The Late Show

16

Ballard was deep in a blue dream. Her father’s long hair and reckless beard were floating free all around his head. His eyes were open. The water felt warm. A bubble formed in his mouth and then rose toward the murky light far above them.

She opened her eyes.

Compton was sitting on the side of the bed with his hand on her shoulder. He was gently rocking her awake. His hair was wet from the shower and he was fully dressed.

“Renée, I gotta go,” he said.

“What?” she said. “What time is it?”

She tried to shake off the dream and the grip of sleep.

“It’s twenty to eleven,” Compton said. “You’re okay to stay and sleep. I just wanted to tell you I was leaving. I gotta pick up my boys.”

“Okay,” she said.

She turned onto her back and looked up at the ceiling. She was trying to get her bearings. She rubbed her eyes with both hands. She remembered they had come home in his car. Her van was still at the station.

“What were you dreaming about?” Compton asked.

“Why, was I talking?” she asked.

“No, you were just... it looked really intense.”

“I think I was dreaming about my father.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s dead. He drowned.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago — more than twenty years.”

A fleeting resonance of the dream came back. She remembered the bubble going to the surface like a call for help.

“You want to come fishing with us?” Compton asked.

“Uh, no, I’m going to go paddle and then do some work,” Ballard said. “But thanks. Someday I’d like to meet your sons.”

Compton got up off the bed and went over to the dresser. He started putting his wallet and cash into the pockets of his blue jeans. Ballard watched him. He had a broad, muscular back, and the tips from a couple of the flames from his sun tattoo poked above the collar of his T-shirt.

“Where are you taking them?” she asked.

“Just down to the rocks by the entrance to the marina,” he said.

“Is fishing legal there?”

He held up his badge to her, then clipped it to his belt. The implication was clear. If a lifeguard or someone else tried to tell him fishing was illegal on the rock jetty at the mouth of Marina del Rey, then he would employ the law enforcement exclusion rule.

“I might go down that way when I’m paddling,” she said. “I’ll look for you guys.”

“Yeah, come on by,” he said. “We’ll try not to snag you with a hook.”

He turned from the dresser, smiling and ready to leave.

“There’s OJ in the fridge,” he said. “Sorry, no coffee.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll hit Starbucks.”

He came over and sat down on the bed again.

“So you were just a kid when your dad drowned.”

“Fourteen.”

“What happened?”

“He was surfing and went under a wave and just never came up.”

“Were you there?”

“Yeah, but there was nothing I could do. I was running up and down the beach, screaming like a crazy person.”

“That’s rough. What about your mother?”

“She wasn’t there. She wasn’t really a part of my life. Then or now.”

“What did you do after he was gone?”

“Well, I lived the way we had been living. On the beach, on friends’ couches when it got cold. Then, after about a year, my grandmother came over and found me, brought me back here when I was sixteen. Ventura, where my dad was from.”

Compton nodded. They had been as intimate physically as you could get, but neither had shared the innermost details of their lives before. Ballard had never met his sons and didn’t even know their names. She had never asked him about his divorce. She knew this moment might bring them closer or could serve to push them apart.

She sat up on the bed and they hugged.

“So I’ll see you around, okay?” he said. “Call me — and not just about work.”

“Okay,” she said. “But thanks for last night.”

“Anytime for you, Renée.”

He moved in for a kiss but she turned her face to his shoulder.

“You’ve brushed your teeth. I haven’t,” she said.

She kissed his shoulder.

“I hope they’re biting today,” she said.

“I’ll text you a photo if we get anything,” he said.

He got up and left the room. Ballard heard the front door close, then the sound of his car starting out front. She thought about things for a few minutes and then got up for the shower. She felt a bit sore. End-of-shift sex was never good sex. It was quick, perfunctory, often rough in the service of a primal drive to somehow reaffirm life through carnal satisfaction. Ballard and Compton had not made love. They had simply gotten what they needed from each other.

When she got out of the shower, she had no choice but to dress in the same clothes as the night before. She noted the scent of adrenalized perspiration left in her blouse from that moment when Nettles left the room and she saw he had a gun. She paused for a moment to relive that thrill. The feeling was addictive and dangerous, and she wondered whether there might be something wrong with her for craving it.

She continued dressing, knowing she would switch to a fresh suit before starting work. Her goal for the day was to track down and get a look at Thomas Trent’s ex-wife, the woman who left him a few months after his arrest on Sepulveda Boulevard and probably knew a lot of his secrets. Ballard knew she had to make a decision about whether to go straight at her for an interview or to finesse a conversation without revealing she was a cop.

As she checked herself in the mirror and ran her fingers through her hair, she felt a text vibration from her phone. Surprised the battery still had some juice, she pulled it out of her suit pocket and checked the screen. She saw she had a missed call from Jenkins that had come in while she was in the shower and a text from Sarah, her critter sitter, asking if Ballard planned on picking up Lola anytime soon.

