The Late Show

37

Ballard calmed herself. The Ruger on her ankle was on the department’s short list of approved backups. She and probably a thousand other cops owned one.

She then started overthinking it, wondering if Carr already knew she had one and the purpose of the phone call was to see if she’d bring it up voluntarily. Her keeping quiet may have landed her on the suspect list.

“They are really thinking a cop did the Dancers thing?”

Ballard swiveled in her chair and saw a detective named Rick Tigert sitting at the desk directly behind hers. She had not realized that he could have overheard her half of the conversation with Carr.

“Look, don’t repeat that anywhere, Rick,” she said quickly. “I thought you had left.”

“I won’t, but if it’s true, the department’s going to be dragged through the shit once again,” Tigert said.

“Yeah, well, some things can’t be helped. Look, I don’t know if it’s true, but just keep it to yourself.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

Ballard turned back to her temporary desk and started opening the interoffice envelope that she had found in her mail slot. The previous recipient had his name crossed out on the address line, just above Ballard’s name. It said Feltzer/ FID. The envelope contained copies of the search warrant return executed at Thomas Trent’s house the day before. Feltzer had made good on his coerced promise to share. The return was the document submitted to the court that had authorized the warrant. The law required law enforcement to report back to the judge so that there was an outside authority standing vigilant against unlawful search and seizure. The returns were usually very detailed about every item taken during a search. Feltzer had also supplemented this with a stack of crime scene photos of each item seized in the place where it was found.

Ballard tried to put the Chastain matter out of her mind for the time being by jumping back onto the Trent case. She studied the list of items taken from the house on Wrightwood. Most were common items that served a purpose in a household or workshop but could take on sinister qualities when in the possession of a suspected serial sex offender. Things like duct tape, zip ties, pliers, a ski mask. The zinger was the collection of brass knuckles from a drawer in a bedside table in the master bedroom. There was no further description of them, so Ballard immediately flipped to the photos and found the shot of four pairs of brass knuckles in the drawer. Each set was of unique design and materials, but all carried the same words on the impact plates. GOOD and EVIL. Ballard assumed that one of the sets was the weapon that Ramona Ramone had been tortured with.

While she didn’t need the brass knuckles to solidify the case against Trent, especially since no case would be moving forward, there was still a silent moment of clarity, fulfillment, and knowledge that she had followed the correct trail in her investigation. Her only regret was that she had no one to share the moment with. Jenkins wasn’t coming in for another six hours and he had never been invested in the case anyway. Only Ballard had been committed to it.

She noticed that Feltzer had included copies of all the crime scene photographs, so she slowly leafed through the stack of 8 x 10s. It was a photo tour of the house, and Ballard was reminded that she had never seen the entire place. She was struck by the normalcy of it. Spare and out-of-date furnishings were in every room. The only piece that allowed her to date the photos as reasonably contemporary was the flat-screen television on the living room wall.

The last photos in the stack were of the lowest room in the upside-down house. And these included shots of Trent in situ — as he had been found. There was more blood on him and the floor than Ballard had remembered. His eyes were half-lidded. She spent a long time studying the photos of the man she had killed. She only pulled her eyes away when her cell phone started to buzz. She looked at the screen. It was Towson.

“Have you checked the website?” he said. “It’s up. It’s good.”

“Hold on,” she said.

She pulled up the Times website on her screen. The story wasn’t the main selection on the home page but it was the third story listed. She opened it, noted that it had Jerry Castor’s byline, and quickly read it. She was pleased with what she saw. Especially the money paragraph.

“Yeah, it’s good,” Ballard said. “What do you think?”

“I think we made a mistake,” he said. “We should have told Feltzer you wanted a promotion to captain too. He gave us everything we wanted! In fact, I checked on your van and they said you can pick it up tomorrow. They’re finished with it.”

She hadn’t known he was going to do that. His taking that initiative suggested to Ballard that things were maybe going to get awkward with Towson.

“Thank you very much, Dean,” she said. “For all of it. You really turned this around.”

“Wasn’t me,” he said. “You made this about the easiest case I’ve ever handled.”

“Well, good. And by the way, I gave your card to Trent’s victim — the one who brought me into the case. I told her she should go after the equity in that house and to call you.”

“Well, I’m much obliged. And you know, Renée, this is now a closed matter, as far as my involvement. That means it would not be a conflict if we were to stay in touch — you know, socially.”

