Read an extract from The Waiting by Michael Connelly.
MONDAY: 7:28 A.M.
1.
She liked waiting for the wave more than riding the wave. Facing the cliffs, straddling the board, her hips finding the up-and-down rhythm of the surface. Riding it like a horse, making her think about Kaupo Boy when she was a child. There was a reverence to the moment before the next set came in and it was time to dig down and paddle.
She checked her watch. She could fit in one more. She’d ride it all the way in if she could. But she savored the moment of just floating, closing her eyes and tilting her head upward. The sun was just over the cliffs now and it warmed her face.
“Haven’t seen you here before.”
Ballard opened her eyes. It was the guy on the One World twelve board. An OG with no wetsuit, no leash, his skin burnished to a dark cherrywood. She braced for what she knew would come next: territorial male posturing.
“I’m usually at Topanga,” she said. “But there was nothing there this morning.”
She didn’t mention that she’d consulted a wave app. The OGs would never look at an app.
He was twenty feet to her left, riding the low rollers sideways so he could keep an eye on her. Women were unusual at Staircases. It was a big boy’s break. Lots of rocks in the short tide. You had to know what you were doing, and Ballard did. She hadn’t crossed anybody’s tube, had not pulled out of a wave too soon. If this guy was going to try to school her, she would shut him down quick.
“I’m Van,” he said.
“Renée,” she said.
“So, you wanna get breakfast at Shoreline after?”
A little forward, but okay.
“Can’t,” she said. “Got one more set and then I got a job. But thanks.”
“Maybe next time,” Van said.
Before the conversation got more awkward, somebody farther down the line began paddling, aligning his board with an incoming wave. It was like a bird startling and jumping the whole flock into flight. Ballard checked over her shoulder and saw the next set coming in tall. She flipped forward and brought her legs up on the board. She started paddling. Deep strokes, fingers together to get speed. Digging down. She didn’t want to miss the wave, not in front of Van.
She glanced to her left and saw him paddling stroke for stroke with her. He was going to press her, show her whose break it was.
Ballard paddled harder, feeling the burn in her shoulders. The board started to rise with the wave, and she made her move, jumping up into a crouch on the center line. She put her left foot behind her and stood just as the wave crested. She pushed the nose down and began slicing down the face of the wave.
She heard Van’s voice in the wake, calling her goofy foot.
She put her hands out for balance, heeled the board into a turn, and went up the wall before cutting it back down and taking it all the way in. For eight seconds everything about the world was gone. It was just her and the ocean. The water. Nothing else.
She was coasting on foam when she remembered Van and looked back for him. He was nowhere in sight and then his head came up in the surf along with his red board. He raised his hand and Ballard nodded her goodbye. She stepped off, lifted her board, and walked out of the surf.
She had her wetsuit stripped down to her hips by the time she rounded the dunes and got to the parking lot. The combination of sun and wind was already drying her skin. She leaned her board against the side of the Defender and reached under the rear wheel well for her key box.
It was gone.
She crouched down and looked at the asphalt around the tire for the magnetic box.
It was not there.
She leaned in, looking up into the well, hoping she had set the box in the wrong spot.
But it was gone.
“Fuck.”
She quickly got up and went to the door. She pulled the handle and the door opened, having been left unlocked.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
There was the key and the magnetic box on the driver’s seat. She saw that the glove compartment was open. She leaned in, reached under the driver’s seat, and swept her hand back and forth on the carpet.
Her phone, gun, wallet, and badge were gone. She swept her hand farther under the seat and pulled out her handcuffs and a seven-shot Ruger boot gun that the thief had apparently missed.
She stood up and looked around the parking lot. No one was there. Just the row of cars and campers belonging to the surfers still out on the water.
“Fuck me,” she said.
2.
With her wallet containing her ID card stolen, Ballard could not pass through the turnstile at the entrance of the LAPD’s Ahmanson Center, so she drove into the overflow lot behind the massive training center and called Colleen Hatteras on her new phone. Hatteras answered with an urgent tone.
