The Late Show

19

Ballard needed to sleep but she kept pushing herself. After leaving Towson she drove back over the hill and down into West Hollywood. Her next stop was Matthew “Metro” Robison’s home. She had left three messages through the night for him and he had not returned the calls.

Robison’s DMV address led Ballard to an apartment complex on La Jolla south of Santa Monica. As she cruised by, she saw an obvious city-ride parked at the curb out front. She kept going and pulled over a half block away. Steadman had told Ballard that Chastain texted his wife about wrangling a witness. Identifying and finding that witness would be priority one, and since Chastain had documented a call from Robison as the last investigative move on his chrono, it looked like the shoe salesman was of high interest to the task force.

Ballard adjusted her side-view mirror so she could keep an eye on the city-ride. After twenty minutes, she saw two detectives leave Robison’s building and get in. She identified them as Corey Steadman and his partner, Jerry Rudolph. They did not have anyone with them, which meant either Robison had not been home or he was home and had answered questions to their satisfaction. Judging by the lack of response from Robison the night before, Ballard was thinking that the most likely scenario was that he had not been there.

Ballard waited until Steadman and Rudolph drove off before she got out of her car and walked back to the apartment building. There was no security gate. She got to Robison’s door and was surprised when her knock was answered. A small woman who looked like she was about nineteen peered out at her from behind a security chain. Ballard showed her badge.

“Are you Metro’s girlfriend?” she asked.

She was hoping her gender and seeming familiarity would get her further than the two white male detectives who had just been here.

“What about it?” the young woman said.

“Like those two men who were just here, I’m looking for him,” Ballard said. “But for different reasons.”

“What’s your reason?”

“I’m worried about him. He reached out to my partner on Friday. And now my partner’s dead. I don’t want Metro to get hurt.”

“You know Metro?”

“Not really. I was just trying to keep him and his friend Zander out of this as much as I could. Do you know where he is?”

The girl tightened her lips and Ballard saw her holding back tears.

“No,” she said in a strangled voice.

“When was the last time he was home?” Ballard asked.

“Friday. I had work, and when I got off at ten, he wasn’t here, and he didn’t answer his texts. He’s gone and I’ve been waiting.”

“Was he supposed to work at Kicks yesterday?”

“Yes, and he didn’t show. I went there and I talked to Zander and he said he never came in. They said he’s fired if he doesn’t show up today. I’m freaking out.”

“My name is Renée,” Ballard asked. “What’s yours?”

“Alicia,” the girl said.

“Did you tell all of this to those two detectives who were just here, Alicia?”

“No. They scared me. I just said he hasn’t been here. They came last night, too, and asked the same questions.”

“Okay, let’s go back to Friday. Metro called my partner at about five o’clock. Were you with him then?”

“No, I go in at four.”

“And where is that?”

“Starbucks on Santa Monica.”

“Where was Metro when you last saw him?”

“Here. He was off Friday and he was here when I left for work.”

“What was he doing?”

“Nothing. Just watching TV on the couch.”

She turned away from the door opening as if to check the couch in the room behind her. She then turned back to Ballard.

“What should I do?” she asked, a tone of desperation clearly in her voice.

“You’re in West Hollywood here,” Ballard said. “Have you reported him missing to the Sheriff’s Department?”

“No, not yet.”

“Then I think what you should do is report him missing. It’s been two nights and he hasn’t come home and he hasn’t reported for work. Call the West Hollywood substation and make the report.”

“They won’t do anything.”

“They will do what they can, Alicia. But if Metro is hiding because he’s scared, that will make it hard to find him.”

“But if he is hiding, why doesn’t he text me?”

Ballard had no answer for that and was afraid her face revealed her true theory about Metro’s fate.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe he will. Maybe he’s keeping his phone off because he’s afraid people can track him through it.”

That provided no comfort.

“I have to go,” Alicia said.

Slowly she closed the door. Ballard reached out her hand and stopped it.

“Let me give you a card,” she said. “If you hear from Metro, tell him the safest thing for him to do is call me. Tell him Detective Chastain and I used to be partners, and he trusted me.”

She pulled out a business card and passed it through the opening. Alicia took it without a word and then closed the door.

