The Night Fire

41

Ballard had her earbuds in and was listening to a playlist she had put together for building an edge and keeping it. She was squeezed between two large Special Ops officers in the back of a black SUV. It was seven a.m. and they were on the 10 freeway heading out to Rialto to take down Elvin Kidd.

Two SUVs, nine officers, plus one already in an observation post outside Kidd’s home in Rialto. The plan was to make the arrest when Kidd emerged from his house to go to work. Going into the residence of an ex-gang member was never a good plan; they would wait for Kidd to step out. The last report from the man in the OP had been that the suspect’s truck and attached equipment trailer were backed into the driveway. No movement or light had been reported inside the house.

The arrest plan had been approved by the Special Ops lieutenant, who was in the lead SUV. Ballard’s role was as observer and then arresting officer. She would step in after Kidd was in custody and read the man his rights.

In the second SUV the men had carried on a conversation as though Ballard was not among them. The dialogue crisscrossed in front of her without so much as a What do you think? or a Where do you come from? thrown Ballard’s way. It was just nervous chatter and Ballard knew everybody had different ways of getting ready for battle. She put her earbuds in and listened to Muse and Black Pumas, Death Cab, and others. Disparate songs that all built and held an edge for her.

Ballard saw the driver talking into a rover and pulled out her buds.

“What’s up, Griffin?” she asked.

“Lights on in the house,” Griffin said.

“How far out are we?”

“ETA twenty minutes.”

“We need to step it up. This guy might be ready to boogie. Can we go to code three on the freeway?”

Griffin relayed the request by radio to Lieutenant Gonzalez in the lead SUV and soon they were moving toward Rialto under lights and sirens at ninety miles per hour.

She put the earbuds back in and listened to the propulsive words and beat of “Dig Down” by Muse.

Twelve minutes later, they were three blocks from Kidd’s home at a meeting point with a couple of Rialto patrol officers called in by courtesy and procedure. Gonzalez and the other SUV team were in position a block from the other side of the suspect’s house. They were waiting for the call from the OP on Kidd emerging before making a move. Ballard had pulled her buds out for good in the middle of “Dark Side” by Bishop Briggs. She was ready to go. She hooked an earpiece attached to her rover on her ear and tuned the radio to the simplex channel the team was using.

Three minutes later they got the call from the OP. Ballard didn’t know if he was in a vehicle, a tree, or the roof of a neighbor’s house, but he was reporting that a black male matching Elvin Kidd’s description was outside the house putting a toolbox into the back of the equipment trailer. He was getting ready to go.

The next radio call placed him at the truck’s door, opening it with a key. Ballard then heard Gonzalez’s voice ordering everyone in. The SUV she was in lurched forward, slamming her back against her seat. Tires squealed as it made the right turn and then the vehicle picked up speed as adrenaline coursed through her bloodstream. The other SUV was point. Through the windshield, Ballard saw it arrive on scene first and pull across the pickup truck’s exit path from the driveway. Only a second behind, the second SUV pulled up on the front lawn, blocking the only other potential angle of escape.

A lot of adrenalized shouting occurred as the Special Ops team emerged from the vehicles with weapons drawn and pointed them at the unsuspecting man in the pickup truck.

“Police! Show me your hands! Show me your hands!”

As previously planned and ordered by Gonzalez, Ballard stayed behind in the SUV, waiting for the call that Kidd had been secured and all was clear. But even turning sideways, she did not have a clear view of the pickup’s front cab through the open door of the SUV. She knew that this was the moment where anything could happen. Any sudden or furtive movement, any sound, even a radio squawk, might set off a barrage of gunfire. She decided not to wait for Gonzalez’s call — she had objected to staying behind from the start. She climbed out of the SUV on the safe side. She drew her weapon and moved around the back of the vehicle. She had a ballistic vest strapped on over her clothes.

She moved around the SUV until she had an angle on the front of the pickup. She saw Kidd inside, palms on top of the wheel, fingers up. It looked like he was surrendering.

The cacophony of voices gave way to the single voice of Gonzalez, who ordered Kidd to get out of the truck and walk backward toward the officers. It seemed like minutes, but it took only seconds. Kidd was grabbed by two officers, put on the ground, and cuffed. They then stood him up, leaned him forward over the hood of his truck, and searched him.

“What is this?” Kidd protested. “You come to my home and do this shit?”

