The Late Show

9

Ballard kept all her work suits in her locker at the station and dressed for her shifts after arriving each night. She had four different suits that followed the same cut and style but differed in color and pattern. She dry-cleaned them two at a time so that she always had a suit and a backup available. After arriving nearly eight hours early for her shift, Ballard changed into the gray suit that was her favorite. She accompanied it with a white blouse. She kept four white blouses and one navy in her locker as well.

It was Friday and that meant Ballard was scheduled to work solo. She and Jenkins had to cover seven shifts a week, so Ballard took Tuesday to Saturday and Jenkins covered Sunday to Thursday, giving them three overlap days. When they took vacation time, their slots usually went unfilled. If a detective in the division was needed during the early-morning hours, then someone had to be called in from home.

Working solo suited Ballard because she didn’t have to run decisions by her partner. On this day, if he had known what Ballard’s plan was, Jenkins would have put the kibosh on it. But because it was Friday, they would not be working together again until the following Tuesday, and she was clear to make her own moves.

After suiting up, Ballard checked herself in the mirror over the locker room sinks. She combed her sun-streaked hair with her fingers. That was all she usually had to do. Constant immersion in salt water and exposure to the sun over years had left her with broken, flyaway hair that she kept no longer than chin length out of necessity. It went well with her tan and gave off a slightly butch look that reduced advances from other officers. Olivas had been an exception.

Ballard squeezed some Visine drops into her eyes, which were red from the salt water. After that she was good to go. She went into the break room to brew a double-shot espresso on the Keurig. She would be operating now and through the night on less than three hours of sleep. She needed to start stacking caffeine. She kept her eye on the wall clock because she wanted to time her arrival in the detective bureau at shortly before four p.m., when she knew the lead detective in the CAPs unit would also be watching the clock, getting ready to split for the weekend.

She had at least fifteen minutes to kill, so she went upstairs to the offices of the buy-bust team next to the vice unit. Major Narcotics was located downtown but each division operated its own street-level drug squad that moved nimbly and was responsive to citizen complaints about drug-dealing hot spots. Ballard had limited connections to the officers assigned to the unit, so she went in cold-calling. The duty sergeant took the information she had on Cynthia Haddel’s boyfriend/drug pimp. The name Cynthia’s father had given Ballard was someone the sergeant said was already on their radar as a small-time dealer who worked the Hollywood club scene. What made Ballard feel bad was that he said that the guy had a girlfriend working — and selling for him — in just about every hot spot in the division. She left the office, wondering if Haddel had known that or had believed she was the only one.

At 3:50 p.m. Ballard entered the detective bureau and looked for a spot to use as a work base. She saw that the desk she had used the night before was still empty and she thought maybe the detective who owned it had left early or was on the four-tens schedule and off Fridays. As she took the spot, she scanned the bureau and her eyes settled on the four-desk pod that comprised the CAPs unit. She saw all the desks were empty except for Maxine Rowland’s, the unit lead. It looked like she was packing her briefcase for the weekend.

Ballard sauntered over, timing it perfectly.

“Hey, Max,” she said.

“Renée,” Rowland responded. “You’re early. You have court?”

“No, I came in early to clean up some work. I owe you a case from last night but the Dancers thing blew up and everything got pushed sideways.”

“I get it. What’s the case?”

“An abduction and assault. The victim is a transgender biological male, found circling the drain in a parking lot on the Santa Monica stroll. She’s in a coma at Hollywood Pres.”

“Shit.”

Rowland just saw her exit to the weekend blocked. And that was what Ballard was counting on.

“Was there a sexual assault?” Rowland asked.

Ballard could tell what she was thinking: push this onto the sexual assault unit.

“Most likely but the victim lost consciousness before being interviewed,” she said.

“Shit,” Rowland said again.

“Look, I just came in to start the paper on it. I was also thinking I’d have time before my shift to make some calls. Why don’t you get out of here and let me run with it? I’m on tomorrow, too, so I could take it through the weekend and get back with you next week.”

