BALLARD AND BOSCH 3 страница

“Aaron?” she called.

The lifeguard poked his curly-haired head up over the sill of the stand and she wondered whether he had been up there sleeping on the bench. She pointed to her tent and the paddleboard on the sand next to it.

“You watch my stuff? I’m going to get coffee.”

Aaron gave her the thumbs-up.

“You want anything?”

Aaron turned his thumb down. Ballard pulled a leash out of one of the zippered pockets on the backpack and snapped it onto Lola’s collar, then headed toward the line of restaurants and tourist stores that lined the beach walk a hundred yards from the ocean. She carried the backpack over one shoulder.

She went to Groundwork on Westminster, got a latte, and grabbed a table in the back corner where she could work without drawing attention from other patrons. Lola slid under the table and found a comfortable spot to lie down. Ballard opened the backpack and pulled out her laptop and the murder book Bosch had left for her.

This time she decided not to jump around in the book. The first section was most important anyway. It was the chronological record. It was basically a case diary, where the detectives assigned to the case described all their moves and the steps taken during the investigation.

Before starting her read she opened the laptop and ran the names George Hunter and his partner, Maxwell Talis, through the LAPD personnel computer and determined that both detectives were long retired, Hunter in 1996 and Talis the year after. It appeared that Hunter had since died but Talis was still receiving a pension. This was valuable information because if she decided to do a thorough reexamination of the Hilton murder, she should try to talk to him about what he remembered of the case.

She closed the laptop and opened up the murder book. She started reading the chrono from the first entry—the callout. Hunter and Talis were at their desks at Hollywood Detectives on a Friday morning when alerted that patrol officers had come upon a car parked in an alley behind a row of shops off Melrose Avenue and the 101 freeway overpass. The detectives responded along with teams from the crime scene unit and the coroner’s office.

The victim was a white male tentatively identified as John Hilton, twenty-four years old, by the driver’s license found in the wallet on the floor of the 1988 Toyota Corolla. The photo on the license appeared to match the face of the man lying on his right side across the front seats and center console of the car.

A computer check of the name and birth date on the DL determined that this Hilton was not the scion of a hotel family but an ex-con who had been released a year earlier from a state prison after serving thirty months for drug possession and burglary convictions.

As lead detective, George Hunter had composed all of the early entries of the chrono, signing each one with his initials. These gave Ballard a good insight into how the investigation was initially focused. As she had surmised on her first quick overview of the book, the investigation took its cue from the victim’s prior history of drug abuse and petty crime. Hunter and Talis clearly believed that this had been a drug rip-off and that Hilton had been murdered for as little as the price of a single hit of heroin.

Ballard now handled all calls for a detective on the midnight shift, but her previous posting had been as a homicide detective working specialty cases out of the downtown police headquarters. While the department’s look-the-other-way sexual politics and systemic misogyny had caused her transfer to the lesser assignment, her skills as a homicide investigator had not deteriorated. Bosch had recognized this and tapped into it when they had crossed paths on a case the previous year. They had agreed to work cases together in the future, even if off the record and below department radar. Bosch was retired and an outsider, no longer encumbered by LAPD rules and procedure. Ballard was not retired but she was certainly out of sight and out of mind on the midnight shift. That made her both an insider and an outsider. All of her homicide skills now told her this was most likely an impossible case: an eighty-dollar drug rip-off that had ended with a bullet nearly thirty years before. There might have been something here that stuck in John Jack Thompson’s craw and lit his fire, but whatever that was would be long gone now.

She first began to suspect that Hilton was a snitch. Perhaps a snitch for Thompson, which was why the detective took an active interest in the case, even though he was not assigned to it. She took a notebook out of her backpack. The first thing she wrote down was a question for Bosch.

How many other murder books did JJT steal?

