The Night Fire

21

Ballard woke with a deep soreness between her shoulder blades and pins and needles in her left foot. She sat up in the tent groaning and found that Lola had decided to sleep with all thirty-five pounds of her body across Ballard’s foot. She pulled her foot free, waking the dog, who looked at her with betrayal in her eyes.

“You crushed my foot,” Ballard said.

She began massaging and working her ankle until the burning feeling started to recede. Once she brought it back to life, she started rolling her shoulders, trying to loosen her back muscles. Before sleeping she had pushed herself on the board, paddling all the way down to the rock jetty at the inlet and then back up, the return being a battle against a strong wind coming down from Malibu.

Lola’s eyes were now expectant and Ballard read the message.

“A short one, Lola. I’ve got work.”

Ballard crawled out of the tent on her knees and looked around. The beach was deserted. Aaron was in the lifeguard stand, slouched so low only the top of his head was visible. Ballard picked the leash up off the sand and Lola heard its metal clip jingle. She shot out of the tent, pushed through Ballard’s legs, and took a seated position in front of her. She looked back over her shoulder at Ballard, ready for the leash to be clipped to her collar.

“Don’t be so pushy. It’s only a short one.”

Ballard put her feet in the sandals she had left outside the tent and they went up toward the boardwalk, where Lola liked to walk and observe the world. Ballard decided to walk north since she had paddled south earlier. They went all the way up to Rose Avenue and then turned around, Lola unsuccessfully tugging against the turn back.

After a half hour it was time for Ballard to get ready. It was almost four and she wanted to get back into the city before the crush of traffic moving east got into full swing. She went to her van, opened a can of food for Lola, and put it in her bowl on the ground in the parking lot. While the dog ate, Ballard looked through the work clothes she had on a hanging bar in the van to make sure she had a clean suit for the night.

After dropping Lola at night care, Ballard avoided the freeways and took surface streets toward Hollywood. She got there by 5:30, parked in the Hollywood Station lot, and changed clothes in the locker room before returning to the parking lot and switching to her city-ride. She then drove to West Hollywood, cruising by the apartment building she believed was the home of Nathan Brazil, John Hilton’s roommate at the time of his murder.

She found parking on Willoughby and walked back to the apartment. There was no security gate, another indication that the building was not a sought-after address. She was able to approach apartment 214 directly and knock. Almost immediately the door was opened by a man with short black hair and a neatly kept beard. Ballard didn’t recognize him from the four-year-old driver’s license photo she had previously pulled up on the computer.

She had unclipped her badge from her belt and was holding it up.

“Mr. Brazil?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I’m Detective Ballard with the LAPD. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Well, what’s it about? This is West Hollywood, not L.A.”

“Yes, I know it is West Hollywood. I’m investigating the murder of John Hilton in Hollywood and I know it’s been a long time but I’d like to ask you about him and about his life back when you lived together.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never lived with anyone named that.”

“You are Nathan Brazil, right?”

“Oh, no. I’m Dennis. Nathan’s my husband — I took his name. But I’m sure he doesn’t know anything about a murder. What was—”

“Is he here?”

“No, he’s at work.”

“Where is work?”

Dennis started getting cagey.

“He works at a restaurant, so you can’t just go barging—”

“He still works at Marix?”

His eyes confirmed this by widening slightly in how-do-you-know-that surprise.

“Do you have a card?” he said. “I’ll have him call you.”

“Or you could just text him now, tell him I’m on my way and to be ready. This is a homicide investigation, Mr. Brazil. We don’t make appointments at people’s convenience. You understand?”

“I guess I do now.”

“Good. Thank you for your time.”

Ballard walked back to her car. Marix was around the corner on Flores and it might have been faster to walk but she wanted to park the city-ride out front as part of her show of authority. If Nathan Brazil had the same attitude as his husband, he might need to be reminded of the power and might of the state.

She parked in the red zone in front of the three-step walk-up to the restaurant. Before she got to the first step, the glass door opened, and a man in his mid-fifties and unsuccessfully fighting baldness stepped out and positioned himself on the top step with his hands on his hips. He wore black jeans, white shirt, black tie, and black apron.

“Table for one cop?”

Sarcasm dripped off his words like melted cheese.

“Mr. Brazil?”

“It’s amazing! You only took thirty years to respond to my call.”

Ballard joined him on the top step.

“What call was that, sir?”

“I wanted to talk about my friend. I called many times and they never came and they never called back because they didn’t give a shit about John.”

Ballard saw a holding area near the front door with bar tables where patrons could drink and congregate while waiting to be seated. It was empty now, too early for a wait for a table. Ballard gestured to the space.

“Can we speak privately over there?”

“Sure, but I have one early bird I need to keep an eye on.”

“No problem.”

They moved into the waiting corral and Brazil positioned himself so that he could see through the glass windows of the restaurant to a table of four men.

“How long have you been working here?” Ballard asked.

“Almost eight years,” Brazil said. “Good people, good food, and I can walk to work.”

“I know it’s good food. I’ve eaten here several times.”

“Is this where you butter me up and then say the case will never be solved?”

“No, it’s not. This is where I tell you I’m going to solve it.”

“Sure.”