“Renée, where are you? Wasn’t the unit meeting at nine?”
“I’m in the back lot. I want you to let me in the exit door, Colleen.”
“Are you sure? If the captain—”
“I’m sure. Just open the door and I’ll deal with the captain. Is everyone still there?”
“Uh, yes. I think Anders went to the cafeteria but he didn’t say anything about leaving.”
“Okay, tell Tom or Paul to get him while you open the door for me. I’ll be there in two.”
“Well, what happened? You didn’t call and didn’t answer our calls. We were starting to get worried.”
Ballard got out of the Defender and headed to the back door of the complex. She was already exasperated with Colleen and the day hadn’t even started.
“Calm down, Colleen,” she said. “Everything’s fine. I lost my phone and wallet at the beach. I had to go home to get a credit card and then hit the Apple Store to get a new phone. So please just open the door. I’m almost there and I’m hanging up now.”
She disconnected before Colleen could respond as Ballard knew she would. She walked up to the fire exit, pulling her jacket closed so maybe it would not be obvious that she had no badge clipped to her belt.
Colleen opened the door and an ear-piercing alarm sounded. Ballard quickly stepped in and pulled the door closed, and the sound cut off.
“How did you lose your phone and wallet? Were they stolen?”
“It’s a long story, Colleen. Is everyone here?”
“Tom went to get Anders.”
“Good. We’ll start as soon as they’re back.”
The fire exit was located behind the murder-book archive. Leading Colleen, Ballard walked along the back row of shelves to the bullpen of the Open-Unsolved Unit. The center of this area was dominated by the “raft”—eight interconnected desks with privacy partitions between them. The side walls of the bullpen were lined with file cabinets and mounted whiteboards on which current investigations were tracked.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ballard announced as she reached her desk at the end of the raft. “As soon as Tom and Anders are here, we’ll start.”
Ballard sat down and logged into her city computer terminal. She went through the department’s password portal and pulled up the database containing crime reports from the entire county. She searched for reports on thefts from vehicles at county beaches and soon was looking at several occurrences. From this she was able to cull a list of thefts that occurred at popular surfing beaches. From Trestles up to Dockweiler, Ballard had been surfing the Southern California coastline since she was sixteen years old. She knew every break and could see a pattern of BFMV—burglary from motor vehicle—reports occurring at places where she knew the parking facilities weren’t visible from the ocean.
This told her three things. One, this was likely the same thief or group of thieves. Two, they were familiar with surfing and probably were surfers themselves. And three, because the thefts were spread out up and down the coast and across multiple police jurisdictions, the pattern had not been noticed by law enforcement. The thefts were seen as individual crimes.
Ballard started reading the summaries of the reports to see if any witnesses had seen anything helpful, if any suspects’ fingerprints had been found, or if there was any follow-up to the initial reporting of the crimes. None of the thefts were large enough to warrant much interest from law enforcement. Wallets, phones, cash, and spare surfboards were the things most often stolen. Taken separately, Ballard knew, these cases likely died with the initial report. As protocol dictated, they would go to an auto-crimes desk somewhere, but without a description of a suspect, a fingerprint, or even a partial license plate of a getaway car, the reports would go into the great swirling maw of minor crimes that did not merit much attention from the criminal justice apparatus. It was the story of the modern age. Reports were taken largely for insurance purposes. As far as law enforcement went, it was a waste of paper.
Colleen stuck her head over the half wall separating Ballard’s desk from her own. From her angle, she could not see Ballard’s screen. “So, what are you working on?” she asked.
Ballard logged out of her search. “Just checking email,” she said. “Is everybody ready?”
“Anders is here,” Colleen said.
Ballard stood up to address the team.
Extracted from The Waiting by Michael Connelly.
The Waiting
by Michael Connelly
Renée Ballard will need Bosch and his daughter to help bring down her enemies—this is Michael Connelly at his compelling best.
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