The Late Show

5

Jenkins was still next door with the witnesses. As Ballard approached him, he had his hands up, fingers spread as if trying to push them back. One of the club patrons had the high-pitched tone of frustration in his voice.

“Man, I have to work in the morning,” he said. “I can’t sit here all night, especially when I didn’t see a fucking thing!”

“I understand that, sir,” Jenkins said, his own voice a notch or two above its usual measured tone. “We will get statements from all of you just as soon as possible. Five people are dead. Think about that.”

The frustrated man made a dismissive hand gesture and turned back to a bench. Someone else cursed and yelled, “You can’t just keep us here!”

Jenkins did not respond but the truth on a technical level was that they could hold all patrons from the club until the investigators sorted out who was a potential witness and who might be a suspect. It was flimsy because common sense dictated that none of these people were suspects, but it was valid.

“You okay?” Ballard asked.

Jenkins turned around like he thought he was about to be jumped, then saw it was his partner.

“Barely,” he said. “I don’t blame them. They’re in for a long night. They’re sending a jail bus for them. Wait till they see the bars on the windows. They’ll really go apeshit then.”

“Glad I won’t be here to see it.”

“Where are you going?”

Ballard held up the evidence bag containing Cynthia Haddel’s property.

“I have to run by the hospital. They found more of her stuff. I’ll be back in twenty, we’ll do the notification, and then it will be all over except for the paperwork.”

“Next-of-kin will be a breeze compared to dealing with these animals. I think half of them are coming off highs. It’s going to get uglier once they’re all downtown.”

“And not our problem. I’ll be back.”

Ballard hadn’t told her partner the real reason she was returning to the hospital, because she knew he would not approve of her true plan. She turned to go back to the car but Jenkins stopped her.

“Hey, partner.”

“What?”

“You can lose the gloves now.”

He had noticed she still had crime scene gloves on. She held one hand up as if noticing the gloves for the first time.

“Right,” she said. “As soon as I see a trash can.”

At the car, Ballard kept the gloves on while she secured Cynthia Haddel’s property in the same cardboard box that contained her tip apron. But first she removed Haddel’s cell phone and slipped it into her pocket.

It was ten minutes back to Hollywood Presbyterian. She was banking on the fact that the shooting and mass casualties at the Dancers had slowed the operations of the coroner’s office and that Haddel’s body would still be waiting for pickup. She confirmed that was so when she got back to the ER and was led to a room where there were actually two covered bodies awaiting transport to the coroner. She asked the attendant to see if the doctor who had attempted to resuscitate Haddel was available.

Ballard had kept her gloves on. She now pulled back the sheet on one of the bodies and saw the face of a young man who had wasted to no more than a hundred pounds. She quickly re-covered the face and went to the other gurney. She confirmed it was Haddel and then moved down the gurney to the victim’s right hand. She pulled out the cell phone and pressed the pad of the dead woman’s right thumb to the home button on the screen.

The phone remained locked. Ballard tried the index finger and that failed to open the phone as well. She moved around the gurney and went through the process again with the left thumb. This time the phone unlocked, and Ballard had access.

She had to take one of her gloves off to manipulate the screen. She wasn’t concerned with leaving fingerprints because the phone was property, not evidence, and likely would never be analyzed for latent prints.

Having an iPhone herself, she knew the phone would relock soon if the screen didn’t remain active. She went into the GPS app and scrolled through previous destinations. There was a Pasadena address and Ballard clicked on it and set up a route there. It would keep the screen activated even as Ballard ignored the directions and went her own way. The phone would remain unlocked and she’d have access to its contents after leaving the hospital. She checked the battery level and saw that it was at 60 percent, which would give her more than enough time to go through the phone. She muted the phone so the GPS app would not be audibly correcting her when she did not follow its directions to Pasadena.

She was pulling the sheet back over the body when the door opened and one of the ER doctors looked in.

“I heard you asked for me,” he said. “What are you doing in here?”

Ballard remembered his voice from the elevator ride up to the OR.

“I needed to get a fingerprint,” Ballard said, holding up the phone in further explanation. “But I wanted to ask you about another patient. I saw that you also worked on Gutierrez — the assault victim with the skull fracture? How is the patient?”

She was careful not to speak in terms of gender. The surgeon wasn’t. He went with anatomy.

“We did the surgery and he’s still in recovery,” he said. “We are inducing coma and it will be a waiting game. The sooner the swelling goes down, the better chance he has.”

Ballard nodded.

“Okay, thanks,” she said. “I’ll check back tomorrow. Did you happen to take any swabs for a rape kit?”

“Detective, our priority was keeping the victim alive,” the doctor said. “That can all come later.”

“Not really. But I understand.”

The doctor was about to leave the doorway, when Ballard pointed to the other gurney in the room.

