BALLARD AND BOSCH 9 страница

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He started to slip off his stool.

“No, I don’t want any,” Ballard said. “I just want to know. You sell a bottle of it the other night? Monday night?”

Marko thought about it for a moment and slowly nodded.

“Maybe,” he said. “I think so.”

“I need to look at your video,” Ballard said.

Marko got off the stool.

“Sure thing,” he said. “You come in.”

He disappeared to his left and Ballard heard the locks on the steel door being opened. She had expected no pushback on her request, no questions about search warrants or other legalities. Marko depended on the police to keep an eye on his business and to respond to his many calls about belligerent or suspicious customers. He knew that if he expected that kind of service it was a two-way street.

Ballard entered and Marko locked the door behind her. She noticed that in addition to the bolt locks he flipped down a metal burglar bar across the door. He wasn’t taking chances.

He led her past the display shelves to a back room used for storage and as an office. A computer stood on a small crowded desk that was pushed against a wall. A back door led to the alley behind the plaza; it, too, was steel and equipped with two burglar bars.

“Okay, so …,” Marko said.

He didn’t finish. He just opened up a screen that was quartered into four camera views, two outside the front, showing the parking lot and the front door of the shop, a third in the alley showing the back door, and the fourth a camera over the ATM in the front room. Ballard saw the patrol car still positioned outside the donut shop. Marko pointed at it.

“Those are good guys,” he said. “They hang around, watch out for me.”

Ballard still thought the donuts might be the draw but didn’t say so.

“Okay, Monday night,” she said.

Ballard had no idea when Edison Banks Jr. received the bottle of Tito’s his fellow encampment inhabitants saw him with, or how long it would have taken him to consume it. So she asked Marko to start running the playback fast, beginning at dusk on Monday. Every time a customer entered the store he would slow the video to normal speed until Ballard determined that the customer was not purchasing what she was looking for.

Twenty minutes into the playback they got a hit on Tito’s vodka but it wasn’t what Ballard expected: a Mercedes Benz coupe pulled into the lot and parked in front of Mako’s. A woman with long black hair, in stiletto heels and all-black leather pants and jacket, got out and entered the store. Inside, she bought a bottle of Tito’s after first withdrawing cash from the ATM. Mako’s was a cash-only business.

“Is she a regular?” Ballard asked.

“Her, no,” Marko said. “Never seen her. She don’t look like a working girl, you know? They different.”

“Yeah, they don’t drive Mercedes.”

Ballard watched as the woman returned to the car, got in, and drove out of the plaza’s lot, heading west on Santa Monica—the direction away from the city park where Edison Banks Jr. would burn to death about four hours later. Ballard committed the car’s license plate number to memory, which was easy because it was a California vanity plate—14U24ME.

“What is that?” Marko said.

“One for you, two for me,” Ballard said.

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Whose ATM is that?”

“It’s mine,” Marko said. “I mean, it’s a company that has them but they pay me to have it there. I get a cut, you know? It makes me good money because people need the cash when they come in here.”

“Right. Can you get records?”

“What records?”

“Of the withdrawals. Like if I wanted to know who she was.”

“Mmm, I don’t know. You might have to have the legal paper for that. Not my company, you see.”

“A search warrant. Okay.”

“I mean, if it was up to me, I give you, you know? I always help police. But this guy might not be the same.”

“I understand. I have her plate number. I can get it with that.”

“Okay. Keep going?”

He pointed to the computer screen.

“Yes, keep going,” Ballard said. “We’re not even halfway through the night.”

A few minutes later in real time and an hour later on the video playback, Ballard saw something that caught her eye. A man in ragged clothes pushed a shopping cart full of bottles and cans up to Mako’s, parked it on the sidewalk, and then buzzed to be allowed entrance. He came in and dumped enough change and crumpled bills into the pass-through drawer to purchase a forty-ounce bottle of Old English malt liquor. He then left the store and returned to his cart, securing the full bottle among the bottles and cans he had collected, and started pushing his way out of the lot. He headed east on Santa Monica and Ballard thought she recognized him as one of the onlookers from Monday night after the fire.