Ballard got back into the car and folded her arms on the steering wheel. She leaned her forehead down against them and closed her eyes. She was beyond tired but her mind couldn’t let go of the case. Matthew Robison had at first been a witness classified as DSS — didn’t see shit. And then at 5:10 p.m. Friday, he called Chastain. Within hours one would be dead and one would be missing. What had happened? What did Metro know?

Ballard startled as her phone rang. She pulled her head up and checked the screen. It was her grandmother.

“Tutu?”

“Hello, Renée.”

“Is everything okay, Tutu?”

“Everything is fine. But a man was here. He said he was police and he was looking for you. I thought you should know.”

“Sure. Did he tell you his name and show you a badge?”

She tried to keep the urgency and concern out of her voice. Her grandmother was eighty-two years old.

“He had a badge and he gave me a business card. He said you have to call him.”

“Okay, I will. Can you read me his name and give me the number?”

“Yes, it’s Rogers — with the s at the end — Carr, spelled with two r’s.”

“Rogers Carr. What about a number so I can call him?”

Ballard grabbed a pen out of the center console and wrote a 213 number on an old parking receipt. She didn’t recognize the name or number.

“Tutu, does it say under his name where he works? Like what unit?”

“Yes, it says Major Crimes Unit.”

Now Ballard understood what was happening.

“Perfect, Tutu. I’ll give him a call. Was he by himself when he came to the door?”

“Yeah, by himself. Are you coming up tonight?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so this week. I’m working a case, Tutu.”

“Renée, it’s your weekend.”

“I know, I know, but they’ve got me working. Maybe I’ll get an extra day next week if we wrap this up. Have you been out to check the break lately?”

“Every day I walk on the beach. A lot of boys on the water. It must be good.”

Ballard’s grandmother lived in Ventura not far from Solimar Beach and Mussel Shoals, the places where her son — Renée’s father — had grown up surfing.

“Well,” Ballard said. “I hope it’s still good next week. I’m going to call this guy now, Tutu, and see what he wants. I’ll let you know next week when I’m heading up.”

“Okay, Renée. Be careful.”

“I know, Tutu.”

Ballard disconnected and looked at the clock on the screen. It was 11:11, and that meant the stores on Melrose Avenue were open. According to Alicia, Zander Speights wasn’t missing. She had spoken to him on Saturday at Kicks when she went in looking for Metro.

Ballard started the engine and dropped the car into drive. She headed down La Jolla toward Melrose. Despite what she had said to her grandmother, she had no intention of calling Rogers Carr. She knew what he was up to and what he wanted. Major Crimes had been folded into the Dancers/ Chastain investigation and, like Steadman and Rudolph, Carr was most likely involved in tracing Chastain’s last steps. That would include his visit to Hollywood Station to pick up Zander Speights and his cell phone. It would also include the final conversation she had with Chastain. That was personal and private and she didn’t want to share it.

Ballard listed her grandmother’s address as her permanent address on all departmental personnel records. She had a bedroom in the little bungalow and spent most of her days off up there, drawn by Tutu’s home cooking and conversation, the nearby surf breaks, and the washer and dryer in the garage. But nobody besides her partner, Jenkins, knew exactly where she went on days off the job. The fact that Carr had made the ninety-minute drive up to the house in Ventura told Ballard that he had gotten access to her personnel jacket, and that bothered her. She decided that if Carr wanted to talk to her, then he could come find her.

Kicks was like a lot of shops that lined Melrose between Fairfax and La Brea. Minimalist chic and expensive. It was essentially a custom-athletic-shoe store. Shoes by recognizable brands like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance were modified with dyes, pins, zippers, and sewn-on sequins, crosses, and rosaries and then sold for hundreds of dollars over the original retail price. And by the looks of things when Ballard entered, nobody seemed to mind. There was a sign behind the cash register station that said the shoe is art.

Ballard felt about as with-it as a chaperone at a high school dance. She scanned the already crowded store and saw Speights opening a shoe box for a customer interested in a pair of Nikes with pink lipstick kisses emblazoned on them. He was extolling the cool factor of the shoes when he saw Ballard hovering nearby.

“I’ll be right with you, Detective,” he said.

He said it loud enough to draw everyone in the store’s attention to Ballard. She ignored the stares and picked up a shoe off one of the clear plastic pedestals used to display the store’s wares. It was a red Converse high-top that had somehow been mounted on a three-inch platform heel.

