The Night Fire

7

The tent was warm and cozy and she felt safe. But then the fumes of kerosene invaded her mouth and nose and lungs and it suddenly grew hot and then it was melting around her and burning.

Ballard sat up with a start. Her hair was still damp and she checked her watch. She had only slept three hours. She thought about going back down but the edges of the dream were still with her, the smell of kerosene. She pulled a length of hair across her face and under her nose. She smelled the apple in the shampoo she had used after paddling.

“Lola.”

Her dog shot through the tent’s opening and to her side. Lola was half boxer and half pit. Ballard rubbed her wide, hard head and felt the horror of the dream receding. She wondered if the man in the tent the night before had woken at the end. She hoped not. She hoped he was so doped up or alcohol addled that he never felt pain or knew he was dying.

She ran her hand along the side of her tent. It was nylon and she imagined heat from a fire collapsing it on her like a shroud. Awake or not, the man had died a horrible death.

She pulled her phone out of her backpack and checked for messages. No calls or texts, just an e-mail from Nuccio, the arson investigator, saying he had received her report and he would send her his reports in turn when completed. He said that he and his partner had determined the death was accidental and that the victim remained unidentified because whatever ID he had with him in the tent had burned.

Ballard put the phone away.

“Let’s take a walk, girl.”

Ballard climbed out of the tent with her backpack and looked around. She was thirty yards from the Rose Avenue lifeguard stand but it looked empty. There was nobody in the water. It was too cold for that.

“Aaron?” she called.

The lifeguard poked his curly-haired head up over the sill of the stand and she wondered whether he had been up there sleeping on the bench. She pointed to her tent and the paddleboard on the sand next to it.

“You watch my stuff? I’m going to get coffee.”

Aaron gave her the thumbs-up.

“You want anything?”

Aaron turned his thumb down. Ballard pulled a leash out of one of the zippered pockets on the backpack and snapped it onto Lola’s collar, then headed toward the line of restaurants and tourist stores that lined the beach walk a hundred yards from the ocean. She carried the backpack over one shoulder.

She went to Groundwork on Westminster, got a latte, and grabbed a table in the back corner where she could work without drawing attention from other patrons. Lola slid under the table and found a comfortable spot to lie down. Ballard opened the backpack and pulled out her laptop and the murder book Bosch had left for her.

This time she decided not to jump around in the book. The first section was most important anyway. It was the chronological record. It was basically a case diary, where the detectives assigned to the case described all their moves and the steps taken during the investigation.

Before starting her read she opened the laptop and ran the names George Hunter and his partner, Maxwell Talis, through the LAPD personnel computer and determined that both detectives were long retired, Hunter in 1996 and Talis the year after. It appeared that Hunter had since died but Talis was still receiving a pension. This was valuable information because if she decided to do a thorough reexamination of the Hilton murder, she should try to talk to him about what he remembered of the case.

She closed the laptop and opened up the murder book. She started reading the chrono from the first entry — the callout. Hunter and Talis were at their desks at Hollywood Detectives on a Friday morning when alerted that patrol officers had come upon a car parked in an alley behind a row of shops off Melrose Avenue and the 101 freeway overpass. The detectives responded along with teams from the crime scene unit and the coroner’s office.

The victim was a white male tentatively identified as John Hilton, twenty-four years old, by the driver’s license found in the wallet on the floor of the 1988 Toyota Corolla. The photo on the license appeared to match the face of the man lying on his right side across the front seats and center console of the car.

A computer check of the name and birth date on the DL determined that this Hilton was not the scion of a hotel family but an ex-con who had been released a year earlier from a state prison after serving thirty months for drug possession and burglary convictions.

As lead detective, George Hunter had composed all of the early entries of the chrono, signing each one with his initials. These gave Ballard a good insight into how the investigation was initially focused. As she had surmised on her first quick overview of the book, the investigation took its cue from the victim’s prior history of drug abuse and petty crime. Hunter and Talis clearly believed that this had been a drug rip-off and that Hilton had been murdered for as little as the price of a single hit of heroin.

Ballard now handled all calls for a detective on the midnight shift, but her previous posting had been as a homicide detective working specialty cases out of the downtown police headquarters. While the department’s look-the-other-way sexual politics and systemic misogyny had caused her transfer to the lesser assignment, her skills as a homicide investigator had not deteriorated. Bosch had recognized this and tapped into it when they had crossed paths on a case the previous year. They had agreed to work cases together in the future, even if off the record and below department radar. Bosch was retired and an outsider, no longer encumbered by LAPD rules and procedure. Ballard was not retired but she was certainly out of sight and out of mind on the midnight shift. That made her both an insider and an outsider. All of her homicide skills now told her this was most likely an impossible case: an eighty-dollar drug rip-off that had ended with a bullet nearly thirty years before. There might have been something here that stuck in John Jack Thompson’s craw and lit his fire, but whatever that was would be long gone now.

She first began to suspect that Hilton was a snitch. Perhaps a snitch for Thompson, which was why the detective took an active interest in the case, even though he was not assigned to it. She took a notebook out of her backpack. The first thing she wrote down was a question for Bosch.

It was an important question because it went to the level of dedication to this case. Bosch was right. If she could figure out why Thompson took this particular murder book, she might be able to zero in on a motive and then a suspect. But as described in the early entries of the chronology, this was a pedestrian murder — if there was such a thing — that would have been nearly impossible to solve at the time, let alone twenty-nine years later.

“Shit,” Ballard whispered.

Lola alerted, raised her head, and looked up at her. Ballard rubbed the dog’s head.

“It’s okay, girl,” she said.

She went back to the chrono and continued to read and take notes.

The manual transmission of Hilton’s car had been in neutral but the key was in the ignition and in the on position. The engine was dead because the gas tank was empty. It was assumed that Hilton had cruised into the alley to make a drive-through drug purchase and had been shot after stopping and putting the transmission in neutral. It could not be determined how much gas had been in the tank when Hilton entered the alley, but the coroner’s investigators estimated that time of death had been between midnight and four a.m., which was four to eight hours before the body was discovered by one of the shop owners arriving for work and parking behind his business.