It gave her a new idea.

She decided to go find the man who collected the bottles.

Ballard caught a call just before end of shift that pulled her away from finishing her report for the RHD meeting on Banks and pushed her into unpaid overtime. It was a he said/he said case on Citrus just south of Fountain. Patrol called her out to referee a violent domestic dispute between two men who shared a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment and had fought over who got to use the shower first before work. They had been drinking and drugging most of the night and the fight began when one of the men took the last clean towel and locked himself in the bathroom. The second man objected and kicked the door open, hitting the first in the face and breaking his nose. The fight then ranged through the small apartment and woke other residents in the building. By the time the police arrived after multiple 911 calls, both men were showing injuries from the altercation and neither was going to work.

The two patrol officers who responded wanted to pass the decision-making off to a detective so they would avoid any future blowback from the case. Ballard arrived and talked to the officers, then to both parties involved. She guessed that the fight wasn’t really about a clean towel or the shower but was symptomatic of problems in the men’s relationship, whatever that was. Nevertheless, she chose to bag them both, out of protection for them and herself. Domestic disputes were tricky. Calming anger, settling nerves, and then simply backing away might seem to be the most judicious path, but if an hour or a week or a year later the same relationship ends in a killing, the neighbors talk to the news cameras and say the police came out before and did nothing. Better safe now than sorry later. That was the rule and that was why the patrol officers wanted no part of the decision.

Ballard arrested both men and had them transported separately to Hollywood Division jail, where they would be held in adjoining cells. The paperwork involved in booking the two, plus Ballard’s need to prepare other documents, pushed her past seven a.m. and the end of shift.

After filing the necessary arrest reports, Ballard took her city car downtown and parked on First Street in front of the PAB. There was no parking there but she was late and her hope was that any traffic officer would recognize the vehicle as a detective ride and leave it unticketed. Besides, she didn’t expect to be inside long.

She hooked her backpack over one shoulder and carried a brown paper evidence bag with her. On the fifth floor she entered the Robbery-Homicide Division, realizing that it was the first time she had been back since she involuntarily transferred to Hollywood Division’s late show. She scanned the vast room, starting with the captain’s office in the back corner. She saw through the glass wall that it was empty. There was no other sign of him—or of Nuccio and Spellman—so she proceeded to the War Room. On the door she saw that the sliding sign was moved to IN USE and knew she had found her party. She knocked once and entered.

The War Room was a 12 x 30 repurposed storage room that held a boardroom-style table and had whiteboards and flat screens on its walls. It was used on task force cases, for meetings involving multiple investigators, or for sensitive cases that should not be discussed in the open squad room.

Captain Robert Olivas was sitting at the head of the long table. To his left were Nuccio and Spellman. To his right were two detectives Ballard recognized as Drucker and Ferlita, both longtime RHD bulls who specialized in burn cases. Drucker had been on the squad so long his nickname was “Scrapyard” because he had replaced two knees, a hip, and a shoulder over time.

“Detective Ballard,” Olivas said, his tone even and not projecting any of the enmity she knew he still carried for her.

“Captain,” Ballard said, just as evenly.

“Investigator Nuccio told me you might be joining. But I think we have things in hand here and you’re not going to be needed on this.”

“That’s good, because I’m parked out front in a red zone. But before I leave, I thought you might want to see and hear some of the evidence I’ve collected.”

“Evidence, Detective? I was told you left the scene Monday night as soon as you could.”

“Not quite like that, but I did leave once the Fire Department said they had things in hand and would contact RHD if anything changed.”

She was telling Olivas what her stand would be should he try to raise issues with how she handled the original call. She also guessed that Nuccio and Spellman would not be a problem because they were smart enough not to get in the middle of a police department squabble.

Olivas, a taciturn man with a wide girth, seemed to decide that this one wasn’t worth it. It was part of that smooth sailing Amy Dodd had mentioned: Olivas wanted no waves in his final year. Ballard knew this would play well with her real plan for the meeting.

“What have you got?” Olivas asked. “We’re not even sure we have a homicide here.”

