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“Not evidence of anything he’s charged with,” Ballard said. “But there is something else. Dehaven wanted the badge because he’s planning something. He has guns and he’s looking to buy more—machine guns.”
“What is he planning?” Olmstead asked.
“We’re not sure,” Bosch said. “But we’re four days out from Presidents’ Day and he and one of his pals have been casing the Malibu pier. In their words, on Monday they’re going to ‘make that thing in Vegas look like child’s play.’”
“You mean a mass shooting,” Olmstead said.
Bosch and Ballard both nodded.
“Jesus Christ, you actually heard this said?” Olmstead asked.
They nodded again.
“And I’ll be your confidential informant,” Bosch said.
The skin around Olmstead’s eyes tightened as the weight of everything they had told him landed.
“Okay, where is Thomas Dehaven right now?” Olmstead asked.
“You don’t need to know that,” Bosch said. “What you need toknow is that he wants to buy machine guns from me. I set up the meet, and that’s where you take him. Before Monday.”
“Wait, no,” Ballard said.
That had not been part of the plan she and Bosch discussed before she contacted Olmstead. The plan was to tell the agent about the caravan out on the coast highway.
“That’s way too dangerous, Harry,” she said. “We need to set up a controlled takedown where he—”
“You want your badge, right?” Bosch said. “He’ll have it when he comes for the guns. He’ll use it to rip me off. He’ll pull it, say he’s LAPD, and take the minis.”
Ballard realized that Bosch might have solved the riddle of why Dehaven needed a badge. The moment he said it, she knew that it fit and that his plan was the best way to recover the badge and take down Dehaven.
“Harry, are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s going to work,” Bosch said.
“Okay, fine,” Ballard said, looking hard at Olmstead. “But this has got to be somewhere out in the open, somewhere safe, where nothing goes wrong.”
“We can do that,” Olmstead said.
“Can you get us four SIG Sauer MPX mini machine guns with the firing pins removed?” Bosch asked.
Olmstead paused a moment on that question.
“Come on, you’re the FBI,” Bosch prompted.
“No promises,” Olmstead said. “But we can try.”
20
LILIA AGHZAFI, PAULMasser, and Colleen Hatteras were in their places on the raft when Ballard arrived at the unit. Ballard felt compelled to explain her long absences during the week, though without revealing what she had actually been up to. She stood at the end of the raft and addressed the group.
“Hey, everybody,” she began. “I just want to say that I have not been here a lot this week because I’ve been involved in a case that doesn’t come out of this unit. I got pulled into it and it’s about to wrap up and things should get back to normal.”
“What’s the case?” Hatteras asked. “Maybe we can help.”
“It’s a sensitive case, Colleen, so I can’t really talk about it,” Ballard said. “Basically, I got a tip from a CI who’d fed me intel before we started the unit. I had to run with it but now it’s been handed off and I’m back here. And speaking of being here, we have a new team member who was supposed to come in today. Has anybody seen Maddie Bosch?”
“She’s here,” Masser said. “She’s in the lockdown room looking at the old cases.”