It was an important question because it went to the level of dedication to this case. Bosch was right. If she could figure out why Thompson took this particular murder book, she might be able to zero in on a motive and then a suspect. But as described in the early entries of the chronology, this was a pedestrian murder—if there was such a thing—that would have been nearly impossible to solve at the time, let alone twenty-nine years later.

“Shit,” Ballard whispered.

Lola alerted, raised her head, and looked up at her. Ballard rubbed the dog’s head.

“It’s okay, girl,” she said.

She went back to the chrono and continued to read and take notes.

The manual transmission of Hilton’s car had been in neutral but the key was in the ignition and in the on position. The engine was dead because the gas tank was empty. It was assumed that Hilton had cruised into the alley to make a drive-through drug purchase and had been shot after stopping and putting the transmission in neutral. It could not be determined how much gas had been in the tank when Hilton entered the alley, but the coroner’s investigators estimated that time of death had been between midnight and four a.m., which was four to eight hours before the body was discovered by one of the shop owners arriving for work and parking behind his business.

Both front windows of the car were open. Hilton had been shot point-blank behind the right ear. This led the detectives to surmise that they were possibly looking for two suspects: one who came to the driver’s door and drew Hilton’s attention and another—the true killer—who came to the passenger door, reached through the window with a gun, and executed Hilton as he was turned and looking out the window. This theory was supported by the location of the shell casing ejected from the murder weapon. It was found on the passenger floor mat, an indication that the gun had been fired from that side of the car. Hilton then most likely slumped against the driver’s door but was pushed back over the center console when his pockets were searched. In the crime scene photos, both front pockets of his pants had been pulled inside out.

To Ballard, the theory of two killers and how they carried out the crime veered slightly from the idea of it being a robbery. It was colder, more calculated. It felt planned to her. A drug rip-off would have also been planned to some extent but usually not with this kind of precision. She began to wonder whether the original detectives had zeroed in on the wrong motive from the start. This could have led to tunnel vision on the investigation, with Hunter and Talis ignoring any clue that didn’t fit their premise.

She also discounted the theory by the original investigators that two killers were involved—one to distract Hilton from the left, one to reach into the car from the right to shoot. She knew that a solo gunman could have easily carried out the killing. Hilton’s attention to his left could have been drawn by any number of things in the alley.

She wrote another note, wanting to remind herself to bring all of this up with Bosch, and then went back to the chrono.

Hunter and Talis focused their search for suspects on the immediate neighborhood and among the dealers known to sell in the alley. They checked with the sergeant in charge of a street-level narcotics unit assigned to Hollywood Division who said his team had intermittently worked undercover buy-bust operations in the area, as it was a known drug market because of its proximity to the 101 freeway. Customers came to Hollywood, jumped off the freeway at Melrose, and made drug purchases before jumping back on the freeway and getting far away from the transaction. Additionally, the location was close to several movie studios, and employees picked up drugs on their way to or from work, unless they were upper-level creatives who had their purchases delivered directly to them.

The chrono noted that the drug clientele in the area was mostly white, while the dealers were exclusively black males who were supplied product by a street gang from South L.A. The Rolling 60s Crips gang had laid claim to this section of Hollywood and enforced its grip with violence. The murder of John Hilton was not good for business because it flooded the area with police activity and shut things down. One note on the chrono stated that a street informant had told a gang officer that members of the Rolling 60s were attempting to identify the killer themselves to eliminate and make an example of him. Business came first, gang loyalty second.

That note froze Ballard and made her wonder whether she was chasing a ghost. The Rolling 60s could have caught and executed the killer or killers of John Hilton decades earlier without the LAPD making the connection between the two cases.

Apparently undaunted by the same question, Hunter and Talis put together a list of known drug dealers who worked in the area and began bringing them in for questioning. None of the interviews produced suspects or leads on the case, but Ballard noticed that the roster was incomplete. A few people on the list were never found or questioned. Among them was a man named Elvin Kidd, a Rolling 60s Crips gang member who was at a street-boss level and ran the territory where the Hilton murder took place.

