed would seal the deal with Captain Gandle. Ballard was waiting for him at the door when he put it in her hand.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said. “I can’t believe all of this happened just because I didn’t want to report a stolen badge.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Bosch said. “Remember, those guys didn’t need your badge to do what they were going to do. The badge was just part of a possible escape plan. But it never got to that point, and people are alive today because you didn’t want to report a stolen badge.”

“I guess so. I’ll take that.”

“Nobody else will ever know, but I will.”

“And I hope it stays that way.”

“Let me know how it goes with your captain.”

“No, I won’t be able to.”

“Right. But if I get pulled in to verify, I’ll get the word to you somehow.”

“Okay. Be safe.”

“You too.”

Forty minutes later, Ballard was sitting in front of Captain Gandle in his office at the PAB. He had never sent her the video taken by the roller-hockey player. He claimed he forgot, but Ballard knew that it was probably intentional. He had not wanted her to see it in advance and have time to make up a plausible explanation.

He played it for her now, turning his computer screen so they could watch together. Though the video was taken from a distance, it was clearly Ballard waiting at the police tape when the camera tracked Bosch walking from the center of the crime scene. Then came a short conversation, the hug, and the hand dropping into the pocket of her coat. Ballard was grateful for two things. First, that it was not clear what, if anything, Bosch had put in her pocket. And second, that the hockey player hadn’t started taking video on his phone while she and Agent Olmstead were talking at the crime scene tape. With nothing to connect her to the agent in charge of the op, Ballard saw daylight.

“That is you, right?” Gandle said. “You were there.”

“Yep, that’s me,” Ballard said. “I was there.”

“Jesus Christ, and you didn’t come forward with this?”

“I was off duty. I was there because Harry Bosch asked me to be there.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

“You said you knew Harry back in the day. So you know he has a thing about the feds. He didn’t trust them when he was a cop, and he trusts them even less now. He wanted some sort of backup. Somebody who wasn’t an FBI agent who could be a witness if things went sideways and they tried to put the blame on him.”

“So you were just an observer. Not part of it.”

“You see that on the video. I’m outside the tape. If I were part of what went down, don’t you think I’d be inside the tape?”

Gandle didn’t say anything as he contemplated that. His next question revealed to Ballard that he was finding her story plausible.

“What did he put in your pocket?” he asked.

Ballard reached into her pocket and took out the medal and chain Bosch had given her at his front door. She held it out to him across the desk and he took it. One side of the medal depicted Saint Michael, the patron saint of police officers. The other side was customized. It showed an LAPD badge with a 6 underneath it. Many officers in the department had side gigs. They sold insurance or real estate or gave self-defense lessons. An officer at Hollywood Division — LAPD’s Sixth Division — sold the medals, and Bosch had one from his days in Hollywood Homicide.

“I got that when I worked the late show at Hollywood,” she said. “I gave it to him to keep with him because I guess I wasn’t so trusting that the FBI was going to watch out for him if shit went down.”

Gandle dangled the chain, and the medal swung in front of his eyes.

“Saint Michael,” he said. “You never struck me as religious, Ballard.”

“When you’re on the street in the middle of the night, you take every edge you can get,” Ballard said. “If this becomes a full internal investigation, I want to make sure I get that back.”

Gandle looked at her for a long moment, trying to get a read on whether she was telling the truth.

“So if I bring Bosch in, he’s going to tell the same story?”

“It is the story, so, yeah, he will.”

“One last question. On the video, your jacket’s all dirty. How come? What happened there?”

It was the one part of the story she and Bosch had not gone over. Though her shoulder was still sore, she forgot to tell Bosch she had fallen out of the FBI van and landed hard on the street. Her mind raced to come up with an answer that didn’t knock down any of the previous explanations.

“Oh... yeah, I fell.”

“You fell? Where?”

“I was up on Ocean Avenue on a bench, watching the meet between Bosch and those guys who wanted the guns. Ocean Avenue is above the parking lot, so that made it a good vantage point. Then when the shooting started, I wanted to get to Bosch. I should have taken the stairs down but they were like a hundred feet to my left. I tried to just run down the embankment and I lost my footing and fell. I got dirty.”

“So why didn’t you go to Bosch then? Why’d you wait till they were taping the crime scene?”

“Well, I was sort of hurt — I still need to get my shoulder checked out. I can’t sleep on it. But the main reason is that there were FBI snipers and they didn’t know about me. Only Bosch knew. I suddenly realized that if I ran out there into the parking lot, I might get shot. So I waited until the tape was up and it was safe.”

Ballard wasn’t completely happy with her quick answer but thought it covered the question. Gandle hesitated, then leaned across the desk and held out the chain, still dangling from his fingers. She opened her palm and he dropped the medal into her hand.

“I don’t know, Ballard,” he said. “The whole thing sounds sketchy.”

“It’s what happened,” Ballard said. “What are you going to tell the Times?”

“Fuck the Times. I’m not telling them anything. And if Anderson calls you or Bosch, you both better do the same. Now get out of here. I have work to do and so do you.”