Both front windows of the car were open. Hilton had been shot point-blank behind the right ear. This led the detectives to surmise that they were possibly looking for two suspects: one who came to the driver’s door and drew Hilton’s attention and another — the true killer — who came to the passenger door, reached through the window with a gun, and executed Hilton as he was turned and looking out the window. This theory was supported by the location of the shell casing ejected from the murder weapon. It was found on the passenger floor mat, an indication that the gun had been fired from that side of the car. Hilton then most likely slumped against the driver’s door but was pushed back over the center console when his pockets were searched. In the crime scene photos, both front pockets of his pants had been pulled inside out.

To Ballard, the theory of two killers and how they carried out the crime veered slightly from the idea of it being a robbery. It was colder, more calculated. It felt planned to her. A drug rip-off would have also been planned to some extent but usually not with this kind of precision. She began to wonder whether the original detectives had zeroed in on the wrong motive from the start. This could have led to tunnel vision on the investigation, with Hunter and Talis ignoring any clue that didn’t fit their premise.

She also discounted the theory by the original investigators that two killers were involved — one to distract Hilton from the left, one to reach into the car from the right to shoot. She knew that a solo gunman could have easily carried out the killing. Hilton’s attention to his left could have been drawn by any number of things in the alley.

She wrote another note, wanting to remind herself to bring all of this up with Bosch, and then went back to the chrono.

Hunter and Talis focused their search for suspects on the immediate neighborhood and among the dealers known to sell in the alley. They checked with the sergeant in charge of a street-level narcotics unit assigned to Hollywood Division who said his team had intermittently worked undercover buy-bust operations in the area, as it was a known drug market because of its proximity to the 101 freeway. Customers came to Hollywood, jumped off the freeway at Melrose, and made drug purchases before jumping back on the freeway and getting far away from the transaction. Additionally, the location was close to several movie studios, and employees picked up drugs on their way to or from work, unless they were upper-level creatives who had their purchases delivered directly to them.

The chrono noted that the drug clientele in the area was mostly white, while the dealers were exclusively black males who were supplied product by a street gang from South L.A. The Rolling 60s Crips gang had laid claim to this section of Hollywood and enforced its grip with violence. The murder of John Hilton was not good for business because it flooded the area with police activity and shut things down. One note on the chrono stated that a street informant had told a gang officer that members of the Rolling 60s were attempting to identify the killer themselves to eliminate and make an example of him. Business came first, gang loyalty second.

That note froze Ballard and made her wonder whether she was chasing a ghost. The Rolling 60s could have caught and executed the killer or killers of John Hilton decades earlier without the LAPD making the connection between the two cases.

Apparently undaunted by the same question, Hunter and Talis put together a list of known drug dealers who worked in the area and began bringing them in for questioning. None of the interviews produced suspects or leads on the case, but Ballard noticed that the roster was incomplete. A few people on the list were never found or questioned. Among them was a man named Elvin Kidd, a Rolling 60s Crips gang member who was at a street-boss level and ran the territory where the Hilton murder took place.

They steered completely clear of another dealer, Dennard Dorsey, when they were told he was on keep-away status because he was a valuable informant. The snitch’s handler — a Major Narcotics unit detective named Brendan Sloan — did the interview and reported back that his man knew nothing of value in regard to the Hilton murder.

Ballard wrote all of the names down. She was bothered that the homicide detectives didn’t interview all the dealers and had left questioning the snitch to his department handler. To her it meant that this angle of the investigation was incomplete. She didn’t know whether laziness or something else had gotten in the way. The murder counts in the city back in the late ’80s and early ’90s were the highest in the city’s history. It was likely that Hunter and Talis had other cases at the time, with new ones constantly coming in.

She finished going through the chronology an hour and one more latte later. The thing that struck her was that the document ended with an entry from Talis on the one-year anniversary of the murder:

And that was it. No explanation as to how it was still actively being pursued.

Ballard knew it was bullshit. The case had ground to a halt for lack of leads and viable angles of investigation. The detectives were waiting for what in homicide was called a “miracle cure” in the form of someone coming forward with the killer’s name. This would most likely have to be someone from the underworld — someone arrested and facing charges, looking to deal their way out of a jam. Only then would they get a name they could run with. So it was kept “open and active,” but Hunter and Talis were on to other things.

What also struck Ballard as missing was the work of John Jack Thompson. During the years he had held the murder book, he had apparently added nothing to it. There was nothing from him in the chronology that indicated he had made any moves, conducted any interviews, or broken any new ground on the case. Ballard wondered whether he had kept notes of his private investigation separate so as not to change or taint the record of the original investigation. She knew she would have to talk to Bosch about it and possibly go back to Thompson’s house and home office to see whether there was a second murder book or any record of Thompson’s work on the case.

She moved on from the chronology to fuller reports filed by the investigators based on the evidence collected and witness interviews. In the victim section of the murder book she read a bio authored by Talis and drawn from interviews and official documents. The victim’s mother and stepfather were still alive at the time of the killing. According to the written account, Sandra Hilton expressed no surprise at her son’s demise and said he had come back from his stint at Corcoran State Prison a different person. She said he seemed broken from the experience and wanted nothing more than to get high all the time. She admitted that she and her husband kicked John out of the house shortly after he returned from prison and appeared to be making no effort to integrate into society. He said he wanted to be an artist but did nothing to pursue it as a career. He was stealing from them in order to support his drug habit.

Donald Hilton stood by his decision to evict John from the family home in the Toluca Lake area. He was quick to note that John was his adopted son but was already eleven when Donald met Sandra and the two got married. His biological father had not been a part of John’s life for those first eleven years, and Donald said that behavioral problems were already deeply set in the boy. Lacking a blood relation to the young man he raised apparently allowed him to kick him out of the house later on without a guilty conscience.