“Look, Nathan, I’m not going to lie to you. A lot of time has gone by. John’s parents are dead, one of the original detectives is dead, and the other is retired in Idaho. There are—”

“They never did give a shit anyway. They didn’t care.”

“Is that based on them not returning your calls?”

“More than that, honey. Not that things are all that different now, but back then they weren’t going to jump through hoops for a drug-addicted poof. That’s just the way it was.”

“You mean a gay man?”

“Poof, fag, queer — whatever you want to call us. LAPD didn’t give a shit. Still doesn’t.”

“To me it’s a victim and that’s all I see, okay? I inherited this case because it was lost and then it got found. I’m on it now and it doesn’t matter to me who John Hilton was or what his lifestyle choices were.”

“See, that’s what I mean. That’s the problem. It isn’t a ‘lifestyle.’ And it’s not a ‘choice.’ You’re hetero, right?”

“Yes.”

“Is that a ‘lifestyle choice’ or are you just hetero?”

“I get it. My mistake and I appreciate what you’re saying. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter to me what John was or did. Gay or drug addict or both, he didn’t deserve what happened and I’m interested, no matter what the people before me were. Okay?”

“Okay. But I have to go check on my table now.”

“I’ll wait here.”

Brazil left the area and went into the restaurant. Ballard watched him take another order for margaritas — it was happy hour — then put in the order at the bar at the back of the restaurant. He came back to Ballard a few moments later. She felt they had gotten the ground rules out of the way and Brazil had had a chance to vent. It was time to get down to business.

“Okay, so how long were you living with John before he was killed?”

“Murdered. I prefer ‘murdered’ because that’s what it was.”

“You’re right. It was a murder. How long did you live with him?”

“Eleven months. I remember because it was sort of awkward. We lived in this dump in North Hollywood and it was time to sign a new lease. Neither of us wanted to but we were too lazy to look for something else and think about moving all our shit. Then he got murdered and I couldn’t do the rent on my own. I had to move.”

“It says in the investigation records that he came to the studio where you were working on the night he was murdered.”

“Yes, Archway. I found out later from the guy at the gate.”

“And that was unusual for him to come there?”

“Sort of. Not really.”

This had stood out to Ballard in the murder book chrono — that it was unusual for Hilton to go to Brazil’s workplace. Now she was hearing something different.

“I read a report from the first investigation that had you saying he’d never done that before,” she prompted.

“First of all, I didn’t know this guy who was interviewing me,” Brazil said. “I called him Detective Vitalis — you remember that stuff in the green bottles? And for a while — until they confirmed my alibi — I thought they were going to try to blame me and make it a fag-on-fag crime. So I told him what I told him.”

“Which was a lie?”

“No, not a lie. But it wasn’t everything, you know? I worked for a company that did craft services. You know, brought all the food and snacks and stuff for whatever production we were on. Sometimes we were at the studio and sometimes we were out filming on location, like on the streets somewhere. And I always told John where we would be and he’d come by and I’d sneak him some food, you know? And that’s why he came to the studio that day. He was hungry. He must’ve had no money and wanted something to eat. But giving my name at the guard shack at Archway wouldn’t have worked. It was our first time on that lot and they didn’t know me from Adam.”

Ballard nodded. It was always good to get the fuller story, but sometimes the more you knew, the more you saw conflicts with other information.

“So, if he had no money for food and tried to come to you, how did he have money to go down to that alley to buy drugs?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Brazil said. “Maybe he had something to trade. Maybe he stole something. He did that sort of thing, you know?”

Ballard nodded. It was possible.

“All I know is that if he came to find me it was because he had no money,” Brazil said. “I need to go to the bar.”

While he was gone, Ballard decided to take the interview in other directions when he got back. This time she had to wait a while as Brazil delivered drinks to his one table, then took their food orders and went back to the kitchen.

“You know, I like you,” he said when he returned. “You are not like Detective Vitalis was at all.”

“I assume you mean Detective Talis?” Ballard said. “I had a hard time with him too.”

“No, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t because of his name. He had his hair hard-parted on the side and then very slick and in place. I could smell the Vitalis because that’s what my father always used.”

“Was his name Hunter?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Hunter. I remember because there was a bar on the boulevard back then called The Hunter. Their slogan was ‘Where the hunter meets the hunted.’ Anyway, he was a jerk.”

“He’s dead.”

“Well, he seemed old even back then.”

“Were you and John lovers or just roommates?”

“Oh, so we’re getting personal.”

“Part of the job. Sorry.”

“We were both, you could say. Nothing serious but sometimes things would happen.”

“Did he have anybody else?”

“Oh, yeah, he had his unattainable fantasy. We all do.”

“Who was his?”

“John went to prison, you know. His parents wouldn’t get him a good lawyer and he ended up with a three-year sentence. He fell in love with somebody there who protected him. But that was only there. There are guys who do what they need to do in prison and then on the outside it’s a different story. They go from gay love to gay hate. You see it all the time. It’s self-denial.”

“Did he ever tell you this guy’s name?”

“No. I mean, I don’t remember if he did. It didn’t matter because it was over. His lover got out and went back to straight life.”

“But John hung on to the fantasy?”

“Yeah, the dream. He sat around drawing pictures of the guy.”

“Pictures?”

