She asked Hatteras to use her cell phone to take a photo of Robert Delsey off the computer screen and text it to her.
“What are you up to?” Hatteras asked.
“Just an old case I worked before I came to the unit,” Ballard said, ready with her answer. “Nothing you have to worry about. Send me that photo, and thank you, Colleen.” Ballard disconnected before another question could come.
The photo arrived on her text app and Ballard studied Robert Delsey. The genetic connection to Dean Delsey was evident. They were most likely father and son. Robert’s face and skin were worn by more years in the sun and salt. Ballard thought of her own father and the deeply tanned wrinkles etched into the corners of his black-brown eyes — he had eyes like his favorite actor, Charles Bronson.
Ballard sat for twenty minutes with a decision she had to make before finally picking up the phone and calling a name on her favorites list. Harry Bosch answered with his usual greeting.
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. How about you?”
“No complaints.”
“Staying busy?”
“Not too much. Been bingeing The Lincoln Lawyer, if you can believe it.”
“You still working with the real Lincoln Lawyer?”
“Here and there — when he needs me.”
“And how is your health, Harry?”
“I’m hanging in. My last scans were clean.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“So what’s up with you?”
“Just checking in. Hadn’t heard from you, and there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Sure.”
“It’s about Maddie and it’s a bit awkward.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, Maddie came in and volunteered for the squad.”
“Open-Unsolved?”
“Yeah, my squad.”
“Okay. What’s the awkward part?”
“Well, she didn’t want me to tell you because she’s, you know, asserting her independence and she’s probably not sure how you’d take it. But it puts me in an awkward spot because it’s not something I would keep from you. I don’t want to get in the middle of you two. I’m sure she’ll tell you. If she’s approved by the captain, I mean.”
“Did she say why she wants to do this?”
“Well, I think it’s kind of obvious. She wants to be like you, Harry. She wants to be a detective, and this won’t hurt her cause. It could even fast-track it.”
Bosch went silent and Ballard imagined him sitting in his house up on the hill, thinking about his daughter.
“You still there, Harry?”
“I’m here. What do you think about this? Do you want her on the unit? She’s young. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.”
“There’s that, but, selfishly, I want her. I’ve been telling the captain for months that I need another badge on the squad. I have to do too much of the legal stuff. The Mirandas, the testifying, the search warrants. It takes too much of my time. So, yeah, I’d take her. But I’ll kill it right here if you want me to, Harry.”
Bosch hesitated, but only for a moment.
“No, it’s not my choice. It’s hers. She’s got to follow her star. Isn’t that what the kids say?”
“As long as you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. Just watch over her, Renée. Keep her safe. And I’m not talking about from bullets. From all the other stuff. From going into the darkness. It’s there in those cold cases you work.”
“I know and I will, Harry.”
“Thank you.”
There was an awkward pause.
“So, you’re sure you’re doing okay?” Ballard asked.
“A hundred percent,” Bosch replied.
“Okay, then let’s get a dinner or a lunch soon.”
“You got it.”
Ballard disconnected. She knew that Bosch in his own way had tried to keep his daughter safe from the darkness that had gotten inside him at times. But it was a never-ending battle. She thought about what Dr. Elingburg had said about vicarious trauma. Sometimes it wasn’t vicarious. Sometimes it was right in your face.
As soon as she dropped her phone into a cupholder, it buzzed. She thought it might be Bosch calling back about something but the screen showed that it was her boss at RHD, Captain Gandle. For a few seconds she considered not answering, but she knew that whatever he wanted, she’d inevitably have to deal with it. She took the call.
“Captain.”
“Ballard, what the fuck? You followed the presiding judge of the superior court to get a DNA sample?”
“Who told you that?”
“Doesn’t matter who told me. You didn’t think to ask my permission to do this?”
“Captain, I have a mandate from you to follow cases where they lead. Do you remember telling me that?”
“Yeah, but not to put the presiding judge under surveillance without at least notifying your CO about what you were doing. Do you have any idea what kind of shit will come down on us if this goes sideways?”
“He’s a primary suspect in a murder and several rapes. It’s not going to go sideways. If the DNA matches, we’re going to take him down, and I don’t care who he is.”
“Ballard...” Gandle went silent.
Ballard needed to know how he’d gotten his information. If she had a leak in the unit, she had to shut it down.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t know what you were told but we got a familial hit on the Pillowcase Rapist. I’m sure you remember the case — a serial rapist that ended up murdering a woman. Two months ago a man was arrested on a domestic-violence call. He was swabbed, and the genetics eventually went into CODIS and pointed to his father as the Pillowcase Rapist. We have the son’s birth certificate, and the judge is his father. No adoption. So what were we supposed to do? Not follow through? No fucking way.”
“No, you were supposed to call me and say, ‘Captain, we have a delicate situation here.’ We — you and I — would have then decided what to do from there.”
“There was no deciding what to do. He’s a suspect, and just because he’s a judge doesn’t mean he wasn’t a rapist and murderer twenty years ago or isn’t one now. We did exactly what we should have done — we got his DNA and we’ll know by Friday if he’s confirmed as the guy. What I want to know now is who told you about this.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I need to know who to trust in my unit with need-to-know information. If this gets out of the department and to the judge before Friday, we’re going to have a problem.”
“It was Kelly Latham, okay?”
The head of the DNA lab and Darcy Troy’s boss. Ballard immediately knew that Paul Masser had given Troy too much information when he dropped the DNA samples at the lab. It made Ballard breathe a little easier. She doubted that Masser realized the background detail he had given Troy would end up with her boss and then make the jump to the captain overseeing the Open-Unsolved Unit.
“You really fucked me, Renée,” Gandle said. “I have this information that I wish I didn’t have. Because I should turn around and inform the tenth floor about this right now.”
The tenth floor of the PAB was where the offices of the chief of police and most of the department’s command staff were located. One of the things Ballard liked most about her job was that, at the Ahmanson Center, she was away from all that. She had only one commander to worry about there, and he was more concerned with back-door alarms than anything else.
“Do what you need to do, Captain,” she said. “But if I were you, I would wait until we hear from the DOJ, because when we get the match, we’re going to have to come up with an arrest plan and that’s when you can bring the tenth floor into it.”