“Who are you?” Ballard asked. “What happened here?”
“I’m Jason Abbott,” the man said. “Dr. Jason Abbott. You saved me.”
He was wearing blue jeans and a light blue button-down shirt with the tails out. The zip ties had left marks on his cheeks. He had a ruddy complexion and blue eyes under a full head of dark, curly hair.
When his wrists were released, he immediately started rubbing them to get circulation going.
“What happened?” Ballard repeated. “Who did this to you?”
“A man,” Abbott said. “His name is Christopher Bonner. He’s an ex-cop. He tied me up.”
After crouching down to cut the ties on Abbott’s ankles, Bosch stood up and backed away. Abbott reached down and rubbed his ankles, exaggerating the action, and then unsteadily stood up and tried to take a few steps. He quickly reached his hands out and leaned down on the front of the desk.
“I can’t feel my feet,” he said. “I’ve been tied to that chair for hours.”
“Dr. Abbott, sit down over here on the couch,” Ballard said. “You need to tell us exactly what happened.”
Ballard held Abbott by the arm and helped him move unsteadily from the desk to the couch, where he sat down.
“Bonner came here and tied me up,” he said.
“When was this?” Ballard asked.
“About two. He came in, he had a gun, and I had to let him tie me up with those plastic things. I had no choice.”
“Two a.m. or p.m.?”
“Two p.m. Like twelve hours ago. What time is it anyway?”
“It’s after four.”
“Jesus. I’ve been in that chair fourteen hours.”
“Why did he tie you up?”
“Because he was going to kill me, I think. He said he had to go do something and I think he wanted me alive and with no alibi when he did it. Then he was going to come back and make it look like I did it. He’d kill me, make it look like a suicide or something and I’d get the blame.”
“He told you all of this?”
“I know it sounds fantastic, but it’s true. He didn’t tell me everything. But I’ve been sitting here for fourteen fucking hours and I put it together. I mean, why else would he tie me up and keep me here?”
Ballard knew that the more she kept Abbott talking, the more his story would become implausible and the flaws in it would show.
“What was it he had to go and do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Abbott said. “But I think he was going to kill somebody. That’s what he does.”
“How do you know that?”
“He told me. He flat out told me. This guy, he’s had his hooks into me for years. He’s been blackmailing me, threatening me, making me do things. And not just me. All of us.”
“Who is ‘all of us,’ Dr. Abbott?”
“My partners. I have partners in the lab, and Bonner bullied his way in and took control. I mean, he was a cop. We were scared. We did what we were told.”
Ballard had to assume that Abbott did not know that Bonner was dead. But trying to throw the blame on him was probably the best ploy he could come up with when he saw Ballard and Bosch on the lab’s exterior cameras and deduced that it hadn’t been Bonner texting him about “complications.”
“So you think this was some sort of master plan on Bonner’s part?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Abbott said. “Ask him. If you can find him.”
“Or was it a spur-of-the-moment sort of thing, you think?”
“I already said I don’t know.”
“Because I noticed those zip ties you were bound to the chair with came from the lab down the hall. I saw a few of them on the floor in there.”
“Yeah, then he must have just grabbed them on his way back here to me.”
“Who let him into the building?”
“I did. We were closed today — tacked the day on to the holiday weekend. I was here alone, catching up on work and he buzzed the gate. I had no idea what he was going to do. I let him in.”
Ballard stepped closer to the couch.
“Let me see your wrists,” she said.
“What?” Abbott exclaimed. “You’re arresting me? For what?”
“I want to see your wrists,” Ballard said calmly.
“Oh,” Abbott replied.
He held out his hands, exposing his wrists below the cuffs of his shirt. Ballard saw no sign of injury or any mark that would have been left if Abbott had been bound for as long as he claimed. Ballard had had that experience herself once and knew what his wrists should look like.