“The guy posed for him or something in prison and Johnny was a pretty good artist. It was the one thing he could do well. He was drawing all the time. On napkins, loose papers, anything. He kept a notebook of drawings from when he was in prison.”

“Did you ever tell any of this to Detective Vitalis?”

“No, he never called me back after that first interview. When I wasn’t useful to him as a suspect, I wasn’t useful.”

“Is this what you were trying to reach him about? The man in prison?”

“No, I wanted him to call my boss back and say I wasn’t a suspect. I got fired because of what he told them — that I would sneak Johnny food every now and then. He told them and I got fired. They thought I was a suspect, and it wasn’t fair.”

All Ballard could do was nod. She didn’t doubt the story for a moment. Hunter and Talis had put together an incomplete murder book on an incomplete investigation. They had been steered away from the truth or turned away on their own. Either way, it was no surprise that they left other victims and casualties in their path.

“Don’t be like them,” Brazil said.

“I’m not,” she said.

22

Ballard got to the station early for her shift and walked into a detective bureau she had never seen so crowded so late in the day. Several dayside detectives were at their desks, working phones and computers. Something had happened. She saw her boss, Lieutenant McAdams, standing by one of the detectives and reading over his shoulder as he typed on a keyboard.

She walked over.

“L-T, what’s happening?”

McAdams turned around.

“Ballard, what are you doing in so early?”

“Was going to get an early start. I had some leftover paperwork and wanted to get it in before roll call. Never know what will happen after that.”

“Paper on what?”

“Oh, just some follow-up stuff on the crispy critter we had the other night. Arson wanted the photos I took on my phone. And then they never sent me their report. So, I’m asking for that, seeing if they got an ID. What’s going on here?”

“We had some hillbilly decide to rob the cash pickup at the In-N-Out on Sunset. Dipshit takes off and realizes he can’t get out of the parking lot because the drive-through line’s clogging the entrance. He ditches the car and runs up to Hawthorne, where he tries to jack a UPS truck, not knowing the driver’s in the back with the packages. The truck takes off, the guy in the back surprises him, they get into a fight for control, and the truck hits three parked cars.”

“Wow.”

“I’m not done yet. Then this guy jumps out of the truck and is still going, but now he’s got the UPS guy and somebody that was in one of the parked cars running after him. He goes north again, tries to cross Hollywood, and is run over by a TMZ tour bus. You know how much paperwork this has generated, Ballard? I’ve got four guys running OT and two are borrowed from Wilshire. So I hope you weren’t planning to hit me up for a greenie on your crispy critter, are you?”

A greenie was an overtime request card.

“No, L-T. No OT.”

“Good, because this is going to break the bank, this deployment, and we still have eight days to go.”

“Don’t worry. You need me to do anything on it?”

She felt she had to offer even though she wanted no part of the case.

“No, we’ve got it covered,” McAdams said. “You just take care of your crispy critter and whatever else comes up tonight. By the way, nothing on a new partner for you yet, but Captain Dean at Wilshire says they can continue to take care of Hollywood Division on the nights you’re off.”

“Great,” Ballard said. “But I don’t mind working alone, L-T. I’ve got patrol backing me up whenever I need it.”

She turned away and looked for a desk to use. The one she had been using lately was currently occupied by its dayside owner. She picked a spot farthest away from the other detectives’ activity and sat down to work.

Ballard wasn’t sure how she felt about McAdams’s mention of his efforts to team her with a partner. Her last partner had retired four months earlier and had been on an extended bereavement leave before that. All told, Ballard had already been working alone for seven months. Though the job had always entailed two detectives splitting up seven nights, it had been different these last months truly working by herself. There had been moments of sheer terror, but for the most part she liked it better than having to be with a partner or constantly report every move she was making to him. She liked that the watch commander kept only a loose string on her. And her true supervisor, McAdams, never knew what she was up to for sure.

Ballard realized that the story she had spun for McAdams about the crispy critter had an element of truth to it. She had not received a report from the Fire Department arson team on the man who had died in his tent on Cole Avenue. This prevented her from completing her own report.

She found Nuccio’s card in the bottom of her backpack and then opened up her LAPD e-mail account on the desktop computer. She composed and sent Nuccio a message asking for the victim’s ID and official cause of death and any other pertinent details, including whether the homeless man’s next-of-kin had been located and informed of the death. She was not expecting to hear back from Nuccio until at least the next working day. She knew the arson guys were nine to fivers unless they were called out or were running with a case.

But her cell phone rang a minute after she sent the e-mail.

“Ballard, it’s Nuccio.”

“I just sent you an e-mail. I need—”

“I read it. That’s why I’m calling. You can stand down. RHD is taking it.”

“Wait, what?”

“We’re calling it a suspicious death after all and that’s the protocol. Robbery-Homicide Division handles it.”

“What’s suspicious about the death?”

“A few things. First of all, the dead guy has some juice, believe it or not. From a rich family down in San Diego. So that’s going to sharpen the focus on this.”

“What’s his name? Who is he?”

“His name is Edison Banks Jr. and his father had a shipyard or something down there and got rich on Navy contracts. He died last year and this kid in the tent inherited a bundle but probably didn’t know it. Five years ago, his father got tired of his shit, gave him ten grand in cash and kicked him out of the house. He was twenty. The family never heard from him again. I guess he used up the money and has been up here on the streets ever since. There’s a younger brother and now he gets all the dough.”

