The Late Show

17

Ballard picked up Lola with profuse apologies to Sarah and went to the beach. At first she just sat cross-legged on the sand with her dog and watched the sun drop toward the horizon. She decided not to paddle. She knew that sharks cruised the shoreline at dusk, looking for food.

She thought about the time Chastain had told her the real story of his father, of how he had been an Internal Affairs hack who was pulled out of a car and murdered by a mob during an explosion of racial tensions that he had helped touch off through his own actions. Chastain didn’t know the truth until after he became a cop and earned the juice it took to pull the sealed records on his father’s death. He confided in Ballard that the thing that had made him so proud growing up had ultimately made him deeply and privately humiliated as a man with a badge. It had fired his ambition to climb through the ranks and redeem his father and himself in some way.

The only problem was, he had trampled over Ballard on the climb.

“Renée?”

Ballard looked up. Aaron the lifeguard stood there.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine, yeah,” she said.

She wiped tears off her cheeks.

“Somebody who totally fucked me over died today,” she said.

“Then why are you sad?” he asked. “I mean, fuck him. If it was a him.”

“I don’t know. I guess because it means what he did can never be changed. His death makes it permanent.”

“I think I get that.”

“It’s complicated.”

He was wearing a red nylon jacket with the word rescue on it. The temperature was dropping with the sun, which was just about to dip into the ocean. The sky was turning neon pink.

“You’re not going to try to sleep out here tonight, are you?” Aaron asked. “Night patrol is out here in force on a Saturday night.”

“No,” Ballard said. “I’m going in to work. Just wanted to see the sunset.”

Aaron said good night and moved on down the beach toward the lifeguard tower, where he was posted until dark. Ballard watched the sun sink into the black water and then got up. She once again bought takeout for herself and Lola on the boardwalk and ate sitting on a nearby bench. She could not generate much enthusiasm for food and ended up giving half her order of black beans, yellow rice, and plantains to a homeless man she knew named Nate. He was a street artist who until January had done decent business selling portraits of the former president. He reported to Ballard that images of the new president went unsold because his kind of people didn’t come to Venice Beach.

She returned Lola to Sarah’s house with more apologies to both dog and sitter, and then headed east back into the city and the cases. She got to Hollywood Station three hours before her shift was scheduled to start. In the locker room, after changing into her suit, she pulled the black elastic mourning band from behind her badge and stretched it across the front of the shield.

Once she was in the detective bureau, she set up in her usual spot and went right to work on the computer, starting with opening the Los Angeles Times website. She knew she could use the department’s own data network — most investigations resulted in basic information being put online for internal access — but that would leave a signature trail. She wanted the names of the three men murdered in the booth at the Dancers and believed the city’s main media standard-bearer would have acquired them by now, nearly forty-eight hours since the massacre.

She was correct and quickly found a story that credited the Medical Examiner’s Office with releasing the names of the dead after next-of-kin notifications and autopsies had been completed. The story identified Cynthia Haddel and Marcus Wilbanks as the Dancers employees killed by the unknown gunman, and Cordell Abbott, Gordon Fabian, and Gino Santangelo as the three customers who were murdered in the booth where they sat.

Names in hand, Ballard proceeded to background the three men in the booth by signing into the crime index and DMV computers. This, too, would leave a trail of her searches but these would not be as easily detected as her simply using her department access to open the online files of the case. Going that way could leave a flag, immediately alerting the case investigators of her activities.

She went through the three names one by one and built data profiles of each. As had been reported the night before on the television news, all three men had criminal records. What raised Ballard’s intrigue level was that they appeared to come from different parts of the criminal underworld, and that made their meeting in that booth unusual.

Cordell Abbott was a thirty-nine-year-old black man who had four convictions on his record for gambling offenses. In each of these cases, he was accused of banking illegal games. In layman’s terms, he was a bookie. He took bets on sports ranging from horse races to Dodgers games. It appeared that, despite four convictions, he had never served time in a state prison. At most, his crimes cost him county jail time measured in weeks and months, not years.