Ballard first texted Sarah, apologized about the late pickup, and said she would be getting Lola within the hour. She next called Jenkins back, thinking he had just been checking in on how things went the night before.

“Partner, what’s up?” she said.

“I was just calling with condolences,” Jenkins said. “That was bad news.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Chastain. You didn’t get the RACER?”

He was referring to a digital alert from the Real-time Analysis and Critical Emergency Response unit, which put out e-mails to all personnel in detective services when a major crime or civic activity was occurring. Ballard had not yet checked her e-mail that morning.

“No, I haven’t looked,” she said. “What happened to Chastain?”

She had a bad feeling growing in the pit of her stomach.

“Uh, he’s dead,” Jenkins said. “His wife found him in their garage this morning.”

Ballard walked over and sat down on the bed. She leaned forward, bringing her chest down to her knees.

“Oh god,” she managed to say.

She flashed on the confrontation they’d had in the detective bureau two nights earlier. The one-sided confrontation. Her mind leaped to the idea that she had kicked off some sort of cascade of guilt that had led Chastain to take his own life. Then she remembered that they didn’t send out RACER alerts for cop suicides.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “How was he killed? He didn’t do it himself, did he?”

“No, he was hit,” Jenkins said. “Somebody got him in the garage when he was getting out of his car. The RACER alert says execution-style hit.”

“Oh my god.”

Ballard was beside herself. Chastain had betrayed her, yes, but her mind skipped over all that to the five solid years of their partnership before it. Chastain was a skilled and determined investigator. He had five years in RHD before Ballard came in, and he’d taught her a lot. Now he was gone and soon his badge and name would join his father’s on the memorial to fallen officers outside the PAB.

“Renée, you okay?” Jenkins asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. “But I gotta go. I’m going to go up there.”

“That’s probably not a good idea, Renée.”

“I don’t really care. I’ll talk to you later.”

She disconnected and flipped over to her Uber app to summon a ride back to Hollywood Division.

Chastain had lived with his wife and teenage son up in Chatsworth in the far-northwest corner of the city. It was about as far as you could get from downtown and the PAB and still live within the borders of the city. Most cops escaped the city at the end of their shifts and lived outside its boundaries but Chastain had been ambitious and he always thought it would pay off to tell promotional boards that he had always lived in the city he policed.

Once back at the station, Ballard quickly changed into a fresh suit, then grabbed the plain wrap assigned to the late show and headed north, taking a series of three different freeways to get to Chatsworth. An hour after she had gotten the call from Jenkins, she pulled to the curb behind a long line of police cruisers and plain wraps clogging the cul-de-sac at the end of Trigger Street. Passing by the street sign reminded Ballard that Chastain used to joke about being a cop who lived on Trigger Street.

Now it seemed sadly ironic.

The first thing Ballard noticed as she got out of her car was that there appeared to be no media on the perimeter of the scene. Somehow, no one in the legion of reporters who covered L.A. had tumbled to or been tipped to the story. It was probably because it was a Saturday morning and the local media machinery was getting a late start.

She hung her badge around her neck as she approached the yellow tape at the driveway. Save for the media, she saw all the other routine participants in a crime scene: detectives, patrol officers, and forensic and coroner’s techs. The house was a midcentury ranch house built when Chatsworth was the utter boondocks of the city. The double-wide garage door was open onto the center of activity.

A patrol officer from Devonshire Division was running the clipboard at the yellow tape. Ballard gave her name and badge number and then ducked under as he wrote it down. As she walked up the driveway toward the garage, a detective she had once worked with at RHD stepped out and walked toward her with his hands up to stop her. His name was Corey Steadman, and Ballard had never had a problem with him.

“Renée, wait,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Ballard stopped in front of him.

“He was my partner,” Ballard said. “Why do you think I’m here?”

“The lieutenant will shit a brick if he sees you,” Steadman said. “I can’t let you in.”

“Olivas? Why is his team handling this? Isn’t it a conflict of interest?”

“Because it’s related to the Dancers thing. We’re folding it in.”

Ballard made a move to go around Steadman but he sidestepped quickly and blocked her. He held his hand up again in front of her.

“Renée, I can’t,” he said.

“Okay, then just tell me what happened,” Ballard said. “Why’s he in the garage?”

“We think he got hit last night when he came in. The shooter was either waiting inside or, more likely, waiting outside and came in behind him in the blind spot when he drove in.”

“What time was this?”

“The wife went to bed at eleven. She had gotten a text from Kenny saying he’d be working until at least midnight. She gets up this morning and sees that he never got home. She texts, he doesn’t answer. She takes some trash out to the cans in the garage and finds him. That was about nine.”

“Where was he hit?”

“Sitting in the driver’s seat, one in the left temple. Hopefully he never saw it coming.”

Ballard paused for a moment as feelings of anger and sorrow combined in her chest.