“You sure? If it’s a bad beat, I don’t want to part-time it.”

“I won’t. I’ll work it. I haven’t been able to follow up on anything off the late show in a long while. There are some leads here. You recall anything lately with brass knuckles?”

Rowland thought for a moment and then shook her head.

“Brass knuckles... No.”

“What about an abduction off the stroll? She was taken somewhere and bound, then taken back. Could’ve been a couple days.”

“It’s not ringing any bells but you need to go up to talk to vice.”

“I know. It was my next stop if you let me run with it. What about the ‘upside-down house’? That mean anything to you?”

“How do you mean?”

“She said it. To the patrol cops. She momentarily regained consciousness while they were waiting for the RA. She said she had been attacked at the upside-down house.”

“Sorry. Never heard of it.”

“Okay, anything else on your plate like this? Somebody grabbed on the stroll?”

“I’ll have to think, but I can’t remember anything right now.”

“I’ll run it through the box, see what comes up.”

“So you’re sure you’ll take it? I can call a couple of my guys back in. They won’t be happy but those are the breaks.”

“Yes, I’ve got it. You go home. Don’t call anybody in. If you want, I’ll send you updates over the weekend.”

“Tell you the truth, I can wait till Monday. Going up to Santa Barbara for the weekend with my kids. The less I have to worry about, the better.”

“You got it.”

“Don’t fuck me on this, Renée.”

“Hey, I’m telling you I won’t.”

“Good.”

“Have a nice weekend.”

Rowland was always blunt and Ballard took no offense. Something about working sex cases had taken subtlety out of her personality.

Ballard left her there to finish packing up and went back to the second floor, this time ducking into the vice unit. Like the buy-bust guys, the vice cops kept odd hours, and there was never a guarantee that anyone would be in the unit. She entered and leaned over the counter to look into the alcove where the sergeants sat. She got lucky. Pistol Pete Mendez was at one of the desks, eating a sandwich. He was the only one there.

“Ballard, what do you want?” he asked. “Come around.”

It was his usual gruff greeting. Ballard reached over the half door to where she knew the lock switch was located and let herself in. She went into the alcove and pulled out the chair opposite Mendez’s desk.

“Ramón Gutierrez,” she said. “I’m working follow-up on that case. You guys hear anything about it last night?”

“Not a peep,” Mendez said. “But we were working East Hollywood and that’s a whole different kettle of fish from the dragon walk.”

“Right. When was the last time you were over there on Santa Monica?”

“Been about a month because things have been pretty tame there. But it’s like cockroaches. You can fumigate but they always come back.”

“You heard anything about a bad actor picking up pros and hurting them?”

“Not in a long while.”

“Ramone was worked over with brass knuckles. The guy was also a biter.”

“We get our fair share of biters but nothing comes to mind with brass knuckles. Is your he-she going to make it?”

“That remains to be seen. Still in a coma at Hollywood Pres for now, but they’ll be moving her down to County as soon as they realize they don’t have a paying customer.”

“That’s the way it goes. Her?”

“Yeah, her. You have a file on Ramona I could borrow?”

“Yeah, I’ll get it for you. But it’s under Ramón Gutierrez, last I checked. What else you got?”

“You ever heard of a place called the upside-down house? Ramona said it to the blue suiters who first responded to the call.”

Like Rowland, Mendez thought about it and then shook his head.

“Not that we know about here,” he said. “There’s an underground bondage club called Vertigo. Moves around to different locations.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Ballard said. “Vertigo means dizzy, not upside-down. Plus I don’t think this was a club thing. It’s deeper than that. This victim’s lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t think of anything else. Let me find that file.”

He got up from the desk and Ballard remained seated. While he was gone, she studied the schedule on the bulletin board next to his desk. It looked like vice ran operations just about every night in a different part of Hollywood. They put out undercover officers as bait and arrested the johns once they offered cash for sex. Like Mendez said, it was like cockroaches, something that never went away. Even the Internet, with its easy connections for free and paid-for sex, could not kill the stroll. It would always be there.

