The Dark Hours (25 page)

Ballard called for a car from the nearby North Hollywood Division to transport Abbott to the Van Nuys jail, where he was booked on suspicion of murder. After that, she dropped Bosch off at his house and drove to Hollywood Station, where she spent the next three hours working up the paperwork in support of the arrest and putting together the case package for both the District Attorney’s Office and Ross Bettany, who would presumably take it to a prosecutor in follow-up of the arrest.

By nine, she was printing it and laying the pages on the three rings of the murder book when Bettany showed up with his partner, Denise Kirkwood.

“This is your lucky day,” Ballard said.

“How so?” Bettany asked.

“I got you an insider willing to talk to save his own ass. And I booked your first suspect about four hours ago.”

“You did what?”

Ballard snapped together the rings in the binder, closed it, and held it up to him.

“It’s all here,” she said. “Read through and call me if you have any questions. I’ve been going all night, so I’m out of here. Good luck, but I don’t think you’ll need it. It’s all there.”

Ballard left Bettany with his mouth open and Kirkwood with
a you-go-girl smile on her face. She got back to her car and drove west until she reached an industrial corridor that ran along the 405 freeway. With the sound of the elevated freeway buzzing overhead, she sat on a bench in a fenced dog yard with Pinto, the rescued Chihuahua mix that was hers for the taking. The brown-and-white dog weighed nine pounds and had the long snout of a terrier and a hopeful look in his amber eyes. She was given a half hour to decide but took less than ten minutes.

The dog came with a metal crate for transport, a five-pound bag of dry food pellets, and a leash with an attached dispenser of biodegradable poop bags. Ballard took him to the beach off Channel Road at the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon, where she sat cross-legged on a blanket and let him run off the leash.

Here, the beach was at its deepest point along the county coastline and nearly deserted. The sky was clear, and there was a slight chill coming in off the Pacific on a wind strong enough to kick sand up onto the blanket. Ballard could see all the way to Catalina Island and the outline of the cargo tankers coming out of the port behind Palos Verde.

The dog had been in a kennel for five weeks. Ballard loved watching him dart back and forth in front of her on the sand. He instinctively knew not to stray far from her. He checked on her every few seconds and seemed to realize she had saved him from a bleak future.

When the dog finally grew tired, he crawled into Ballard’s lap to sleep. She petted him and told him everything was going to be all right now.

He was there when Ballard took the call she had been expecting since leaving Bettany and Kirkwood with the murder book. It was Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds calling to inform her she had been suspended for insubordination until further notice. The lieutenant was formal and used a monotone in the delivery of the
notice, but then he went off the record and expressed his disappointment in her in terms of what her actions meant to him.

“You made me look bad, Ballard,” he said. “You embarrassed me, running through the night on this — and I have to hear it first from West Bureau command? I hope they roll you out of the department for this. And I’ll be right here, waiting to help.”

He disconnected before hearing Ballard’s response.

“They tried to kill me,” she said into the dead phone.

She put the phone down on the blanket and gazed out to the blue-black sea. Insubordination was a firing offense. Suspended until further notice meant that the department had twenty days to reinstate her or take her to a Board of Rights hearing, which was essentially a trial, in which a guilty verdict could result in termination.

Ballard was not troubled by all of this. She had expected things to lead to this from the moment she had hidden Bonner’s burner phone in her junk drawer. That was when she had left the confines of acceptable police work.

She picked up the phone and called the one person she believed cared about any of this.

“Harry,” she said. “I’m out. Suspended.”

“Shit,” he said. “I guess we knew that was coming. How bad? CUBO?”

Conduct Unbecoming of an Officer was a lesser crime than insubordination. It was hopeful thinking on Bosch’s part.

“No. Insubordination. My lieutenant says they’re going to try to fire me. And he’s going to help.”

“Fuck him.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Probably just spend a couple days on the beach. Surf, play with my dog, think things through.”

“You have a new dog?”

“Just got him. We’re getting along real nice.”

“You want a new job to go with your new dog?”

“You mean with you? Sure.”

“Not much of a fallback but you would easily pass the background check.”

Ballard smiled.

“Thanks, Harry. Let’s see how things play out.”

“I’m here if you need me.”

“I know it.”

Ballard disconnected and put the phone down. She looked out at the sea, where the wind was kicking up whitecaps on the waves bringing in the tide.