“And you’re saying that makes this suspicious?”

“No, I’m saying that makes us want to check all of the boxes on this. And in doing that, it got suspicious.”

“How?”

“Two things. One is the autopsy. The blood-alcohol screen was off the chart. Came back with a three-six BAC. That’s like triple the drunk driving limit.”

“More like quadruple. But he wasn’t driving, Nuccio.”

“I know that, but this kid is five-eight, a hundred forty pounds, according to the autopsy. That much booze and he wouldn’t be driving or anything else. He’d be down for the count.”

Ballard didn’t bother schooling Nuccio on how blood-alcohol content was not skewed by body size or weight.

“Doesn’t matter how drunk he was, he still could’ve kicked the heater over in his sleep,” she said.

“Maybe,” Nuccio said. “Except we examined the heater, too. It’s got a float valve that cuts off fuel supply to the flame if the device is more than forty-five degrees off level. It’s a safety feature. So kicking it over actually puts the flame out. It doesn’t start a fire.”

“And you tested it?”

“Several times. And it doesn’t leak. Only way to spill the fuel is to unscrew the cap and turn it on its side. But the cap was screwed on. So, it’s suspicious. This guy’s in the tent passed out, somebody for whatever reason crawls into the tent, unscrews the cap, and dumps out the heating oil, screws it back on and gets the hell out. Then lights a match, throws it in, and whoosh. Poor guy never knew what hit him. That’s the only way it would work and that adds up to suspicious. RHD is taking it by protocol.”

Ballard was silent as she considered what Nuccio had described. She saw it like a movie in her mind.

“Who has it at RHD?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know,” Nuccio said. “I talked to Captain Olivas about it and there’s a big powwow tomorrow at eight. I’ll find out who he assigned it to then.”

Of course, it was Olivas. RHD teams took the big cases. Ballard had been on one of those teams once. Until defending herself against Olivas cost her the job.

“Okay, Nuccio, I’ll see you there tomorrow,” she said.

“What?” Nuccio said. “No. This was informational only. It’s not your case, Ballard. RHD has it, and besides, you don’t even know where the meeting is.”

“I know that you go to RHD. RHD never comes to you. I’ll see you there.”

She disconnected the call. She wasn’t sure she would go to the meeting — it was her goal in life to never be in the same room with Olivas again — but she needed Nuccio to think she was coming. That would rattle him and it would rattle Olivas when he was told. That’s what Ballard wanted.

23

Ballard spent the first hour after roll call trying to get a line on Edison Banks Jr. He had no criminal record and his driver’s license had expired three years earlier and not been renewed. Ballard pulled up the DMV photo and estimated it was taken seven years earlier, when the license was issued. It showed a blond-haired surfer type with thin lips and green eyes. Ballard printed it even though she knew that it would probably be useless in terms of showing it to people who might have known Banks in recent years.

Next, she started working the phone, calling shelters, soup kitchens, and homeless outreach centers in the Hollywood area. There weren’t many of them and not all of them operated twenty-four hours. She was looking for any sort of connection to Banks that she could have in her back pocket if she crashed the RHD meeting in the morning. She didn’t expect to be allowed to stay on the case — that was a given with Olivas the captain in charge — but if she could come up with information that kick-started the investigation or gave it a direction, then her actions on the night of the body’s discovery might not be judged so harshly. She knew that Olivas would take any opportunity to second-guess her decisions, and she was vulnerable to criticism on this one: she had passed off what might have been determined to be a homicide to the LAFD arson squad, and that shouldn’t have happened. She should have been the one to inform RHD, not the Fire Department.

At the end of an hour she had nothing. Banks had apparently steered clear of places where names and photos are taken in exchange for a bed, a hot meal, or a bar of soap. Or he was using an alias. Either way, he had successfully stayed off the grid. It clearly suggested that Banks had been hiding his trail and didn’t want his family to find him.

She grabbed the DMV photo off the printer and a rover from the charging station before heading down the hallway to the watch office. She told Lieutenant Washington that she was going out to conduct a second-level canvass of the area, now that the death had been ruled suspicious.

“Arson deaths go to RHD,” Washington said.

“I know,” Ballard replied. “There’s a meet tomorrow at eight. I just want to finish my report and pass it on. There’s a few people out there we missed the other night and now’s the time to get them. They scatter at sunup.”

Washington asked if she wanted backup and she declined. The presence of uniformed officers would not be conducive to getting information from the denizens of the Hollywood night.

She first cruised around the city park and slowly along Cole to check things out. She saw no activity, except for a few inhabitants of the encampment who were still awake and sitting on the curb or on folding chairs and smoking and drinking by themselves.

At the north end of the park, Ballard saw a group of men sitting under a streetlight. She parked her car across the street from them in front of a prop house and used the rover to call her location in to the watch office. It was a routine practice.

As she got out, she slipped off her suit jacket so the badge on her belt would be readily recognized when she approached the men. Crossing the street, she counted four men sitting together in a small clearing between two tents and a blue tarp lean-to attached to the park’s perimeter fence. One of the men spoke up in a raspy whiskey- and cigarette-cured voice before she got to them.