She could hear Mendez opening and closing file cabinets as he looked for a file on Gutierrez.

“How’d you guys end up doing last night?” she asked.

“Bubkes,” Mendez said from the other side of the room. “I think that thing at the club on Sunset scared people away. We had cruisers going up and down the streets all night.”

He came back to the desk and dropped a manila file down in front of Ballard.

“That’s what we got,” he said. “You probably could have pulled the whole thing off the box.”

“I’d rather have the hard copy,” Ballard said.

She would take a paper file over a computer file any day. There was always a chance that there was more in the hard file, handwritten notes in the margins, phone numbers scribbled on the folder, extra photos of crime scenes. That was never the case with a computer file.

Ballard thanked Mendez and said she would be in touch if anything developed on the case. He said he would keep his eyes and ears open on the streets.

“I hope you catch the guy,” he said.

Back on the first floor, Ballard had one more stop before she was in the clear to work the case. The lieutenant in charge of the detective bureau had an office in the far corner of the squad room. The room had three windows that looked out on the squad, and through them Ballard could see Lieutenant Terry McAdams at his desk, working. Ballard often went weeks without seeing her direct supervisor because of the hours of her shift. McAdams usually worked an eight-to-five day because he liked to arrive after his detectives were in and had gotten things going for the day, and then he liked to be the last man out.

She knocked on the open door of the office and McAdams invited her in.

“Long time no see, Ballard,” he said. “I heard you had a fun shift last night.”

“Depends on what you consider fun,” she said. “It was busy, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, I saw on the watch log that before the shit hit the fan at the Dancers, you and Jenkins caught an abduction caper. But I didn’t see any paper on it.”

“Because there isn’t any. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

She summarized the Ramona Ramone case and told McAdams that she had Maxine Rowland’s go-ahead to stick with it for a few days. Technically, Ballard should have started by getting an approval from McAdams, but she knew that as an administrator, McAdams liked to be brought things that were already tied in a bow. It made his job easier. He just had to say yes or no.

McAdams said what Ballard knew he would say.

“Okay, have at it, but don’t let it get in the way of your normal duties,” he said. “If it does, then we have a problem, and I don’t like problems.”

“It won’t happen, L-T,” she said. “I know my priorities.”

Leaving the lieutenant’s office, Ballard saw a small group of remaining detectives gathered in front of the three television screens mounted on the back wall of the bureau. The screens were usually silent but one of the men had raised the sound on the middle screen to hear the report on the Dancers shooting, which kicked off the five-o’clock news hour.

Ballard sauntered over to watch. On the screen was video from a press conference held earlier in the day. The chief of police was at the podium and he was flanked by Olivas and Captain Larry Gandle, commander of the Robbery-Homicide Division. The chief was reassuring the media and the public that the shooting at the Dancers was not an act of domestic terrorism. While the exact motivation for the mass killing was not known, he said, detectives were zeroing in on the circumstances that caused the extreme violence.

When the report shifted back to the news anchor, she reported that the names of the victims had not yet been released by the Coroner’s Office but that sources told channel 9 that three of the victims, all believed to have been the intended targets of the shooter, had criminal records ranging from drug charges to extortion and acts of violence.

The anchor then moved on to the next story, this one about another LAPD press conference, to announce arrests in a human-trafficking investigation at the Port of Los Angeles, where a cargo container that was used to bring in young women abducted from Eastern Europe had been intercepted earlier in the year. There was file video showing the stark interior of the shipping container and aid workers offering water to and wrapping blankets around the victims as they were shepherded to safety. It was then coupled with new video showing a line of men in handcuffs being walked off a jail bus by detectives. But the story wasn’t about Hollywood, and the detective with the remote lost interest. He hit the mute button. No one objected and the group around the screens started to dissipate as everybody moved back to their respective pods or headed out of the station for the weekend.

Once she got back to her desk, Ballard looked through the file Mendez had lent her. There were several arrest reports going back three years, as well as booking photos that showed the progression of Ramona Ramone’s physical changes as she transitioned. There were more than cosmetic changes, like eyebrow shaping. It was clear from the front and side photos that her lips had gotten fuller and she’d had her Adam’s apple shaved.