“What’s the story there?” she asked. “Cancer?”

“Everything,” the doctor said. “Cancer, HIV, complete organ shutdown.”

“Why’s he going downtown?”

“It’s a suicide. He pulled his tubes, disconnected the machines. I guess they have to be sure.”

“Right.”

“I need to go.”

The doctor disappeared from the doorway and Ballard looked at the other gurney and thought about the man using his last ounces of strength to pull the tubes. She thought there was something heroic in that.

In the car she moved off the GPS screen on Cynthia Haddel’s phone and opened the list of favorite contacts. The first one was labeled “Home” and Ballard checked the number. It was a 209 area code and she expected that it was the number of the home where Haddel had grown up, in Modesto. There were four other favorite contacts, all listed by first name only: Jill, Cara, Leon, and John, all with L.A. area codes. Ballard figured she had enough to get to Haddel’s parents if the number marked “Home” didn’t work.

She next pulled up the texting app and checked that. There were two recent communications. One was to Cara.

Haddel responded with an emoji showing a happy face. The text before that began with a question from someone who wasn’t on her favorites list.

There were no previous messages, indicating it was either a new acquaintance or the earlier exchanges had been deleted. There were several other text conversations on the app but none of the others were active in the hours since Haddel had come to work. Ballard pegged Cara as most likely Haddel’s best friend and DP as her drug supplier. She moved on to the e-mail file and found that the incoming messages were largely generic notifications and spam. Haddel apparently didn’t do much in the way of e-mailing. Haddel’s Twitter feed was as expected. She followed a number of entertainers, primarily in the music business, the Dancers’ own account, the LAPD’s Hollywood Station feed regarding crime alerts, and the former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

The last app Ballard opened was the phone’s photo archive. It said there were 662 photos. Ballard thumbed through the most recent and saw many photos of Haddel involved in activities with friends, working out, at the beach, and with cast and crew members on sets where she had found work as an actress.

Ballard’s own phone buzzed and a photo of Jenkins came up on the screen. She answered the call with a question.

“The bus get there?”

“Just left. Get me out of here.”

“On my way.”

Ballard re-engaged the GPS route to Pasadena so the phone’s screen would remain active and headed back to the Dancers. After she picked up Jenkins, they drove to the La Brea address on Cynthia Haddel’s driver’s license. The first step of the notification process was to go to the victim’s home to see if there might be a husband or other relative sharing the premises.

It was a recently built apartment building a half block north of Melrose in an area of shops and restaurants popular with the younger crowd. There were ramen noodle and build-yourown-pizza restaurants fronting the first floor, with the building’s entrance in the middle.

Haddel’s license listed her in unit 4B. Ballard used one of the keys on the ring taken from the locker to gain entrance through a security door to the elevator lobby. She and Jenkins rode to the fourth floor and found 4B at the end of the hallway leading to the back of the building.

Ballard knocked twice but no one answered. It did not mean there was no other occupant. Ballard knew from experience that someone could still be sleeping inside. She used the second key to open the door. By law they should have had a search warrant but both detectives knew they could cite exigent circumstances if a problem developed later. They had five people dead and no suspects and no motive. They needed to check on the safety of any possible roommates of their victim, no matter how peripheral to the case she might be.

“LAPD! Anyone home?” Ballard called out as they entered.

“Police!” Jenkins added. “We’re coming in.”

Ballard kept her hand on her hip holster as she entered but she did not draw her gun. There was a single light on in the living room, which opened off a short entrance hallway. She visually checked a galley kitchen to the right and then moved toward another hallway leading to the back of the apartment. It led to a bathroom and a single bedroom. The doors to these rooms were open and Ballard quickly hit light switches and scanned them.

“Clear,” she called out when she confirmed there were no other occupants.

She stepped back into the living room, where Jenkins was waiting.

“Looks like she lived alone,” she said.

“Yep,” Jenkins said. “Doesn’t help us any.”

Ballard started looking around, paying attention to the personal details of the small apartment: knickknacks, photos on shelves, a stack of bills left on the coffee table.

“Pretty nice place for a cocktail waitress,” Jenkins said. “The building is less than a year old.”

“She was slinging dope at the club,” Ballard said. “I found her stash in her locker. There may be more here someplace.”

“That explains a lot.”

“Sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

Ballard moved into the kitchen and saw a variety of photos on the refrigerator. Most of them were like the ones on Cynthia’s phone — outings with friends. Several were of a trip to Hawaii that showed Haddel surfing on a training board and riding on a horseback trail through a volcano crater. Ballard recognized the outline of Haleakalã in the background and knew it was Maui. She had spent many years growing up on the island and the shape of the volcano on the horizon had been part of her daily existence. She knew it the way people in L.A. knew the crooked line of the Hollywood sign.