Ballard turned off her phone Tuesday night, got into her sweats, and slept for ten hours on her living room couch, still not ready to return to the bedroom, where she had almost died. She woke up Wednesday in pain, her body sore from the struggle with Bonner as well as the uneven support provided by the couch. Pinto was curled up asleep at her feet.

She turned on her phone. Though suspended, she had not been removed from the department-wide alert system. She saw that she had gotten a text announcing that all divisions and units in the department were going on tactical alert again following civil disturbances in Washington, D.C., and expected protests locally. It meant the entire department would mobilize into twelve-hour shifts in order to put more officers out on the streets. By prior designation Ballard was on B shift, working 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. under the response plan.

She reached for the TV remote and put on CNN. Her screen immediately filled with the images of people, hordes of them, storming the U.S. Capitol. She flipped channels and it was on every network and cable news channel. The commentators were calling it an insurrection, an attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election two months before. Ballard watched in
stunned silence for an hour without moving from the couch, before finally sending a text to Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds.

I assume I am still on the bench?

She did not have to wait long for a response.

Stay on the bench, Ballard. Do not come here.

She then thought of responding with a snarky comment about being accused of insurrection within the department but let it pass. She got up, slipped on shoes, and took Pinto out for his first walk in the neighborhood. She went up to Los Feliz Boulevard and back, the streets almost deserted. Pinto stayed close, never pulling the slack out of the leash. Lola had always pulled the line tight, charging forward, all seventy pounds of her. Ballard missed that.

After coming home and feeding Pinto some of the food from Wags and Walks, Ballard returned to the couch. For the next two hours, remote in hand, she flipped channels and watched the disturbing images of complete lawlessness, trying to comprehend how divisions in the country had grown so wide that people felt the need to storm the Capitol and try to change the results of an election in which 160 million people had voted.

Tired of watching and thinking about what she was seeing, she packed two energy bars for herself as well as some more food for the dog. In the garage, she put both her paddleboard and the mini onto the roof racks of the Defender. She was about to hop in, when a voice came from behind.

“You’re going surfing?”

She whipped around. It was the neighbor. Nate from 13.

“What?” Ballard asked.

“You’re going surfing?” Nate said. “The country’s falling apart, there are protests all over the place, and you’re going surfing. You’re a cop — shouldn’t you be … I don’t know … doing something?”

“The department is on twelve-hour shifts,” Ballard said. “If everybody went to work now, there’d be nobody to work at night.”

“Oh, okay.”

“What are
you
doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“What the fuck are you doing, Nate? You people hate us. You hate the cops until the shit comes down and then you need us. Why don’t
you
go out there and do something?”

Ballard immediately regretted saying it. The frustrations of everything in her job and life had just misfired at the wrong person.

“You are paid to protect and serve,” Nate said. “I’m not.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ballard said. “That’s fine.”

“Is that a dog in there?”

He pointed through the window at Pinto.

“Yeah, that’s my dog,” Ballard said.

“You need HOA approval for that,” Nate said.

“I read the rules. I can have a dog under twenty pounds. He’s not even ten.”

“You still have to have approval.”

“Well, you’re the president, right? Are you telling me you don’t approve of me having a dog in an apartment where somehow a man was able to get around building security and break in and assault me?”

“No. I’m just saying there are rules. You have to submit a request and then get the approval.”

“Sure. I’ll do that, Nate.”

She left him there and got in the Defender. Pinto immediately jumped in her lap and licked her chin.

“It’s okay,” Ballard said. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

An hour later, she was paddling west along the Sunset break, the little dog out on the nose of the board, standing alert but shaking. It was a new experience for him.

The sun and salt air worked deeply on her muscles and eased the tension and pain. It was a good workout. She went ninety minutes — forty-five minutes toward Malibu and forty-five back. She was exhausted when she climbed into the tent she had pitched on the sand and took a nap, with Pinto sleeping on the blanket at her feet.

Ballard did not return home until after dark. She had purposely left her phone behind and found that she had accumulated several messages throughout the day. The first was from Harry Bosch, checking in to see how she was faring and to mention that he thought he had seen everything but never expected to ever see the Capitol stormed by its own citizens.

The second message was a formal notification that a Board of Rights hearing had been scheduled for her to appear at in two weeks at the Police Administration Building. Ballard saved the message. She knew she would need to have a representative from the union with her as a defense rep. She would make that call later. But the very next message was from the union and an officer named Jim Lawson saying that they had also received notice of the Board of Rights hearing and were prepared to defend her. Ballard saved that one too and moved on to the next message, which had come in at 2:15 p.m. from Ross Bettany.

