He handed a Post-it Note across the desk to her. It had her name on the top — it was the Post-it she had seen earlier — but now it had another name and a number written under hers: Detective Ross Bettany. Ballard had never heard of him, but he would be the one to take her good work and close the case.
“Tell me about this suspect,” Robinson-Reynolds said.
Ballard knew that if she mentioned that she had linked two murders and that the likely hit man was an ex-LAPD cop, she wouldn’t even get the autopsy. Robinson-Reynolds would skip over her and West Bureau and go straight to the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown. They would grab it like a hawk snatching a sparrow out of the air. She didn’t want that. If she couldn’t be lead, she wanted to give it to Bettany in such a way that she still retained a piece of it. That way, Bettany and his partner would need her and her knowledge to close it.
“We think it was about money,” she said. “As I told you on the phone yesterday, Raffa’s shop was sitting on a valuable piece of land. He had a silent partner and he was trying to break their contract. We think the partner hired a hitter — the go-between who brought them both together in the first place.”
Ballard thought she had walked the tightrope without a net. Nothing she had said was false. She just didn’t tell the whole story.
“ ‘We’？” Robinson-Reynolds asked.
“What?” Ballard said.
“You said, ‘We think it was about money.’ Who’s ‘we’？”
“Oh, sorry, just an expression. I meant ‘we’ as in the LAPD as a whole. We think.”
“You sure?”
“Uh, yeah. Last I checked, the department hasn’t filled my partner’s slot because of the freeze.”
The lieutenant nodded like all of that was true.
“You know a guy named Harry Bosch?” he asked. “Retired LAPD. Worked here at Hollywood for a lot of years, in fact.”
Ballard realized that she had just walked into a mantrap. She went in one door and it had locked behind her. The next door had to be opened from the other side. And Robinson-Reynolds was the guy on the other side.
“Uh, yeah, I know him,” she said carefully. “We’ve crossed paths on things before. Why?”
She wanted to get as much from Robinson-Reynolds as she could before she tried walking across the tightrope again.
“Because I got a report here on my desk that came from GED,” Robinson-Reynolds said. “They had your victim’s memorial service under surveillance so they could see what guys from Las Palmas showed up. Instead, they got photos of you standing with an old guy identified as Harry Bosch and talking to another guy who didn’t look too happy about being talked to.”
Ballard’s mind was racing as she tried to put together an answer.
“Yeah,” she said. “That was Bosch and that was the silent partner I was just talking about. Dennis Hoyle.”
She doubted that Robinson-Reynolds would go for the distraction of Hoyle, but it gave Ballard time to think her way through this confrontation. She knew one thing: Davenport was behind this. He had sent the surveillance photos to the lieutenant. Ballard decided she would find a way to deal with him later.
“And Bosch?” Robinson-Reynolds said. “Why was he there? Why was he with you?”
He held up a surveillance photo, and there was Bosch next to Ballard as they confronted Hoyle at his car. Ballard knew that her only way out was to come clean about the first murder. Bosch’s case. If she gave that to Robinson-Reynolds, she might survive this.
“Well, you see,” she began. “I took — ”
“Let me see if I can put it together,” the lieutenant said, cutting her off. “You’ve got a full plate. You catch a murder New Year’s Eve and West Bureau’s overwhelmed so you have to run with that through the weekend. Then the Midnight Men jump up again and now you’ve got that. You’ve got no help because even Lisa Moore’s abandoned you for Santa Barbara — yes, I know about that. So you’re up against the wall, and you remember Harry Bosch, the retired guy who wishes he wasn’t retired. You think, ‘I could reach out to him for help and advice, but how do I get to him?’ So you pull out your little black bag of lockpicks and you break into my office to get the pension book that has Bosch’s number. The only problem besides getting photographed by the GED is that you forgot the little black bag and you put the pension book back in the wrong spot. How am I doing?”