Similarly, Gordon Fabian had escaped prison time, despite a long history of convictions for various drug-related crimes. Fabian was white and, at fifty-two years old, the oldest victim of the massacre. Ballard counted nineteen arrests on his record dating back to the 1980s. These all related to the personal use or small-time sale of drugs. He received probation and time-served sentences in most cases. In some others, charges were dropped. However, at the time of his murder, Fabian had finally made it to the big leagues and was awaiting an upcoming trial in federal court for possession of a kilo of cocaine. He was out on bail but facing a long prison sentence if convicted.

The third victim, Gino Santangelo, was a forty-three-year-old white man and the only one of the three with a record of violence. He had been charged with assault three times over a fifteen-year period. One case involved a firearm in which he shot but did not kill the victim and the other two times the charges included a GBI — great bodily injury — add-on by the D.A.’s Office. In each of the cases, Santangelo pleaded guilty to lesser charges and received lesser penalties. His first conviction involved the use of the firearm, and that cost him three years in a state prison. After that, he apparently got smart and dropped the use of a gun from his repertoire because it would add years to the penalty spectrum. In subsequent arrests, he used his hands and feet to assault the victims and was allowed to plead out to lesser charges, like battery and disturbing the peace, leading to sentences of under a year in the county jail. Ballard’s read on Santangelo, without having the details of each case in front of her, was that he was an enforcer for the mob. She keyed on the third case, in which he was charged with assault with GBI. It was pleaded down to misdemeanor battery. For a case to drop like that, Ballard knew there had to be a witness or victim issue. Santangelo had a history of violence but the victim, or maybe a witness, was afraid or refused to testify. The result was a thirty-day sentence reduced to a week in the county jail.

There was much Ballard could deduce by reading between the lines of the case extracts, but she did not have access to detailed case summaries that put the crimes and the individuals in context. For that, she would need to pull actual files, and that wasn’t going to happen on a Saturday night. She did look at booking photos of the three men, which allowed her to recall their positions in the booth where they were murdered.

Cordell Abbott was easy to place because he was the only black victim. Ballard remembered seeing his body to the immediate left of the open space in the booth. That put Abbott right next to the shooter.

Gordon Fabian’s side-view mug shot showed a man with a gray ponytail, and that easily put him in the seat across from the shooter. He was the victim who had fallen halfway out of the booth, the end of his ponytail dipping into his own blood like a paintbrush.

And that put Gino Santangelo in the middle.

Ballard leaned back in her desk chair and thought about what she knew and what she could assume. Four men slide into a booth. Did they just randomly take their positions, or was there a choreography based on the relationships between the men? There was a bookie, an enforcer, a drug dealer, and, for lack of better information, a shooter.

Added to this was a question about shooting sequence. Ballard did not have access to the crime and property reports, but if she had to name one person in the booth besides the shooter who was armed, she would go with Santangelo. He had previously been convicted of a gun crime, and even though he appeared to shrug off the use of firearms in his strong-arm tactics, it was unlikely that he would stop carrying. His record showed him to be a career criminal and the gun would be one of the tools of the trade.

This led to the next question. The split-second selfie video provided by the witness Alexander Speights clearly showed the shooter firing first on Fabian, the drug dealer. Why would he do that if he had knowledge of who Santangelo was and that he was most likely armed?

Ballard drew several conclusions from her admittedly incomplete information. The first was that the men in the booth didn’t all know each other. It was likely that the shooter knew Abbott, the bookie, if he knew any of the men, because he sat next to him. And she figured he fired first on the drug dealer because of malice or momentum. Malice if he held the drug dealer accountable for whatever went wrong during the meeting. Momentum if he simply chose to shoot the other men in a one-two-three pattern. It would have been the fastest and safest way to shoot, provided he didn’t know that Santangelo was armed.

Ballard knew her assumptions got her nowhere. There were myriad other possibilities and factors at work. The shooter might have checked the others for weapons before joining the meeting, and the seating arrangement could have been dictated simply by the separate arrivals of the men. There was no way of knowing anything for sure and her final conclusion was that she was just spinning her wheels on a case that was not hers and that she had been clearly ordered to stay away from.

But still, she couldn’t drop it. It pulled at her because of Chastain. And she now considered a move that would surely get her fired if discovered by the department.