Ballard heard her name over the radio earpiece, her cue that it was safe for her to move in and speak to Kidd. She holstered her weapon and walked to the pickup. She was surprised by the pitch of her own voice as the adrenaline held her vocal cords tight; at least to herself, she sounded like a little boy.

“Elvin Kidd, you are under arrest for murder and conspiracy to commit murder. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights as I have recited them to you?”

Kidd turned his head to look at her.

“Murder?” he said. “Who’d I murder?”

“Do you understand your rights, Mr. Kidd?” Ballard said. “I can’t talk to you until you answer.”

“Yeah, yeah, I understand my fucking rights. Who you all sayin’ I killed?”

“John Hilton. Remember him?”

“I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about.”

Ballard had anticipated such a deflection. She also anticipated that this might be her only moment to confront Kidd. He would most likely demand a lawyer and she would never get close to him again. She would also soon be yanked off the case because all of her off-the-reservation actions would come to light with his arrest. It was not the right place to do what she was about to do, but to her, it was now or never. She pulled her mini-recorder from her back pocket and hit the Play button. The recording of the wiretap between Kidd and Marcel Dupree was cued to a particular moment. Kidd heard his own voice come from the device:

A piece of work I had to handle back then. A white boy who owed too much money.

Ballard clicked off the recorder and studied Kidd’s reaction. She could see the wheels grinding, then coming to a halt at the phone call he had received from Dupree. She could tell he knew he had just experienced his last moments of freedom.

“We’re going to take you back to L.A. now,” Ballard said. “And you’ll get a chance to talk to me if—”

She was interrupted by a voice in her ear. The man in the observation post.

“Somebody’s coming out. Black female, white bathrobe. She’s got... I think... gun! Gun! Gun!”

Everyone reacted. Weapons were drawn and the Special Ops guys all turned toward the front of the house. Through the narrow space between the two black SUVs, Ballard saw the woman on the stone walk leading from the front door to the driveway. She wore an oversize robe — probably her husband’s — that had allowed her to conceal a handgun in the sleeve. It was up and out now, and she was yelling.

“You can’t take him!”

Her eyes then fell on Ballard, who stood there as an open target in the clearing between the two SUVs and the pickup. Ballard held the recorder in her hand instead of her gun.

Ballard saw the woman’s arm come up. It almost seemed to be in slow motion. But then the movement stopped, the angle of the gun still down. Then the side of her head exploded in blood and tissue before Ballard even heard the shot come from a distance. She knew it had come from the OP.

The woman’s knees bent forward and she collapsed on her back on the stone path her husband had likely installed himself at their house.

Officers rushed forward to secure the gun and check on the woman. Ballard instinctively took a step in that direction as well and then remembered Kidd. She turned back to him, but he was gone.

Ballard ran out to the street and saw Kidd running, hands still cuffed behind his back. She took off after him, yelling to the others.

“We’ve got a runner!”

Kidd was fast for a man his age wearing construction boots and running with his arms behind his back. But Ballard closed on him before the end of the block and was able to grab the chain between his cuffs and pull him to a stop.

Now she pulled her gun and held it at the side of her thigh.

“Did you kill her?” Kidd said breathlessly. “Did you motherfuckers kill her?”

Ballard was out of breath herself. She tried to gulp in air before responding. She felt sweat popping on her neck and scalp. One of the SUVs was barreling down the street toward them. She knew they would grab him now and these would possibly be her last moments with Kidd.

“If we killed her, it’s on you, Elvin,” she said. “It’s all on you.”

42

The killing of Cynthia Kidd had brought out the Critical Incident Vehicle, which was a thirty-two-foot RV repurposed as a mobile incident command and interview center. The CIV was parked two doors down from the Kidd home. The street was taped off at both ends of the block, with members of the media standing vigil at the closest point. The physical and forensic investigation continued at the house while all officers involved in the morning’s incident were debriefed by detectives from the Force Investigation Division in the second room of the CIV, the room dubbed “the Box” because of its perfectly square dimensions.