They steered completely clear of another dealer, Dennard Dorsey, when they were told he was on keep-away status because he was a valuable informant. The snitch’s handler—a Major Narcotics unit detective named Brendan Sloan—did the interview and reported back that his man knew nothing of value in regard to the Hilton murder.

Ballard wrote all of the names down. She was bothered that the homicide detectives didn’t interview all the dealers and had left questioning the snitch to his department handler. To her it meant that this angle of the investigation was incomplete. She didn’t know whether laziness or something else had gotten in the way. The murder counts in the city back in the late ’80s and early ’90s were the highest in the city’s history. It was likely that Hunter and Talis had other cases at the time, with new ones constantly coming in.

She finished going through the chronology an hour and one more latte later. The thing that struck her was that the document ended with an entry from Talis on the one-year anniversary of the murder:

No new leads or suspects at this time. Case remains open and active.

And that was it. No explanation as to how it was still actively being pursued.

Ballard knew it was bullshit. The case had ground to a halt for lack of leads and viable angles of investigation. The detectives were waiting for what in homicide was called a “miracle cure” in the form of someone coming forward with the killer’s name. This would most likely have to be someone from the underworld—someone arrested and facing charges, looking to deal their way out of a jam. Only then would they get a name they could run with. So it was kept “open and active,” but Hunter and Talis were on to other things.

What also struck Ballard as missing was the work of John Jack Thompson. During the years he had held the murder book, he had apparently added nothing to it. There was nothing from him in the chronology that indicated he had made any moves, conducted any interviews, or broken any new ground on the case. Ballard wondered whether he had kept notes of his private investigation separate so as not to change or taint the record of the original investigation. She knew she would have to talk to Bosch about it and possibly go back to Thompson’s house and home office to see whether there was a second murder book or any record of Thompson’s work on the case.

She moved on from the chronology to fuller reports filed by the investigators based on the evidence collected and witness interviews. In the victim section of the murder book she read a bio authored by Talis and drawn from interviews and official documents. The victim’s mother and stepfather were still alive at the time of the killing. According to the written account, Sandra Hilton expressed no surprise at her son’s demise and said he had come back from his stint at Corcoran State Prison a different person. She said he seemed broken from the experience and wanted nothing more than to get high all the time. She admitted that she and her husband kicked John out of the house shortly after he returned from prison and appeared to be making no effort to integrate into society. He said he wanted to be an artist but did nothing to pursue it as a career. He was stealing from them in order to support his drug habit.

Donald Hilton stood by his decision to evict John from the family home in the Toluca Lake area. He was quick to note that John was his adopted son but was already eleven when Donald met Sandra and the two got married. His biological father had not been a part of John’s life for those first eleven years, and Donald said that behavioral problems were already deeply set in the boy. Lacking a blood relation to the young man he raised apparently allowed him to kick him out of the house later on without a guilty conscience.

A section of the report had been redacted with a black marker. Two lines in the middle of the interview summary were completely blacked out. This seemed odd to Ballard because a murder book was already a confidential document. The exception to this was when a case was filed and murder book documents became part of discovery and turned over to the defense. On some occasions redacting occurred to protect the names of informants and others. But this case had never resulted in charges, and it seemed odd to Ballard that an interview with the parents of a victim would contain any information that would need to be kept hidden or secret. She opened the binder’s rings and removed the page, studying the back to see if any of the redacted words could be read. Unable to make anything out, she put the page at the front of the binder to remind herself of the anomaly every time she opened the book: What information had been redacted from the case file? And who did it?

