The Night Fire

30

Ballard started her shift at the Watch Three roll call. Nothing had been left in her inbox by day-watch detectives so she went upstairs to roll call to get a take on what was happening out on the street. Lieutenant Washington was holding forth at the podium, another sign that it was shaping up as a slow night. He usually had a sergeant handle roll call while he remained in the watch office monitoring what was happening outside.

Washington called out the teams and their assigned reporting districts.

“Meyer, Shuman: six-A-fifteen.”

“Doucette and Torborg: six-A-forty-five.”

“Travis and Marshall, you’ve got forty-nine tonight.”

And so on. He announced that State Farm was continuing its stolen-car program, awarding uniform pins to officers who recovered five stolen cars or more during the monthlong campaign. He mentioned that some of the officers in roll call had reached five already and some were stalled at three or four. He wanted shift-wide compliance. Otherwise there was not much out there to talk about. Roll call ended with a warning from the watch commander:

“I know these nights have been slow out there but it will pick up. It always does,” Washington said. “I don’t want anybody submarining. Remember, this isn’t like the old days. I’ve got your GPS markers on my screen. I see anybody circling the fort, they’re going to get the three-one for next DP.”

Submarining was a team leaving their assigned patrol area and cruising close to the station so they could return quickly when the shift was over, and the call went out that the first watch teams were down and heading out. Six-A-thirty-one, the patrol area farthest from the station, consisted mostly of East Hollywood, where nuisance calls — homeless and drunk and disorderly — were more frequent. Nobody wanted to work the three-one, especially for a twenty-eight-day deployment period (DP), so it was usually assigned to someone on the watch commander’s shit list.

“All right, people,” Washington said. “Let’s get out there and do good work.”

The meeting broke up but Renée stayed seated so she could speak to Washington after the uniformed officers left the room. He saw her waiting and knew the score.

“Ballard, what’s up?”

“L-T, you got anything for me?”

“Not yet. You got something going?”

“I got a couple leftover things from last night, a phone number I need to trace. Let me know when I’m needed.”

“Roger that, Ballard.”

Ballard went back down the stairs and into the detective bureau, where she set up in a corner as usual. She opened her laptop and pulled up the wiretap software on the off chance that Elvin Kidd decided to make a phone call or send a midnight tweet. She knew it was probably a long shot but the clock was ticking on the seventy-two-hour wiretap, so it couldn’t hurt to keep the channel open in case she got lucky again.

She set to work tracing the number that Kidd had sent the text to after receiving the jail call from Dennard Dorsey. Her first step was just to run it through a Google database containing a reverse phone directory. That produced nothing. A search on Lexis/Nexis was also fruitless, indicating the number was unlisted. She next signed into the department database and ran a search to see if the number had ever been entered into a crime report or other document collected by the department. This time she got lucky. The number had turned up on a field interview card four years earlier. It had been digitized in the department-wide database and she was able to call it up on the workstation’s computer screen.

The field interview was conducted by a South Bureau gang intel team that had stopped to talk to a man loitering outside a closed restaurant at Slauson and Keniston Avenues. Ballard pegged this location as just on the border between Los Angeles and Inglewood — and firmly in Rolling 60s territory. The man’s name was Marcel Dupree. He was fifty-one years old and, though he denied membership in a gang, he had a tattoo of the Crips’ six-pointed star on the back of his left hand.

According to the FI card, Dupree told the officers who stopped him that he was waiting to be picked up by a girlfriend because he’d had too much to drink. Seeing that no crime had been committed, they filled in an FI card — including cell phone number, home address, birth date, and other details — and left the man where they had found him.

Ballard next entered Marcel Dupree’s name into the crime index computer and pulled up a record of numerous arrests and at least two convictions dating back thirty-three years. Dupree had served two prison terms, one for armed robbery and the other for discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling. What was more important than all of that was that there was a felony warrant out for Dupree for not paying child support. It wasn’t much, but Ballard now had something she could try to squeeze him with if necessary.

She spent the next hour pulling up individual arrest reports and more than once found descriptions of Dupree that called him a shot caller in the Rolling 60s Crips. The child support beef had gone to a felony warrant because Dupree owed more than $100,000 in child support to two different women going back three years.

Ballard was excited. She had just connected two of the dots in the Kidd investigation, and she had something on Dupree she might be able to use to further the investigation. She felt like telling Bosch but guessed he might be asleep. She downloaded the most recent DMV shot of Dupree, which was four years old, along with his last mug shot, which was a decade older. In both he had a perfectly round head and bushy, unkempt hair. Ballard included both photos in a text to Bosch. She wanted him to know what Dupree looked like before they set up their surveillance operation the next day.