“Why, that’s the prettiest po-lice officer I think I ever seen.”

The other men laughed and Ballard could tell they weren’t feeling any pain at the moment.

“Evening, fellas,” she said. “Thanks for the compliment. What’s going on tonight?”

“Nothin’,” Raspy said.

“We’s just havin’ an Irish wake for Eddie,” said another, who was wearing a black beret.

A third man raised a short dog bottle of vodka to toast the fallen. “So, you guys knew Edison,” Ballard said. “Yup,” said the fourth man.

He appeared to Ballard to be barely twenty years old, his cheeks hardly holding a stubble.

“Were you guys here the other night?” she asked.

“Yeah, but we didn’t see nothing till it was all over,” said Beret.

“How about before?” Ballard asked. “Did you see Eddie earlier in the night? Was he around?”

“He was around,” Raspy said. “Had himself a fiver and he wouldn’t share none of it.”

“What’s a fiver?”

“A whole fifth of the good stuff.”

Ballard nodded. Judging by the one man’s short dog, she assumed scraping enough change on corners and from passersby to buy a fifth was a rare thing.

“How’d he get the fiver?” she asked.

“He, um, had a guardian angel,” said The Kid.

“Someone bought it for him? Did you see who?”

“Nah, just somebody. It’s what he said. Said somebody gave him the big boy for nothin’. Didn’t have to suck a cock or anything.”

“You remember what it was he was drinking?”

“Yeah, Tito’s.”

“That’s tequila?”

“No, vodka. The good stuff.”

Ballard pointed to the short dog in the other man’s hand.

“Where you guys buy your bottles?”

The man pointed with the bottle down toward Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Mostly over there at Mako’s.”

Ballard knew the place, an all-night market that primarily sold booze, smokes, rolling papers, pipes, and condoms. Ballard had responded to numerous calls there over her years on the late show. It was a place that drew rip-off artists and assaults like a magnet. Consequently, there were cameras inside and outside the business.

“You think that’s where Eddie got his fiver?” she asked.

“Yup,” said The Kid.

“Had to be,” said Short Dog. “Ain’t no other place round here open late.”

“You heard about Eddie having trouble with anybody?” she asked.

“Nah, ever’body like Eddie,” Short Dog said.

“A gentle soul,” Raspy added.

Ballard waited. Nobody volunteered anything about Eddie having trouble.

“Okay, guys, thanks,” Ballard said. “Be safe.”

“Yup,” said The Kid. “Don’t want to end up like Eddie.”

“Hey, Miss Detective,” said Beret. “Why you asking all these questions? Nobody give a shit ’bout Eddie before.”

“They do now. Good night, guys.”

Ballard got back in her car and drove down to Santa Monica Boulevard. She turned right and went down three blocks to a rundown strip shopping plaza, where Mako’s Market was located. The market anchored one end of the plaza and a twenty-four-hour donut shop held down the other end. In between there were two empty businesses, a Subway franchise, and a storefront business that offered one-stop shopping for notary needs, photocopying, and losing weight or quitting cigarettes through hypnosis.

The area patrol car was parked in front of the donut shop, confirming the cliché. Ballard got out of her car and waved her hand palm down, signaling smooth sailing. Behind the wheel of the patrol car, she could see Rollins, one of the officers who had responded to the fatal fire the other night. He flashed his lights in acknowledgment. Ballard assumed his partner was inside the donut shop.

Mako’s was a fortress. The front door had an electronic lock that had to be opened from inside. Once buzzed in, she saw the business was built like a bank in a high-crime neighborhood. The front door led to an anteroom that was ten feet wide and six feet deep. There was nothing in this space except an ATM machine against the wall to the left. Front and center was a stainless-steel counter with a large pass-through drawer and a wall of bulletproof glass rising above it. A steel door with triple locks was to the right of the counter. A man sat on a stool on the other side of the glass. He nodded at Ballard in recognition.

“How’s it going, Marko?” she said.

The man leaned forward, pushed a button, and spoke into a microphone.

“All is okay, Officer,” he said.

Ballard had heard a story about Marko Linkov having ordered the sign out front many years ago and then accepting the misspelled sign that arrived at half price. She didn’t know if it was true.

“You sell Tito’s vodka?” Ballard asked.

“Yes, sure,” Marko said. “Got it in back.”

He started to slip off his stool.

“No, I don’t want any,” Ballard said. “I just want to know. You sell a bottle of it the other night? Monday night?”

Marko thought about it for a moment and slowly nodded.

“Maybe,” he said. “I think so.”

“I need to look at your video,” Ballard said.

Marko got off the stool.

“Sure thing,” he said. “You come in.”

He disappeared to his left and Ballard heard the locks on the steel door being opened. She had expected no pushback on her request, no questions about search warrants or other legalities. Marko depended on the police to keep an eye on his business and to respond to his many calls about belligerent or suspicious customers. He knew that if he expected that kind of service it was a two-way street.

Ballard entered and Marko locked the door behind her. She noticed that in addition to the bolt locks he flipped down a metal burglar bar across the door. He wasn’t taking chances.

He led her past the display shelves to a back room used for storage and as an office. A computer stood on a small crowded desk that was pushed against a wall. A back door led to the alley behind the plaza; it, too, was steel and equipped with two burglar bars.

