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“As soon as I know something.”
“I might go, then. I have to do some stuff and I want to work out before I go in.”
“Then get out of here. And thank you for sticking with this. We’ll see what happens.”
“They’d better sign off on it. We fucking solved it.”
“We did. You did. But we’ll see whether they can see the light. I’ll call when I know.”
“Thanks.”
Ballard headed to her desk. She opened her email to retrieve the FFI letter Maddie had just sent. She then composed a new message addressed to Carol Plovc.
Maddie came by her desk on her way out.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said. “I was talking to my dad last night and he said Captain Gandle called him up out of the blue.”
“Really?” Ballard said. “Why?”
“I think to see what he thought of me volunteering for the unit. But then Gandle asked about you.”
“Me? Why?”
“I guess to see if you were doing okay with, you know, the pressures of the job. Anyway, he said to tell you that Gandle called but that everything is fine.”
“Well, okay, I guess. Thanks.”
“So, I’m heading out.”
“Okay. As soon as I hear something I’ll call you.”
Ballard watched her go. She knew what Harry’s real message was: He had backed Ballard’s story when Gandle called. Her only disappointment was that the captain had called Bosch to check the story out, which meant she had not entirely convinced him earlier. At least the whole badge caper was behind her now and she could concentrate on the cases in front of her.
She finished the email to Carol Plovc explaining the new analysis. She sent it with the letter from FFI attached.
Ballard had another reason for urgently wanting to officially clear the Black Dahlia case. She knew that if they cleared L.A.’s greatest mystery, the credit would rightly go to Maddie Bosch and that would make it politically difficult, if not impossible, for Gandle to have her cut from the Open-Unsolved Unit. Ballard wanted it done through official channels, with Captain Gandle agreeing to rescind his orderand keep her on. She also knew that if the DA’s office failed to sign off on the clearance again, there were other ways to keep Maddie on the team.
Ballard took her mug upstairs to get a second cup of coffee. When she returned, she again expected to see Hatteras at her screen, but the raft was empty. She stepped down the aisle next to the archives and looked into each row of shelved murder books. No Colleen.
As much as Hatteras’s nearly constant presence in the office annoyed her, Ballard realized that the room didn’t feel quite the same without her. Ballard had explicitly told Colleen to take time off, and now that she had, Ballard had to acknowledge that she sort of missed her relentless hovering and questioning. She sat down, put her coffee to the side, and sent an email to Hatteras asking if she had determined whether Andrew Bennett had any open houses in Laguna Beach over the weekend. She ended the message with a suggestion that they could both ride down and get a look at him, and maybe they’d get lucky and surreptitiously capture a DNA sample as well. As she wrote it, she wasn’t sure if the offer was merely to bait Hatteras into responding or a real offer to take her into the field.
She sent the email, sure it would elicit a quick response. While she waited, she opened a Word document and finally started to write the overdue summary report on the trip to Las Vegas. This took over an hour because of the distraction of phone calls from Masser and Laffont, who were checking in to see what was happening with the Black Dahlia and Pillowcase Rapist cases and asking if she needed them to come in before the weekend started. After updating them, Ballard told them they didn’t have to come in until the usual Monday team meeting.
It was almost noon by the time Ballard sent the report to Captain Gandle. Hatteras had still not called or responded to the email, and Ballard wondered if her feelings were still hurt by the way Ballard had dismissed her the day before.
She decided to extend an olive branch if that was the case and called Colleen’s cell. It immediately went to voicemail. Ballard hesitated but left a message.
“Colleen, it’s Renée. I’m at the office today and just wanted to see if you’re interested in going down to Laguna to get a look at Andrew Bennett. Undercover, of course. If he’s having an open house, we could go there, but even if he’s not, we could still look up one of his listings and make an appointment to see it. So give me a call and we’ll see what we can set up.”
She disconnected, knowing that the wordundercoverwas an enticement Hatteras wouldn’t be able to resist.
Ballard had skipped breakfast to surf and was now famished. She left the office and drove over to the Melody on Sepulveda. She knew one of their hamburgers would power her through the day and well into the night. Since her return to red meat, she went to the Melody often. The place had been around since 1952 and had been through many transformations as the nearby airport expanded and its runways got closer and closer. Now the jets came screaming in directly overhead, but with its good food and drink and live music at night, the Melody had a loyal clientele.
Ballard ate her hamburger at the bar that ran down the center of the room. She kept her phone face up next to her plate so she wouldn’t miss a call from Hatteras while a plane passed overhead.
By the time she finished there still had been no call, and her concern about Hatteras was building. She wondered if she had subconsciously chosen the Melody because it was just on the other side of the airport from El Segundo, where she knew Hatteras lived.
Ballard went out the back door to her car. Once inside she opened her laptop and pulled up the file that contained all the applications submitted by current members of the Open-Unsolved Unit. She plugged the home address Hatteras had put on her form into the car’s GPS.