There were three shake cards clipped to the inside of the file folder. These were 3 x 5 cards with handwritten notes taken while patrol or vice officers stopped Ramone on the stroll to question what she was doing. Officially called field interview or FI cards, they were more often called shake cards because the American Civil Liberties Union had repeatedly complained that the unwarranted interviews of people whom the police were suspicious of were actually shakedowns. The rank and file embraced that description and continued the practice of stopping and interviewing suspicious individuals and writing down details about their description, tattoos, gang affiliation, and hangout locations.

The cards written on Ramona Ramone largely said the same thing and most contained information Ballard already knew. Some of the notes revealed more about the personality of the officer than it did about Ramone. One officer wrote, Holy shit this is a guy!

The one piece of useful information Ballard gleaned from the cards was that Gutierrez/Ramone had no driver’s license and therefore no verifiable home address. The official reports simply stated the address where the arrest was made, most often on Santa Monica Boulevard. But during the field interviews, she had twice given an address on Heliotrope. The third card said, Lives in trailer, moves around the 6. This information was good to have and Ballard was glad she had gone up to see Mendez.

Finished with her review of the file and Ramone’s background, Ballard fired up the computer terminal and went to work, looking for the suspect. Her plan was to start small and go big — to look for local cases that were similar to the attack on Ramone. If she found nothing, then she would widen her computer search to look for similar cases in the state of California, then the country, and then even the world.

Working the department’s computer archives was an art form. Formally, the system was called DCTS — Detective Case Tracking System. One wrong input in the search parameters could easily result in a “no records found” response, even if there was a closely matching case somewhere in the data. Ballard composed a short list of details that she would enter and subtract from until she got a hit.

She entered them into a search of all cases in the archive and got a quick “no records found.” She eliminated Santa Monica Boulevard, searched again, and got the same response. She continued to search, dropping words as she went and then trying different combinations and adding variations, using “bindings” and “tied up” instead of “bound,” “escort” instead of “prostitute.” But none of the combinations scored a hit in the data.

Frustrated and beginning to feel the effects of less than three hours’ sleep, Ballard got up from her station and started walking down the now empty aisles of the bureau, hoping to get her blood moving. She wanted to avoid a caffeine headache, so she held off on going to the break room for another coffee. She stood for a moment in front of the silent TV screens and watched a man in front of a weather map that showed no sign of inclement weather heading toward L.A.

She knew it was time to widen the search outside the city. With that would come a lot of desk work as she tried to chase down far-off cases that might be connected to hers. It would be a slog and the prospect was daunting. She returned to the desk and put another call in to Hollywood Presbyterian to check on her victim on the off chance she had miraculously come to and could be interviewed.

But there was no change. Ramona Ramone was still in an induced coma.

Ballard hung up the phone and looked at the list of case attributes that had failed to draw a hit from the data bank.

“Key words, my ass,” she said out loud.

She decided to try one more angle.

California was one of only four states that made possession of brass knuckles — or metal knuckles, as they were referred to in the statutes — illegal. Other states had age minimums and laws against using them in the commission of a crime, but in California they were illegal across the board, and violating the law could be charged as a felony.

Ballard typed in one more search of the LAPD’s data archive, asking for all cases in the last five years involving an arrest for possession of brass knuckles, felony or misdemeanor.

She got fourteen hits on separate cases, which she thought was surprisingly high given that the weapon had so rarely come up in cases she had worked or had even known about in her ten years as a detective.

Ballard checked the wall clock and started the task of pulling up expanded records on the cases to see if anything in the summary reports remotely connected in MO to her case. She was quickly able to move through most of the cases because they involved gang arrests in South Los Angeles, where it appeared to Ballard that brass knuckles were employed in lieu of firearms by gangbangers who probably didn’t know they were illegal.

There were other arrests involving pimps and mob enforcers for possession of metal knuckles, with their intended use of the weapons being obvious. And then Ballard came across a three-year-old case that immediately held her attention.