A section of the report had been redacted with a black marker. Two lines in the middle of the interview summary were completely blacked out. This seemed odd to Ballard because a murder book was already a confidential document. The exception to this was when a case was filed and murder book documents became part of discovery and turned over to the defense. On some occasions redacting occurred to protect the names of informants and others. But this case had never resulted in charges, and it seemed odd to Ballard that an interview with the parents of a victim would contain any information that would need to be kept hidden or secret. She opened the binder’s rings and removed the page, studying the back to see if any of the redacted words could be read. Unable to make anything out, she put the page at the front of the binder to remind herself of the anomaly every time she opened the book: What information had been redacted from the case file? And who did it?

Ballard’s review of the other witness summaries produced only one notable question. Hilton had shared an apartment in North Hollywood with a man named Nathan Brazil, who was described as a production assistant at Archway Studios in Hollywood. Ballard knew the studio was on Melrose Avenue near Paramount — and near where Hilton was murdered. Brazil told the investigators that he was working the night of the murder on a film production and Hilton had dropped by the guarded entrance to the studio and asked for him. Brazil did not get the message until hours later and by then Hilton was gone. Presumably he left the studio and proceeded down Melrose to the alley where he was shot and killed. Brazil told investigators that it was unusual for Hilton to come to his workplace. It had never happened before and he didn’t know why Hilton did so or what he wanted.

It was another mystery within the mystery that Hunter and Talis had not solved.

Ballard looked at her notes. She had written down the names of several people she would have to run down and interview, if they were still alive.

Maxwell Talis

Donald Hilton

Sandra Hilton

Thompson widow

Vincent Pilkey, dealer

Dennard Dorsey, dealer/snitch — protected

Brendan Sloan, narcotics

Elvin Kidd

Nathan Brazil, roommate

Ballard knew that John Jack Thompson’s widow was alive, as well as presumably Maxwell Talis. Brendan Sloan was still around as well. Sloan, in fact, was well known to her. He had risen from narcotics detective to deputy chief in the twenty-nine years since the Hilton murder. He was in charge of West Bureau. Ballard had never met him but since Hollywood Division fell under West Bureau’s command, Sloan was technically her boss.

Ballard’s back was stiffening. It was a combination of a tough morning paddle into strong headwinds, a lack of sleep, and the hard wooden chair she had been sitting on for two hours. She closed the murder book, deciding to leave the remaining pages and reports for later. She reached down to ruffle Lola’s scruff.

“Let’s go see Double, girl!”

The dog’s tail wagged violently. Double was her friend, a French bulldog being boarded at the day-care center where Lola spent most nights and some days when Ballard worked.

Ballard needed to drop Lola off so she could continue to work the case.

8

Ballard’s first stop was Property Division, where she checked out the sealed evidence box marked with the John Hilton murder case number. She could tell right away that it was not a twenty-nine-year-old box and the sealing tape was not yellowed as would have been expected. The box had obviously been repacked, which was not unusual. The Property Division was a massive warehouse but still too small for all the evidence stored there. Consolidation was an ongoing project and old, dusty evidence boxes were often opened and repacked in smaller boxes to save room. Ballard had the evidence list from the murder book that she could use to make sure everything was intact — the victim’s clothes, personal belongings, etc. She was primarily looking for two things: the expended bullet retrieved from Hilton’s body during autopsy and the casing retrieved from the floor of his car.

She checked the sign-out sheet on the box and saw that, other than the repackaging that had taken place six years earlier, the box had apparently not been opened since it was placed in Property by the original two detectives — Hunter and Talis — nearly three decades before. This would generally not be unusual because no suspects had ever been developed, so there was no reason to analyze collected evidence in regard to a potential killer. Hunter and Talis had collected the evidence and had a list of the box’s contents in the murder book. They knew firsthand what they had. They had seen it and held it.

However, what Ballard did find curious was that John Jack Thompson, when he took possession of the murder book and apparently started working the case, had never gone to Property and pulled the box. He had never checked out the physical evidence.

It was literally the first move Ballard had made. Yes, she had the property list from the murder book, but she still wanted to see the evidence. It was a visceral thing, like an extension of the crime scene photos. It brought her close to the case, closer to the victim, and she could not see pulling and working a case without this necessary step. Yet Thompson, the mentor to two generations of detectives, had apparently chosen not to.

Ballard put the question aside and started going through the contents of the box, checking them off against the list from the murder book and studying each piece of clothing and every item gathered from the Corolla. She had seen something in the crime scene photos that she wanted to find: a small notebook that was in the console between the front seats of the car. An entry on the property list said simply notebook, with no description of its contents or any detail about why Hilton kept a notebook by his side in his car.

She found it in a brown paper bag with other items from the console. These included a lighter, a drug pipe, spare change amounting to eighty-seven cents, a pen, and a parking ticket issued six weeks before Hilton’s death. The parking ticket had been explored by the original investigators and there was a report in the murder book on their efforts. The ticket appeared to be a dead end. It had been issued on a street in Los Feliz where a friend of Hilton’s lived. The friend recalled that Hilton had visited to sell the friend a clock radio he said his stepfather had given him. But he ended up staying at the apartment for several hours when the friend shared a hit of heroin with him. While Hilton was nodding off in his friend’s apartment, his car was being ticketed. Hunter and Talis deemed the ticket irrelevant to the investigation and Ballard saw nothing that made her think otherwise.

