11

11

BALLARD PARKED ON Speedway in front of a garage door at the rear of a walled residence. Three signs on the shabby gray door warned of the consequences of blocking it. But Ballard wasn't planning on leaving her vehicle. The spot gave her a prime view of Dean Delsey's second-floor apartment in a run-down complex that had been built seventy-five years ago and designed to look like a boat. The windows in the complex were round like portholes, and the exterior front corner of the retaining wall surrounding the property had anchors attached to it as if it were the prow of a ship. Before settling in to watch, Ballard had done a walk around the apartment complex and had determined that Delsey's DL address corresponded with the apartment at the east end of the second floor.

The apartment had a balcony that overlooked Speedway. Stacked against its side wall were three or four surfboards. Ballard could see that the sliding door to the apartment was open, and faint, unidentifiable music was floating through.

Someone was home.

Ballard settled in for what she knew could be an hours-long surveillance. She wasn't sure what her next move would be but she hoped at a minimum to get a look at Delsey before she called it a day.

She thought of something she should have done before leaving the office and decided to risk drawing Hatteras into her off-the-books actions. She called her on her cell.

"Renée, you all right?"

"I'm fine. But I need you to do something for me."

"Sure."

"All right, go over to my terminal. I should still be signed in."

"You got it."

Ballard waited until Colleen said she was in place and that Ballard was still signed in to the department network. Ballard then walked her through accessing the DMV database and putting Delsey's address into the search engine to see if the same address happened to be on anyone else's driver's license.

"Two names come up," Hatteras said.

"One is Dean Delsey," Ballard said. "Give me the other one."

"Robert Delsey. Must be his brother. Or, wait, no, this may be his father. He's older."

"What's his DOB?"

Hatteras gave a birth date in 1981, making Robert twice Dean's age. It also doubled Ballard's interest in the pair. Another father-and-son case, the second in two days. Ballard did not put much stock in so-called coincidences—Harry Bosch had taught her that—but she thought this one must be a genuine one.

She directed Hatteras to open a search on the department's criminal records index. Hatteras reported that Robert Delsey had a criminal history much longer than Dean's. It included a nine-year stretch in prison for assault with a deadly weapon. Nine years meant it was no bar fight or skirmish over surf territory. It told Ballard that he had probably come close to killing someone, and that meant he was a dangerous man.

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."

Gandle hesitated. "By Friday, you think?" he asked.

"Our lab liaison put a rush on it," Ballard said, deciding not to mention Darcy Troy's name.

"Okay, but I want to be informed of every move you make between now and then."

"Well, that's easy. We're not making any moves until we get the results back. My IGG person is building a genetic tree, but that's internet work. We're not out there knocking on any doors."

"That's Hatteras? Tell her to stop the IGG. Do nothing more until the results are in. Understood?"

"Yes, understood."

"What are you doing right now?"

"I'm sitting in my car making calls about a prospective volunteer. I'll let you know if she pans out and I want to bring her on."

"A she—that's good. Just make sure she can kick a door open."

"I already know that she can, Captain."

"Good. Let me know."

He disconnected and Ballard sat there staring through the windshield, reviewing the call and hoping she had headed off a problem with the captain. It was a long moment before she realized that there was a man standing on the balcony of the Delsey apartment.

She grabbed the binoculars from the center console and focused on him.

It was Dean. He was wearing a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt. He looked older than his license photo, and his hair was shorter now, but he was definitely in his twenties, not his forties. He was holding a bottle of beer and smoking a joint, blowing the smoke out across Speedway. Ballard watched, waiting to see if he was joined on the balcony by his father or someone else from the apartment. But no one came out.

Dean Delsey finished smoking and flicked what was left of the joint down onto Speedway. He then disappeared back inside.

Ballard did some quick detective math. It appeared that Dean Delsey was alone in the apartment. If the father and son were responsible for the string of thefts, it stood to reason that between the two, the son would be the one she had the better chance of breaking. He had an arrest record but had repeatedly been given second chances by the system. The father had done hard time. Dean was on probation; Robert was on parole. Dean was the weak link.

Ballard reached under her seat and grabbed her handcuffs, then lowered the front visor and got out of the car.