“And that’s why you guys down here get the big bucks, right?” Ballard said. “You get to figure it out.”

Olivas was finished with the introductory pleasantries.

“Like I said, what have you got, Ballard?”

Now his tone was slipping. Condescension and dislike were taking over. Ballard put the evidence bag on the table.

“I’ve got this for starters,” she said. “An empty fifth of Tito’s vodka.”

“And how does that fit into this?” Olivas asked.

Ballard pointed to Nuccio.

“Inspector Nuccio told me yesterday that the victim’s blood-alcohol content was measured at three-six at the coroner’s. That takes a lot of alcohol. I spoke to some of the homeless men who knew the victim and they said that on Monday night Banks was drinking a fifth of Tito’s that he wasn’t sharing. They said somebody—‘a guardian angel’—gave it to him. I recovered the bottle from another homeless man who camps on the same sidewalk and collects bottles and cans for recycling. Chain of custody is for shit but he felt pretty sure he picked up the bottle after Banks chugged the vodka. I figure you might want to take it to latent prints. If you get prints from Banks, it confirms the story. But you might also get the prints of the ‘guardian angel,’ and that’s somebody you want to talk to. That is, if somebody helped get him drunk so they could light him on fire.”

Olivas digested that for a few moments before responding.

“Did anybody see this ‘guardian angel’?” he asked. “Are we talking man, woman, what?”

“Not the guys I talked to,” Ballard said. “But I went down the street to Mako’s and they have video of a woman in a Mercedes pulling up and buying a bottle of Tito’s about four hours before Banks got burned. That may just be a coincidence but I’ll leave that to you guys to figure out.”

Olivas looked at his men.

“It’s thin,” he said. “The whole thing is thin. You men take the bottle and anything else Ballard has. We need to pick up the heater and do our own testing on that. We’re going to withhold determination of death until we know what’s what. Ballard, you can go. You’re off duty now anyway, right?”

“I am,” Ballard said. “And I’m out of here. You guys let me know if you need me to go back to the scene for anything tonight.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Olivas said. “We’ll handle it from here.”

“I just need you to sign off on a summary report on the recovery of the bottle,” Ballard said. “So there’s a record of chain of custody and no confusion down the line should the bottle of Tito’s be significant.”

“And to make sure you get the credit,” Olivas said.

It was not a question and Ballard was pleased with how Olivas took it.

“We all want proper credit for what we do, don’t we?” she said.

“Whatever,” Olivas said. “You write it up and I’ll sign it.”

Ballard unzipped her backpack and removed a file containing two copies of a two-page document. The front page was taken up by a detailed summary of the bottle’s origin and the second was the signing page bearing only Olivas’s name and rank below a signature line. She placed the documents on the table.

“One for you and one for me,” she said.

Olivas signed both documents. Ballard took one and left the other on the table. She put her copy back in its folder and returned it to her backpack.

Ballard threw a mock salute at Olivas, then turned and left the room. On her way out of RHD, she tried to calm herself and control her emotions. It was difficult. Olivas would always be able to get to her. She knew that. He had taken something from her, as other men had in the past. But the others had paid in one way or another: come-uppance … revenge … justice—whatever the term. But not Olivas. Not so far. At best he had been left with a temporary blemish on his reputation that was gone soon enough. Ballard knew she could outwit and out-investigate him all she wanted, but he would still always have that unnameable thing he had taken from her.

After leaving RHD, Ballard went down the hall to the Special Assault Section again. This time Amy Dodd was not in her cubicle, but the station next to it still seemed to be unused. Ballard sat down and logged into the department’s computer. She blew out a deep breath and tried to relax now that she was away from her tormentor. She was actually finished for the day, but anxiety was seizing her because of Olivas and what seeing him brought up in her. She had just given up one case and wanted to get back to the other. To keep things moving forward.

She opened her notebook next to the computer and found the page where she had written down the intel she had gathered on Elvin Kidd. She had both the cell number and the landline associated with his business. Connecting to Nexis/Lexis, she ran a search on the numbers and got the service providers, a requirement for a wiretap search warrant. Once she had that, she opened a template for a search warrant application requesting approval of audio surveillance on both phone numbers.