There was a photo partially obscured by newer additions to the refrigerator but Ballard saw a woman of about fifty who shared the same jawline as Haddel. She carefully pulled it off and found that it showed Cynthia Haddel between a man and woman at a Thanksgiving table, the cooked turkey on full display. It was most likely a shot of Haddel and her parents, the lines of heredity clear in both their faces.

Jenkins came into the kitchen and looked at the photo in Ballard’s hand.

“You want to do it now?” he asked. “Get it over with?”

“Might as well,” she said.

“Which way you want to go with it?”

“I’ll just do it.”

Jenkins had been referring to the choice they had here. It is a harsh thing to learn by a telephone call that a loved one has been murdered. Ballard could have called the Modesto Police Department and asked them to make the notification in person. But going that way would remove Ballard from the process and she would lose the opportunity to get immediate information about the victim and any possible suspects. More than once in her career when she had made next-of-kin notification, she had come up with credible leads to follow in the investigation. That seemed unlikely with Cynthia Haddel, since she was probably not at the center of motivation for the mass shooting. As Olivas had said, she was collateral damage, a fringe player in what had happened. So it was a valid question from Jenkins, but Ballard knew that she would feel guilty later if she didn’t make the call. She would feel like she had skirted a sacred responsibility of the homicide detective.

Ballard pulled out Haddel’s phone. The GPS program had kept the screen active. She pulled up the contacts list to get the number for home and then called it from her own phone. It rang through to a voice-mail greeting confirming that it was the Haddel family home. Ballard left a message identifying herself and asking for a call back to her cell number, saying it was urgent.

It was not unusual for people not to answer a blocked call in the middle of the night, but Ballard hoped that her message would bring a quick return call. She stepped over to the refrigerator and looked at the photos once again while waiting. She wondered about Cynthia growing up in Modesto and then journeying south to the big city, where roles with partial nudity were okay and selling dope to Hollywood scenesters supplemented her income.

After five minutes, there was no call back. Jenkins was pacing and Ballard knew he wanted to keep moving.

“Call the cops up there?” he asked.

“No, that could take all night,” Ballard said.

Then a phone started buzzing, but it wasn’t Ballard’s. Cynthia’s phone showed an incoming call from the home number. Ballard guessed that her parents had gotten the message she just left and had chosen to call their daughter first to see if she was all right.

“It’s them,” she said to Jenkins.

She answered the phone.

“This is Detective Ballard with the Los Angeles Police Department. Who am I speaking with?”

“No, I called Cindy. What is going on there?”

It was a woman’s voice, already choked with desperation and fear.

“Mrs. Haddel?”

“Yes, who is this? Where is Cindy?”

“Mrs. Haddel, is your husband with you?”

“Just tell me, is she all right?”

Ballard looked over at Jenkins. She hated this.

“Mrs. Haddel,” she said. “I’m very sorry to tell you that your daughter has been killed in a shooting at the club where she worked in Los Angeles.”

There was a loud scream over the line, followed by another, and then the sound of the phone clattering to the floor.

“Mrs. Haddel?”

Ballard turned toward Jenkins and covered the phone.

“Call Modesto, see if they can send somebody,” she said.

“Where?” Jenkins asked.

Then it hit Ballard. She didn’t have an address to go with the phone number. She could now hear moaning and crying on the line, but it was distant from the phone, which was apparently still on the floor somewhere in Modesto.

Suddenly a gruff male voice was on the line.

“Who is this?”

“Mr. Haddel? I am a detective with the LAPD. Is your wife all right?”

“No, she’s not all right. What is going on? Why do you have our daughter’s phone? What happened?”

“She’s been shot, Mr. Haddel. I am so sorry to do this by phone. Cynthia has been shot and killed at the club where she worked. I’m calling to—”

“Oh, Jesus... Jesus Christ. Is this some kind of a joke? You don’t do this to people, you hear me?”

“It’s not a joke, sir. I am very sorry. Your daughter was hit by a bullet when someone started firing a weapon in the club. She fought hard. They got her to the hospital but they were unable to save her. I am so sorry for your loss.”

The father didn’t respond. Ballard could hear the mother’s crying growing louder and she knew that the husband had gone to his wife while still clutching the phone. They were now together. Ballard looked at the photo in her hand and pictured the couple holding on to each other as they grappled with the worst news in the world. She herself grappled with how far to push things at the moment, whether to intrude further into their agony with questions that might be meaningless in terms of the investigation.

And then:

“This is all because of that bastard boyfriend of hers,” the father said. “He’s the one who should be dead. He put her to work in there.”

Ballard made a decision.

“Mr. Haddel, I need to ask you some questions,” she said. “It could be important to the case.”