FID detectives interviewed the Special Ops officers one by one about the arrest gone sideways, and Ballard was listed as last to be questioned. Each officer had a union defense representative at their side, because they all knew that the outcome of the shooting investigation could determine their career paths. There was a somber silence hanging over everything. A highly trained SWAT team had killed the wife of a suspect under arrest. It was a colossal failure of tactics. Added to that, the dead woman was black and this would invariably draw massive public scrutiny and protest. It would invariably lead to rumors that the victim had been unarmed and simply gunned down. The true story — as bad as it was on its own — would be bent to the needs of those with agendas or axes to grind in the public forum. Everybody on scene knew this and it resulted in a blanket of dread descending over the proceedings on the residential street in Rialto.

It was almost three hours after the shooting before Ballard was finally interviewed. The session with an FID detective named Kathryn Meloni lasted twenty-six minutes and was largely focused on the tactics Ballard had used during the Kidd arrest and the tactics she had observed being used by the arrest team. Ballard’s defense rep, Teresa Hohman, happened to have been in Ballard’s academy class, where they competed closely in all the physical challenges for top female recruit but always had beers and cheers at the academy club after. It was that bond that had prompted Ballard to ask her to be her rep.

Up until the final minutes of the questioning, Ballard believed she had given no answer that could come back on her or the Special Ops team in terms of mistakes or poor tactics. Then Meloni hit her with a trap question.

“At what point did you hear Lieutenant Gonzalez or anyone else order someone to either watch or guard the front door?” she asked.

Ballard took several seconds to compose her answer. Hohman whispered in her ear that there was no good response, but that she had to answer.

“There was a lot of yelling,” Ballard finally said. “Screaming at Elvin Kidd in the truck. I was concentrating on him and my role in the arrest. So I didn’t hear that particular order when it was given.”

“Are you saying that there was an order and you just didn’t hear it?” Meloni asked. “Or was it that there was no order given?”

Ballard shook her head.

“See, I can’t answer that one way or the other,” she said. “I had a laser focus on what I was doing and needed to be doing. That’s how we’re trained. I followed my training.”

“Going back now to the planning meeting prior to the operation,” Meloni said. “Did you tell Lieutenant Gonzalez that the suspect was married?”

“I did.”

“Did you tell him or members of the team that the wife could be expected to be in the home?”

“I think we all knew, making the arrest so early in the morning, that we could expect her to be on scene. In the house.”

“Thank you, Detective. That’s it for now.”

She reached over to turn the recorder off but then stopped and turned back to Ballard.

“One more thing,” she said. “Do you believe that killing Mrs. Kidd may have saved the lives of officers today?”

This time Ballard didn’t pause.

“Absolutely, yes,” she said. “I mean, we were all wearing vests and those guys had ballistic helmets and so forth, so you can never be sure. But I was standing there in the open in front of the pickup and she could have shot me. Then for a moment she hesitated and got hit herself.”

“If she hesitated, do you think she was not intending to fire her weapon?” Meloni asked.

“No, it wasn’t that. She was going to shoot. I could feel it. But she hesitated because I was between her and her husband — until he took off running, that is. I think she thought that if she shot and missed me, she might hit him. So that’s when she hesitated. Then she got hit and maybe that saved my life.”

“Thank you, Detective Ballard.”

“Sure.”

“If you don’t mind staying in the room, your captain wants to come in and speak to you next.”

“My captain?”

“Captain Olivas. You were working this case for him, correct?”

“Oh, yes, correct. Sorry, I’m still a little shaken up.”

“Understandable. I’ll send him in.”

Ballard was surprised that Olivas was on scene. They were more than an hour away from the city and she hadn’t expected him to be involved in the FID investigation at all. Her mind raced and she began to feel dread at the realization that Olivas must have been informed about the case that had led to Elvin Kidd. He knew what she had done.

“He told me he wanted to speak to you alone,” Hohman said. “Is that okay?”

She and Teresa still met for beers from time to time, even though their paths in the department were quite different. Ballard had previously told Hohman of her history with Olivas.

“Or I can stay,” she said.

“No,” Ballard said. “I’m okay. You can send him in.”

The truth was Ballard didn’t want a witness to what might come out or happen next, even if that witness was her own friend and defense rep.

After Teresa left, Olivas entered the CIV, walked through the outer room and into the Box. He silently took a seat across the table from Ballard. He stared at her for a moment before speaking.

“I know how you did it,” he said.

“Did what?” Ballard said.

“Got my signature on the wiretap warrant.”

Ballard knew there was no use denying the truth. That wasn’t the right move here.

“And?”