“You would look great in those, Detective.”

Ballard turned. It was Speights. He had broken away from his customer, who was pacing in front of a mirror and considering the Nikes with kisses that she had tried on.

“I’m not sure they would hold up on a fast break,” she said.

His face betrayed that Speights didn’t get the joke. Ballard moved on.

“Zander, I need to talk to you for a few minutes. Do you have an office in the back where we can have some privacy?”

Speights gestured toward his customer.

“I’m working, and this is a commission shop,” he said. “We have a sale today and I have to sell. I can’t just—”

“Okay, I get it,” Ballard said. “Just tell me about Metro. Where is he?”

“I don’t know where Metro is, man. He’s supposed to be here. He didn’t show yesterday either, and when I called him, he didn’t pick up.”

“If he was hiding, where would he go?”

“What? I don’t know. I mean, who goes into hiding? This is so weird.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“That night when we left the club. Look, my customer is waiting.”

“Let her look at herself for a couple more minutes. What about Friday? You didn’t see him Friday?”

“No, we’re both off Fridays. That’s why we went out Thursday night.”

“So you don’t know what he was doing Friday? You never called him to tell him about coming to the station and the police taking your phone? You didn’t warn him that we might want to talk to him?”

“No, because he didn’t see anything that night. Neither of us did. And besides, I couldn’t call him, because you and that detective took my phone.”

“So why did he call the police on Friday at five? What did he know?”

“I have no idea why he called or what he knew, and I’m about to lose a sale. I gotta go.”

Speights walked away from Ballard and over to his customer, who was now sitting down and taking off the Nikes. It looked to Ballard like a no-sale. She realized that she was still holding the Converse with the three-inch heel. She checked the underside of the shoe and saw a price tag of $395. She then carefully put it back on its pedestal, leaving it there like a work of art.

Ballard headed out to Venice and sleep after that. She picked up Lola and pitched her tent fifty yards north of the Rose Avenue lifeguard stand. She was so tired that she decided to sleep first and paddle afterward.

Her sleep was repeatedly interrupted by a series of calls to her phone from a 213 number that matched digit for digit the number her grandmother had read off the business card given to her by Rogers Carr. She didn’t answer and he kept calling, popping her out of sleep every thirty or forty minutes. He never left a message. After the third interruption, Ballard put the phone on mute.

After that, she slept a solid three hours, waking with her arm draped around Lola’s neck. She checked her phone and saw that Carr had called two more times and finally, after the last call, had left a message:

“Detective Ballard, this is Detective Rogers Carr with Major Crimes. Listen, we need to talk. I’m on the team investigating the murder of fellow officer Ken Chastain. Can you call me back so we can set up a face-to-face?”

He left two numbers: his cell — which Ballard already had — and his landline at the PAB. Ballard was always annoyed by people who prefaced what they said with the word listen.

Listen, we need to talk.

Listen, no we don’t.

She decided not to call him back yet. It was supposedly her day off, and she was losing the light. Through the tent’s zippered slot she checked the water and saw that the afternoon wind had kicked up a light chop. She looked up at the sun and estimated she could get in an hour’s paddle before dusk, when the sharks came out.

Fifteen minutes later Ballard was on the water with a passenger. Lola sat on her haunches, weighting down the front of the board as it nosed through the chop. Ballard paddled north against the wind so she could count on it to be at her back when she was spent and returning to the beach.

She dug deep into the water with long, smooth strokes. As she worked, she let the details of the Dancers case flow through her mind. She tried to delineate what she knew, what she could assume, and what she didn’t know. If she assumed that the fourth man in the booth was a cop, that made it a meeting of individuals with expertise in several areas of vice and law enforcement — gambling, loan-sharking, and drugs. Fabian, the drug dealer, had asked his attorney about delivering a cop to trade for help on his case. That indicated that he knew of a cop who was involved in illegal activities. Perhaps a cop who had taken bribes or had run interference on cases. Perhaps a cop who owed money.

Ballard could see a scenario where a cop who owed money to a bookie would be introduced to a loan shark with perhaps the drug dealer as the go-between. Another scenario she paddled through had the cop already owing the bookie and loan shark and being introduced to the drug dealer to set up a deal that would pay off his debts.