Seeking a wiretap approval was a complicated and difficult process because listening in on personal phone calls starkly conflicted with Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. The probable cause for such an intrusion had to be complete, airtight, and desperate. Complete and airtight because the writer had to lay out in the probable cause statement that the threshold of criminal activity by the target of the surveillance had been easily passed. Desperate because the investigator must also make a convincing argument for the wiretap being the only alternative for advancing the case against the intended target. A wiretap was supposed to be a last-resort measure, and so required a detective to get the written approval of the department. It had to be signed off on by a high-ranking supervisor—like a captain or higher.

It took Ballard an hour to write a seven-page probable cause document that was half boilerplate legalese and half an outline of the case against Kidd. It leaned heavily on information from an LAPD-certified informant named Dennard Dorsey and stated that the wiretap was a last-resort measure because the case was twenty-nine years old and witnesses had died, had faded memories, or could not be located. The document did not mention that Dorsey had not been an active informant in more than a decade or that Kidd had not been active in the Rolling 60s Crips gang for even longer.

As Ballard was proofing the statement on the screen, Amy Dodd arrived at her cubicle.

“Well, this is getting to be a regular thing,” she said.

Ballard looked up at her. Dodd looked tired, as though she’d worked a long night on a case. Ballard once again was hit with concern.

“Just in time,” she said. “What’s the printer code for this unit?”

Dodd said she had to look it up. She sat down at her desk, logged in, then read the unit’s printer ID off her screen. Ballard sent the probable cause document to be printed.

“So what’s up?” Dodd said from the other side of the partition. “You moving in over there?”

“Writing a search warrant,” Ballard said. “I have to take it over to Judge Thornton before he starts court.”

“Wiretap?”

“Yeah. Two lines.”

Judge Billy Thornton was the Superior Court’s wiretap judge, meaning all search warrants for phone surveillance went through him for approval. He also ran a very busy courtroom that usually convened by ten each morning.

Following instructions from Dodd, Ballard went to a break area at the rear of the squad room to fish her document out of the printer. She then came back to her borrowed desk and pulled from her back-pack the same file folder she had produced during the War Room meeting with Olivas. She attached the signature page from the chain-of-custody document to the back of the search warrant application and was ready to go.

“I’m out of here,” she announced. “You ever want to get together after work, I’m here, Amy. At least until the late show starts.”

“Thanks,” Dodd said, seeming to pick up on Ballard’s worry. “I might take you up on that.”

Ballard took the elevator down and then crossed the front plaza toward her car. She checked the windshield and saw no ticket. She decided to double down on her luck and leave the car there. The courthouse was only a block away on Temple; if she was fast and Judge Thornton had not convened court, she could be back to the car in less than a half hour. She quickened her pace.

Judge Billy Thornton was a well-regarded mainstay in the local criminal justice system. He had served both as a public defender and as a deputy district attorney in his early years, before being elected to the bench and holding the position in Department 107 of the Los Angeles Superior Court for more than a quarter century. He had a folksy manner in the courtroom that concealed a sharp legal mind—one reason the presiding judge assigned wiretap search warrants to him. His full name was Clarence William Thornton but he preferred Billy, and his bailiff called it out every time he entered the courtroom: “The Honorable Billy Thornton presiding.”

Thanks to the inordinately long wait for an elevator in the fifty-year-old courthouse, Ballard did not get to Department 107 until ten minutes before ten a.m., and she saw that court was about to convene. A man in blue county jail scrubs was at the defense table with his suited attorney sitting next to him. A prosecutor Ballard recognized but could not remember by name was at the other table. They appeared ready to go and the only party missing was the judge on the bench. Ballard pulled back her jacket so the badge on her belt could be seen by the courtroom deputy and went through the gate. She moved around the attorney tables and went to the clerk’s station to the right of the judge’s bench. A man with a fraying shirt collar looked up at her. The nameplate on his desk said ADAM TRAINOR.

