The Late Show

3

The siren died as the ambulance came down the chute into the sally port. Ballard waited and watched. The double doors at the back of the ambulance opened and the paramedics brought out the fifth victim on the gurney. She was already hooked to a breathing bag.

Ballard heard the team communicate to the waiting ER team that the victim had coded in the ambulance and that they had brought her back and stabilized her, only to have her flatline once again as they were arriving. The ER team came out and took control of the gurney, then moved swiftly through the ER and directly into an elevator that would take them up to the OR. Ballard tagged along behind and was the last one on before the doors closed. She stood in the corner as the team of four medical workers in pale blue surgical garb attempted to keep the woman on the gurney alive.

Ballard studied the victim as the elevator jolted and slowly started to rise. The woman wore cutoff jeans, high-top Converses, and a black tank that was soaked in blood. Ballard noticed the tops of four pens clipped to one of the jeans pockets. She guessed that this meant the victim was a waitress at the club where the shooting took place.

She had been shot dead center in the chest. Her face was obscured by the breathing mask but Ballard put her at midtwenties. She checked the hands but saw no rings or bracelets. There was a small black-ink tattoo depicting a unicorn on the woman’s inside left wrist.

“Who are you?”

Ballard looked up from the patient but could not tell who had addressed her, because everyone was wearing masks. It had been a male voice but three of the four people in front of her were men.

“Ballard, LAPD,” she said.

She pulled the badge off her belt and held it up.

“Put on a mask. We’re going into the OR.”

The woman pulled a mask out of a dispenser on the wall of the elevator and handed it to her. Ballard immediately put it on.

“And stay back and out of the way.”

The door finally opened and Ballard quickly exited and stepped to the side. The gurney came rushing out and went directly into an operating room with a glass observation window. Ballard stayed out and watched through the glass. The medical team made a valiant attempt to bring the young woman back from the dead and prepare her for surgery, but fifteen minutes into the effort they called it and pronounced her dead. It was 1:34 a.m. and Ballard wrote it down.

After the medical personnel cleared the room and went on to other cases, Ballard was left alone with the dead woman. The body would soon be moved out of the operating room and taken to a holding room until a coroner’s van and team arrived to collect it, but that gave Ballard some time. She entered the room and studied the woman. Her shirt had been cut open and her chest was exposed.

Ballard took out her phone and snapped a photo of the bullet wound on the sternum. She noted that there was no gunpowder stippling, and that told her that the shot came from a distance of more than four feet. It seemed to have been a skilled shot, the work of a marksman who had hit the ten ring while most likely on the move and in an adrenalized situation. It was something to consider should she ever come face-to-face with the killer, as unlikely as that seemed at the moment.

Ballard noticed a length of string around the dead woman’s neck. It wasn’t a chain or any kind of jewelry. It was twine. If there was a pendant, she couldn’t see it because the string disappeared behind a tangle of blood-matted hair. Ballard checked the door and then looked back at the victim. She pulled the string free of the hair and saw that there was a small key tied to it. Seeing a scalpel on a tray of surgical instruments, she grabbed it and cut the string, then pulled it free. She took a latex glove from her coat pocket and placed the key and string inside it in lieu of an evidence bag.

After pocketing the glove, Ballard studied the victim’s face. Her eyes were slightly open and there was still a rubber airway device in her mouth. That bothered Ballard. It distended the woman’s face and she thought it would have embarrassed her in life. Ballard wanted to remove it but knew it was against protocol. The coroner was supposed to receive the body as it was in death. She had already crossed the line by taking the key but the indignity of the rubber airway got to her. She was reaching for it when a voice interrupted from behind.

“Detective?”

Ballard turned and saw that it was one of the paramedics who had brought the victim in. He held up a plastic bag.

“This is her apron,” he said. “It has her tips.”

“Thank you,” Ballard said. “I’ll take it.”

He brought the bag to her and she held it up to eye level.

“Did you guys get any ID?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” the paramedic said. “She was a cocktail waitress, so she probably kept all of that in her car or a locker or something.”