Ballard and Chastain had been partners for nearly five years before the falling-out over her complaint about Olivas. During that time they worked closely on high-priority and often dangerous investigations. It drew them close and in many ways their partnership was like a marriage, although there was never any crossing or even blurring of the professional line. But still, they shared all things work-related, and Ballard even knew Chastain’s password into the department’s computer system. She had sat next to him too many times while he logged in not to notice and remember it. It was true that the department required detectives to change their passwords every month, but investigators were creatures of habit and most simply updated the last three digits of a steady password, using the month and year.

She believed it was unlikely that he had switched his main password after the dissolution of their partnership. Ballard had not changed her own, because it was easy to remember — her father’s name spelled backward — and she didn’t want to be bothered memorizing a combination of letters and numbers that might have no significance to her. She knew that Chastain’s password was the date of his marriage followed by his and his wife’s initials and the current month and year.

Ballard doubted Chastain’s account would already have been deleted following his death. In a bureaucracy like the LAPD, it might take months before the digital access unit wiped the system of his user access. But she knew that if she logged in as Chastain now, the breach could be traced back to the exact computer used. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t technically Ballard’s computer or desk. She would become the primary suspect and it would result in her dismissal from the force, if not criminal prosecution for hacking.

She logged her own user account off the computer and pulled up the entry prompt. She drummed her fingers on the desk for a few moments, waiting for an inner voice to caution her against taking the next step. But it never came. She typed in Chastain’s user name and password, then waited.

She was in. She was now able to follow her old partner’s ghost in the system and she quickly used his approved access to open files on the Dancers case. She opened numerous crime scene and evidence reports, as well as witness summaries and the chronological logs kept by the investigators on the case. Ballard scanned the reports to identify what they were and then sent them to the detective bureau’s printer for a more thorough review later. She felt like she had broken into someone’s house and needed to get out before being discovered.

Fifteen minutes later, she logged out and was clear. She went to the printer room and pulled out a sheaf of copies nearly two inches thick.

For the next hour, she took her time and reviewed the documents. Most of it was routine paperwork but some of the reports offered a fuller glimpse of the crime and the parts individuals played. Most notable were the fuller background reports on the three victims in the booth. The bio on Santangelo stated that he was a known loan shark and debt collector connected with an organized-crime family based in Las Vegas. Additionally, the crime scene report noted that a.45 caliber handgun was indeed found tucked into the waistband of his suit pants. The gun was traced back to a 2013 home burglary in Summerland, Nevada.

One document that was surprising for its lack of content was the video survey report. It stated that a review of footage from cameras at the entrance of the Dancers as well as from nearby businesses on Sunset Boulevard and the vicinity revealed no images of the suspected shooter or his vehicle. The video unit could not provide even the barest minimum description of a getaway vehicle or direction of travel — east or west — the killer had taken. To Ballard it was almost as if the shooter knew there were no cameras or had chosen the location of the meeting based on the video cracks he could slip through.

Disappointed, Ballard moved on and finished with the investigative chronologies. There were five detectives assigned full-time to the case, plus Lieutenant Olivas. This produced three chronos from the two pairs of detectives and Chastain, the task force whip. There was no chronological report yet from Olivas.

From these documents Ballard was able to see the moves being made and discern that the primary focus of the investigation was Santangelo. It was believed that the mass killing might have been a hit on the mob figure, with the four other victims being collateral damage. One of the detective teams had been dispatched to Las Vegas to pursue this angle.

Ballard knew that all of this would likely change with the murder of Chastain. Investigative priorities would be recalibrated. If the detective’s murder and the Dancers massacre were linked forensically or by other evidence, then it would obviously mean the killer was still in Los Angeles.

Ballard read through Chastain’s chrono last. She saw that he had dutifully logged his visit to the Hollywood Division to consult with her and to pick up the witness Alexander Speights. It also showed that he later identified Metro, the friend and coworker Speights had been with at the club, as Matthew Robison, twenty-five, who lived on La Jolla Avenue in West Hollywood. Chastain interviewed Robison Friday morning at his apartment after getting the information from the manager of the Slick Kicks store. A note in the chrono after the entry said DSS, which Ballard remembered was Chastain’s shorthand for a witness who supposedly didn’t see shit.

Neither Speights nor Robison was a probative witness but the split-second video that Speights came up with was still of high value. If charges and a trial ever emerged out of the investigation, Speights would be a witness, if only to introduce the selfie in which he had captured the first shot. If he was challenged in some way by the defense, his pal Robison could be brought in to testify and back up his story.