“And I’m willing to play along.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve got a year until I’m out. I don’t need another fight with you and, right now, this is another feather in my cap. We took down a murderer, cleared a thirty-year-old case.”

“We?”

“That’ll be how it plays. We both win. You keep your badge, I look good. What’s not to like about that?”

“I guess that woman who got her head blown off might find something not to like.”

“People do stupid things in high-stress situations. Gangbanger’s wife? There will be no blowback on this one. Internally, at least. There will be protests and Black Lives Matter and all of that. But internally she doesn’t matter in this equation. She’s collateral damage. What I’m saying, Ballard, is that I could take you down for this. Take your badge. But I’m not. I’m going to give you credit for this. And you give me credit right back.”

Ballard knew what was happening. The command staff of the department was known to watch out for their own. Olivas was angling for one more promotion before he pulled the pin on his career.

“You want to make deputy chief, don’t you?” she said. “Going out on a DC’s pension, that would be sweet. Add a corporate security job to that and you’ll be rolling in the green, huh? Living on the beach.”

City pensions were based on salary at the time of retirement. There was a long history in the department of promotions within command ranks just prior to retirement — with city taxpayers footing the bill. There was also a history of punitive demotions among rank-and-file members that lowered their pensions and payouts. Ballard suddenly flashed on the legal fight Harry Bosch had engaged in after his retirement. She didn’t know all the details, but she knew the department had tried to fuck him over.

“My business is my business,” Olivas said. “All we need right now is to agree on a course of action.”

“How do I know you won’t try to fuck me over in the end?” Ballard said.

“I thought you would ask that. So this is what we do: once the smoke clears here, we go back to L.A. and hold a press conference — you and me — and we tell the story. That’s your edge. Once it’s public record, it would look bad for me to turn around and do something against you before I leave. Understand?”

Ballard found the idea of being part of a press conference with her oppressor and nemesis revolting.

“I’ll pass on the press conference,” she said. “But I’ll share credit with you and keep my badge. And I don’t need an edge. If you do try to come back on me in any way before you quit, I’ll tell the world about this dirty little deal and you’ll go out as a lieutenant instead of a deputy chief. Understand?”

Ballard reached down to her thigh and picked up her phone. She brought it up and put it down on the table. The recording app was open on the screen. The elapsed time on the file being recorded was over thirty-one minutes.

“Rule number one,” she said. “If IA or FID records an interview with you, you record it yourself. To be safe. I just sort of forgot to turn it off.”

Ballard watched the skin around Olivas’s eyes tighten as anger charged his blood.

“Relax, Captain,” she said. “It makes us both look bad. I can’t hurt you without you hurting me. That’s the point, you see?”

“Ballard,” Olivas said, “I always knew there was something I liked about you besides your looks. You’re a devious bitch and I like that. Always have.”

She knew that he thought the words would hurt and distract her. He made a swipe at the phone but she was ready and grabbed it off the table, his hand brushing over hers. She stood up, her chair falling back against the aluminum wall.

“You want to fight me for it?” she asked. “I’ve gotten strong since you did what you did to me. I will kick your fucking ass.”

Olivas remained seated. He held his hands up, palms out.

“Easy, Ballard,” he said. “Easy. This is crazy. I’m good with what we said. The deal.”

The door to the CIV opened and Teresa Hohman looked in, drawn by the clattering of the chair against the vehicle’s thin wall.

“Everything okay in here?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” Olivas said.

Hohman looked at Ballard. She wasn’t taking Olivas’s word for it. Ballard nodded, and only then did Hohman step back and close the door.

Ballard looked back at Olivas.

“So we have a deal?” she asked.

“I said yes,” he said.

Ballard turned off the recording app and put her phone in her pocket.

“Except now I want something else,” she said. “A couple of things, actually.”

“Jesus Christ,” Olivas said. “What?”

“If Elvin Kidd decides to talk, I do the interview.”

“Not a problem — but he’ll never give it up. That’ll get him killed inside. I already heard he told FID to pound fucking sand when they tried to question him about his own wife getting killed. No interview. He wants a lawyer.”

“I’m just saying: my case, my interview — if there is one.”

“Fine. What’s the other thing?”

“The arson case. Put me back on it.”

“I can’t just—”

“It was a midnight crime, you need a midnight detective. That’s what you say and what you do. You tell the others on the case that there’s a briefing tomorrow at eight to bring me up to date.”