Ballard stood up. She felt like she was in the clear.

“Wait a minute,” Gandle suddenly said. “Sit back down. What is going on with the case? You said Vegas was good but I don’t have a report from you yet.”

Ballard sat down again and summarized what she and Maddie Bosch had gotten from Van Ness and told him about the follow-ups being made on the three names he had given them. She said she would check with the coroner’s office to see if they still had blood from the late Taylor Weeks.

“Let’s hope it’s not a match,” Gandle said.

“Why?” Ballard asked.

“Because you get no real media traction with a dead suspect. We could use a live one for once. Somebody in cuffs at an arraignment or on a perp walk. A dead suspect just provides answers. A live one provides a shot at justice being carried out. That’s what the people want and it makes us look good.”

Ballard nodded in agreement. The captain was right.

“Then I hope Weeks is not a match and we find a live one,” she said. “Either way, I will close this case.”

She stood up again.

“One more thing,” Gandle said. “I’m thinking now that bringing Madeline Bosch into the unit was a mistake.”

“You approved her,” Ballard said.

“Yeah, I know. But now I want you to drop her.”

For the third time, Ballard sat down.

“What are you talking about?” she said. “She’s great. The Black Dahlia case is all because of her. And she was the one in Vegas who finally got Van Ness to open up and talk. On top of that, she’s the only one in the unit other than me who has a badge, and I’ve been telling you for months I need a second badge in the unit.”

“It just doesn’t look good,” Gandle said. “You and her father and that whole mess at the beach, then you turn around and bring in the daughter. Not good optics, Ballard. Cut her loose.”

“It’s only bad optics if it gets in the Times, and you said you weren’t going to talk to them.”

“I’m not, but you never know. This could still blow up. So cut her loose.”

“Sir—”

“That’s an order, Ballard.”

Ballard paused before responding. She was trying to think two moves ahead of the captain.

“Understood,” she finally said. “Can I go now?”

“I’m not stopping you,” Gandle said. “Go make cases.”

“Right.”

“And have a good day.”

Ballard got up. The hollow feeling in her chest had not gone away. The concern about the Times inquiry had just been replaced with the order from Gandle to cut Maddie Bosch from the unit. She knew she had merely traded one problem for another. She needed to find a way to make the captain rescind his order and let her keep Maddie.

50

Ballard dropped off a blood sample drawn from Taylor Weeks during his autopsy at the lab and she had just gotten on the 10 freeway when her phone buzzed and she saw the name Dan Farley on the screen. She braced herself. He had never reached out to her except for the first call when he had introduced himself and said that her inquiry had landed on his desk at the MINT. All the other times, it had been Ballard calling him to check in and see if there had been any progress.

She wished she could pull over to take the call but it would be dangerous to sit on the shoulder of the eight-lane freeway, let alone try to get back into the heavily congested traffic lanes afterward.

She took the call and tried to concentrate on her driving while she spoke.

“Dan? What’s up?”

“I found your mother, Renée. And she’s alive.”

Ballard didn’t respond at first. She had prepared herself for a call confirming the opposite news. For months she had assumed the woman who had birthed her but had done little else as a mother would be among the casualties of the fires in Maui. She had prepared herself for losing her without a chance for confrontation or reconciliation. In a moment that had changed, and she wasn’t prepared for it.

“Renée?”

“Yes, I’m here. It’s just that... I wasn’t expecting this. Where is she?”

“Right now she’s at Maui Community Correctional in Wailuku. But they are going to ROR her today.”

“She was arrested?”

“Yeah, on warrants. Unpaid traffic stuff, I guess a lot of them. I don’t know the details. But I had put a BOLO into the system after you filed the missing person report. I got the heads-up a little while ago and I knew you would want to know.”

Ballard went silent again.

“Still there?”

“Yes, I’m just thinking. Did she give a home address?”

“She would have had to give something and I can get that for you. I’m here in what’s left of Lahaina, and Wailuku is on the other side of the island. I’m not going to be able to go over there today.”

“Sure, I understand.”

She was in a daze. She couldn’t think of what else to say. She thought about Farley having put the BOLO into the system. Be on the lookout — that said it all about her relationship with her mother. All the early years looking for her, hoping to find her.

“Um, I’m going to close this file,” Farley said. “But if you come over to see her, you have my number. I don’t know, I could show you around, show you what we’re doing here. I mean, if you’re interested.”

“Uh, sure, Dan,” Ballard said. “I’ll call you.”

Ballard snapped out of her fugue and realized that this man had done so much for her.

“And Dan, thank you,” she said. “You went all out for her. For me. She might not have been worth it, but cop to cop, I appreciate it.”

“Of course,” Farley said. “That’s what we do here. And this is one of the better endings, believe me. You take care, Renée, and I hope knowing your mother is still alive leads to something good between you two.”

“Yeah, me too. Thank you.”

She continued the drive west but passed by the transition to the south 405 that would have taken her back to Ahmanson. Instead, she continued west and took the curve through the tunnel where the freeway became the Pacific Coast Highway.

She headed toward the water.