She didn’t know whether Bosch had a text chime set on his phone but there was no reply after five minutes. She picked up the rover she had taken from a charger at the start of shift and radioed Lieutenant Washington that she was taking a code 7 — a meal break — but would have her rover with her as usual. She walked through the station’s deserted back lot to her city car and headed out.

There was an all-night taco truck in a parking lot at Sunset and Western. Ballard ate there often and knew Digoberto Rojas, the man who operated it. She liked to practice her Spanish on him, more often than not confusing him with her mix of Spanish and English.

This night he was working alone and Ballard asked him in halting Spanish where his son was. The young man had worked with his father most nights until recently. The last two or three times Ballard had gone to the truck, Digoberto was working alone. This concerned her because it made him a more vulnerable target. They spoke through the truck’s counter window as Digoberto made her a pair of shrimp tacos.

“He lazy,” Digoberto said. “He want to hang out all day with his vatos. Then he say he too tired to come to work.”

“You want me to come talk to him,” Ballard said, dropping the Spanish. “I will.”

“No, is okay.”

“Digoberto, I don’t like you working out here at night by yourself. It’s dangerous working alone.”

“What about you? You alone.”

“It’s different.”

She lifted the flap on her jacket to show the gun holstered on her hip. Then she held up the rover.

“I call, my friends come running,” she said.

“The police, they protect me,” Digoberto said. “Like you.”

“We can’t be here all the time. I don’t want to get a call and find out you got robbed or hurt. If your son won’t help you, then find somebody who will. You really need to.”

“Okay, okay. Here you are.”

He handed her a paper plate through the counter window. Ballard’s tacos were on it, wrapped in foil. She handed a ten through the window and Digoberto held his hands up like he was under arrest.

“No, no, for you,” he said. “I like you. You bring other police here.”

“No, but you need to make a living. That’s not fair.”

She put the bill down on the counter and refused to take it back. She carried her plate over to a folding table where there were a variety of hot sauces and napkins. She grabbed napkins and a bottle of the mild sauce and went to the communal picnic table that was empty at the moment.

Ballard ate facing Sunset Boulevard and with her back to the taco truck. The tacos were delicious and she didn’t bother with the sauce on the second one. Before she was finished, Digoberto came out of the truck through the back door of the kitchen and brought her another taco.

“Mariscos,” he said. “You try.”

“You’re going to make me el gordo,” she said. “Pero gracias.”

She took a bite of the fish taco and found it to be just as good as the shrimp. But it was milder and she put on hot sauce. Her next bite was better but she never got a third. Her rover squawked and Washington sent her to a traffic stop on Cahuenga beneath the 101 freeway overpass. It was no more than five minutes away. Ballard asked Washington why a detective was needed and he simply said, “You’ll see.”

Since she had heard no call earlier from patrol or dispatch concerning that location, Ballard knew that whatever it was, they were keeping it off the radio. Plenty of media gypsies in the city listened to police frequencies and responded to anything that might produce a sellable video.

Ballard waved her thanks to Digoberto, who was back in his truck, tossed her plates into a trash can, and got in her car. She took Sunset to Cahuenga and headed north toward the 101. She saw a single patrol car with its roof lights flashing behind an old van that advertised twenty-four-hour rug cleaning on its side panels. Ballard didn’t have time to wonder about who would need rug cleaning in the middle of the night. One of the patrol officers who had stopped the van came toward her car, flashlight in hand. It was Rich Meyer, whom she had seen earlier at roll call.

Ballard killed the engine and exited the car.

“Rich, whaddaya got?”

“This guy in the van, he must’ve gotten off the freeway and pulled under here so that the women he had in the back could take care of business. Me and Shoo come passing through and there’s four women squatting on the sidewalk.”

“Squatting?”

“Urinating! It looks like human trafficking, but nobody’s got ID and nobody’s speaking English.”

Ballard started toward the van where Meyer’s partner, Shuman, was standing with a man and four women, all of them with hands bound behind their back with zip ties. The women wore short dresses and appeared disheveled. They all had dark hair and were clearly Latina. None looked older than twenty.

Ballard pulled her mini-light off her belt and first pointed the beam through the open rear doors of the van. There was a mattress and some ragged blankets strewn across it. A couple of plastic bags were filled with clothes. The van smelled of body odor and desperation.

She moved the light forward and saw a phone in a dashboard cradle. It had a GPS map glowing on it. Moving around the van to the driver’s door, she opened it, leaned in, and pulled the phone out of its holder. By tapping the screen she was able to determine the van’s intended destination: an address on Etiwanda Street in the Valley. She put the phone in her pocket and went over to where Meyer and Shuman were standing with the detainees.