Now she opened the notebook and found Hilton’s name and a number she assumed was his prisoner number at Corcoran written on the inside flap. The pages of the notebook were largely filled with pencil studies and full sketches of hard-looking men, many with tattoos on their faces and necks. Other prisoners, Ballard surmised. The finished drawings were quite good and Ballard thought Hilton had some artistic talent. Knowing that he had this other dimension beyond drug addict and petty thief humanized him to her. Nobody deserved to be shot to death in a car, no matter what they were doing, but it was helpful to get a human connection. It added fuel to the fire that the detective needed to somehow keep burning. She wondered if Hunter or Talis or Thompson had made a connection to Hilton through this notebook. She doubted it. If they had, it would have been kept in the murder book so that the detective could see it and open it when he needed to stoke the fire.

Ballard finished flipping through the pages. One sketch caught her eye and she held on it. It was of a black man with a shaved head. He was turned away from the artist and on his neck was a six-pointed star with the number 60 in its center. Ballard knew that all Crips gangs or sets shared the symbol of the six-pointed star, its points symbolizing the early altruistic goals of the gang: love, life, loyalty, understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. The 60 in the middle of the star was what caught Ballard’s eye. It meant that the subject of the sketch was a Rolling 60s Crip, a member of the same set of the notoriously violent gang that controlled drug sales in the alley where Hilton was murdered. Was that a coincidence? It appeared that Hilton had sketched this man while in prison; less than two years after his release, he was killed on Rolling 60s turf.

None of this had been in any reports in the murder book that Ballard had read. She made a mental note to check again. It might be a significant clue or it might be purely coincidental.

She flipped farther into the notebook and saw another drawing, which she thought might be the same man with the Rolling 60s tattoo. But his face was turned away and shadowed. She couldn’t be sure. Then she found what she believed was a self-portrait. It looked like the face of the man she had seen in the crime scene photos. In the drawing, the man had haunted eyes with deep circles beneath them. He looked scared, and something about the drawing punched Ballard in the chest.

Ballard decided to add the notebook to the items she checked out of Property. The drawings reminded her of a case that was cracked by the cold case unit a few years earlier, when Ballard had been assigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division. Detective Mitzi Roberts had connected three murders of prostitutes to a drifter named Sam Little. Little was caught and convicted, then from prison started confessing to dozens of murders committed over four decades and all over the country. They were all “throwaway” victims — drug addicts and prostitutes — whom society, and police departments, had marginalized and given little notice to. Little was an artist and he sketched pictures of his victims to help visiting investigators identify the women and the cases. He held their images in his head, but not so often their names. He was given a full set of artist supplies and his drawings were in color and very realistic, eventually matching up to victims in multiple states and helping to clear cases. But they didn’t serve to humanize Sam Little, only his victims. Little was seen as a psychopath who showed no mercy to his victims and deserved no mercy in return.

Ballard signed out the bullet evidence and the notebook and left the Property Division. She called Bosch when she got outside.

“What’s up?”

“I just came out of Property. I pulled the bullet and casing. Tomorrow is Walk-In Wednesday at ballistics. I’ll go right after my shift.”

“Sounds good. Anything else in the box?”

“Hilton was a sketch artist. He had a notebook in his car that had drawings from prison. I checked it out.”

“How come?”

“Because I thought he was good at it. There are a few other things from my review that I want to go over. You want to meet?”

“I’m sort of in the middle of something today but I could meet for a few minutes. I’m close by.”

“Really? Where?”

“The Nickel Diner, you know it?”

“Of course. I’ll be there in ten.”

9

Ballard found Bosch in the back with his laptop open and several documents spread on a four-top table. It was apparently late enough in the day for the management to allow him to monopolize the spot. A plate with half a chocolate-frosted donut was on the table, assuring Ballard that Bosch was a paying customer rather than a freeloader who bought nothing but coffee and monopolized a table for hours.

She noticed the cane hooked over one of the empty chairs as she sat down. Assessing the documents that Bosch had started stacking when he noticed her approach, Ballard raised her hands palms up in a What gives? gesture.

“You’re the busiest retired guy I think I’ve ever seen.”

“Not really. I just said I’d take a quick look at this and then that would be it.”

Putting her backpack on the empty chair to her right, she caught a glimpse of the letterhead on one of the documents Bosch was clearing. It said “Michael Haller, Attorney-At-Law.”

“Oh, shit, you’re working for that guy?”

“What guy?”

“Haller. You work for him, you work for the devil.”

“Really? Why do you say that?”

“He’s a defense attorney. Not only that, but a good one. He gets people off that shouldn’t get off. Undoes what we do. How do you even know him?”

“Last thirty years, I’ve spent a lot of time in courthouses. So has he.”

“Is that the Judge Montgomery case?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Who doesn’t? Judge murdered in front of the courthouse — that’ll get some attention. Besides, I liked Judge Montgomery. When he was on a criminal bench I hit him up for warrants every now and then. He was a real stickler for the law. I remember this one time, the clerk let me go back to chambers to get a warrant signed and I go in there and look around and there’s no judge. Then I hear him say, ‘Out here.’ He had opened his window and climbed out onto the ledge to smoke a cigarette. Fourteen floors up. He said he didn’t want to break the rule about smoking in the building.”

Bosch put his stack of files on the empty chair to his right. But that wasn’t the end of it.

“I don’t know,” Ballard said. “I may have to reassess our... thing. I mean, if you’re going to be working for the other side.”

“I don’t work for the other side or the dark side or whatever you want to call it,” Bosch said. “This is a one-day thing and I actually volunteered for it. I was in court today and something didn’t add up right. I asked to look at the files and, as a matter of fact, did just find something before you walked in.”

“Something that helps the defense?”

“Something that I think the jury should know. Doesn’t matter who it helps.”

“Whoa, that’s the dark side talking right there. You’ve crossed over.”

“Look, did you come here to talk about the Montgomery case or the Hilton case?”

“Take it easy, Harry. I’m just busting your balls.”

She pulled her backpack over, unzipped it, and pulled out the Hilton murder book.

“Now, you went through this, right?” she asked.

“Yes, before giving it to you,” Bosch said.

“Well, a couple things.”

She reached into the backpack for the envelopes containing the ballistic evidence.