Chastain’s chrono contained two phone-call entries that intrigued Ballard. The first was at 1:10 p.m. Friday. It was an outgoing call that Chastain had placed to someone named Dean Towson. And the second was the last entry in the chrono, an incoming call at 5:10 p.m. from Matthew Robison, the witness who supposedly hadn’t seen shit. No further explanation of either of the calls was registered in the log. Chastain had probably intended to fill out the details later. But Ballard noted that the call had come in and Chastain had logged it shortly before he got the word from Olivas that he was off duty for the evening.

The name Dean Towson was familiar to Ballard but she couldn’t place it. She Googled it on the computer and soon was looking at the website for a criminal defense attorney specializing in federal court cases.

“Fabian,” Ballard said out loud.

It clicked. Fabian was facing federal drug charges. Towson specialized in federal cases. It was likely that he was Fabian’s attorney on the kilo case and that Chastain had reached out to him to see if he might know why his client was in that booth at the Dancers when the shooting started.

Ballard checked the clock over the TV screens and saw it was almost ten. She knew she could run Towson’s home address down through the DMV and go knock on his door, but it was late on a Saturday and she decided her approach to the lawyer would probably be better received in daylight hours. She put the idea aside and instead called the phone number Robison had called Chastain from. The chrono listed it as a 213 area code. Her call went unanswered and direct to a beep without an outgoing greeting. She left a message.

“Mr. Robison, this is Detective Ballard with the LAPD. I am following up on the phone conversation you had Friday with Detective Chastain. Could you give me a call back as soon as possible?”

She was leaving her number on the message when she saw on one of the TV screens video footage from outside Ken Chastain’s house. The media had finally been alerted to the story. The sound was down on the screen but on the video Ballard saw the chief of police addressing several reporters while Olivas stood just behind him and to his left. The chief looked ashen, as though he knew that whatever had started in that booth at the Dancers had now reached deep into his department and done irreparable damage.

Ballard didn’t need to hear his statement to know it.

The last set of documents Ballard looked through were Chastain’s own rough notes on the autopsies. He had transferred them to a digital file in preparation for writing reports to be submitted to the overall case file. He was dead before he got the chance to accomplish that.

Because the case was of highest priority — high enough to draw Dr. J., the coroner herself, out to the crime scene — the examinations of the bodies were conducted late Friday morning at the Medical Examiner’s Office, with Dr. J. supervising several deputy coroners assigned to each of the bodies. While there was little doubt as to cause of death of the victims, recovery of bullets from the bodies was an important step in the investigation and thus gave the individual cases priority status. Usually autopsies weren’t even scheduled for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. These were conducted less than twelve hours after the deaths.

Dr. J. conducted the Fabian autopsy herself. The actual autopsy report would take several days to produce but in the meantime Chastain took notes as the attending investigator. It was in those notes that Ballard came across a sentence and a question that turned her thoughts on the case in a new direction.

According to Chastain’s notes, Dr. J. had labeled a wound on Fabian’s chest as a first-degree burn that had occurred at the time of death but was not caused by a firearm. Chastain had added a second notation to this conclusion: “Battery burn?”

Ballard froze as she remembered seeing Chastain, Dr. J., and Lieutenant Olivas gathered around Fabian’s body at the crime scene and studying his chest.

Now she knew why. Fabian had a burn on his chest that may have come from a battery.

Ballard quickly moved back to the property report on Fabian and saw nothing listed as recovered with the body that could explain the burn. Whatever was burning him at the time of the shooting was taken from the scene — apparently by the shooter.

It all tumbled together for Ballard. She believed that Fabian was wearing a listening device. He was wired at the Dancers meeting, and the battery of the device had started to burn him. It was a well-known hazard in undercover work. Compact listening devices overheat and oils and sweat from the body can create an arcing connection with the battery. Professional UCs take measures to insulate themselves from what they call bug burn, wrapping the devices in rubber sheathing to place the devices away from the body’s sweat glands.

There was nothing in the background material on Fabian that Ballard had reviewed that showed he had ever worked as an undercover operative. But there was a burn on his chest that indicated otherwise in the Dancers massacre.

Ballard believed that Chastain was onto something and it might have been what got him killed.