“Okay, so...,” Marko said.

He didn’t finish. He just opened up a screen that was quartered into four camera views, two outside the front, showing the parking lot and the front door of the shop, a third in the alley showing the back door, and the fourth a camera over the ATM in the front room. Ballard saw the patrol car still positioned outside the donut shop. Marko pointed at it.

“Those are good guys,” he said. “They hang around, watch out for me.”

Ballard still thought the donuts might be the draw but didn’t say so.

“Okay, Monday night,” she said.

Ballard had no idea when Edison Banks Jr. received the bottle of Tito’s his fellow encampment inhabitants saw him with, or how long it would have taken him to consume it. So she asked Marko to start running the playback fast, beginning at dusk on Monday. Every time a customer entered the store he would slow the video to normal speed until Ballard determined that the customer was not purchasing what she was looking for.

Twenty minutes into the playback they got a hit on Tito’s vodka but it wasn’t what Ballard expected: a Mercedes Benz coupe pulled into the lot and parked in front of Mako’s. A woman with long black hair, in stiletto heels and all-black leather pants and jacket, got out and entered the store. Inside, she bought a bottle of Tito’s after first withdrawing cash from the ATM. Mako’s was a cash-only business.

“Is she a regular?” Ballard asked.

“Her, no,” Marko said. “Never seen her. She don’t look like a working girl, you know? They different.”

“Yeah, they don’t drive Mercedes.”

Ballard watched as the woman returned to the car, got in, and drove out of the plaza’s lot, heading west on Santa Monica — the direction away from the city park where Edison Banks Jr. would burn to death about four hours later. Ballard committed the car’s license plate number to memory, which was easy because it was a California vanity plate — 14U24ME.

“What is that?” Marko said.

“One for you, two for me,” Ballard said.

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Whose ATM is that?”

“It’s mine,” Marko said. “I mean, it’s a company that has them but they pay me to have it there. I get a cut, you know? It makes me good money because people need the cash when they come in here.”

“Right. Can you get records?”

“What records?”

“Of the withdrawals. Like if I wanted to know who she was.”

“Mmm, I don’t know. You might have to have the legal paper for that. Not my company, you see.”

“A search warrant. Okay.”

“I mean, if it was up to me, I give you, you know? I always help police. But this guy might not be the same.”

“I understand. I have her plate number. I can get it with that.”

“Okay. Keep going?”

He pointed to the computer screen.

“Yes, keep going,” Ballard said. “We’re not even halfway through the night.”

A few minutes later in real time and an hour later on the video playback, Ballard saw something that caught her eye. A man in ragged clothes pushed a shopping cart full of bottles and cans up to Mako’s, parked it on the sidewalk, and then buzzed to be allowed entrance. He came in and dumped enough change and crumpled bills into the pass-through drawer to purchase a forty-ounce bottle of Old English malt liquor. He then left the store and returned to his cart, securing the full bottle among the bottles and cans he had collected, and started pushing his way out of the lot. He headed east on Santa Monica and Ballard thought she recognized him as one of the onlookers from Monday night after the fire.

It gave her a new idea.

She decided to go find the man who collected the bottles.

24

Ballard caught a call just before end of shift that pulled her away from finishing her report for the RHD meeting on Banks and pushed her into unpaid overtime. It was a he said/he said case on Citrus just south of Fountain. Patrol called her out to referee a violent domestic dispute between two men who shared a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment and had fought over who got to use the shower first before work. They had been drinking and drugging most of the night and the fight began when one of the men took the last clean towel and locked himself in the bathroom. The second man objected and kicked the door open, hitting the first in the face and breaking his nose. The fight then ranged through the small apartment and woke other residents in the building. By the time the police arrived after multiple 911 calls, both men were showing injuries from the altercation and neither was going to work.

The two patrol officers who responded wanted to pass the decision-making off to a detective so they would avoid any future blowback from the case. Ballard arrived and talked to the officers, then to both parties involved. She guessed that the fight wasn’t really about a clean towel or the shower but was symptomatic of problems in the men’s relationship, whatever that was. Nevertheless, she chose to bag them both, out of protection for them and herself. Domestic disputes were tricky. Calming anger, settling nerves, and then simply backing away might seem to be the most judicious path, but if an hour or a week or a year later the same relationship ends in a killing, the neighbors talk to the news cameras and say the police came out before and did nothing. Better safe now than sorry later. That was the rule and that was why the patrol officers wanted no part of the decision.

Ballard arrested both men and had them transported separately to Hollywood Division jail, where they would be held in adjoining cells. The paperwork involved in booking the two, plus Ballard’s need to prepare other documents, pushed her past seven a.m. and the end of shift.

After filing the necessary arrest reports, Ballard took her city car downtown and parked on First Street in front of the PAB. There was no parking there but she was late and her hope was that any traffic officer would recognize the vehicle as a detective ride and leave it unticketed. Besides, she didn’t expect to be inside long.

She hooked her backpack over one shoulder and carried a brown paper evidence bag with her. On the fifth floor she entered the Robbery-Homicide Division, realizing that it was the first time she had been back since she involuntarily transferred to Hollywood Division’s late show. She scanned the vast room, starting with the captain’s office in the back corner. She saw through the glass wall that it was empty. There was no other sign of him — or of Nuccio and Spellman — so she proceeded to the War Room. On the door she saw that the sliding sign was moved to IN USE and knew she had found her party. She knocked once and entered.