“Right.”

“But her name’s Cindy.”

“Cindy?”

“Yeah, we asked back at the club. You know, so we could talk to her. Didn’t matter, though. She coded.”

He looked down at the body. Ballard thought she saw sadness in his eyes.

“Wish we had gotten there a few minutes earlier,” he said. “Maybe we could have done something. Hard to tell.”

“I’m sure you guys did your best,” Ballard said. “She would thank you if she could.”

He looked back at Ballard.

“Now you’ll do your best, right?” he said.

“We will,” she said, knowing that it would not be her case to investigate once RHD took over.

Shortly after the paramedic left the room, two hospital orderlies entered to move the body so that the operating room could be sterilized and put back into rotation — it was a busy night down in the ER. They covered the body with a plastic sheet and rolled the gurney out. The victim’s left arm was exposed and Ballard saw the unicorn tattoo again on her wrist. She followed the gurney out, clutching the bag containing the victim’s apron.

She walked along the hallway, looking through the windows into the other operating rooms. She noticed that Ramón Gutierrez had been brought up and was undergoing surgery to relieve pressure from the swelling of his brain. She watched for a few moments, until her phone buzzed, and she checked the text. It was from Lieutenant Munroe, asking the status of the fifth victim. Ballard typed out an answer as she walked toward the elevator.

KMA was an old LAPD designation used at the end of a radio call. Some said it stood for Keep Me Apprised but in use it was the equivalent of over and out. Over time it had evolved to mean end of watch or, in this case, the victim’s death.

While riding down on the slow-moving elevator, Ballard put on a latex glove and opened the plastic bag the paramedic had given her. She then looked through the pockets of the waitress’s apron. She could see a fold of currency in one pocket and a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a small notepad in the other. Ballard had been in the Dancers and knew the club got its name from a club in the great L.A. novel The Long Goodbye. She also knew it had a whole menu of specialty drinks with L.A. literary titles, like the Black Dahlia, Blonde Lightning, and Indigo Slam. A notebook would be a requirement for a waitress.

Back at the car Ballard popped the trunk and placed the bag in one of the cardboard boxes she and Jenkins used for storing evidence. On any given shift they might collect evidence from multiple cases, so they divided the trunk space with cardboard boxes. She had earlier placed Ramón Gutierrez’s belongings in one of the boxes. She put the bag containing the apron in another, sealed it with red evidence tape, and closed the trunk.

By the time Ballard got over to the Dancers, the crime scene was a three-ring circus. Not the Barnum & Bailey kind, but the police kind, with three concentric rings denoting the size, complexity, and media draw of the case. The center ring was the actual crime scene, where investigators and evidence technicians worked. This was the red zone. It was circled by a second ring, and this was where the command staff, uniformed presence, and crowd and media control command posts were located. The third and outer ring was where the reporters, cameras, and the attendant onlookers gathered.

Already all eastbound lanes of Sunset Boulevard had been closed off to make room for the massive glut of police and news vehicles. The westbound lanes were moving at a crawl, a long ribbon of brake lights, as drivers slowed to grab a view of the police activity. Ballard found a parking spot at the curb a block away and walked it in. She took her badge off her belt, pulled out the cord wound around the rear clip, and looped it over her head so the badge would hang visibly from her neck.

Once she’d covered the block, she had to search for the officer with the crime scene attendance log so she could sign in. The first two rings were cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape. Ballard lifted the first line and went under, then saw an officer holding a clipboard and standing post at the second. His name was Dunwoody and she knew him.

“Woody, put me down,” she said.

“Detective Ballard,” he said as he started writing on the clipboard. “I thought this was RHD all the way.”

“It is, but I was at Hollywood Pres with the fifth victim. Who’s heading it up?”

“Lieutenant Olivas — with everybody from Hollywood and West Bureau command staff to the C-O-P sticking their nose in.”

