Ballard walked out of the room, leaving Bosch there. She had no doubt that he was behind the story in the Times. 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 the Times website 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 the Times story, 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.

“Colleen, hold on a second,” Ballard said. “I don’t want to have to answer the same questions four times as the others come in. So let’s wait for everybody to get here and then I’ll tell everyone what I know and what I want everybody to be working on this week. Okay?”

“Okay,” Hatteras said. “I get it. But I just want to go on the record and say, I got a bad vibe from Ted Rawls. I didn’t want to say anything before, because he was a colleague. But I felt it when he was here—a super dark aura. I have to admit, I thought it might be coming from Harry, but now I know. It was definitely Ted.”

“Thank god,” Bosch said. “Such a relief to know my aura isn’t super dark.”

Ballard heard Bosch say it but couldn’t see him because of the privacy wall. She leaned down over her desk so Hatteras wouldn’t be able to see her smiling at the rejoinder. Then she got serious.