“And Shelby didn’t hear the shot? What about Tyler?”

“Tyler was staying the weekend with a friend from the volleyball team. Shelby didn’t hear anything, we think because there was an improvised suppressor. We’ve got some paper fibers and a liquid residue on the car seat and body. Sticky. We’re thinking orange soda but that’s up to the lab.”

Ballard nodded. She knew that Steadman was talking about the method of taping a plastic liter bottle of soda to the muzzle of a gun. Empty out the liquid and stuff in cotton, paper towels, anything. The setup considerably dampened the sound of the muzzle blast but also expelled some of the material in the bottle.

And it was good for one shot only. The shooter must have been confident that it would get the job done.

“Where was he last night?” Ballard asked. “What was he doing?”

“The lieutenant actually sent him home at six,” Steadman said. “He’d been running eighteen hours straight by then and L-T told him to take a break. But he didn’t go home. Shelby said he texted that he had to go wrangle a witness and would be home late.”

“That was the word he used in the text? ‘Wrangle’?”

“That’s what I heard, yeah.”

Ballard had heard Chastain use the word on multiple occasions when they had been partners. She knew that to him, wrangling a witness meant dealing with a complicated situation. It could be complicated for numerous reasons but most often it meant going out and looking for a reluctant witness, one that needed to be controlled and herded into court or into giving a statement.

“Who was the wit?”

“I don’t know. Somebody he heard about or had a line on.”

“And he was working by himself?”

“He’s been the squad whip. You know, since you... transferred out.”

The whip was a detective elevated to a role secondary to the lieutenant. Most often it was someone being groomed for promotion and without an assigned partner. It explained why Chastain might have gone out on his own.

“How is Shelby?” Ballard asked.

“I don’t know,” Steadman said. “I haven’t talked to her. The L-T was dealing with her inside.”

Mentioning Olivas seemed to conjure him. Looking over Steadman’s shoulder, Ballard saw the lieutenant step out of the garage and head toward them. He had his suit jacket off, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, and his shoulder holster exposed — counterbalanced with gun on the left and two bullet clips on the right. In a low voice she warned Steadman.

“Here he comes,” she whispered. “Tell me to get out of here again. Make it loud.”

It took Steadman a moment to understand the warning.

“I told you,” he said forcefully. “You can’t be here. You need to go back to your—”

“Corey!” Olivas barked from behind. “I’ll handle this.”

Steadman turned as if just realizing Olivas was behind him.

“She’s leaving, L-T,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“No, go back in,” Olivas said. “I need to speak to Ballard.”

Olivas waited for Steadman to head back to the garage. Ballard stared at him, ready for what she knew would be a verbal assault.

“Ballard, did you have any contact with Chastain yesterday?” he asked.

“Not since I turned a witness over to him on the morning after the shooting,” Ballard said. “That was it.”

“Okay, then you need to leave. You’re not welcome here.”

“He was my partner.”

“Once. Until you tried to co-opt him with your lies. Don’t think for one minute you can make up for it now.”

Ballard held her hands wide and looked around like she was asking who could possibly hear them where they stood on the driveway.

“Why are you lying? There’s nobody else here. Don’t tell me you’ve told it to yourself so often, you actually believe it.”

“Ballard, you—”

“We both know exactly what happened. You made it clear on more than one occasion that my trajectory in the department relied upon you and that I had to put out or I’d get pushed out. Then at the Christmas party I get pushed up against a wall and you try to put your tongue down my throat. You think lying to my face about it will help convince me it didn’t happen?”

Olivas seemed taken aback by the intensity of her voice.

“Just leave. Or I’ll have you escorted off the property.”

“What about Shelby?”

“What about her?”

“Did you just leave her alone in there? She needs somebody to be with her.”

“You? Not in a million fucking years.”

“We were tight. I was her husband’s partner and she trusted me not to sleep with him. I could be of use to you here.”

Olivas seemed to take a moment to consider the option.

“We take care of our own here, and you’re not one of us. Show some integrity, Ballard. Show some respect. You have thirty seconds before I ask the patrol officers to remove you from the property.”

With that, Olivas turned and headed back toward the open garage. Ballard looked past him and saw that several of the people in the garage had been surreptitiously watching their confrontation. She could also see her ex-partner’s take-home plain wrap parked in the right-side bay. The trunk was open and she wondered if that was for processing or to help shield the view of his body slumped in the driver’s seat.

Chastain had betrayed their partnership in the worst way a partner could. It was unacceptable and unforgivable but Ballard understood it, considering Chastain’s ambitions. Still, she always thought there would be a personal reckoning and that he would eventually do the right thing, that he would back her and tell the world what he saw Olivas do. Now there would never be a chance for that. Ballard felt the loss for both Chastain and herself.

She turned and headed down the driveway to the street. She passed a black SUV pulling up that she knew was carrying the chief of police. Her eyes were stinging with tears before she made it to her car.