Ballard almost groaned. Robert Olivas headed up one of the Homicide Special teams at RHD. Ballard had a bad history with him, stemming from her assignment to his team four years earlier when he was promoted to the unit from Major Narcotics. That history was what landed her on the late show at Hollywood Division.

“You seen Jenkins around?” she asked.

Her mind was immediately moving toward a plan that would allow her to avoid reporting on the fifth victim directly to Olivas.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Dunwoody said. “Where was that? Oh, yeah, they’re bringing a bus in for the witnesses. Taking them all downtown. I think Jenkins was watching over that. You know, making sure none of them try to split. Apparently it was like rats on a sinking ship when the shooting started. What I heard, at least.”

Ballard moved a step closer to Dunwoody to speak confidentially. Her eyes raked across the sea of police vehicles, all of them with roof lights blazing.

“What else did you hear, Woody?” she asked. “What happened inside? Was this like Orlando last year?”

“No, no, it’s not terrorism,” Dunwoody answered. “What I hear is that it was four guys in a booth and something went wrong. One starts shooting and takes out the others. He then took out a waitress and a bouncer on his way out.”

Ballard nodded. It was a start toward understanding what had happened.

“So, where is Jenkins holding the wits?”

“They’re over in the garden next door. Where the Cat and Fiddle used to be.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

The Dancers was next to an old Spanish-style building with a center courtyard and garden. It had been an outdoor seating area for the Cat and Fiddle, an English pub and major hangout for off duty and sometimes not-off-duty officers from the nearby Hollywood Station. But it went out of business at least two years earlier — a victim of rising lease rates in Hollywood — and was vacant. It had now been commandeered as a witness corral.

There was another patrol officer posted outside the gated archway entrance to the old beer garden. He nodded his approval to Ballard and she pushed through the wrought-iron gate. She found Jenkins sitting at an old stone table, writing in a notebook.

“Jenks,” Ballard said.

“Yo, partner,” Jenkins said. “I heard your girl didn’t make it.”

“Coded in the RA. They never got a pulse after that. And I never got to talk to her. You getting anything here?”

“Not much. The smart people hit the ground when the shooting started. The smarter people got the hell out and aren’t sitting in here. As far as I can tell, we can clear as soon as they get a bus for these poor folks. It’s RHD’s show.”

“I have to talk to someone about my victim.”

“Well, that will be Olivas or one of his guys, and I’m not sure you want to do that.”

“Do I have a choice? You’re stuck here.”

“Not like I planned it this way.”

“Did anybody in here tell you they saw the waitress get hit?”

Jenkins scanned the tables, where about twenty people were sitting and waiting. It was a variety of Hollywood hipsters and clubbers. A lot of tattoos and piercings.

“No, but from what I hear, she was waiting on the table where the shooting started,” Jenkins said. “Four men in a booth. One pulls out a hand cannon and shoots the others right where they’re sitting. People start scattering, including the shooter. He shot your waitress when he was going for the door. Took out a bouncer too.”

“And nobody knows what it was about?”

“Nobody here, at least.”

He waved a hand toward the witnesses. The gesture apparently looked to one of the patrons sitting at another stone table like an invitation. He got up and approached, the wallet chain draped from a front belt loop to the back pocket of his black jeans jangling with each step.

“Look, man, when are we going to be done here?” he said to Jenkins. “I didn’t see anything and I don’t know anything.”

“I told you,” Jenkins said. “Nobody leaves until the detectives take formal statements. Go sit back down, sir.”

Jenkins said it with a tone of threat and authority that totally undermined the use of the word sir. The patron stared at Jenkins a moment and then went back to his table.

“They don’t know they’re getting on a bus?” Ballard said in a low voice.

“Not yet,” Jenkins said.

Before Ballard could respond further, she felt her phone buzz and she pulled it out to check the screen. It was an unknown caller but she took it, knowing it was most likely a call from a fellow cop.

“Ballard.”

“Detective, this is Lieutenant Olivas. I was told you were with my fifth victim at Presbyterian. It would not have been my choice but I understand you were already there.”