“Okay, fine. But it’s still run out of RHD and my guys are lead.”

“Fine. Then I think we’re done here.”

“And I want the summary report on this on my desk before that meeting.”

“Not a problem.”

She turned toward the door. Olivas spoke to her as she was stepping out.

“You watch yourself, Ballard.”

She looked back in at him. It was an impotent threat. She smiled at him without humor.

“You do that too, Captain,” she said.

43

It took Ballard most of her shift after roll call that night to write up the final summary report on the Hilton case. It had to be complete but carefully worded on three fronts. One was to keep Harry Bosch in the clear, and the second was to include Olivas in a way that would be acceptable under lines of command and protocol. The third front was actually the most difficult. She had left her direct supervisor, Lieutenant McAdams, in the dark through the entire investigation. Her saying in the report that she had been operating under the direction of Captain Olivas covered a lot of things but did nothing to lessen the damage that her actions would do to her relationship with McAdams. She knew that she was going to have to sit down with him sooner rather than later and try to smooth things over. It would not be a pleasant conversation.

Her only break came when she got up from the computer to change her focus and relax her eyes. She took her cruiser and went over to the taco truck to pick up some food to go.

Digoberto was once again working alone. But at the moment at least he was busy with a line of nightingales — three young women and two men — fresh out of a club that had just closed at four a.m. Ballard waited her turn and listened to their insipid chatter about the scene they had just left. Ballard hoped there would be some fresh shrimp left by the time she ordered.

When one of the men noticed the badge peeking through her coat on her belt, their talk dropped to whispers, and then by group consent they offered Ballard the front of the line, since she was obviously working and they weren’t sure what to order. She took them up on the kind offer and got her shrimp tacos, answering routine questions from the group as she waited for Digoberto to put her order together.

“Are you on a case or something?” one of the women asked.

“Always,” Ballard said. “I work graveyard — what they call the late show because there’s always something going on in Hollywood.”

“Wow, like what is the case you’re on right now?”

“Uh, it’s about a young guy — about your age. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He got shot in an alley where they sell drugs.”

“Shot dead?”

“Yeah, dead.”

“That’s crazy!”

“A lot of crazy stuff happens around here. You all should be careful. Bad things happen to good people. So stick together, get home safe.”

“Yes, Officer.”

“It’s Detective, actually.”

She brought the food back to the station in a take-out box, passing a shirtless and fully tattooed man cuffed to the lockdown bench in the back hallway. At her borrowed work space she continued writing her report while eating, careful not to drop crumbs into the keyboard and draw a complaint from the desk’s daytime owner. The foil wrapping had kept everything warm and the shrimp ceviche tacos had not lost their flavor on the ride back.

At dawn she printed out three copies of her report: one for Lieutenant McAdams, which she put in his inbox along with a note asking for a private meeting; one for herself, which went into her backpack; and the third for Captain Olivas. She put it into a fresh file folder and carried it with her as she headed across the parking lot to her cruiser.

Her phone buzzed almost as soon as she pulled out of the Hollywood Division parking lot to head downtown. It was Bosch.

“So I have to read about the Kidd case in the L.A. Times?”

“I’m so sorry. I’ve just been running crazy and then I wasn’t going to call you in the middle of the night. I just left the station and was about to try you.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“I was.”

“So they killed his wife.”

“Awful. I know. But it was her or us. Truly.”

“They going to get dinged for that? Are you?”

“I don’t know. They fucked up. Nobody was watching the door. Then she came out and it went sideways. I think I’m in the clear because I was just a ride-along, but those guys are probably all getting letters.”

Bosch would know she meant a letter of reprimand in their personnel files.

“At least you’re all right,” he said.

“Harry, I think she was about to shoot me,” Ballard said. “Then she got hit.”

“Well, then they had the right man in the OP.”

“Still. We had locked eyes. When it happened, she was looking at me, I was looking at her. Then...”

“You can’t dwell on it. She made a choice. It was the wrong one. Is Kidd talking?”

“He lawyered up and isn’t talking. I think he thinks he can sue the city for his wife and get enough money for a big-time lawyer — maybe your boy, Haller.”

“I doubt that. He doesn’t voluntarily take murder cases anymore.”

“Got it.”

“So, should I expect a call about my involvement in the Hilton case?”