Ballard’s review of the other witness summaries produced only one notable question. Hilton had shared an apartment in North Hollywood with a man named Nathan Brazil, who was described as a production assistant at Archway Studios in Hollywood. Ballard knew the studio was on Melrose Avenue near Paramount—and near where Hilton was murdered. Brazil told the investigators that he was working the night of the murder on a film production and Hilton had dropped by the guarded entrance to the studio and asked for him. Brazil did not get the message until hours later and by then Hilton was gone. Presumably he left the studio and proceeded down Melrose to the alley where he was shot and killed. Brazil told investigators that it was unusual for Hilton to come to his workplace. It had never happened before and he didn’t know why Hilton did so or what he wanted.

It was another mystery within the mystery that Hunter and Talis had not solved.

Ballard looked at her notes. She had written down the names of several people she would have to run down and interview, if they were still alive.

Maxwell Talis

Donald Hilton

Sandra Hilton

Thompson widow

Vincent Pilkey, dealer

Dennard Dorsey, dealer/snitch—protected

Brendan Sloan, narcotics

Elvin Kidd

Nathan Brazil, roommate

Ballard knew that John Jack Thompson’s widow was alive, as well as presumably Maxwell Talis. Brendan Sloan was still around as well. Sloan, in fact, was well known to her. He had risen from narcotics detective to deputy chief in the twenty-nine years since the Hilton murder. He was in charge of West Bureau. Ballard had never met him but since Hollywood Division fell under West Bureau’s command, Sloan was technically her boss.

Ballard’s back was stiffening. It was a combination of a tough morning paddle into strong headwinds, a lack of sleep, and the hard wooden chair she had been sitting on for two hours. She closed the murder book, deciding to leave the remaining pages and reports for later. She reached down to ruffle Lola’s scruff.

“Let’s go see Double, girl!”

The dog’s tail wagged violently. Double was her friend, a French bulldog being boarded at the day-care center where Lola spent most nights and some days when Ballard worked.

Ballard needed to drop Lola off so she could continue to work the case.

Ballard’s first stop was Property Division, where she checked out the sealed evidence box marked with the John Hilton murder case number. She could tell right away that it was not a twenty-nine-year-old box and the sealing tape was not yellowed as would have been expected. The box had obviously been repacked, which was not unusual. The Property Division was a massive warehouse but still too small for all the evidence stored there. Consolidation was an ongoing project and old, dusty evidence boxes were often opened and repacked in smaller boxes to save room. Ballard had the evidence list from the murder book that she could use to make sure everything was intact—the victim’s clothes, personal belongings, etc. She was primarily looking for two things: the expended bullet retrieved from Hilton’s body during autopsy and the casing retrieved from the floor of his car.

She checked the sign-out sheet on the box and saw that, other than the repackaging that had taken place six years earlier, the box had apparently not been opened since it was placed in Property by the original two detectives—Hunter and Talis—nearly three decades before. This would generally not be unusual because no suspects had ever been developed, so there was no reason to analyze collected evidence in regard to a potential killer. Hunter and Talis had collected the evidence and had a list of the box’s contents in the murder book. They knew firsthand what they had. They had seen it and held it.

However, what Ballard did find curious was that John Jack Thompson, when he took possession of the murder book and apparently started working the case, had never gone to Property and pulled the box. He had never checked out the physical evidence.

It was literally the first move Ballard had made. Yes, she had the property list from the murder book, but she still wanted to see the evidence. It was a visceral thing, like an extension of the crime scene photos. It brought her close to the case, closer to the victim, and she could not see pulling and working a case without this necessary step. Yet Thompson, the mentor to two generations of detectives, had apparently chosen not to.

Ballard put the question aside and started going through the contents of the box, checking them off against the list from the murder book and studying each piece of clothing and every item gathered from the Corolla. She had seen something in the crime scene photos that she wanted to find: a small notebook that was in the console between the front seats of the car. An entry on the property list said simply notebook, with no description of its contents or any detail about why Hilton kept a notebook by his side in his car.