Ballard paused before answering, a feeling of dread building in her chest.

“That’s right,” she finally said. “She coded and the body is waiting for a coroner’s pickup team.”

“Were you able to get a statement from her?” he asked.

“No, she was DOA. They tried to bring her back but it didn’t happen.”

“I see.”

He said it in a tone that suggested it was some failing on her part that the victim had died before she could be interviewed. Ballard didn’t respond.

“Write your reports and get them down to me in the morning,” Olivas said. “That’s all.”

“Uh, I’m here at the scene,” Ballard said before he disconnected. “Next door with the witnesses. With my partner.”

“And?”

“And there was no ID on the victim. She was a waitress. She probably had a locker somewhere inside that would have her wallet and her phone. I’d like to—”

“Cynthia Haddel — the bar manager gave it to me.”

“You want me to confirm it and gather her property or have your people take it?”

Now Olivas paused before responding. It was like he was weighing something unrelated to the case.

“I have a key that I think is to a locker,” Ballard said. “The paramedics turned it over to me.”

It was a significant stretch of the truth but Ballard did not want the lieutenant to know how she got the key.

“Okay, you handle it,” he finally said. “My people are fully involved elsewhere. But don’t get charged up, Ballard. She was a peripheral victim. Collateral damage — wrong place at the wrong time. You could also make next-of-kin notification and save my guys that time. Just don’t get in my way.”

“Got it.”

“And I still want your report on my desk in the morning.”

Olivas disconnected before Ballard could respond. She kept the phone to her ear a moment, thinking about his saying that Cindy Haddel was collateral damage and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ballard knew what that was like.

She put the phone away.

“So?” Jenkins asked.

“I need to go next door, check her locker, and find her ID,” she said. “Olivas also gave us next-of-kin.”

“Ah, fuck.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

“No, it doesn’t work that way. You volunteer yourself, you volunteer me.”

“I didn’t volunteer for next-of-kin notification. You heard the call.”

“You volunteered to get involved. Of course he was going to give you the shit work.”

Ballard didn’t want to start an argument. She turned away, checked out the people sitting at the stone tables, and saw two young women wearing cutoff jeans and tank tops, one shirt white and one black. She walked over to them and showed her badge. The white tank top spoke before Ballard could.

“We didn’t see anything,” she said.

“I heard,” Ballard said. “I want to ask about Cindy Haddel. Did either of you know her?”

The white top shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, yeah, to work with,” said the black top. “She was nice. Did she make it?”

Ballard shook her head and both of the waitresses brought their hands to their mouths at the same time, as if receiving impulses from the same brain.

“Oh god,” said the white top.

“Does either of you know anything about her?” Ballard asked. “Married? Boyfriend? Roommate? Anything like that?”

Neither did.

“Is there an employee locker room over at the club? Someplace she would have kept her wallet and her phone, maybe?” Ballard asked.

“There are lockers in the kitchen,” the white top said. “We put our stuff in those.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you. Did the three of you have any conversation tonight before the shooting?”

“Just waitress stuff,” the black top said. “You know, like who was tipping and who wasn’t. Who was grabby — the usual stuff.”

“Anybody in particular tonight?” Ballard asked.

“Not really,” the black top said.

“She was all bragging because she got a fifty from somebody,” the white top said. “I actually think it was somebody in that booth where the shooting started.”

“Why do you think that?” Ballard asked.

“Because that table was hers and they looked like players.”

“You mean show-offs? Guys with money?”

“Yeah, players.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

The two waitresses looked at each other first, then back at Ballard. They shook their heads.

Ballard left them there and went back to her partner.

“I’m going next door.”

“Don’t get lost,” he said. “As soon as I’m done babysitting, I want to go get next-of-kin over with and start writing. We’re done.”

Meaning the rest of the shift would be dedicated to paperwork.

“Roger that,” she said.

She left him sitting on the stone bench. As she made her way to the entrance of the Dancers she wondered if she would be able to get to the kitchen without drawing the attention of Lieutenant Olivas.