“I don’t think so. I just finished the report and left you out of it. I said the widow found the murder book after her husband’s death and contacted a friend to turn it in. Your name is nowhere in the report. You shouldn’t have any problem at all.”

“Good to know.”

Ballard drove down the ramp off Sunset onto the 101. The freeway was crowded and moving slow.

“I’m taking it down to Olivas right now,” she said. “I have a meeting at PAB anyway.”

“Meeting on what?” Bosch asked.

“That arson-murder I worked the other night. I’m back on it. They need a midnight detective to help work it. And that’s me.”

“Sounds like they’re finally getting smart down there.”

“We can only hope.”

“That’s Olivas, right? One of his cases.”

“He’s the captain, yes, but I’ll be working with a couple detectives and the LAFD arson guys. So, what are you doing?”

“Montgomery. I have something in play. We’ll see how it — hey, I almost forgot, that guy down in Orange I told you about that was creeping the houses where female students lived? They bagged him.”

“Fantastic! How?”

“He creeped a house Saturday night but didn’t know a boyfriend was staying over. He caught the guy, trimmed him up a little bit, then called the police.”

“Good deal.”

“Last night I called one of the OPD guys on it — the guy I gave the heads-up to about me watching over Maddie’s place. He said the guy had a camera with an infrared lens. He had photos of the girls sleeping in their beds.”

“That’s fucked up. That guy should go away and the key should get lost. He’s on a path, you know what I mean?”

“And that’s the issue. No matter how twisted this is, right now they have him for burglary of an occupied dwelling. That’s it until the DNA comes back on the other hot prowls. But meantime, their worry is he’ll bail out and disappear.”

“Shit. Well, who is he? A student?”

“Yeah, he goes to the school. They think he followed girls from the campus to their houses and then came back to creep the places and take his pictures.”

“I hope they put a rush on the DNA.”

“They did. And my guy’s going to let me know if he makes bail. The arraignment’s this morning and they have a D.A. who’s going to ask the judge to go high on the bail.”

“Did your daughter ever know that you were going down there on Saturday nights and watching her house?”

“Not exactly. It only would have worried her more.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

They ended the conversation after that. Ballard bailed from the freeway at Alvarado and took First Street the rest of the way into downtown. She was early for her meeting and early for most of the staff at the PAB. She had her pick of parking in the garage beneath the police headquarters.

She ended up on the Robbery-Homicide Division floor twenty minutes before the meeting time set by Olivas. Rather than go into the squad room and have to endure small talk with people she knew were predisposed not to like her, she walked up and down the hallway outside, looking at the framed posters that charted the history of the division. When she had worked for RHD, she had never taken the time to do so. The division was started fifty years earlier after the investigation into the assassination of Robert Kennedy revealed the need for an elite team of investigators to handle the most complex, serious, and sensitive cases — politically or media-wise — that came up.

She walked by posters displaying photos and narratives on cases ranging from the Manson murders to the Hillside Stranglers to the Night Stalker and the Grim Sleeper — cases that became known around the world and that helped cement the reputation of the LAPD. They also established the city as a place where anything could happen — anything bad.

There was no doubt an esprit de corps that came with an assignment to the RHD, but Ballard, being a woman, never felt fully a part of it, and that had always bothered her. Now it was a plus, because she didn’t miss what she’d never had.

She heard talking from the elevator alcove and looked down the hallway to see Nuccio and Spellman, the arson guys from the Fire Department, cross the hall and go through the main door to RHD. They, too, were early — unless Olivas had given them a different start time for the meeting.

Ballard stepped through another door, which led into the opposite end of the squad room. She headed down the main aisle, passing more historical posters and some movie posters until she reached the Homicide Special unit and the War Room. She entered, hoping that Nuccio and Spellman were the first to arrive and that she could talk to them before Olivas and his men got there.

But it didn’t work out that way. She knocked once and entered the War Room, only to find the same five men who had been there last time sitting in exactly the same positions. That included Olivas. They were in mid-discussion, which ceased the moment she opened the door. Since everybody was at least fifteen minutes early, Ballard took that as confirmation that Olivas had given the men an earlier start time, perhaps to discuss what to do about her inclusion in the case before she arrived. She assumed that would largely mean Olivas directing the other investigators to keep her at arm’s length. It would be something she needed to redirect.

“Ballard,” Olivas said. “Have a seat.”

