The Late Show

12

Ballard went upstairs to the roll-call room early. It was always a good time to socialize, hear station gossip, and pick up street intel. There were already seven uniformed officers seated, including Smith and Taylor, when she walked in. Two of the others were a female team Ballard knew well from crossing paths in the locker room. As would be expected, the conversation under way was about the quintuple murder of the night before. One of the officers was saying that RHD had put a tight seal on internal news about the case, not even releasing the names of the victims as of twenty-four hours after the crime.

“You were inside, Renée,” said Herrera, one of the women. “What’s the scoop on the victims? Who were they?”

Ballard shrugged.

“No scoop,” she said. “I just handled one of the peripheral victims, the cocktail waitress. They didn’t bring me into the inner circle. I saw three dead guys in a booth but I don’t know who they were.”

“I guess they weren’t going to bring you in with Olivas in charge,” Herrera said.

It was a reminder that in a police station, there were few secrets. Within a month of her transfer to Hollywood, everyone in the station knew about her losing her complaint against Olivas, even though personnel matters were supposed to be kept secret by law.

Ballard tried to change the subject.

“So coming in, I saw FSD was inside there tonight,” she said. “They miss something last night?”

“I heard they never left,” Smith said. “They’ve been at it almost twenty-four hours.”

“That’s got to be a record or something,” Herrera added.

“The record is the Phil Spector case — forty-one hours on scene with forensics,” Smith said. “And that was for one body.”

Spector was a famous music producer who had killed a woman he brought home from a bar. It was a sheriff’s case but Ballard decided not to make that distinction.

More officers soon entered the room, followed by Lieutenant Munroe. He took a position behind the podium at the head of the room and convened roll call. It was uneventful and dry, with the usual reporting of area crimes, including the credit-card theft Ballard had handled the night before. Munroe had no news on the Dancers case, not even an artist’s drawing of a suspect. His report lasted less than ten minutes. He concluded by throwing it to Ballard.

“Renée, anything you want to talk about?”

“Not much. We had the assault last night. The victim is still hanging in. Happened on the he-she stroll and anything anybody picks up on that would be welcome. Note that the suspect used brass knuckles. Ask around about that. Other than that and five people murdered in the Dancers, quiet times.”

People laughed.

“Okay,” Munroe said.

The lieutenant moved on to housekeeping announcements about scheduling and body-camera training. Ballard wanted to leave but knew it would be rude, so she pulled her phone to surreptitiously check messages down by her thigh. She saw that she had received a text from Jenkins a few minutes before. He was just checking in with her, as was their custom on the shifts they worked alone.

Roll call ended as she was finishing the text exchange. Ballard put her phone away and headed toward the stairs. Munroe called to her from behind as she was making the turn on the first landing.

“Ballard, you’re not going over to the Dancers, are you?” he asked.

Ballard stopped and waited for him to catch up.

“No, why?” she said.

“Just wanted to know what my people are doing,” Munroe said.

Technically, Ballard was not one of Munroe’s people but she let the remark slide. He ran patrol in the division during the late show, but Ballard was a detective and reported to Lieutenant McAdams, the dayside D bureau commander.

“Like I said in roll call, I’m working the assault from last night,” she said. “McAdams gave it to me.”

“Yeah, I didn’t get the memo on that,” Munroe said.

“Did you get a memo telling you to keep me away from the Dancers?”

“No, I told you, just want to know where everybody on the shift is.”

“Yeah, well, now you know what I’m working on. I have to go by the hospital for a minute but I’m around if you need me.”

She turned and went down the last flight of steps and moved directly into the detective bureau. She wondered if Munroe was hiding something. She usually worked autonomously, without the patrol lieutenant keeping tabs on her. Had Olivas or someone else from downtown told him to keep her clear of the club and the investigation?

The exchange with Munroe unnerved her but she put the thoughts aside so she could focus on the case she had at hand. She got keys for the late show city-ride out of the drawer of the receptionist’s desk, then grabbed a fresh battery for her rover out of the charging station. She went back to her desk for her handbag and the radio and then headed out. Once she was in the car, she could immediately tell someone had used it during the day — someone who had ignored the rule prohibiting smoking in all city vehicles. She opened up all the windows as she pulled through the lot gate and turned north on Wilcox toward Sunset.

At Hollywood Presbyterian, she badged her way past a security guard and two nursing stations in order to get to the room where Ramona Ramone was lying comatose in a bed. Ballard had asked a nurse named Natasha to accompany her in case there came a time when she needed backup testimony at a trial.