“I pulled the box at Property and checked out the bullet and the casing. As you said before, maybe we get lucky.”

“Good.”

“I also found this in the box.”

She went into the backpack again and came up with the notebook she had found in the property box. She handed it to Bosch.

“In the crime scene photos this was in the center console of the car. I think it was important to him.”

Bosch started flipping through the pages and looking at the sketches.

“Okay,” he said. “What else?”

“Well, that’s it from Property,” Ballard said. “But I think what I didn’t find there is worth noting, and it’s where you come into the picture.”

“You want to explain that?”

“John Jack Thompson never pulled the evidence in the case,” she said.

She read Bosch’s reaction as the same as hers. If Thompson was working the case, he would have pulled the box at Property and seen what he had.

“You sure?” Bosch asked.

“He’s not on the checkout list,” Ballard said. “I’m not sure he ever investigated this case — unless there’s more at his house.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything that shows he was investigating. Notes, recordings, maybe a second murder book. There’s no indication at all — not one added word — that indicates John Jack pulled this case to work it. It’s almost like he took the book so no one else would work it. So, you need to go back to his widow and see if there’s anything else. Anything that shows what he was doing with this.”

“I can go see Margaret tonight. But remember, we don’t know exactly when he took the murder book. Maybe he took it on his way out the door when he retired and then it was too late to get into Property. He had no badge.”

“But if you were going to take a book so you could work on it, wouldn’t you plan it so you could get to Property before you walked out the door?”

Bosch nodded.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Okay, so you go to Margaret and see about that,” Ballard said. “I made up a list of names from the book. People I want to talk to. I’m going to start running them down as soon as we’re finished here.”

“Can I see the list?”

“’Course.”

For the fourth time Ballard went into the backpack and this time pulled out her own notebook. She opened it and turned it around on the table so Bosch could read the list.

Maxwell Talis

Donald Hilton

Sandra Hilton

Thompson widow

Vincent Pilkey, dealer

Dennard Dorsey, dealer/snitch — protected

Brendan Sloan, narcotics

Elvin Kidd

Nathan Brazil, roommate

Bosch nodded as he looked at the names. Ballard took this to mean he was in agreement.

“Hopefully some of them are still alive. Sloan is still in the department, right?”

“Runs West Bureau. My boss, technically.”

“Then all you have to do is get around his adjutant.”

“That won’t be a problem. Are you going to eat the rest of that donut?”

“No. It’s all yours.”

Ballard grabbed the donut and took a bite. Bosch lifted his cane from the back of the other chair.

“I gotta get back to the courthouse,” he said. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Ballard said, her mouth full. “Did you see this?”

She put the rest of the donut back on the plate, then opened the binder, unsnapped the rings, and handed Bosch the document she had moved to the front of the murder book.

“It’s redacted,” she said. “Who would black out lines in the statement from the parents?”

“I saw that too,” Bosch said. “It’s weird.”

“The whole book is confidential, why black anything out?”

“I know. I don’t get it.”

“And we don’t know who did it — whether it was Thompson or the original investigators. When you look at those two lines in context — the stepfather talking about adopting the boy — you have to wonder if they were protecting somebody. I’m going to try to run down Hilton’s birth certificate through Sacramento, but that will take forever because I don’t have his original name. That was probably redacted too.”

“I could try to run it down at Norwalk. Next time I go to see Maddie on a weekday.”

Norwalk was the site of Los Angeles County’s record archives. It was at the far south end of the county and with traffic could take an hour each way. Birth records were not accessible by computer to the public or law enforcement. Proper ID had to be shown to pull a birth certificate, especially one guarded by adoption rules.

“That’ll only work if Hilton was born in the county. But worth a try, I guess.”

“Well, one way or another we’ll figure it out. It’s a mystery for now.”

“What’s at the courthouse?”

“I want to see if I can get a subpoena. I want to get there before the judges all split.”

“Okay, I’ll let you go. So, you’ll go see Margaret Thompson later and I’ll run down these names. The ones that are still alive.”

Bosch stood up, holding the docs and his laptop under his arm. He didn’t have a briefcase. He hooked his cane back on the chair so he could reach into his pocket with his free hand.

“So, did you sleep yet today or just go right into this?”

“Yes, Dad, I slept.”

“Don’t call me that. Only one person can call me that and she never does.”

He pulled out some cash and left a twenty on the table, tipping as though there had been four people after all.

“How is Maddie?” Ballard asked.

“A little freaked out at the moment,” Bosch said.

“Why, what happened?”

“She’s got one semester to go down at Chapman and then she graduates. Three weeks ago some creep broke into the house she shares near the school with three other girls. It was a hot prowl. Two of the girls were there asleep.”

“Maddie?”

“No, she was up here with me because of my knee. Helping out, you know? But that doesn’t matter. They’re all freaked out. This guy, he wasn’t there to steal shit, you know, no money or anything taken. He left his semen on one of the girls’ laptops that was on the kitchen table. He was probably looking at photos of her on it when he did his thing. He’s obviously bent.”

“Oh, shit. Did they get a profile off it?”

“Yeah, a case-to-case hit. Same thing four months before. Hot prowl, girls from Chapman, and he left his DNA on a photo that was on the refrigerator. But no match to anybody in the database.”

“So did Maddie and the girls move out?”

“No, they’re all two months from graduation and don’t want to deal with moving. We put on extra locks, cameras inside and out. Alarm system. The local cops put the street on twice-by a shift. But they won’t move out.”

“So that freaks you the fuck out.”

“Exactly. Both hot prowls were on Saturday nights, so I’m thinking that’s this guy’s night out and maybe he’s going to come back. So I’ve been going down and sitting on the place the last two Saturday nights. Me and this knee. I sit in the back seat with my leg up across the seat. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw something but I’m there.”

“Hey, if you want company, I’m there too.”