He pointed to a seat at the end of the rectangular table. It would put her opposite him, with the two LAFD guys to her right and the two RHD guys, Drucker and Ferlita, to her left. On the table was a murder book with very few pages in it and a few other files, one of them thicker than the murder book.

“We were just talking about you and how we’re going to work this,” Olivas said.

“Really?” Ballard said. “Before I got here — nice. Any conclusions?”

“Well, for starters, we know we have you out there in Hollywood working the late show, so trolling for witnesses is still important. I know you did a couple sweeps out there already, but people in that world come and go. It would be good to hit that strip again.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, we were just getting started.”

“Well, could we start then with an update on where we are on the investigation? What happened with the bottle I gave you guys?”

“Good idea. Scrapyard, why don’t you summarize where things are?”

Drucker looked surprised that he had drawn the request from Olivas. He opened a file on the table in front of him and reviewed a few things in it, probably to gather his thoughts, before speaking.

“Okay, on the bottle,” he said. “We took it into latents as suggested and they did get a twelve-point match to a thumbprint off the victim, Edison Banks. So we are good there. We went out last night to find the bottle collector you got it from, to reinterview him and see if there was anything else to glean from him now that we have confirmation on the bottle. Unfortunately, we didn’t find him and—”

“What time were you out there?” Ballard asked.

“About eight,” Drucker said. “We looked around for an hour, couldn’t find him.”

“I don’t think he gets back to his squat till later,” Ballard said. “I’ll find him tonight.”

“That would be great,” Drucker said.

There was an awkwardness to the conversation, an acknowledgment that the men were doing what they should have done from the start — bringing in the expert on the dark hours of Hollywood.

“Were there other prints on the bottle?” Ballard asked.

Drucker flipped a page of the report in front of him.

“Yes,” he said. “We got a palm print. We matched it to the liquor license belonging to Marko Linkov, who operates the Mako store where we believe the bottle was originally sold. We spoke to him and watched the video you told us about. So we are up to speed there.”

“So it was the woman in the video?” Ballard said.

“We traced her plate — ‘one for you, two for me’ — and it turns out that plate was stolen off a same-make and — model Mercedes earlier that day. Our working conclusion is that the woman bought the bottle and gave it to our victim. Whether that was part of the plan to kill him, we don’t know. We have so far not been able to identify her.”

“What about the ATM? She got cash from there.”

“She used a counterfeit card with a legit number and PIN belonging to a seventy-two-year-old man living in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

“Did the ATM have a camera? Did you get a clear shot of her?”

“You watched the store video,” Ferlita said. “She put her hand over the camera. She knew just where it was.”

“No picture,” Drucker added.

Ballard did not respond. She sat back in her chair and considered all the new information. The complexity of the mystery woman’s actions was very suspicious and raised more questions.

“I don’t get it,” she finally said.

“Get what?” Olivas asked.

“I’m assuming this woman is the suspect,” she said. “Stolen plate, stolen ATM card. But for what reason? Why didn’t she buy the bottle somewhere else, where it would never be connected?”

“Who knows?” Nuccio said.

“It’s like she wanted to be seen but not identified,” Ballard said. “There’s a psychology there.”

“Fuck her psychology,” Drucker said. “We just need to find her.”

“I’m just saying, if we understand her, maybe it helps find her,” Ballard said.

“Whatever,” Drucker said.

Ballard let him have his moment before pressing on.

“Okay, what else?” she said.

“Isn’t that enough?” Ferlita said. “We’ve had the case two days and most of that was spent catching up to you.”

“And you wouldn’t have what you have if not for me,” Ballard said. “What about the victim and the probate case? Is that a copy of the file?”

She pointed to the thick file on the table next to Drucker.

“It is,” he said. “We’ve gone through it a couple times and haven’t found anything that links up to this. One of those cases where you feel it in your gut but there’s no evidence of anything.”

“Can I take that, then?” Ballard asked. “I’ll give it a read while I’m in the car tonight watching for the bottle man. Then I’ll be as up to date on this as everybody else.”

Drucker turned to Olivas for approval.

“Of course,” Olivas said. “We’ll make you a copy. Knock yourself out.”

“Has anybody talked to the Banks family?” Ballard asked.

“We’re going down to San Diego today to interview the brother,” Drucker said.

“Want to come?” Ferlita asked, a baiting tone in his voice.

“I’ll pass,” Ballard said. “I’m sure you two can handle it.”