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“Talk to me, Harry. What’s going on?”
“Look, I haven’t been in the department for a long time, but I still know how to read the tea leaves. They’re going to tell you to get rid of me. And that’s fine. I don’t want to cause you any more problems than I already have. But when I go, who’s going to work this?”
He pointed to the case’s seven binders on the counter.
“So I figure I’ll take it with me,” he said. “And I’ll keep working it. I’ll call you when I find McShane.”
“Harry, I’m not going to bullshit you and tell you everything is copacetic,” Ballard said. “But I told them, if you go, I go. I said that directly to the chief.”
Bosch nodded.
“I appreciate that,” he said. “I really do. But you shouldn’t have done it. It won’t stop them from doing what they want.”
“We’ll see,” Ballard said.
“We will, and probably pretty soon.”
“What was in theTimesthis morning doesn’t help. Did you read it?”
“I don’t read theTimes.”
“They got a lot that wasn’t said during the chief’s press conference.”
“It’s what they do.”
“This Keisha Russell, the reporter—do you know her?”
“Uh, yeah, but last I heard, she went to the Washington bureau. That was, like, I don’t know, a long time ago. Years. I’m surprised she’s still around.”
“Yeah, well, she is, and she’s in L.A. now, and she laid the whole thing out. Rawls being in the unit, and that the councilman’s office put him there. That’s why I’m in early—because Nelson Hastings called me at six this morning.”
“I bet he was hot. Is that the box from Rawls’s car?”
“He was hot and he still is. And don’t change the subject. Whoever fed Russell that story really put me in deep shit.”
The copy machine finished its job and the room was silent.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bosch finally said. “There was nobody named in the story?”
“ ‘Sources said’—that was it for attribution,” Ballard said. “And Nelson thinks I’m one of those sources. I mean, she did call me. Three times, in fact. But I never talked to her, didn’t even return the calls to say, how’d you get my number and no fucking comment. Nothing like being blamed for something you didn’t do.”
“I know how that is. I’m sorry. But maybe it’s good that it’s out there and the public knows. Don’t you think?”
“Not if they shutter the unit again. What Pearlman gives, he can also take away. And why not? His sister’s case is solved. He already got what he wants out of it.”
“You really think they’d shut the thing down because of Rawls?”
“You and I have both seen worse decisions made. That’s why you can forget about Gallagher for now.”
“What do you mean?”
Ballard picked up the box again and turned toward the door.
“Rawls is still priority one,” she said. “If we connect him to other cases and start clearing them, then maybe they won’t cut us. And if they try, maybe somebody will leakthattoKeisha Russell. Then they’ll look bad and have to back the fuck off.”
Ballard walked out of the room, leaving Bosch there. She had no doubt that he was behind the story in theTimes.When she didn’t recognize the name of the reporter that Hastings yelled over the phone at 6 a.m., she did a search on theTimeswebsite of Russell’s prior stories and saw that in the nineties she covered the cop shop. Several of her stories were about cases worked by a detective named Harry Bosch. She was annoyed with Bosch. Not so much for what he did—she had to acknowledge that getting the full story out there was something the department should have done in the first place. She just wished he had come to her first and they had planned it together. On top of that, she wished he had owned up to his part in the story. It showed that he did not trust her as much as she had thought.
She took the box to the interview room. It was more than an hour before the other investigators started to trickle into their stations in the pod. By then, Ballard was at hers and Bosch was at his, keeping his head down, even though Ballard knew he was there. Colleen Hatteras was the first of the others to report for work, and she immediately started peppering Ballard and Bosch with questions about Rawls, the shooting, and other aspects of the case. She, too, mentioned theTimesstory, but her questions mostly came because this was the first time she had seen Ballard and Bosch since the shootout on Sunday. Bosch had been off and Ballard had borrowed a desk at PAB and worked from there Monday and Tuesday so that she could be easily reached by the FID investigators as well as by the media relations people and command staff.
