The Late Show

6

Back at Hollywood Station, they divvied up the report writing. Jenkins took the Lantana burglary their shift had started with and Ballard agreed to take the paper on Ramona Ramone and Cynthia Haddel. It was an uneven split but it guaranteed that Jenkins would walk out the door at dawn and be home when his wife woke up.

It was still called the paperwork but it was all done digitally. Ballard went to work on Haddel first so that she could be sure to get the reports in before Olivas could ask for them. She also had plans to stall the Ramone case. She wanted to keep it for herself, and the longer she took doing the paperwork, the better chance she had of making that happen.

The two partners did not have assigned desks in the detective bureau but each had a favorite spot at which to work in the vast room that was usually left abandoned at night. These choices were primarily dictated by the comfort of the desk chair and the level of obsolescence of the computer terminal. Ballard preferred a desk in the Burglary-Auto Theft pod, while Jenkins posted himself at the opposite end of the room in the Crimes Against Persons unit. There was a daytime detective who had brought in his own chair from the Relax the Back store and Jenkins treasured it. It was locked by a long bike cable to the desk in the CAPs module, so that anchored him there.

Ballard was a quick writer. She had a degree in journalism from the University of Hawaii and while she had not lasted long as a reporter, the training and experience had given her skills that helped immeasurably with this side of police work. She reacted well to deadline pressure and she could clearly conceptualize her crime reports and case summaries before writing them. She wrote short, clear sentences that gave momentum to the narrative of the investigation. This skill also paid dividends when Ballard was called into court to testify about her investigations. Juries liked her because she was a good storyteller.

It was in a courtroom that the direction of Ballard’s life had changed dramatically fifteen years earlier. Her first job out of the University of Hawaii had been as one of a phalanx of crime reporters for the Los Angeles Times. She was assigned to a cubbyhole office in the Van Nuys courthouse, from which she covered criminal cases as well as the six LAPD divisions that comprised the north end of the city. One particular case had caught her attention: the murder of a fourteen-year-old runaway who had been snatched off the beach one night in Venice. She had been taken to a drug house in Van Nuys, where she was repeatedly raped over several days, and then eventually strangled and dropped in a construction site trash hauler.

The police made a case and took two men to trial for the murder. Ballard covered the preliminary hearing of the case against the accused. The lead detective testified about the investigation and in doing so recounted the many tortures and indignities the victim endured before her eventual death. The detective started crying on the stand. It wasn’t a show. There was no jury, just a judge to decide whether the case should go to trial. But the detective cried, and in that moment Ballard realized she didn’t want to just write about crime and investigations anymore. The next day she applied to enter the LAPD training academy. She wanted to be a detective.

It was 4:28 a.m. when Ballard began to write. Though Cynthia Haddel would need to be formally identified by the Coroner’s Office, there was little doubt that she was the victim. Ballard put her name on the reports and listed her address on La Brea. She first wrote the death report that listed Haddel as a victim of a homicide by gunshot wound and included the basic details of the crime. She then wrote a chronology, a step-by-step accounting of the moves she and Jenkins had made once they received the call from Lieutenant Munroe while at Hollywood Presbyterian.

After the chrono was completed, she used it as an outline for her Officer’s Statement, which was a more detailed summary of where the case had taken her and Jenkins through the night. After that, she moved on to documenting and filing the property she had collected from the hospital and the employee locker at the Dancers.

Before starting the process, she counted how many individual pieces she would be filing and then called the forensics lab and spoke to the duty officer, Winchester.

“Have they started booking evidence from the four on the floor in Hollywood?” she asked. “I need a DR number.”

Every piece of booked evidence required its own Division of Records number.

“That place is a mess,” Winchester said. “They’re still on scene and will probably be collecting all night and into the day. I don’t expect they’ll start booking evidence till noon. It’s up to five now, by the way. Five on the floor.”

“I know. Okay, I’ll get my own numbers. Thanks, Winchester.”

She got up and made her way over to Jenkins.

“I’m going to buy DRs out of the manual. You need any?”

“Yeah, get me one.”

“Be right back.”