The War Room was a 12 x 30 repurposed storage room that held a boardroom-style table and had whiteboards and flat screens on its walls. It was used on task force cases, for meetings involving multiple investigators, or for sensitive cases that should not be discussed in the open squad room.

Captain Robert Olivas was sitting at the head of the long table. To his left were Nuccio and Spellman. To his right were two detectives Ballard recognized as Drucker and Ferlita, both longtime RHD bulls who specialized in burn cases. Drucker had been on the squad so long his nickname was “Scrapyard” because he had replaced two knees, a hip, and a shoulder over time.

“Detective Ballard,” Olivas said, his tone even and not projecting any of the enmity she knew he still carried for her.

“Captain,” Ballard said, just as evenly.

“Investigator Nuccio told me you might be joining. But I think we have things in hand here and you’re not going to be needed on this.”

“That’s good, because I’m parked out front in a red zone. But before I leave, I thought you might want to see and hear some of the evidence I’ve collected.”

“Evidence, Detective? I was told you left the scene Monday night as soon as you could.”

“Not quite like that, but I did leave once the Fire Department said they had things in hand and would contact RHD if anything changed.”

She was telling Olivas what her stand would be should he try to raise issues with how she handled the original call. She also guessed that Nuccio and Spellman would not be a problem because they were smart enough not to get in the middle of a police department squabble.

Olivas, a taciturn man with a wide girth, seemed to decide that this one wasn’t worth it. It was part of that smooth sailing Amy Dodd had mentioned: Olivas wanted no waves in his final year. Ballard knew this would play well with her real plan for the meeting.

“What have you got?” Olivas asked. “We’re not even sure we have a homicide here.”

“And that’s why you guys down here get the big bucks, right?” Ballard said. “You get to figure it out.”

Olivas was finished with the introductory pleasantries.

“Like I said, what have you got, Ballard?”

Now his tone was slipping. Condescension and dislike were taking over. Ballard put the evidence bag on the table.

“I’ve got this for starters,” she said. “An empty fifth of Tito’s vodka.”

“And how does that fit into this?” Olivas asked.

Ballard pointed to Nuccio.

“Inspector Nuccio told me yesterday that the victim’s blood-alcohol content was measured at three-six at the coroner’s. That takes a lot of alcohol. I spoke to some of the homeless men who knew the victim and they said that on Monday night Banks was drinking a fifth of Tito’s that he wasn’t sharing. They said somebody — ‘a guardian angel’ — gave it to him. I recovered the bottle from another homeless man who camps on the same sidewalk and collects bottles and cans for recycling. Chain of custody is for shit but he felt pretty sure he picked up the bottle after Banks chugged the vodka. I figure you might want to take it to latent prints. If you get prints from Banks, it confirms the story. But you might also get the prints of the ‘guardian angel,’ and that’s somebody you want to talk to. That is, if somebody helped get him drunk so they could light him on fire.”

Olivas digested that for a few moments before responding.

“Did anybody see this ‘guardian angel’?” he asked. “Are we talking man, woman, what?”

“Not the guys I talked to,” Ballard said. “But I went down the street to Mako’s and they have video of a woman in a Mercedes pulling up and buying a bottle of Tito’s about four hours before Banks got burned. That may just be a coincidence but I’ll leave that to you guys to figure out.”

Olivas looked at his men.

“It’s thin,” he said. “The whole thing is thin. You men take the bottle and anything else Ballard has. We need to pick up the heater and do our own testing on that. We’re going to withhold determination of death until we know what’s what. Ballard, you can go. You’re off duty now anyway, right?”

“I am,” Ballard said. “And I’m out of here. You guys let me know if you need me to go back to the scene for anything tonight.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Olivas said. “We’ll handle it from here.”

“I just need you to sign off on a summary report on the recovery of the bottle,” Ballard said. “So there’s a record of chain of custody and no confusion down the line should the bottle of Tito’s be significant.”

“And to make sure you get the credit,” Olivas said.

It was not a question and Ballard was pleased with how Olivas took it.

“We all want proper credit for what we do, don’t we?” she said.

“Whatever,” Olivas said. “You write it up and I’ll sign it.”

Ballard unzipped her backpack and removed a file containing two copies of a two-page document. The front page was taken up by a detailed summary of the bottle’s origin and the second was the signing page bearing only Olivas’s name and rank below a signature line. She placed the documents on the table.

“One for you and one for me,” she said.

Olivas signed both documents. Ballard took one and left the other on the table. She put her copy back in its folder and returned it to her backpack.

Ballard threw a mock salute at Olivas, then turned and left the room. On her way out of RHD, she tried to calm herself and control her emotions. It was difficult. Olivas would always be able to get to her. She knew that. He had taken something from her, as other men had in the past. But the others had paid in one way or another: come-uppance... revenge... justice — whatever the term. But not Olivas. Not so far. At best he had been left with a temporary blemish on his reputation that was gone soon enough. Ballard knew she could outwit and out-investigate him all she wanted, but he would still always have that unnameable thing he had taken from her.

