The Late Show

14

The address that came from Mumbai corresponded to a run-down motel called the Siesta Village. It was a two-story U-shaped complex with parking inside the U, as well as a small pool and an office. A sign out front said FREE WIFI AND HBO. Ballard pulled in and cruised the lot. Each room had a large plate-glass window that looked out on the center of the complex. It was the kind of place that would still have box TVs in each room, locked to the bureau with a metal frame.

Ballard located room 18 and saw no lights on behind its curtained window. She noted the beat-up Ford pickup parked in front of its door. Eighteen was the last room before a well-lit alcove that contained an ice dispenser and Coke machine housed in a steel cage with cutouts for depositing money and removing drinks. She kept moving and parked the city-ride on the other side of the office so that it would not be seen should someone in room 18 split the curtain and look out the window. The car could be identified as a police car a mile away.

Before getting out, she used the rover to request a wants-and-warrants check on the pickup. It came back clean and registered to a Judith Nettles of Poway, a small town Ballard knew was down in San Diego County. Nettles had no record and no warrants on the computer.

Ballard proceeded on foot to the motel office, where she had to push a button on the glass door and wait until a man came out from a back room located behind the counter. Ballard had her badge up already and he buzzed her in.

“Hey there,” Ballard said as she entered. “I’m Detective Ballard from the Hollywood Station. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

“Evening,” said the counterman. “Ask away, I guess.”

He stifled a yawn as he sat down. Behind him on the wall were several clocks showing the time in cities all over the world, as if the place catered to the international traveler who had to keep tabs on business around the globe. Ballard could hear the sound of a TV coming from the back room. It was the audience laughter of a late-night talk show.

“Do you have a guest in room eighteen tonight?” Ballard asked.

“Uh, yes, eighteen is occupied,” the man said.

“What’s that guest’s name?”

“Don’t you need a warrant to ask that?”

Ballard put her hands on the counter and leaned toward the man.

“You watch too much TV in that back room, sir. I don’t need a warrant to ask questions and you don’t need to be presented with a warrant to answer them. You just need to choose right now to either help the LAPD with an investigation or hinder the LAPD.”

He stared at her for a moment and then turned the seat clockwise until he was facing a computer screen to his right. He hit the space bar and the screen came to life. He then pulled up the motel’s occupancy chart and clicked on room 18.

“His name is Christopher Nettles,” he said.

“He alone in there?” Ballard asked.

“Supposed to be. Registered as a single.”

“How long has he been here?”

The man referred to his screen again.

“Nine days.”

“Spell the first and last name for me.”

After getting the spellings, Ballard told the clerk she would be right back. She grabbed a couple of pamphlets for a Homes of the Stars bus tour off a stack on the counter and used them to keep the door from latching. She stepped into the parking lot to be out of the counterman’s earshot and used the rover to call communications and check Christopher Nettles for wants and warrants. He came up clean but Ballard was smart enough to know not to leave it there. She pulled her phone and called the Hollywood Station watch office and asked a desk uni to run the name through the national crime index database.

She paced on the asphalt while waiting for the results and noticed that there was no water in the motel pool. She walked around to the corner of the office so she could get another visual on room 18. It was still dark behind the curtain. She checked the pickup truck and pegged it as at least twenty years old. It likely didn’t have an alarm and would not be useful in drawing Nettles out of the room.

The desk officer came back on the line and reported that there was a Christopher Nettles in the system with a 2014 conviction on multiple theft charges, including burglary of an occupied dwelling. This Christopher Nettles was white, twenty-four years old, and on parole after serving two years in state prison for the convictions.

Ballard asked the officer to put Lieutenant Munroe on the line.

“L-T, it’s Ballard. I’m at Siesta Village and I have a line on a suspect in the four-five-nine on El Centro last night. Can you send me a unit?”

“I can do that. I had all hands on a domestic but it’s calm now and I’ll pull a car off and send them your way. They’re ten out.”

“Okay, have them hold a block back and go to Tact four and I’ll call them in. I want to try to caper this guy out of the room.”

“Roger that, Ballard. You got a name I can write down?”

He was asking for the suspect’s name in case things went sideways and they had to go hunting for him without Ballard’s help. She gave him the details she had on Nettles and then disconnected. She switched her rover to the Tactical 4 frequency and went back into the office, where the counterman was waiting.

“How has Mr. Nettles been paying for his room?” she asked.

“He pays with cash,” he said. “Every three days he pays for three days in advance. He’s good till Monday.”

“Has he been getting deliveries here?”

“Deliveries?”

“You know, boxes, mail. Have people been sending him stuff?”

“I wouldn’t really know. I work during the night. The only deliveries are pizza deliveries. Matter of fact, I think Nettles got a pizza a couple hours ago.”

“So you’ve seen him? You know what he looks like?”

“Yeah, he’s come in and paid for the room a couple times at night.”

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know. Twenties, I’d say. Young. I’m not good at that stuff.”

“Big or small?”

“I’d say on the big side. Looks like he works out.”

“Tell me about the free Wi-Fi.”

“What can I tell you? It’s free. That’s it.”

“Does every room have a router, or is there a main router for the whole place?”

“We got the setup in the back here.”

He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the room behind him. Ballard knew that the router’s history could be examined for proof that Nettles had attempted to make purchases online with Leslie Anne Lantana’s credit card, but that would require a warrant and a commitment of time and money from the department’s Commercial Crimes Division that outweighed the importance of the case. It would never happen unless Ballard or someone working the daytime burglary unit did it.

“What about phones? Are there phone lines in the rooms?”