She took the rear hallway to the property room. She knew there would be no clerk on duty. There never was at this hour. The property room was left as empty as the detective bureau at night. But there was a Division of Records ledger on the counter and it contained an up-to-date listing of DR numbers for booking property and evidence. Everything went to the FSD — the Forensic Sciences Division — for analysis as potential evidence. Since the lab could not provide a sequence of numbers for the RHD case, the property that Ballard and Jenkins had collected in their cases would be booked under Hollywood Division numbers instead and shipped to the FSD for sorting.

Ballard grabbed a scratch pad from the counter and wrote down a number from the ledger for Jenkins and then a seven-number sequence for herself. The numbers all started with the year and the 06 designation for Hollywood Division. As she walked back down the empty hallway to the detective bureau, she heard a sudden echo of laughter from the watch office, which was in the opposite direction. Among the chortles, she identified the infectious sound of Lieutenant Munroe’s laugh and smiled to herself. Cops were not humorless people. Even in the depths of the midnight shift on a night of massive violence they could always find something to laugh about.

She gave Jenkins his DR number but didn’t bother to ask how far along he was. She could see he was typing with two fingers and still on an incident report. He was slow to the point of frustration. Ballard usually volunteered to do all the paperwork so she didn’t have to wait for him to finish.

Back at her borrowed desk, Ballard gloved up and went to work. It took her thirty minutes to process everything. This included the contents of the locker, the key the victim wore around her neck, and the money she had been carrying in her wallet and tip apron. It had to be counted out and documented. For her own protection Ballard called Jenkins over so he could witness the money count and she took cell-phone photos of each evidence bag after sealing it.

She took all of the plastic bags and placed them in one large brown paper sack that she marked with the DR number and sealed with red evidence tape. She then carried it back down the hallway to the property room and placed it in one of the lockers, where it would remain until someone working the case in RHD picked it up or it was carried by courier to the lab for forensic analysis.

When Ballard returned to the bureau, she saw that it was 6:11 on the clock over the television screens. Her shift was supposed to end at seven a.m. and overtime was only a slim possibility because it was the middle of the month’s deployment period and money in the OT bucket was probably already gone. She didn’t want overtime, however. She just wanted to push the Ramona Ramone case into her next shift.

On the Dancers case, she still had summaries to write regarding her interviews with Haddel’s parents and fellow waitresses. She knew it would take her to the end of shift. She settled back into the workstation, opened up a new file on the computer screen, and was about to start the summary of her talk with Nelson Haddel, when her cell buzzed and she saw it was Lieutenant Munroe.

“L-T.”

“Ballard, what’s your location?”

“I’m in detectives. Filing paper. Heard you guys laughing it up a little while ago.”

“Oh, yeah, we’re having a ball up here. I need you to take a statement.”

“From who? I’m in the middle of this and still have the assault I haven’t even touched yet.”

“A guy just walked in, said he was in the Dancers when the shooting started. He says he has photos.”

“You sure? It’s a no-photo place.”

“He snuck a couple selfies.”

“Anything in them?”

“They’re dark but he’s got something. Looks like muzzle flash. Maybe they can enhance at the lab. That’s why I need you to take this guy and see what he has and what he knows. He’s sitting on a chair in the lobby. Grab him before he decides he doesn’t want to wait any longer.”

“On my way. But hey, L-T, I’m out of here in sixty. You signing any greenies tonight? I still haven’t touched the assault and now I have this witness.”

She was referring to the green voucher cards a shift supervisor had to sign to authorize overtime.

“I’ll give you an hour, that’s it,” Munroe said. “I can’t blow the bank in one night. That should give you enough time to talk to this guy and finish up the paper on the Dancers. The assault you can push till tomorrow — as long as the vic is still kickin’. I can’t stall a homicide.”

“Last I checked, she came through surgery.”

“Okay, then come take this guy off my hands.”

“Roger that.”

Ballard clicked off. She was pleased that she would not be turning the Ramona Ramone case over to the CAPs unit at the end of shift. That was more important to her than the overtime. On her way to the front lobby she cruised by Jenkins’s desk and saw that he was still typing with two fingers. She told him about the witness and added that they’d scored an hour of overtime, if he wanted it. He said no thanks, he had to get home.