A man named Thomas Trent had been arrested for possession of brass knuckles by the Valley Bureau vice unit. The case had not come up on Ballard’s previous key-word search because none of the other words in her combinations was in play. Trent had been charged with the brass knuckles offense only, nothing else.

And yet it was a vice case. That contradiction was what had initially caught Ballard’s eye. When she pulled up the digital case file, she learned that Trent, thirty-nine at the time, had been arrested during a sting operation at a motel on Sepulveda Boulevard. The summary report said he had knocked on the door of a room at the Tallyho Lodge near Sherman Way, where the vice unit had been sending men who had connected online with an officer posing as an underage Latino male available for submissive role play. Trent had made no appointment at the motel and the vice officers could not connect him to any of the men who had taken part in the online conversations.

They believed he had probably been one of the online suitors but they did not have evidence of that and could not charge him with solicitation of a minor. But they also did not need to pursue linking him to the online sting once they found brass knuckles in his pockets. He was arrested for felony possession of a dangerous weapon and booked into the Van Nuys jail.

The summary report listed the undercover officer who arrested Trent by serial number only. Ballard sent the report to the bureau’s printer, then picked up the desk phone and called the department’s personnel unit. She quickly had a name to go with the serial number of the vice officer. He was Jorge Fernandez and he was still assigned to the Valley Bureau’s vice squad. Ballard called the Valley vice unit and was told that Fernandez was off duty. She left her cell number and a message for him to call her back, no matter what time.

She next took a deeper dive into online records and pulled up an abstract on Trent’s case. She learned that following his arrest, Trent negotiated an agreement with the District Attorney’s Office in which he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon, paid a five-hundred-dollar fine, and was placed on three years’ probation. The plea was part of a pretrial intervention program that would allow Trent to have his record cleaned if he completed probation without another arrest.

On the court records, Trent’s home address was listed on Wrightwood Drive in Studio City. Ballard plugged the address into Google and found a map showing that Wrightwood dropped off of Mulholland Drive on the northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. She clicked on the street-view feature and saw what looked like a contemporary ranch house with a double-wide garage. But she knew from the map that the house was on the mountain and that it was most likely that the structure stretched one or two levels down the slope from the street. It was a very typical design of many of the homes in the hills. The top floor contained the common areas — kitchen, dining room, living room, and so on — while the lower levels contained the bedrooms. There would be stairs, or in some cases an elevator, that led down to the lower floors.

Ballard realized that someone unfamiliar with these mountainside designs could view the houses as odd because the bedrooms were on the bottom floors. In that way, Trent’s home might be considered an upside-down house.

That realization dumped a jolt of adrenaline into Ballard’s blood. She leaned closer to the computer screen to study Trent’s booking photo and arrest report. The personal details on the report said Trent was a car salesman who worked at an Acura dealership on Van Nuys Boulevard. The first question that struck her at that point was how a car salesman afforded a home in the hills, where price tags easily started in the seven figures.

She switched over to a different search site that handled public records and put in Trent’s name and date of birth. Soon she was looking at records of a marriage dissolution that occurred seven months after his arrest. Beatrice Trent had claimed irreconcilable differences in her divorce petition and it appeared that Trent did not contest the filing. The three-year marriage was dissolved.

There was also a record of a lawsuit from 2011 in which Trent was the plaintiff in a personal injury claim against a company called Island Air and its insurer. The record showed only the filing — for injuries sustained in a helicopter crash in Long Beach — but not the outcome of the case. Ballard assumed that this meant the case had been settled before trial.

Ballard printed all of these reports and then picked up the desk phone and called the dealership where Trent worked. She asked for him by name and the call was transferred.

A voice said, “This is Tom. How can I help you?”

Ballard hesitated and then disconnected. She looked at the clock and saw it was just past six o’clock and in the guts of rush hour. It would be a miserable crawl from Hollywood up into the Valley.

There was no guarantee that Trent would even still be working by the time she got there, but Ballard decided to give it a shot. She wanted to get a look at him.