“Yes, we have phones. Except for a couple rooms where they got stolen. We haven’t replaced them.”

“But eighteen has a phone?”

“Yes, there’s a phone.”

Ballard nodded as she considered a plan for getting Nettles out of his room so she could question and possibly arrest him.

“Can you turn the light off in that alcove with the Coke machine?”

“Uh, yeah. I have a switch here. But it turns out the light on the second floor alcove too.”

“That’s okay, turn them both off. Then I need you to call his room and get him to come to the office.”

“How do I do that? It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

He pointed over his shoulder toward the wall of clocks to underline that it was too late for him to call Nettles’s room. As if on cue, her rover squawked and she heard her call code. She brought the rover up to respond.

“Six-William-twenty-six, you guys in position?”

“That’s a roger.”

She recognized the voice. It was Smith. She knew she had a solid cop and a gung-ho boot as backup.

“Okay, hold there. When I call you in, drive in the main entrance and don’t let anyone out. Suspect has a 1990s Ford one-fifty, silver in color.”

“Roger that. Weapons?”

“No known weapons.”

Smith clicked twice on the radio to acknowledge.

“Okay, five minutes,” Ballard said. “I’ll give you a standby pop, followed by a go sign.”

The counterman was looking wide-eyed at her when Ballard turned her attention back to him.

“Okay, so now I need you to call room eighteen and tell Nettles that the police were just here asking about him,” she said.

“Why would I do that?” the clerk said.

“Because it’s what just happened. And because you want to continue to cooperate with the LAPD.”

The counterman didn’t say anything. He looked very concerned about being pulled into something.

“Look,” Ballard said. “You’re not lying to the guy. You are telling him exactly what just happened. Keep it simple. Say something like ‘Sorry to wake you up but a police detective was just here asking about you.’ He’ll then ask you if the police are still here and you say you think they left. That’s it. If he asks anything else, tell him you’ve got another call and have to go. Short and simple.”

“But how come you want him to know you were here?” the clerk asked.

“I’m just trying to spook him and get him to come out of that room and make it safer to approach him. Now give me three minutes and make the call. You good?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated by your police department.”

Ballard left the office and followed the walkway in front of the rooms until she got to room 18. She walked by and entered the alcove to the right of its window. The overhead light in the alcove was now off but the plastic front of the Coke machine was brightly lit, and Ballard needed cover, not illumination. She reached behind the machine and pulled the plug, plunging the recessed area into full darkness. She stood back in the shadow and waited, checking her watch to see when three minutes had passed.

Just as she did so, she heard the ringing of a phone through the wall between the alcove and room 18. Four rings went by before it was answered with a muffled but gruff response. She keyed the mic on her rover twice, sending the standby alert to the backup team waiting in the street.

She continued to hear a muffled voice through the wall as she assumed Nettles was asking questions of the counterman. She moved up to the edge of the alcove so she had an angle on the pickup. Just as she did so, she heard the door to the room open. Before looking, she shrank back into the shadow for a moment, opened the mic on the rover, and whispered, “Go. We are go.”

When Ballard edged back to the corner of the alcove, she saw a man wearing blue jeans and nothing else pushing a cardboard box into the rear of the truck’s crew cab. His back was to her and she could see the grip of a black handgun tucked into the rear belt line of the jeans.

That changed things. She quickly pulled her weapon out of her hip holster and stepped out of the alcove. The man, who was struggling with the heavy box, did not see her as she approached from behind. She held her weapon up and brought the rover to her mouth.

“Suspect is armed, suspect is armed.”

She then dropped the rover to the ground and moved into a combat stance with both hands on her weapon, pointing it at the suspect. In that moment she realized her tactical mistake. She could not cover the man at the door of the pickup and the door to room 18 at the same time. If there was someone else in the room, they had the drop on her. She started moving sideways to close the angle between the two possible danger points.

“Police!” she yelled. “Let me see your hands!”

The man froze but did not comply. His hands remained on the box.

“Put your hands on the roof of the truck!” Ballard yelled.

“I can’t,” the man yelled back. “If I do, the box will drop. I have to—”

A patrol car came rushing into the lot off the street. Ballard kept her eyes on the man at the truck but had the cruiser in her peripheral vision. A flood of relief started moving through her. But she knew she wasn’t clear yet.

She waited for the car to stop, the officers to get out, and there to be three guns on the suspect.

“Get down!” Smith yelled.

“On the ground,” yelled Taylor.

“Which is it?” the man at the truck yelled. “She said hands on top. You say get on the ground.”

“Get on the fucking ground, asshole, or we’ll put you there,” Smith yelled.

There was enough tension in Smith’s voice to make it clear that his patience had run out, and the man at the truck was smart enough to read it.

“Okay, okay, I’m getting down,” he yelled. “Easy now, easy. I’m getting down.”

The man took a step back from the truck and let the box fall to the ground. Something made of glass inside it broke. The man turned toward Ballard with his hands up. She lost sight of the gun but held her eyes on his hands.

“You assholes,” he said. “You made me break my stuff.”

“On your knees,” Smith yelled. “Now.”

The suspect went down one knee at a time and then pitched forward to lie flat on the asphalt. He locked his hands behind his head. He knew the routine.

“Ballard, take him,” Smith yelled.

Ballard moved in, holstering her weapon and pulling her cuffs free. She put one hand on the man’s back to hold him down and yanked the gun out of his belt line with the other. She slid the weapon across the asphalt in the direction of the unies. She then moved up, put one knee on the small of the man’s back, and pulled his hands down one at a time to cuff them behind him. The moment the second cuff clicked, she yelled to the other officers.

“Code four! We’re good!”