“Thanks, that means a lot, but that’s my point. Don’t miss your sleep. I remember last year...”

“What about last year? You mean the case we worked?”

“Yeah. We both had sleep deprivation and it... affected things. Decisions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look, I don’t want to get into it. You can blame it on me. My decisions were affected, okay? Let’s just make sure we get sleep this time.”

“You worry about you and I’ll worry about me.”

“Got it. Sorry I even brought it up.”

He picked up his cane off the chair and headed toward the door. He was moving slow. Ballard realized she would look like an ass if she walked quickly ahead of him and then out.

“Hey, I’m going to hit the restroom,” she said. “Talk later?”

“Sure,” Bosch said.

“And I really mean that about your daughter. You need me, I’m there.”

“I know you mean it. Thanks.”

10

Ballard walked to the Police Administration Building so she could use a computer to run down some of the names on her list. This would be a routine stop for most detectives from the outer geographic stations. There were even desks and computers reserved for “visiting” detectives. But Ballard had to tread lightly. She had previously worked in the Robbery-Homicide Division located in the PAB and had left for the midnight shift at Hollywood Station under a cloud of suspicion and scandal. A complaint to Internal Affairs about her supervisor sexually harassing her led to an investigation that turned the Homicide Special unit upside down until the complaint was deemed unfounded and Ballard was sent off to Hollywood. There were those still in the PAB who did not believe her story, and those who viewed the infraction, even if true, as unworthy of an investigation that threatened a man’s career. There were enemies in the building, even four years later, and she tried to maintain her job without stepping through its glass doors. But to drive all the way from downtown to Hollywood just to use the department’s database would be a significant waste of time. If she wanted to keep momentum, she had to enter the PAB and find a computer she could use for a half hour.

She made it through the lobby and onto the elevator unscathed. On the fifth floor she avoided the vast homicide squad room and entered the much smaller Special Assault Section, where she knew a detective who had backed her through all the controversy and scandal. Amy Dodd was at her desk and smiled when she saw Ballard enter.

“Balls! What are you doing down here?”

Amy used a private nickname derived from the stand Ballard had made during the past troubles in RHD.

“Hey, Doddy. How’s it hanging? I’m looking for a computer to run names on.”

“I hear there are plenty of open desks in homicide since they trimmed the fat over there.”

“Last thing I want to do is set up in there. Might get stabbed in the back again.”

Amy pointed to the workstation next to hers.

“That one’s empty.”

Ballard hesitated and Amy read her.

“Don’t worry, I won’t talk your ear off. Do your work. I have court calls to make anyway.”

Ballard sat down and went to work, putting her password into the department database and then opening her notebook to the list of names from the Hilton case. She quickly located a driver’s license for Maxwell Talis in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which was not a welcome piece of information. Yes, Talis was still alive, but Ballard was working this case on her own and with Bosch, not as an official LAPD investigation. An out-of-town trip was not in the equation. It meant she would have to reach Talis by phone. This was disappointing because face-to-face interviews were always preferable. Better tells and better reads came out of in-person sit-downs.

The news did not get any better as she moved down her list. She determined that both Sandra and Donald Hilton were dead. They had passed — Donald in 2007 and Sandra in 2016 — without knowing who had killed their son or why, without any justice for his life and their loss. To Ballard it didn’t matter that John Hilton had been a drug addict and criminal. He had talent and with that he had to have had dreams. Dreams of a way out of the life he was trapped in. It made Ballard feel that if she didn’t find justice for him, no one ever would.

Next on the list was Margaret Thompson and Bosch was handling that. Vincent Pilkey was the next name and it was another dead end. Pilkey was one of the dealers whom Hunter and Talis never connected with to interview, and now she never would either: Pilkey was listed as deceased in 2008. He was only forty-one at the time and Ballard assumed he met an untimely death by violence or overdose, but she could not determine it from the records she was accessing.

Ballard’s luck changed with the next name down: Dennard Dorsey, the dealer Hunter and Talis did not talk to because he was also a snitch for Major Narcotics. Ballard ran his name on the computer and felt a jolt of adrenaline kick in as she learned that not only had the snitch somehow survived the last thirty years, but he was literally two blocks away from her at that very moment: Dorsey was being held in the county jail on a parole violation. She checked his criminal history and saw that the last decade was replete with drug and assault arrests, the accumulation eventually landing him in prison for a five-year term. It seemed pretty clear from the history that Dorsey’s usefulness as a snitch had long since ended and he was without the protection of his handlers at Major Narcotics.

“Hot damn!” she said.

Amy Dodd leaned back in her chair so she could see around the partition between their work spaces.

“Something good, I take it?” she asked.

“Better than good,” Ballard said. “I found a guy and I don’t even have to get in my car.”

“Where?”

“Men’s Central — and he’s not going anywhere.”

“Lucky you.”

Ballard went back to the computer, wondering if the dice would keep tumbling her way. She pulled up the hold for parole violation and got a second jolt of adrenaline when she saw the name of the PO who had filed the violation and pickup order on Dorsey. She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and called Rob Compton on speed dial.

“You,” Compton answered. “What do you want?”

It was clear from his brusqueness that Compton still hadn’t gotten past their last interaction. They’d had a casual off-duty relationship that blew up on-duty when Compton and Ballard disagreed on strategy regarding a case they were working. Compton bailed out of the car they were arguing in and then bailed out of the relationship they’d had.

“I want you to meet me at Men’s Central,” Ballard said. “Dennard Dorsey, I want to talk to him and I might need you for leverage.”

“Never heard of him,” Compton said.

“Come on, Rob, your name’s on the VOP order.”

“I’ll have to look him up.”

“Go ahead. I’ll wait.”

Ballard heard typing and realized she had reached Compton at his desk.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. “I seem to recall being left high and dry by you the last time I did you a favor.”

“Oh, come on,” Ballard said. “I seem to recall you pussied out on me and I got mad. You got out of the car and walked away. But you can make up for it now with Dorsey.”

