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BALLARD AND BOSCHwere squeezed into one side of a booth at Mary and Robbs Café in Westwood. The other side was empty.
Bosch checked his watch. “You sure this guy’s going to show?”
“He’s never stood me up before. He’s probably walking over.”
“You mean, like, stood you up for a date? That sort of thing?”
“No, Harry. It’s strictly a professional relationship.”
“You trust him?”
“I wouldn’t have called him if I didn’t trust him. Gordon is a good guy. He’s helped the unit on a lot of cases. The FBI obviously moves a lot faster on out-of-state warrants than we do because they’ve got agents everywhere. And it’s a fact that people who think they’ve gotten away with murder tend not to hang around. They split, and having a go-to guy in the Bureau is gold. I know your relationship with the FBI was… fraught, but that was then and this is now.”
“‘Fraught.’ Yeah, I think that might be a bit of an understatement.”
The waiter brought a mug of coffee for Ballard and black tea for Bosch.
“What’s with the tea?” Ballard asked. “You were always a black-coffee guy.”
“I don’t know,” Bosch said, shrugging. “People change.”
She nodded and watched him over the rim of her cup as she sipped. He looked beat, and once again she felt guilty for enlisting him in whatever this was.
“You doing okay, Harry?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look tired. Maybe we should—”
“I told you, I’m good. If I wasn’t, I’d say so. So what’s the plan here? We just hand this off to the guy and walk away from it?”
“We’ll see how he wants to handle it. But he’s got to promise me about the badge or it’s a no-go and he gets nothing. You good with that?”
“I’m good with it. I just thought that if there’s a way for you to get some credit for bagging this guy, that would help… you know, secure your position inside the department.”
Ballard shook her head. “You’d think, right?” she said. “But probably the exact opposite would happen. They’d ding me for going out of my lane.”
Ballard had a view of the front door but knew there was a back way into the restaurant that would be on a direct walking route from the FBI’s field office three blocks over on Wilshire Boulevard.
She flipped open the file folder on the table and looked at the photo of Thomas Dehaven she had pulled from Idaho DMV records. She closed the file when she looked up and saw Gordon Olmstead approaching the booth. She wasn’t sure which way he had come in.
Before he sat down, Olmstead held out his right hand to Renée.
“Happy New Year,” he said.
She shook his hand.
“Happy New Year to you, Gordon,” she said. “This is Harry Bosch, who I told you about. Harry, Agent Gordon Olmstead with the Bureau.”
The two men shook hands and Olmstead sat down across from them. He was a seasoned agent, a few years away from retirement.He worked in the fugitives division after a long career of postings in almost all sections in the Los Angeles field office.
“I have to say, I’m very intrigued,” Olmstead said. “We don’t get many of the insurrectionists out this way.”
That was how Ballard had baited him. She’d told him she could deliver a man wanted on a federal warrant for his activities during the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
Ballard now slid the folder across the table to him. It was bad timing. Just as Olmstead started to open it, the waiter came to the table to ask if he wanted coffee. Olmstead declined any drink and waited for the server to walk away before opening the file.
There were two printouts inside. The top was a photocopy of Thomas Dehaven’s driver’s license issued four years earlier in Idaho. He had been thirty-nine at the time and clean-shaven. But Bosch had confirmed the ID. Dehaven was the man who had met Bosch in the beach parking lot to talk about machine guns.
