“Yes, fifteen minutes ago. Send it. Now. No delay. And keep this connection open.”
Ballard barked the address into the phone, then refocused on Bechtel. She would find out about the missing backup later.
Bechtel was sitting with both hands in the front pocket of his hoodie.
“I want you to take your hands out of the hoodie and keep them where I can see them,” she said.
Bechtel complied but shook his head like this whole thing was a misunderstanding.
“Are you really arresting me?”
“Do you want to explain why you climbed over the roof of the house across the street, broke in on the back deck, and took three artworks worth several hundred thousand dollars?”
Bechtel didn’t speak. He seemed surprised by her knowledge.
“Yeah, there’s video,” Ballard said.
“Well, I had to get in there somehow,” he said. “Otherwise, somebody else would’ve and then the paintings would be gone.”
“They’re prints, actually.”
“Whatever. I didn’t steal them.”
“Did you take anything else besides the prints?”
“No, why would I do that? I just cared about the paintings. The prints, I mean.”
Ballard had to decide whether to cuff Bechtel to neutralize the threat or to wait for backup, which now might be another ten to fifteen minutes away. It was a long time to wait with a suspect not fully controlled.
“The District Attorney’s Office will decide whether a crime was committed. But I will be arresting you. Right now I want you—”
“This is such bullshit—”
“—to get up from the chair and face the wall. I want you to kneel on the floor and lace your fingers behind your head.”
Bechtel stood up but didn’t move any further.
“Kneel down, sir.”
“No, I’m not kneeling down. I didn’t do anything.”
“You are under arrest, sir. Kneel down on the ground and lace your—”
She didn’t finish. Bechtel started moving toward her. It was crystal clear in the moment that if Ballard pulled her gun, she would probably have to use it, and it would most likely be the end of her career, no matter how justified a shooting it would be.
But what wasn’t clear was whether Bechtel was coming at her or trying simply to walk around her and leave the room.
He moved as if heading toward the door but then suddenly pivoted toward her. Ballard tried to use his advantage — his weight and muscles — against him.
As Bechtel advanced, Ballard placed a well-directed kick to his groin, then took two steps back and to the side as he doubled over and lurched forward, emitting a sharp groan. She grabbed his right wrist and elbow, pushed the wrist down and pulled the elbow up as she pivoted him over her leg. He went down face-first and she dropped all 120 pounds of her weight through her knees onto the small of his back.
“Don’t fucking move!”
But he did. He groaned like a monster and attempted to rise, doing a push-up off the floor. Ballard drove a knee into his ribs and he dropped to the floor again with an oof. She quickly grabbed the cuffs off her belt and clasped one over his right wrist before he realized he was being cuffed. He struggled against the next one but Ballard had the leverage. She pulled the wrists together against his spine and closed the second cuff around the left. Bechtel was now controlled.
Ballard got up, exhausted but exhilarated that she had taken the stronger man to ground.
“You’re going to jail, motherfucker.”
“This is all a big mistake. Come on, this is wrong.”
“Tell it to the judge. They love hearing bullshit from guys like you.”
“You’ll regret this.”
“Believe me, I already do. But it doesn’t change anything. You’re going to jail.”
Bosch
18
Bosch and Lourdes had spent the rest of the day watching Dr. Jaime Henriquez to see whether he would eventually make a house call. Henriquez was a native son of San Fernando. He was the kid who’d made good and stayed close. A UCLA-trained physician, he could have worked anywhere in the country. But he came home and now operated a busy general practice on Truman Avenue with two other doctors to handle the overflow of patients Henriquez drew. He was a San Fernando success story, having grown up in the barrio and now living in the lush Huntington Estates, the nicest and safest neighborhood in the city.
But while outwardly he was a pillar of success and respectability, his name was secretly carried in the SFPD’s gang intel files. Both his father and grandfather had been SanFers, and loyalty — whether compelled or volunteered — ran deep. The secret of his life was that Henriquez was a suspected gang doctor, and Bosch and Lourdes were going to find out if he was treating the killer of Martin Perez. Lourdes’s cousin J-Rod had put them onto Henriquez, saying he was one of three doctors on the gang unit’s radar. But the other two had already drawn investigations from the state’s medical board and it was J-Rod’s interpretation that for this case — the killing of a witness — the SanFers would go to their top patcher, who lived a life that seemed beyond reproach.
Most of the day had been spent on surveillance of the busy medical office where Henriquez practiced. Both Bosch and Lourdes dodged calls from sheriff’s detectives Lannark and Boyce. And as they watched the medical building and the Mercedes-Benz registered to Henriquez parked out front, they tried to figure out where the leak in the investigation had been.
One of two things had happened. Someone had tipped the SanFers to the fact that Martin Perez was cooperating with the police. Or Perez had made some slip with an acquaintance or family member and had given himself away.
Bosch and Lourdes believed it was most likely the former and they spent their time running down the possibilities, dismissing some and holding on to others.
Bosch had mentioned his suspicions about Tom Yaro, the LAPD detective assigned as interdepartmental liaison to the execution of the search warrant, but Lourdes pointed out that Yaro didn’t have enough information about the case to set up the hit on Perez. Additionally, it had been Yaro who had alerted Lourdes to Cortez watching the morning’s search from the parking lot of the laundry. But that could have been a sincere warning or part of a more devious plan to solidify Yaro as someone on the pro-Bosch team.
“Yaro was briefed for the search warrant,” Lourdes said. “But we never discussed your source in the briefing, and Perez was a John Doe on the warrant. Yaro had no name, no location — it’s a long shot, if you ask me.”
This turned the conversation uncomfortably toward the SFPD. Many of the officers in the department were from San Fernando, and it would have been virtually impossible to grow up in the two-square-mile town without knowing somebody who was in the SanFers. Still, that connection usually worked in a positive way. Many officers added to the gang intel files after street conversations with past acquaintances. Lourdes’s cousin J-Rod was an example of this and she could not remember an incident in her history with the department when information had gone the other way.
That seemed to turn the conversation even more uncomfortably toward Bosch. What move had he made that might have revealed Perez’s betrayal to the SanFers?
Bosch was at a loss. He acknowledged that he often left his laptop in the cell he used as an office. But the cell was always locked and the computer was password protected. He knew that both could be compromised but it still seemed like a remote possibility that a member of the SanFer gang would undertake such an intrusion.
“It’s gotta be something else,” he said. “Maybe we look at Perez again. Who knows? Maybe he called somebody, bragged about taking down Cortez. Nobody said he was very smart.”