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“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 ofpolice 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.”