There it was. The awkward overture. It was routine to get hit on by men in the department as well as the larger field of the justice system. That was how she and Compton had hooked up — a shared experience leading to something more. She had been feeling Towson’s interest growing since the interview at his town house Sunday morning. The problem was, she did not return his interest, especially after the ordeal she had just been through.

“I think I want to keep this on a professional level, Dean,” she said. “I may need your legal services in the future and I like how you handled this — a lot.”

She hoped that puffing him up on a professional level would allow the personal rejection to go down easier.

“Well, of course,” he said. “Whatever you need, Renée. I’m here for you. But think about it. We could always have both.”

“Thank you, Dean,” she said.

After ending the call, Ballard went back to the photos, studying once again the shots of Trent’s body and the room on the bottom floor of the upside-down house. Seeing the body and the blood allowed her to go back to it and go over it in her mind’s eye. She relived the steps she took, the escape from her bindings, and then the attack. She cupped her right hand around her left wrist. It was the one she had first freed, and it had suffered the deepest laceration from the zip tie. The photos made her feel the pain again. But it was earned. It was sacrifice. She could not articulate it even to herself, but going through it again in her head and not second-guessing anything was therapeutic. It was needed.

She almost didn’t hear her name being called from the other side of the squad room. She looked up and saw Danitra Lewis waving a clipboard at her from just outside McAdams’s office. Lewis was the division’s records and property clerk. Ballard knew that at the end of each day, Lewis dropped off evidence logs in the lieutenant’s in-box so that he would be apprised of the comings and goings on different cases.

Ballard got up and went over to see what she wanted.

“What’s up, Danitra?”

“What’s up is I need a disposition on the property you got in my locker. You can’t just leave it there forever.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m saying you’ve got that bag sittin’ in one of my boxes since last week.”

“The one going to Chastain at RHD? He was supposed to take it Friday.”

“Well, like I’m saying, it’s still in that locker, and it’s got a hold for you on it, not him. I need you to come get it. I need the space.”

Ballard was confused. The evidence bag contained the belongings of Cynthia Haddel, the waitress gunned down in the Dancers massacre. Ballard knew that she was an ancillary victim but it didn’t make a lot of sense to her that Chastain had not taken the property bag early Friday morning when he had been at the station. She had told him about it. But even if Chastain hadn’t taken the bag because his hands were full with the witness Zander Speights, it should have been transported by courier Monday morning to Property Division downtown and held for him there.

That was the procedure. But Lewis was saying that none of that had happened. That the bag was on hold for her.

“I don’t know what’s going on with that, but I’ll go check it in a few minutes,” Ballard said.

Lewis thanked her and left the squad room.

Ballard went back to the desk she was using, stacked the photos and the search warrant return together, and put them back into the interoffice mailer so that they would not be lying around on display. She then locked the envelope in her file cabinet and headed back to the property room.

Lewis was gone and the room was empty. Ballard opened the locker in which she had put the brown paper bag that contained Cynthia Haddel’s personal effects. She took the bag out and carried it over to the counter. The first thing she noticed was that the bag was double taped. A second layer of red evidence tape had been applied over the first, meaning the bag had been opened and resealed since Ballard had placed it in the locker early Friday morning. She assumed that Chastain had done this. She next checked the property transfer label and saw that this, too, was new. Handwritten instructions on the label said to hold the property for Detective Ballard at Hollywood Division. Ballard recognized the handwriting as Chastain’s.

Ballard grabbed a box cutter off the counter, cut through the tape, and opened the bag. From it she pulled the plastic evidence bags she had placed inside the paper bag the morning after Haddel’s murder. She noticed that one of these was also double taped. It had been opened and resealed.

Without breaking the new seal on the bag, she spread it out on the counter so she could see its contents through the plastic. There was an inventory list inside and she was able to check everything against it, from Haddel’s phone to her tip apron to the cigarette box containing the vial of Molly.

Based on what Rogers Carr had said about Chastain now being the focus of the investigation, Ballard wondered what Chastain had been up to. Was there something in the bag that he wanted to keep hidden from RHD? Was it something on Haddel’s phone? Or had he taken something?

There was no easy answer. Ballard grabbed the top corners of the bag and flipped it over on the counter so that she could examine its contents from the other side. Right away she noticed a business card that hadn’t been there before slipped down into the cellophane wrap of the cigarette box. It was Chastain’s LAPD business card.