“Who do we have working tonight that has Spanish?” Ballard asked.

“Uh, Perez is on — she’s in the U-boat,” Meyer said. “And Basinger is fluent.”

Ballard now remembered seeing both officers at roll call. She knew Perez pretty well, plus she thought a woman would be better for interviewing the four females. If she was working the U-boat, which is what they called a single-officer car that only took reports on minor crimes, calling her would not pull her off active patrol. She raised her rover and requested that Officer Perez roll to the scene. Perez came back with a roger and an ETA of eight minutes.

“We should just call ICE and be done with this,” Shuman said. Ballard shook her head.

“No, we’re not doing that,” she said.

“That’s the protocol,” Shuman insisted. “They’re obviously illegals — we call ICE.”

Ballard saw that Shuman had one bar on his uniform sleeve. Five years on the job. She looked at Meyer, who had four bars on his sleeve. He was standing slightly behind Shuman. He rolled his eyes so only Ballard would see. It was a sign that he wasn’t going to cause Ballard any grief on this.

“I’m the detective,” Ballard said. “I have control of this investigation. We’re not calling ICE. If you have a problem with that, Shuman, you can get back in your car and go back out on patrol. I’ll handle it from here.”

Shuman averted his eyes and shook his head.

“We call ICE, they get sent back and then they do it again,” Ballard said. “They go through all the rape and horrors they went through getting here the first time.”

“That’s not our concern,” Shuman said.

“Maybe it should be,” Ballard said.

“Hey, Shoo,” Meyer said. “I got this here. Why don’t you go back to the shop and start the incident report.”

The shop was the patrol car. Shuman walked off without another word and got in the passenger side of the patrol car. Ballard saw him roughly swing the MDT on its swivel toward him so he could start to type in his incident report.

“I hope he spells my name right,” Ballard said.

“I’m sure he will,” Meyer said.

Perez got there two minutes early. With her translating, Ballard first questioned the driver, who claimed to know only that he was paid to take the four young women to a party. He said he did not remember where he picked them up or who had paid him. Ballard had Meyer put him in the back of his patrol car and transport him to the Hollywood Station jail, where she would later file paperwork arresting him for human trafficking.

The four women found their voices after the driver was gone from the scene. Through Perez they one by one told stories that were sad and horrible, yet typical of such journeys made by desperate people. They had traveled from Oaxaca, Mexico, and were smuggled across the border in an avocado truck with a secret compartment, each forced to pay for the trip by having sex with several of the men involved. Once across in Calexico they were placed in the van, told they owed thousands of dollars more for the remaining trip, and driven north to Los Angeles. They did not know what awaited them at the address on Etiwanda in the Valley but Ballard did: sexual servitude in gang-operated brothels where they would never break even and would never be missed should they stop earning and their masters decide to bury them in the desert.

After calling for a police tow for the van, Ballard made a call to a battered-woman’s clinic in North Hollywood, where she had delivered women before. She spoke to her contact and explained the situation. The woman agreed to take in the four Mexican women and see that they were medically treated and given beds and fresh clothes. In the morning, they would be counseled on their options: returning home voluntarily or seeking asylum based on the threat that the group that procured them would seek to harm them should they go back to Mexico. Neither choice was good. Ballard knew that many hardships awaited the women.

After a flatbed from the police garage arrived to impound the van, Ballard and Perez each took two of the women in their cars to the shelter in North Hollywood.

Ballard did not get back to the station until five a.m. She wrote up the arrest report on the driver of the van, using the name Juan Doe because he still refused to identify himself. That was okay with Ballard. She knew his fingerprint would provide his ID if he had had any previous engagement with U.S. law enforcement. She thought the chances of that were good.

The department had a human trafficking task force operating out of the PAB. Ballard put together a package on the case and put it into the transit box to be delivered downtown first thing. It was one of the few times she didn’t mind passing on a case, as late-show protocol dictated. Human trafficking was one of the ugliest crimes she encountered as a detective and it left scars as well as drew up memories of her own past, when she’d been left alone on the streets of Honolulu as a fourteen-year-old.

She left the station at seven a.m. and headed toward her van. She knew she had to be in the Crenshaw District by noon at the latest to be on-site and ready to shadow the meeting between Elvin Kidd and Marcel Dupree. But at the moment she needed the beach. As tired as she was, she wasn’t planning to sleep. She needed to get her dog and get out on the water to push herself against the current. To dig deep with the paddle until she had exhausted her body and mind and nothing could get in to haunt her.