“Hi,” Ballard whispered, feigning breathlessness so Trainor would think she had run up the nine flights of steps and take pity. “Is there any chance I can get in to see the judge about a wiretap warrant before he starts court?”

“Oh, boy, we’re just waiting on the last juror to get here before starting,” Trainor said. “You might have to come back at the lunch break.”

“Can you please just ask him? The warrant’s only seven pages and most of it’s boilerplate stuff he’s read a million times. It won’t take him long.”

“Let me see. What’s your name and department?”

“Renée Ballard, LAPD. I’m working a cold case homicide. And there is a time element on this.”

Trainor picked up his phone, punched a button, and swiveled on his chair so his back was to Ballard and she would have difficulty hearing the phone call. It didn’t matter because it was over in twenty seconds and Ballard expected the answer was no as Trainor swiveled toward her.

But she was wrong.

“You can go back,” Trainor said. “He’s in his chambers. He’s got about ten minutes. The missing juror just called from the garage.”

“Not with those elevators,” Ballard said.

Trainor opened a half door in the cubicle that allowed Ballard access to the rear door of the courtroom. She walked through a file room and then into a hallway. She had been in judicial chambers on other cases before and knew that this hallway led to a line of offices assigned to the criminal-court judges. She didn’t know whether to go right or left until she heard a voice say, “Back here.”

It was to the left. She found an open door and saw Judge Billy Thornton standing next to a desk, pulling on his black robe for court.

“Come in,” he said.

Ballard entered. His chambers were just like the others she had been in. A desk area and a sitting area surrounded on three sides by shelves containing legal volumes in leather bindings. She assumed it was all for show, since everything was on databases now.

“A cold case, huh?” Thornton said. “How old?”

Ballard spoke as she opened her backpack and pulled out the file.

“Nineteen-ninety,” she said. “We have a suspect and want to stimulate a wire, get him talking about the case.”

She handed the file to Thornton, who took it behind his desk and sat down. He read through the pages without taking them out of the folder.

“My clerk said there is a time element?” he said.

Ballard wasn’t expecting that.

“Uh, well, he’s a gang member and we’ve talked to some others in the gang about the case,” she said, improvising all the way. “It could get back to him before we have a chance to go in and stir things up, get him talking on the phone.”

Thornton continued reading. Ballard noticed a black-and-white photo of a jazz musician framed on the wall next to the coatrack, where a judge’s spare robe hung. Thornton spoke as he appeared to be reading the third page of the document.

“I take wiretap requests very seriously,” he said. “It’s the ultimate intrusion, listening to somebody’s private conversations.”

Ballard wasn’t sure if she was supposed to respond. She thought maybe Thornton was speaking rhetorically. She answered anyway in a nervous voice.

“We do, too,” she said. “We think this is our best chance of clearing the case—that if prompted, he’ll check in with his gang associates and admissions of culpability might be made.”

She was quoting the document Thornton was reading. He nodded while keeping his eyes down.

“And you want text messaging on the cell phone,” he said.

“Yes, sir, we do,” Ballard said.

When he got to the sixth page she saw him shake his head once and she began to think he was going to reject the application.

“You say this guy was high up in the gang,” Thornton said. “Even back at the time of the killing he was high up. You think he did the actual killing?”

“Uh, we do, yes,” Ballard said. “He was in a position to order it done, but because of the possible embarrassment of the situation, we think he did it himself.”

She hoped the judge wouldn’t ask who “we” constituted, since she was working the case alone at this point. Bosch was out of the department, so he didn’t count.

He got to the last page of text, where Ballard knew she was grabbing at straws in support of probable cause.

“This sketchbook mentioned here,” the judge said. “Do you have that with you?”

“Yes, sir,” Ballard said.

“Let me take a look at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ballard reached into her backpack, pulled out John Hilton’s prison sketchbook, and handed it across the desk to Thornton.

“The sketch referred to in the warrant is marked with the Post-it,” she said.

She had marked only one drawing because the second drawing was not as clearly recognizable as Kidd. Thornton leafed through the book rather than going directly to the marker. When he finally got there, he studied the full-page drawing for a long moment.

