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.”