“I have to make up for it? You’ve got balls, Ballard. That’s all I can say about it.”

Ballard heard a peal of laughter from the other side of the partition. She knew Amy had heard Compton’s comment. She held the phone against her chest so Compton would not hear, then turned the volume down before bringing it back to her mouth.

“You got him or not?” she asked.

“Yeah, I got him,” Compton said. “No wonder I didn’t remember him. I never met him. He never reported. Got out of Wasco nine months ago, came back down here, and never showed up. I put in the VOP and he got picked up.”

“Well, now’s a good time to meet him.”

“I can’t, Renée. I got paper to do today.”

“Paperwork? Come on, Robby. I’m working a murder and this guy may have been a key witness.”

“Doesn’t look like the type who’s going to talk. He’s got a gang jacket. Rolling 60s going back to the eighties. He’s hard-core. Or was.”

“Not really. Back in the day he was a snitch. A protected snitch. Look, I’m going over there. You can help me if you want. Maybe give him some incentive to talk.”

“What incentive would that be?”

“I figure you might give him a second chance.”

“Nah, nah, nah, I’m not letting the guy out. He’ll just shit all over me again. I can’t do that, Ballard.”

Compton going to her last name told her he was set on this.

“Okay, I tried,” she said. “I’ll try something else. See ya around, Robby. Or actually, I probably won’t.”

She disconnected and dropped her phone on the desk. Amy spoke teasingly from the other side of the partition.

“Bitch.”

“Hey, he deserved it. I’m working a murder here.”

“Roger that.”

“Roger the fuck that.”

Ballard’s plan was to go over to Men’s Central, but first she finished the rundown on the names on her list. After Brendan Sloan, whose whereabouts she already knew, came Elvin Kidd, the Rolling 60s street boss at the time of the murder, and Nathan Brazil, John Hilton’s roommate. Both were still alive and Ballard got addresses for them from the DMV computer. Kidd lived out in Rialto in San Bernardino County and Brazil was in West Hollywood.

Ballard was curious about Kidd. Now nearly sixty years old, he had moved far away from Rolling 60s Crips turf, and his interactions with the justice system seemed to have stopped almost twenty years before. There had been arrests and convictions and prison time, but then it appeared that Kidd either started to fly below the radar with his continuing illegal pursuits or found the straight-and-narrow life. The latter possibility would not have been all that unusual. There were not that many old gangsters on the street. Many never got out of their twenties alive, many were incarcerated with life sentences, and many simply grew out of gang life after realizing only the first two alternatives awaited them.

In checking Kidd’s record she came across a possible connection to Hilton. Both had spent time at Corcoran State Prison, with what looked like a sixteen-month overlap in the late 1980s when they were both there. Hilton was finishing his sentence while Kidd was starting his. His term ended thirteen months after Hilton was released.

The overlap meant they could have known each other, though one was white and one was black and groups in state prison tended to self-segregate.

Ballard went onto the California Department of Corrections database and downloaded photos of Kidd taken each year at the prisons where he was incarcerated. She was immediately hit with a charge of recognition when the photos from Corcoran came up. Kidd had shaved his head since his previous prison stint. And now she recognized him.

She quickly opened her backpack and pulled out John Hilton’s notebook. She flipped through the pages until she came to the drawing of the black man with the shaved head. She compared the drawing to Elvin Kidd’s photos from Corcoran. They were a match. John Hilton had been murdered in a drug alley controlled by a man he had obviously known and even sketched while at Corcoran State Prison.

After that, she reconfigured her list based on what she now knew about the names on it. She put them into two groups because of the angles from which she had to approach them.

Dennard Dorsey

Nathan Brazil

Elvin Kidd

Maxwell Talis

Brendan Sloan

Ballard was excited. She knew she was making progress. And she knew that the first three interviews, if she got the men to talk to her, would give context to the conversation she hoped to have with Talis, one of the original investigators on the case. She put Sloan in last position because, depending on whether Dorsey spoke with Ballard, he might not even be relevant to her investigation.

Ballard logged out of the system and returned all the case materials to her backpack. She stood up and leaned on the partition to look at Amy Dodd. She had always worried about Amy, who had spent her entire career as a detective working sexual assault cases. Ballard knew it could wear you down, leave you feeling hollow.

“I’m going to go,” Ballard said.

“Good luck,” Amy said.

“Yeah, you too. You all right?”

“I’m good.”

“Good. How are things around here?”

“No controversies lately. Olivas seems to be lying low since he made captain. Plus I heard he’s only got a year left before he plans to cash in and retire. Probably wants things to go smoothly till he’s out. Maybe they’ll even send him out as a deputy chief.”

Olivas was the lieutenant-now-captain who had been in charge of Ballard’s old unit, Homicide Special. He had been the one who drunkenly pushed her up against a wall at a unit holiday party and tried to stick his tongue down her throat. That one moment changed the trajectory of Ballard’s career and barely left a bruise on his. Now he was captain and in charge of all of the Robbery-Homicide Division squads. But she had made her peace with it. She had found new life on the late-show beat. The department brass thought they were exiling her to the dark hours, but what they didn’t know was that they were redeeming her. She had found her place.

Still, knowing Olivas planned to cash out in a year was good intel.

“The sooner the better,” Ballard said. “Take care of yourself, Doddy.”

“You too, Balls.”

11

The Men’s Central jail was on Bauchet Street, a twenty-minute walk from the PAB. But Ballard changed her mind and decided to drive it so she could hit the road after speaking to Dennard Dorsey and move on to the next interview.

She waited in an interview room for twenty minutes before a sheriff’s deputy named Valens brought Dorsey in and sat him at a table across from her. Dorsey had a casualness about himself that indicated he was comfortable in his surroundings. He was far from a wide-eyed first-timer in Men’s Central. He was African-American, with skin so dark that the complete collar of tattoos on his neck was unreadable and looked to Ballard like a set of old bruises. He had a full head of graying hair that was cornrowed and matched a goatee that was so long, it too was braided. His wrists were cuffed behind his back and he had to lean forward slightly in the chair.