“And you say this is Kidd?” he asked.

“Yes, Your Honor. I have photos of him from that time—mug shots—if you want to see them.”

“Yeah, let me take a look.”

Ballard returned to the backpack while the judge continued.

“My concern is that you’re making a subjective conclusion that, first, this drawing is of Kidd and, second, that the drawing implies some sort of prison romance.”

Ballard opened her laptop and pulled up the photos of Kidd taken while he was in Corcoran. She turned the screen to the judge. He leaned in to look closely at the photos.

“You want me to enlarge them?” Ballard asked.

“That’s not necessary,” the judge said. “I concede that that is Mr. Kidd. What about the romantic relationship? You don’t have proof of that, other than to say you can see it in this drawing. Hilton might have just been a good artist.”

“I see it in the drawing,” Ballard said, maintaining her ground. “Plus you have the victim’s roommate confirming that he was gay and that he was fixated on someone. You have the fact that Hilton was murdered in an alley controlled by Kidd at a time when Kidd had cleared out all other gang members. I believe that Hilton was in love with him and what happens in prison stays in prison. Kidd could not have exposure of the relationship undermine his position of authority in the gang. I think it’s there, Your Honor.”

“I decide that, don’t I?” Thornton said.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Well, your theory is there,” Thornton said. “Some of it is supported by probable cause, but as I say, some is assumption, even conjecture.”

Ballard didn’t respond. She felt like a student being chewed out after school by her teacher. She knew she was going down in flames. Thornton was going to say she didn’t have it, to come back when the probable cause was on solid footing. She watched him flip up the last page to the signature line with Olivas’s name on it.

“You’re working for Captain Olivas on this?” he asked.

“He’s in charge of cold cases,” Ballard said.

“And he signed off on this?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ballard suddenly felt ill—sick to her stomach. She realized that her deception had sent her down a bad path. She was lying to a superior-court judge. Her enmity for Olivas had led her to carry her subterfuge to a person she had only respect for. She now regretted ever taking the murder book from Bosch.

“Well,” Thornton said. “I have to assume he knows what he’s doing. I worked cases with him as a prosecutor twenty-five years ago. He knew what he was doing then.”

“Yes, sir,” Ballard said.

“But I’ve heard rumors about him. Call it his management style.”

Ballard said nothing and Thornton must have realized she wasn’t biting on the bait he had thrown into the water. He moved on.

“You’re asking for a seven-day wire here,” he said. “I’m going to give you seventy-two hours. If you don’t have anything by then, I want you off the lines. Shut it down. You understand, Detective?”

“Yes, sir. Seventy-two hours. Thank you.”

Thornton went through the process of signing the order she would give to the service providers on Kidd’s phones. Ballard wanted him to hurry so she could get out of there before he changed his mind. She was staring at the photo of the musician on the wall but not really seeing it as she thought about the next steps she would take.

“You know who that is?” the judge asked.

Ballard came out of the reverie.

“Uh, no,” she said. “I was just wondering.”

“The Brute and the Beautiful—that’s what they called him,” Thornton said. “Ben Webster. He could make you cry when he played the tenor sax. But when he drank he got mean. He got violent. I see that story all the time in my courtroom.”

Ballard just nodded. Thornton handed her the documents.

“Here’s your search warrant,” he said.

BOSCH

Bosch sat at his dining room table with copies of documents from the Walter Montgomery case broken into six stacks in front of him. In the stacks were all the records of the LAPD investigation of the judge’s murder that Mickey Haller had received in discovery prior to trial. Knowing what he did about homicide detectives, prosecutors, and the rules of discovery, Bosch was pretty sure he didn’t have everything that had been accumulated during the investigation. But he had enough to at least begin his own.

And Bosch was also sure that he was the only one investigating the matter. Jerry Gustafson, the lead detective, had made it clear when the murder charge against Jeffrey Herstadt was dismissed that he felt the murderer had been set free. To take a new look at his investigation would be to disavow his prior conclusion. The sins of pride and self-righteousness left justice for Judge Montgomery swaying in the wind.

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