The victim actually looked worse a night later. Her head had been partially shaved and the surgery to repair the skull fracture and limit the impact of brain swelling had left her face puffy and unrecognizable. She lay at the center of a nest of tubes, drips, and monitors.

“I need you to open her smock so I can photograph the bruises on her torso,” Ballard said.

“Wasn’t it done last night?” Natasha asked.

“It was. But the bruises will look different today.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to, Natasha. Just open the smock.”

Ballard knew that bruising occurred when blood vessels beneath the skin were damaged by impact and red blood cells leaked into the surrounding tissues. The bruise sometimes grew larger and darker in the twenty-four hours after an injury because blood continued to seep from the damaged vessels. Ballard was hoping that Ramona Ramone’s bruises would now be more defined and possibly even legible.

The nurse moved some tubing out of the way, then pulled down a thermal blanket that covered the patient. She unbuttoned the pale blue smock to expose the victim’s naked body. There was a catheter attached to the penis and the urine in the clear tube had a reddish hue from internal bleeding. The nurse pulled the blanket back up slightly and Ballard didn’t know if that was a show of modesty or revulsion.

Ballard noted that the right and left sides of the upper torso were fully covered in deep purple bruising. The delineated edges of the red impact marks she had seen the night before were now blurred as the blood continued to spread beneath the skin. If the damage were being seen for the first time now, it would be impossible to deduce that it had been inflicted with brass knuckles. Ballard leaned down over the bed from the left side to study the purple blossoms closely. Before long she identified two side-by-side rings of deep purple against a lighter shade of bruising. She believed it was the double O in the word GOOD.

“Natasha, will you look at this?”

Ballard straightened up and stepped to her left so the nurse could move in. She pointed to the pattern.

“What is that?” Ballard asked.

“You mean the bruising?” Natasha said.

“There’s a pattern there. Do you see it?”

“I see... well, maybe. You mean the circles?”

“Exactly. Let me photograph it.”

Ballard pulled out her phone and moved in close again when Natasha stepped back. As she took photos, she thought about the billboards she had seen all over the city that showed stunning, professional-grade shots taken on the new iPhone camera. Ballard guessed that these kinds of photos would never be put on billboards.

“Is that from the weapon?” Natasha asked. “Like maybe he had two big rings on his fingers when he punched this man.”

Ballard continued to shoot, with and then without the flash.

“Something like that,” she said.

She moved around to the other side of the bed and studied the bruising on the left side of Ramona Ramone’s torso. Here the purple blossoms were an even deeper color and Ballard could find no pattern indicative of the word EVIL. She did know that the deeper color meant deeper injury, and the imbalance between the two sides of the torso indicated that the attacker’s power hand was his right. She tried to recall if Thomas Trent had done anything during their interaction and test-drive earlier to reveal whether he was right-handed. It had been evident that the knuckles on his right hand were painfully bruised. She then remembered him writing down her phone number with his right hand.

Ballard took photos of the left side just so she could document the extent of the injuries.

“You can cover her up, Natasha,” she said. “I’m finished for now.”

Natasha started rebuttoning the smock.

“You saw that he’s a man, right?” the nurse asked.

“Biologically, yes,” Ballard said. “But she chose to live as a woman. That’s what I go with.”

“Oh,” Natasha said.

“Do you know if she has had any visitors? Any family?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Are they going to transfer her?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

Hollywood Presbyterian was a private hospital. If family or insurance was not found for Ramone, she would be transferred to a county hospital, where she wouldn’t get the same level of care she was getting here.

Ballard thanked Natasha for her help and left the room.

After clearing the hospital, Ballard drove to a neighborhood in the shadow of an elevated section of the 101 freeway. Ramona Ramone had no driver’s license under her current or birth name and the only address Ballard had found for her was on Heliotrope Drive. It was the address on two shake cards in her vice file and the one given when she was last arrested.

Ballard had thought it was most likely a phony, not because there wasn’t a street in Hollywood called Heliotrope but because she knew something about plants and flowers from growing up in Hawaii. She had often worked with her family on tomato farms and plant nurseries on the dense mountainsides of Maui. A heliotrope was a plant that blossomed with fragrant purple and blue flowers and was known for turning its petals toward the sun. It seemed to Ballard like a metaphor of some kind, that maybe Ramona Ramone had chosen the name of the street because it fit with her desire to change and turn her petals to the sun.

Now, as she followed the road to the freeway, she saw that the address corresponded to a row of old RVs and house trailers parked stem to stern under the overpass. It was one of L.A.’s many homeless encampments, and beyond the row of beat-up vehicles on the street, she could see pitched tents and shelters made of blue tarp and other materials in the hardscrabble yard beneath the overpass.

Ballard parked her car and got out.