“Yeah, uh, Ballard, Ross Bettany here. Give me a call back. Have something to talk to you about. Thanks.”

The last message came in two hours later and was from Bettany again, his voice a little more intense.

“Bettany here. Really need a call back from you. This guy Hoyle and his lawyer, he says he’ll only talk to you, only trusts you. So we need to figure something out. We obviously need to start talking to the guy. We need to file on Abbott by tomorrow a.m. or the case goes pumpkins. Call me. Thanks.”

After an arrest and booking, the district attorney had forty-eight hours to file charges and arraign the suspect or reject the case. The fact that Hoyle was lawyered up also added a complication. Ballard guessed that Bettany had taken what she had given him to the DA, and the filing deputy had wanted more — as in Hoyle giving a formal, voluntary statement as opposed to the surreptitious recording she had made in the car.

Bettany had left his cell phone number with both messages. Ballard thought that calling him back might violate the orders to engage in no police work during her suspension, but she called anyway.

“You know I’m suspended, right?”

“I know, Ballard, but you left me a shit sandwich here.”

“Bullshit, I gave you a full package you just needed to walk down to the DA.”

“Yeah, I did that, but they said no go.”

“Who was the filing deputy?”

“Some stiff named Donovan. Thinks he’s F. Lee Bullshit.”

“What’s wrong with the package?”

“Your taping Hoyle without his knowledge. Hoyle already has a lawyer — this hotshot guy Dan Daly — and he’s screaming entrapment. So Donovan looks at the tape and has a problem with it. First of all, who were you talking to when you put down the window and said you might need to transport Hoyle?”

Ballard froze for a moment. She realized she had lowered the
window and talked to Bosch while recording Hoyle. It was part of the play but it had been a mistake.

“Ballard?” Bettany prompted.

“It was Bosch, the guy who worked the original case. The Albert Lee murder.”

“Isn’t he retired?”

“Yeah, he’s retired, but I went to him about the case because the murder book’s gone. I needed him to tell me about that investigation and we were together when the Hoyle thing went down.”

There was a silence while Bettany digested this incomplete explanation.

“Well, that’s not a good look, but that’s not the problem here,” he finally said. “The problem is you told Bosch you might need a transport, and Donovan says that’s a threatening and coercive tactic that could get the whole tape tossed. He told me to walk Hoyle through it again, but Hoyle says he will only talk to you. And that’s kind of funky, because you tricked the guy but he only trusts you. That’s where we stand.”

Now Ballard was silent as she considered this change of fortune. A mistake she had made was now working in her favor.

“They have to reinstate me if they want me to do the interview,” she said.

“That’s about the size of it, yes,” Bettany said. “Meantime, Donovan is working on a qualified immunity deal with Daly.”

“Have you told anybody about this?”

“My L-T knows, and he’s been talking to yours, I guess. Somebody at Hollywood.”

Ballard almost smiled, thinking about the jam Robinson-Reynolds was in, having doubled down on her suspension that morning with his terse reply to her text and now needing her back on the job to salvage a multiple-murder case.

“Where is Hoyle?” she asked.

“He’s home, I guess,” Bettany said. “Or wherever Daly has him stashed.”

“Okay, I’ll call my L-T and get back to you.”

“Make it quick, Ballard, okay? We don’t want to kick this guy Abbott loose. He has the funds and the connections to disappear, if you ask me.”

Ballard disconnected and immediately called Robinson-Reynolds on his cell. He didn’t bother with any sort of greeting and Ballard wasn’t expecting one.

“Ballard, you talk to Bettany?”

“Just did.”

“Well, it looks like you fell into the shit with your antics the other night and are coming out smelling like a rose.”

“Whatever. Am I reinstated or what? We have to get to Hoyle tonight. Our forty-eight on Jason Abbott is up in the morning.”

“I’m working on it. Set up the interview tonight. You’ll be reinstated by the time you get in the room.”

“Is that permanent reinstatement or temporary.”

“We’ll see, Ballard. It won’t be my call.”

“Thanks, L-T.”

She said it with cheery sarcasm. She disconnected and then called Bettany back.

“It’s a go,” she said. “Set it up for tonight and then call me.”

“Roger that,” Bettany said.