“I’m out of the lot now. I’ll hang back, but which way are you going?”
“North on Ocean. Coming up on Broadway now.”
“Okay, I’m five behind and will cut it to two.”
“Sounds good. Keeping the line open.”
Ballard kept her eyes on the white van, which was now about two blocks ahead of her in moderate traffic. She was watching the crosswalk countdowns and maintaining a pace that would keep her from getting stopped by a traffic signal.
She saw the van glide into the left-turn lane ahead and she prepared to follow suit. “Harry, he’s going down the California Incline.”
“Got it.”
Cars stacked up in the turning lane and Ballard ended up only three cars behind the van. She caught a glimpse of the badge buyer in the van’s rectangular side-view mirror. He was wearing sunglasses.
The arrow turned green and the van made the turn. Ballard followed, keeping the three-car separation. The traffic dropped down and the road merged with the Pacific Coast Highway. The van moved to the inner lane, indicating to Ballard that the guy would not be turning off anytime soon.
“On PCH, heading toward Malibu.”
“I missed the light at the Incline. You got him for now.”
“Not a problem.”
She thought about where the badge buyer might be headed. She knew that the sovereigns fit in nicely with most of the other extremist groups nowadays, from Aryan Nation to the Oath Keepers to the grab bag of other groups that had charged the Capitol three years before. That didn’t quite fit with Malibu, but beyond Malibu was Ventura County and towns like Oxnard and Fillmore, where such groups were known to have roots.
But the badge buyer stopped well short of Ventura County or even Malibu. Just past Sunset Beach, still within the city limits of Los Angeles, the van pulled to the side of the road across the coast highway from the beach at Castle Rock. The van eased into a spot behind a large RV that was parked in a line of other RVs, smaller campers, and vans below the cliff facings of the Pacific Palisades.
To Ballard, it looked like someone had been waiting there for the van and had moved an orange cone that had been used to reserve the spot so the badge buyer could slip into it.
Ballard drove by to avoid notice.
“Harry, he just pulled over on the east side at Castle Rock. I drove by and I’ll figure out a way to double back.”
“Got it. I’ll find a place to pull over short of there. Give me a meetup point when you’ve got one.”
Ballard pulled into the left-turn lane and cut quickly through an opening in the oncoming traffic into the parking lot on the beach side of the PCH. She worked her way through the lot and found a spot with an angle on the white van across the four lanes of highway.
“I went into the lot on the beach side,” she said. “I have eyes on the van but not the guy.”
Bosch didn’t respond but Ballard assumed he was maneuvering and wanted his hands free. He wasn’t a Bluetooth-and-earbuds kind of guy.
She took up the binoculars and tried to see into the van through its windshield, but there were curtains hanging down behind the front seats. She hadn’t noticed them earlier and thought the badge buyer might have gone into the back of the van and pulled the privacy curtains closed behind him.
“Harry, what’s your twenty?”
His answer was a knock on her front passenger window. Ballard unlocked the door and he climbed in.
“You see him?” he asked.
“No, I think he’s in the back of the van,” Ballard said. “There are curtains behind the front seats. Did you see that when you talked to him?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“The other thing was that it was like he knew that spot. Like it was waiting for him.”
“You see anybody else talk to him?”
“I think somebody moved a cone blocking the spot out of the way for him. But then I had to drive by and didn’t get a look.”
“So, is that reserved camper parking over there?”
“I don’t think so. Probably just unregulated mobile homeless people.”
The city was not enforcing most laws that were designed to help curtail the number of people living on the streets. Despite curfews and laws about sidewalk obstruction, encampments proliferated. Unenforced overnight-parking regulations had created a population of homeless people who lived in vans and campers that lined public streets at night.
“Great,” Bosch said. “Now we have homeless terrorists.”
“You really think that’s what he is?” Ballard asked. “A terrorist?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it. If he’s downloaded the sovereign bullshit, that could be exactly what he is. A lot of people like that stormed the Capitol.”
Ballard said nothing. She continued to stare across the street, her view of the van repeatedly interrupted by passing cars.
“So, what do you think?” Bosch asked.
“I think there’s a good chance that my badge is in that van,” Ballard said, “waiting for me to come get it.”
16
It was four hours before the badge buyer emerged through the curtains of his van and opened the door to step out. In the interim, Ballard checked the webcam of the pet day-care center where she left her dog, Pinto, when she was at work, and she dealt with calls from Colleen Hatteras, Tom Laffont, and Maddie Bosch. She told Hatteras and Laffont that she was working on non-cold-case matters and they should not expect to see her in the office until Thursday. She told Maddie Bosch that she had been cleared to begin work with the OU team the following day. She was welcome to come to the bullpen, take the desk her father had used the year before, and start looking at cases.
Ballard was careful not to call Maddie a volunteer, because she wasn’t. Ballard had received the green light from Captain Gandle to take the younger Bosch onto the team if the police union gave its approval. This was the most difficult step because the union, which represented the rank and file of the department, was not in the business of allowing its members to do unpaid police work and objected to such a precedent. Ballard handled that by agreeing to pay Madeline Bosch four hours of overtime per week as a member of the unit. If she chose to work more than those four hours, that was between her and the union. Ballard knew she could cover the overtime with money from a National Institute of Justice grant she had received to review cold cases. It was money she could use at her discretion and she decided that having Maddie Bosch and her sworn law enforcement powers on the unit was worth it. She could pay Maddie for four hours a week for at least five years before the grant money ran out.
“He changed clothes,” Bosch said.
He was watching through Ballard’s binoculars.
“He probably had a nice nap too,” Ballard said. “What’s he doing?”
“Talking to the guy from the RV in front of the van,” Bosch said. “They look like they’re very familiar with each other.”
“Why not? They’re neighbors. They’ve probably been camped out there for months, nobody from the city doing a thing about it.”
“What do you think the average house on the beach here goes for? A couple million?”
“Easy. Probably double that.”
“It must make them so happy to have these people out here.”
“Harry, that’s a heartless way to describe the unhoused.”
“I guess I’m not woke.”
“You, not woke? Shocking.”
Ballard knew Bosch wasn’t heartless. But like many in Los Angeles, he was losing patience and empathy as he watched the city he loved slide into chaos because of a problem the government and its citizens seemingly had no solutions for.
They lapsed into an uneasy silence as Ballard thought about the price of the double-wide she had bought a block off the beach in Paradise Cove last year. She had needed all of the inheritance from her grandmother and the proceeds from the sale of her house in Ventura to buy into what was known as the most expensive trailer park in the world.