Ballard went over to a latex glove dispenser on the wall and grabbed a pair. She snapped the gloves on and went back to the evidence bag. She cut the seal and reached in for the cigarettes. She removed the box and examined it closely before slipping the business card out. There was a name written on the side of the card, not visible when it had been behind the cigarette box cellophane.

Ballard didn’t recognize the name or know the meaning of the initials VMD. She put the card aside and opened the cigarette box. The vial was still there and it appeared to be half full — as it was when Ballard had discovered it.

She decided to look through everything to see if anything else stood out to her as having been tampered with. The phone was now useless. It had long since used up its charge. She opened the tip apron next and saw what appeared to be the same contents as before, a fold of currency, more cigarettes, a lighter, and a small notebook. She took out the money and counted it. Not a dollar was missing, and there was no clue as to what Chastain had been up to.

Ballard pulled out her phone. She took off a glove, typed in Eric Higgs, and fired the name into her search engine. She got a variety of responses. There was an artist, a college football player, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Irvine, and several others. But none of the people with the name connected to Ballard on any level of significance.

She next typed VMD into the search engine and got numerous results, including references to Visual Molecular Dynamics, Veterinary Medicines Directorate, and Vector Meson Dominance. Far down the list, she saw the words Vacuum Metal Deposition, and the explanatory line beneath it grabbed her attention with one word.

The physical process of coating evidence with very thin metal film...

Ballard remembered reading something about this process. She clicked on the link to an article and started reading. VMD was a forensic technique in which applications of gold and zinc to evidence in a low-pressure environment revealed latent fingerprints on objects and materials usually deemed too porous to produce prints. The process had been successful in applications on plastics, patterned metals, and some woven fabrics.

The article was two years old and from a website called Forensic Times. It said the technique was complicated and required a sizable pressure chamber and other equipment, not to mention the expensive metals gold and zinc. Therefore, its study and application were primarily carried out on the university level and in private forensic labs. At the time of the article, it said neither the FBI nor any major metropolitan police department in the United States had a VMD chamber and that this was hindering law enforcement use of the technique in criminal cases.

The article listed a handful of private labs and universities where the application of VMD was either offered or being studied. Among these was UC Irvine, where Ballard had just determined that an Eric Higgs was a chemistry professor.

Ballard quickly repackaged all of Cynthia Haddel’s property back into the brown paper bag and resealed it with tape from a dispenser on the counter. She then carried the bag back to the detective bureau, where she went to work tracking down Professor Higgs.

Twenty minutes later, and thanks to the University Police Department, she placed a call to a lab assigned to the professor. Ballard judged the voice that answered as being too young to be a professor.

“I’m looking for Professor Higgs.”

“He’s gone.”

“For the day?”

“Yeah, for the day.”

“Who is this?”

“Well, who is this?”

“Detective Renée Ballard, Los Angeles Police Department. It’s very important that I reach Professor Higgs. Can you help me?”

“Well, I... ”

“Who is this?”

“Uh, Steve Stilwell. I’m the grad assistant in the lab.”

“Is this the VMD lab?”

“Well, it’s not exactly a VMD lab, but we have the setup here, yeah.”

Ballard grew more excited with the confirmation.

“Do you have a cell phone for Professor Higgs or any way I could reach him?”

“I have his cell. I guess I could... I’m not sure it’s allowed.”

“Mr. Stilwell, I’m calling about a murder investigation. Do you understand? Either give me that number or call Professor Higgs yourself and ask permission to give it to me. I need you to do one or the other right now.”

“Okay, okay, let me get the number. I have to look it up on this phone so I won’t hear you if you say anything.”

“Just hurry, Mr. Stilwell.”

Ballard couldn’t contain herself while waiting. She got up and started pacing one of the aisles in the detective bureau while Stilwell got the number out of his phone. Finally, he started to call it out as he read it off his phone screen. Ballard raced back to her workstation and wrote the number down. She disconnected the call with Stilwell just as he brought the phone back to his mouth and said, “Got it?”

She dialed the number and a man answered after only one ring.

“Professor Higgs?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Ballard. I’m a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.”

There was a long moment before he responded.

“You worked with Ken Chastain, didn’t you?”

Ballard felt a bolt of pure energy go through her chest.

“Yes, I did.”

“I thought you might call. He told me that if anything happened to him, I could trust you.”