The Waiting

Renée Ballard, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), leads the Open-Unsolved Unit, a cold-case squad staffed by volunteers operating out of the Ahmanson Center, the department's training complex. Her team includes Tom Laffont, a retired FBI agent; Paul Masser, a former prosecutor; Lilia Aghzafi, retired from Las Vegas Metro police; Anders Persson, a Swedish software entrepreneur who handles internet research; and Colleen Hatteras, a genetic genealogist with no law enforcement background. Together they comb through decades-old murder cases for those where modern forensic technology might identify a killer. The novel interweaves three investigations with Ballard's personal reckoning over her missing mother.

One morning, Ballard surfs at an unfamiliar break called Staircases after a wave app directs her there. She returns to find her car has been broken into; her badge, gun, phone, wallet, and police ID are gone. Unwilling to report the theft for fear department enemies will use it to reassign her, Ballard investigates off the books. She traces the thefts to Dean Delsey and his father Robert, who use the same app to target surfers. After confronting Dean, she learns the goods were fenced to a man called the Lion at a run-down Venice hotel. Ballard infiltrates the operation and recovers her Glock handgun but discovers her badge has been sold to a buyer who also wants machine guns.

Ballard enlists Harry Bosch, her retired mentor who is battling cancer. Bosch poses as a gun dealer and meets the buyer in a Santa Monica parking lot. The man drives a white van bearing a Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flag instead of license plates, signaling anti-government extremism. Ballard follows the van to a caravan of RVs along the Pacific Coast Highway. That night, she enters the van and discovers an arsenal along with an LAPD SWAT vest. While hiding as the occupants scout the Malibu pier, she overhears them say their Presidents' Day plan will "make that thing in Vegas look like child's play," referencing the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.

Ballard and Bosch break into the man's storage units and identify him as Thomas Dehaven, a fugitive wanted for murdering his ex-wife and for sedition tied to the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Recognizing the threat, Ballard contacts FBI Agent Gordon Olmstead, demanding her name stay out of all reports and the FBI recover her badge. Bosch serves as bait at a controlled buy that turns violent when Dehaven draws a weapon. FBI snipers kill Dehaven and the driver; Bosch survives and retrieves Ballard's badge from around Dehaven's neck, later slipping it into her pocket during a hug.

Parallel to the badge recovery, Ballard pursues the unit's most significant case. Criminalist Darcy Troy reports a familial DNA match between the Pillowcase Rapist, a serial offender who pulled pillowcases over women's heads during assaults from 2000 to 2005, and Nicholas Purcell, a young man recently arrested for domestic violence. Nicholas's father is identified as Judge Jonathan Purcell, the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court. The team covertly collects the judge's DNA from a soupspoon at a restaurant, but results come back negative: Neither the judge nor his wife are Nicholas's biological parents.

Ballard and Masser confront the judge, who reveals Nicholas was the biological child of Mallory Richardson, a neighbor's teenage daughter whose religious family offered the baby to the childless Purcells. Mallory never identified the father and died by suicide a year after the birth. At Smoke Tree Ranch in the desert, Mallory's mother, Robin Richardson, recalls that a senior named Rodney Van Ness took Mallory to prom. Using a St. Vincent's school yearbook, Hatteras calculates that conception aligns with prom season and identifies four boys who shared a hotel room that night: Van Ness, Victor Best, Andrew Bennett, and Taylor Weeks.

Ballard and Maddie Bosch, Harry's daughter and a patrol officer who has joined the unit, drive to Las Vegas to interview Van Ness. He admits he had consensual sex with Mallory at the prom, after which she passed out. He left her unconscious in the room and returned the key to Best or Bennett, meaning anyone with access could have entered. Van Ness provides a DNA swab to clear himself. Of the remaining suspects, Weeks died in a car crash years earlier, Best moved to Hawaii in 2003, and Bennett sells real estate in Laguna Beach.

Meanwhile, Maddie brings a second major case. A storage facility manager showed her disturbing photos from a delinquent unit belonging to Emmitt Thawyer, a photographer who died years earlier. Among files labeled with women's first names, Maddie recognized Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, victim of Los Angeles's most infamous unsolved 1947 murder. In Thawyer's former house, Ballard and Maddie discover a hidden basement where luminol, a chemical that detects traces of cleaned blood, reveals extensive biological residue. Physical markers in the photos confirm all eight depicted murders took place there. Despite compelling evidence, District Attorney Ernest O'Fallon twice rejects the case, refusing to hand a public victory to Police Chief Detry, who endorsed O'Fallon's election opponent.

Then catastrophe strikes: Hatteras fails to appear at the office, and Ballard drives to her El Segundo home to find her body in a closet, strangled and shot behind the ear. Her computer, hard drive, and phone are missing. Through Persson's examination of phone records, Ballard discovers Colleen made a 29-minute call to Andrew Bennett the afternoon before her murder. Despite instructions to stay in her lane, Hatteras had contacted Bennett directly, alerting him that someone was investigating his past.

Ballard drives to Laguna Beach alone, tails Bennett to an open house, and enters before it opens. She finds her stolen Glock in his briefcase and unloads it. When Bennett pulls the empty weapon on her, revealing he killed Hatteras, Ballard draws her backup Ruger and takes control. Bennett reveals that Hatteras warned him others would come looking, but Colleen protected her colleagues by telling Bennett the threat came from amateur internet sleuths rather than law enforcement. Ballard binds him and calls the lead detective.

At a press conference, Police Chief Detry announces Bennett's arrest as the Pillowcase Rapist and the killer of Hatteras. Ballard accepts responsibility for not adequately safeguarding her volunteer. The unit gathers afterward; Laffont says, "To Colleen. May she rest in peace."

Ballard then leaks the Black Dahlia story to a Los Angeles Times reporter, stipulating that Maddie receive prominent credit. The front-page exposé forces Captain Gandle to rescind his order to remove Maddie from the unit, an order he issued after cell phone footage linked Ballard to Bosch's role in the FBI operation. Firing the officer publicly credited with solving the city's most famous case is untenable.

Throughout the novel, Ballard attends therapy with Dr. Cathy Elingburg, who suggests Ballard masks her own abandonment by absorbing the trauma she encounters through work. Ballard's father drowned pursuing a dangerous surfing lifestyle, and her mother, Makani, disappeared when Ballard was 14. Makani has been listed among the missing since wildfires devastated Lahaina, Maui. Then Dan Farley, Ballard's contact on the Morgue Identification and Notification Task Force (MINT), calls with unexpected news: Makani has been found alive, arrested on old traffic warrants. Overwhelmed, Ballard drives to the ocean.

In the epilogue, Ballard wakes before dawn in up-country Maui. She studies a map tracing the route to the address her mother gave when arrested, a road passing the stables where her childhood horse was once kept. She heads out before she can change her mind, driving to find the woman who brought her into the world and then left her behind.