She found it in a brown paper bag with other items from the console. These included a lighter, a drug pipe, spare change amounting to eighty-seven cents, a pen, and a parking ticket issued six weeks before Hilton’s death. The parking ticket had been explored by the original investigators and there was a report in the murder book on their efforts. The ticket appeared to be a dead end. It had been issued on a street in Los Feliz where a friend of Hilton’s lived. The friend recalled that Hilton had visited to sell the friend a clock radio he said his stepfather had given him. But he ended up staying at the apartment for several hours when the friend shared a hit of heroin with him. While Hilton was nodding off in his friend’s apartment, his car was being ticketed. Hunter and Talis deemed the ticket irrelevant to the investigation and Ballard saw nothing that made her think otherwise.

Now she opened the notebook and found Hilton’s name and a number she assumed was his prisoner number at Corcoran written on the inside flap. The pages of the notebook were largely filled with pencil studies and full sketches of hard-looking men, many with tattoos on their faces and necks. Other prisoners, Ballard surmised. The finished drawings were quite good and Ballard thought Hilton had some artistic talent. Knowing that he had this other dimension beyond drug addict and petty thief humanized him to her. Nobody deserved to be shot to death in a car, no matter what they were doing, but it was helpful to get a human connection. It added fuel to the fire that the detective needed to somehow keep burning. She wondered if Hunter or Talis or Thompson had made a connection to Hilton through this notebook. She doubted it. If they had, it would have been kept in the murder book so that the detective could see it and open it when he needed to stoke the fire.

Ballard finished flipping through the pages. One sketch caught her eye and she held on it. It was of a black man with a shaved head. He was turned away from the artist and on his neck was a six-pointed star with the number 60 in its center. Ballard knew that all Crips gangs or sets shared the symbol of the six-pointed star, its points symbolizing the early altruistic goals of the gang: love, life, loyalty, understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. The 60 in the middle of the star was what caught Ballard’s eye. It meant that the subject of the sketch was a Rolling 60s Crip, a member of the same set of the notoriously violent gang that controlled drug sales in the alley where Hilton was murdered. Was that a coincidence? It appeared that Hilton had sketched this man while in prison; less than two years after his release, he was killed on Rolling 60s turf.

None of this had been in any reports in the murder book that Ballard had read. She made a mental note to check again. It might be a significant clue or it might be purely coincidental.

She flipped farther into the notebook and saw another drawing, which she thought might be the same man with the Rolling 60s tattoo. But his face was turned away and shadowed. She couldn’t be sure. Then she found what she believed was a self-portrait. It looked like the face of the man she had seen in the crime scene photos. In the drawing, the man had haunted eyes with deep circles beneath them. He looked scared, and something about the drawing punched Ballard in the chest.

Ballard decided to add the notebook to the items she checked out of Property. The drawings reminded her of a case that was cracked by the cold case unit a few years earlier, when Ballard had been assigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division. Detective Mitzi Roberts had connected three murders of prostitutes to a drifter named Sam Little. Little was caught and convicted, then from prison started confessing to dozens of murders committed over four decades and all over the country. They were all “throwaway” victims—drug addicts and prostitutes—whom society, and police departments, had marginalized and given little notice to. Little was an artist and he sketched pictures of his victims to help visiting investigators identify the women and the cases. He held their images in his head, but not so often their names. He was given a full set of artist supplies and his drawings were in color and very realistic, eventually matching up to victims in multiple states and helping to clear cases. But they didn’t serve to humanize Sam Little, only his victims. Little was seen as a psychopath who showed no mercy to his victims and deserved no mercy in return.

Ballard signed out the bullet evidence and the notebook and left the Property Division. She called Bosch when she got outside.

“What’s up?”

“I just came out of Property. I pulled the bullet and casing. Tomorrow is Walk-In Wednesday at ballistics. I’ll go right after my shift.”

“Sounds good. Anything else in the box?”

“Hilton was a sketch artist. He had a notebook in his car that had drawings from prison. I checked it out.”

“How come?”