There were many plausible possibilities and she could not narrow anything down without more facts. She changed the direction of the board and shifted her focus to Chastain. His actions indicated that he had been on the same path that Ballard was on now but that he had somehow drawn attention to it, and it had gotten him killed. The question was, how did he get there so fast? He did not have the information Ballard had gotten from Towson, yet something had told him it was a cop who had been in that booth.

She went back to the start, to the callout on the case. She quickly went through her own steps in the investigation, beginning at Hollywood Presbyterian and carrying it through to her dismissal by Olivas at the crime scene. She examined each moment as though it were a film and she was interested in everything in its frame.

Eventually she saw something that didn’t fit. It was that last moment at the crime scene, Olivas in her face, insulting her and telling her to leave. She had looked over his shoulder for a sympathetic eye. First it was to the coroner and then it was to her old partner. But Dr. J. had looked away and Chastain had been busying himself bagging evidence. He never even looked her way.

She now realized that that was the moment. Chastain was bagging something — it had looked like a black button to Ballard — while Olivas had his back turned and was looking at her. Chastain also had his back turned to Dr. J. so she would not have a view of what he was doing either.

Detectives didn’t bag evidence at crime scenes. The criminalists did. On top of that, it had been too early for anyone to be picking up and bagging evidence. The crime scene was fresh, bodies were still in place, and the 3-D crime scene camera had not even been set up. What was Chastain doing? Why was he breaking protocol and removing something from the crime scene before it was properly noted, recorded, and cataloged?

Ballard was exhausted but she picked up her pace, pushing herself harder with each dig of the paddle. Her shoulders, arms, and thighs were vibrating with the strain. She needed to get back. She needed to return to Chastain’s case files to figure out what she had missed.

As she cut into the shore, she forgot about the pain and her plans when she saw a man waiting next to her tent. He was in jeans and a black bomber jacket and wearing black aviators. She knew he was a cop before she could make out the badge on his belt.

Ballard came out of the water and quickly removed the board’s leash. She then wrapped the Velcro ankle strap around the ring on Lola’s collar. She knew Lola could easily break it if she lunged but Ballard was hoping that she would feel the tug of the strap and know she was under Ballard’s control.

“Be easy, girl,” Ballard said.

With the board under her left arm and her fingers in the grip hole, she walked slowly toward the man in the aviators. He looked familiar but she couldn’t place him. Maybe it was just the sunglasses. They were standard with most cops.

He spoke before Ballard had to.

“Renée Ballard? I’ve been trying to reach you. Rogers Carr, Major Crimes.”

“How’d you find me?”

“Well, I’m a detective. Some people, believe it or not, say a pretty good one.”

“Don’t joke with me. Tell me how you found me or you can go fuck off.”

Carr held his hands up in surrender.

“Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean to piss anybody off. I put out a broadcast on your van and a couple of bicycle cops saw it in the lot. I came, I asked around. I’m here.”

Ballard put her board down next to her tent. She heard a low rumbling, like distant thunder, coming from Lola’s chest. The dog had picked up her vibe.

“You put out a broadcast on my van?” she asked. “It’s not even registered in my name.”

“I know that,” Carr said. “But I met Julia Ballard today. I believe she is your grandmother? I ran her name for registered vehicles and came up with the van. I heard you like surfing and put two and two together.”

He gestured toward the ocean as if it confirmed his investigative logic.

“I was paddleboarding,” Ballard said. “It’s not surfing. What do you want?”

“I just want to talk,” Carr said. “Did you get my message on your cell?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I left you a message.”

“I’m off today. My phone’s off too.”

“I’m on the Chastain case and we are retracing his moves in the last forty-eight hours. You had some interaction with him and I need to ask you about it. That’s it. Nothing sinister, strictly routine. But I have to get it done.”

Ballard reached down and patted Lola on the shoulder, letting her know everything was all right.

“There’s a place down there on Dudley called the Candle,” she said. “It’s on the boardwalk. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

“Why can’t we go now?” Carr asked.

“Because I need to get a shower and to wash the salt off my dog’s legs. Twenty minutes tops. You can trust me, Carr. I’ll be there.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not if this is as routine as you claim it is. Try the mahimahi tacos, they’re good.”

“Meet you there.”

“Get an outside table. I’m bringing the dog.”