According to the records Ballard had pulled up on the computer, Dorsey had turned fifty in jail just a few days earlier, making him just twenty-one at the time of John Hilton’s murder. But the man in front of her looked much older, easily into his sixties. The aging seemed so extreme that at first Ballard thought there had been a mistake and Valens had brought the wrong man into the room.

“You’re Dennard Dorsey?” she asked.

“That’s me,” he said. “What you want?”

“How old are you? Tell me your birth date.”

“March ten, ’sixty-nine. I’m fifty, so what the fuck is this about?”

The date matched and Ballard was finally convinced. She pressed on.

“It’s about John Hilton.”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“You remember. The guy got shot in the alley off Melrose where you used to sell drugs.”

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

“Yes, you do. You talked to your handler at the LAPD about it. Brendan Sloan, remember?”

“Fuck Brendan Sloan, that motherfucker never did jack shit for me.”

“He kept homicide away from you when they wanted to talk to you about John Hilton.”

“Fuck homicide. I never killed nobody.”

Dorsey turned around to see if he could get a guard’s attention through the glass door behind him. He was going to get up and go.

“Stay in your seat, Dennard,” Ballard said. “You’re not going anywhere. Not till we have a conversation.”

“Now why would I have a conversation with you?” Dorsey asked. “I talk to anybody I talk to my lawyer, that’s it.”

“Because right now, I’m talking to you as a possible witness. You bring a lawyer into it, then I’ll be talking to a suspect.”

“I tol’ you, I never killed nobody ever.”

“Then I’ll give you two reasons to talk to me. One, I know your parole officer — the one you never showed up to meet after you got out of Wasco. We’ve worked cases together. You help me here and I’ll go talk to him. Maybe he lifts the VOP and you’re back on the street.”

“What’s the other reason?” Dorsey asked.

Ballard was wearing a brown suit with chalk pinstripes. She reached into an inside pocket of her jacket for a folded document, a prop she had pulled out of the murder book in prep for the interview. She unfolded it and put it down on the table in front of Dorsey. He leaned further forward and down to read it.

“I can’t read this,” he finally said. “They don’t give me glasses in here. What is it?”

“It’s a witness report from the John Hilton murder case from 1990,” Ballard said. “The lead investigator says there that he can’t talk to you because you’re a high-value snitch for the narco unit.”

“That’s bullshit. I ain’t no snitch.”

“Maybe not now, but you were then. Says it right there, Dennard, and you don’t want that piece of paper getting into the wrong hands, you know what I mean? Deputy Valens told me they got you in the Rolling 60s module. How do you think the shot callers in there will react if they see a piece of paper like that floating around?”

“You just messing with me. You can’t do that.”

“You don’t think so? You want to find out? I need you to tell me about that murder from twenty-nine years ago. Tell me what you know and what you remember and then that piece of paper disappears and you don’t have to worry about it ever again.”

“Okay, look, I remember I talked to Sloan about it back then. I tol’ him I wudn’t there that day.”

“And that’s what he told the detectives on the case. But that wasn’t the whole story, Dennard. You know something. A killing like that doesn’t go down without dealers on that street knowing something or hearing something before or after. Tell me what you know.”

“I can’t hardly remember that far back. I done a lotta drugs myself, you know.”

“If you ‘hardly’ remember, that means you remember something. Tell me what you remember.”

“Look, all I know is we was told to get away from that location. Like we thought we had a tip that a bust was coming down or something. So I wudn’t there, man, like I tol’ Sloan back then and tell you now. I didn’t see nothin’, I don’t know nothin’, ’cause I wudn’t there. Period. Now rip up that paper like you said.”

“Is that what you told Sloan, that you were told to clear out?”

“I don’t know. I tol’ him I wudn’t there that day and it was no lie.”

“Okay, who told you to clear out of that alley?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Had to have been a boss, right?”

“I guess maybe. It was a long time ago.”

“Which boss, Dennard? Work with me. We’re almost there.”

“I ain’t working with you. You get me outta here, then I tell you who it was.”

Ballard was not happy that Dorsey was now trying to write the rules of the deal.

“Nah, that isn’t how it works,” she said. “You help me, then I help you.”

“I am helping you,” Dorsey protested.

“No, you’re not. You’re just bullshitting. Tell me who gave the clear-out order and then I talk to your PO. That’s the deal, Dennard. You want it or not? I’m just about out of here. I hate being in jail.”

Dorsey sat quietly for a moment, then nodded his head as though he had convinced himself internally to make the deal.

“I think he dead now anyway,” he said.

“Then giving him up won’t be a problem, will it?” Ballard said. “Who was it?”

“An OG name a Kidd.”

“I want a real name.”

“That was his name.”

“What was his first name?”

“Elvin. Almost like Elvis. Elvin Kidd. He had that alley and he was the boss.”

“Did he tell you to clear out for the day or what?”

“No, he just said like take the day off. We were like already out there and he came up and said you all scram outta here.”

“Who is ‘we’? You and who else were already out there?”

“Me and V-Dog — but that motherfucker dead too. He not going to help you.”

“Okay, well, what was V-Dog’s real name?”

“Vincent. But I don’t know his last name.”

“Vincent Pilkey?”

“I just tol’ you I don’t know. We just work together back then. I don’t know no names.”

Ballard nodded. Her mind was already going back to that alley twenty-nine years ago. A picture was forming of Dorsey and Pilkey running dope in the alley and Elvin Kidd driving in and telling them to clear out.

It made her think Elvin Kidd knew what was going to happen in that alley to John Hilton before it happened.

“Okay, Dennard,” Ballard said. “I’ll call your PO.”

“Talk to him good.”

“That’s the plan.”