“Because I thought he was good at it. There are a few other things from my review that I want to go over. You want to meet?”

“I’m sort of in the middle of something today but I could meet for a few minutes. I’m close by.”

“Really? Where?”

“The Nickel Diner, you know it?”

“Of course. I’ll be there in ten.”

Ballard found Bosch in the back with his laptop open and several documents spread on a four-top table. It was apparently late enough in the day for the management to allow him to monopolize the spot. A plate with half a chocolate-frosted donut was on the table, assuring Ballard that Bosch was a paying customer rather than a freeloader who bought nothing but coffee and monopolized a table for hours.

She noticed the cane hooked over one of the empty chairs as she sat down. Assessing the documents that Bosch had started stacking when he noticed her approach, Ballard raised her hands palms up in a What gives? gesture.

“You’re the busiest retired guy I think I’ve ever seen.”

“Not really. I just said I’d take a quick look at this and then that would be it.”

Putting her backpack on the empty chair to her right, she caught a glimpse of the letterhead on one of the documents Bosch was clearing. It said “Michael Haller, Attorney-At-Law.”

“Oh, shit, you’re working for that guy?”

“What guy?”

“Haller. You work for him, you work for the devil.”

“Really? Why do you say that?”

“He’s a defense attorney. Not only that, but a good one. He gets people off that shouldn’t get off. Undoes what we do. How do you even know him?”

“Last thirty years, I’ve spent a lot of time in courthouses. So has he.”

“Is that the Judge Montgomery case?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Who doesn’t? Judge murdered in front of the courthouse—that’ll get some attention. Besides, I liked Judge Montgomery. When he was on a criminal bench I hit him up for warrants every now and then. He was a real stickler for the law. I remember this one time, the clerk let me go back to chambers to get a warrant signed and I go in there and look around and there’s no judge. Then I hear him say, ‘Out here.’ He had opened his window and climbed out onto the ledge to smoke a cigarette. Fourteen floors up. He said he didn’t want to break the rule about smoking in the building.”

Bosch put his stack of files on the empty chair to his right. But that wasn’t the end of it.

“I don’t know,” Ballard said. “I may have to reassess our … thing. I mean, if you’re going to be working for the other side.”

“I don’t work for the other side or the dark side or whatever you want to call it,” Bosch said. “This is a one-day thing and I actually volunteered for it. I was in court today and something didn’t add up right. I asked to look at the files and, as a matter of fact, did just find something before you walked in.”

“Something that helps the defense?”

“Something that I think the jury should know. Doesn’t matter who it helps.”

“Whoa, that’s the dark side talking right there. You’ve crossed over.”

“Look, did you come here to talk about the Montgomery case or the Hilton case?”

“Take it easy, Harry. I’m just busting your balls.”

She pulled her backpack over, unzipped it, and pulled out the Hilton murder book.

“Now, you went through this, right?” she asked.

“Yes, before giving it to you,” Bosch said.

“Well, a couple things.”

She reached into the backpack for the envelopes containing the ballistic evidence.

“I pulled the box at Property and checked out the bullet and the casing. As you said before, maybe we get lucky.”

“Good.”

“I also found this in the box.”

She went into the backpack again and came up with the notebook she had found in the property box. She handed it to Bosch.

“In the crime scene photos this was in the center console of the car. I think it was important to him.”

Bosch started flipping through the pages and looking at the sketches.

“Okay,” he said. “What else?”

“Well, that’s it from Property,” Ballard said. “But I think what I didn’t find there is worth noting, and it’s where you come into the picture.”

“You want to explain that?”

“John Jack Thompson never pulled the evidence in the case,” she said.

She read Bosch’s reaction as the same as hers. If Thompson was working the case, he would have pulled the box at Property and seen what he had.

“You sure?” Bosch asked.

“He’s not on the checkout list,” Ballard said. “I’m not sure he ever investigated this case—unless there’s more at his house.”

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