25

After leaving RHD, Ballard went down the hall to the Special Assault Section again. This time Amy Dodd was not in her cubicle, but the station next to it still seemed to be unused. Ballard sat down and logged into the department’s computer. She blew out a deep breath and tried to relax now that she was away from her tormentor. She was actually finished for the day, but anxiety was seizing her because of Olivas and what seeing him brought up in her. She had just given up one case and wanted to get back to the other. To keep things moving forward.

She opened her notebook next to the computer and found the page where she had written down the intel she had gathered on Elvin Kidd. She had both the cell number and the landline associated with his business. Connecting to Nexis/Lexis, she ran a search on the numbers and got the service providers, a requirement for a wiretap search warrant. Once she had that, she opened a template for a search warrant application requesting approval of audio surveillance on both phone numbers.

Seeking a wiretap approval was a complicated and difficult process because listening in on personal phone calls starkly conflicted with Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. The probable cause for such an intrusion had to be complete, airtight, and desperate. Complete and airtight because the writer had to lay out in the probable cause statement that the threshold of criminal activity by the target of the surveillance had been easily passed. Desperate because the investigator must also make a convincing argument for the wiretap being the only alternative for advancing the case against the intended target. A wiretap was supposed to be a last-resort measure, and so required a detective to get the written approval of the department. It had to be signed off on by a high-ranking supervisor — like a captain or higher.

It took Ballard an hour to write a seven-page probable cause document that was half boilerplate legalese and half an outline of the case against Kidd. It leaned heavily on information from an LAPD-certified informant named Dennard Dorsey and stated that the wiretap was a last-resort measure because the case was twenty-nine years old and witnesses had died, had faded memories, or could not be located. The document did not mention that Dorsey had not been an active informant in more than a decade or that Kidd had not been active in the Rolling 60s Crips gang for even longer.

As Ballard was proofing the statement on the screen, Amy Dodd arrived at her cubicle.

“Well, this is getting to be a regular thing,” she said.

Ballard looked up at her. Dodd looked tired, as though she’d worked a long night on a case. Ballard once again was hit with concern.

“Just in time,” she said. “What’s the printer code for this unit?”

Dodd said she had to look it up. She sat down at her desk, logged in, then read the unit’s printer ID off her screen. Ballard sent the probable cause document to be printed.

“So what’s up?” Dodd said from the other side of the partition. “You moving in over there?”

“Writing a search warrant,” Ballard said. “I have to take it over to Judge Thornton before he starts court.”

“Wiretap?”

“Yeah. Two lines.”

Judge Billy Thornton was the Superior Court’s wiretap judge, meaning all search warrants for phone surveillance went through him for approval. He also ran a very busy courtroom that usually convened by ten each morning.

Following instructions from Dodd, Ballard went to a break area at the rear of the squad room to fish her document out of the printer. She then came back to her borrowed desk and pulled from her back-pack the same file folder she had produced during the War Room meeting with Olivas. She attached the signature page from the chain-of-custody document to the back of the search warrant application and was ready to go.

“I’m out of here,” she announced. “You ever want to get together after work, I’m here, Amy. At least until the late show starts.”

“Thanks,” Dodd said, seeming to pick up on Ballard’s worry. “I might take you up on that.”

Ballard took the elevator down and then crossed the front plaza toward her car. She checked the windshield and saw no ticket. She decided to double down on her luck and leave the car there. The courthouse was only a block away on Temple; if she was fast and Judge Thornton had not convened court, she could be back to the car in less than a half hour. She quickened her pace.

Judge Billy Thornton was a well-regarded mainstay in the local criminal justice system. He had served both as a public defender and as a deputy district attorney in his early years, before being elected to the bench and holding the position in Department 107 of the Los Angeles Superior Court for more than a quarter century. He had a folksy manner in the courtroom that concealed a sharp legal mind — one reason the presiding judge assigned wiretap search warrants to him. His full name was Clarence William Thornton but he preferred Billy, and his bailiff called it out every time he entered the courtroom: “The Honorable Billy Thornton presiding.”

Thanks to the inordinately long wait for an elevator in the fifty-year-old courthouse, Ballard did not get to Department 107 until ten minutes before ten a.m., and she saw that court was about to convene. A man in blue county jail scrubs was at the defense table with his suited attorney sitting next to him. A prosecutor Ballard recognized but could not remember by name was at the other table. They appeared ready to go and the only party missing was the judge on the bench. Ballard pulled back her jacket so the badge on her belt could be seen by the courtroom deputy and went through the gate. She moved around the attorney tables and went to the clerk’s station to the right of the judge’s bench. A man with a fraying shirt collar looked up at her. The nameplate on his desk said ADAM TRAINOR.

“Hi,” Ballard whispered, feigning breathlessness so Trainor would think she had run up the nine flights of steps and take pity. “Is there any chance I can get in to see the judge about a wiretap warrant before he starts court?”

“Oh, boy, we’re just waiting on the last juror to get here before starting,” Trainor said. “You might have to come back at the lunch break.”

“Can you please just ask him? The warrant’s only seven pages and most of it’s boilerplate stuff he’s read a million times. It won’t take him long.”

“Let me see. What’s your name and department?”

“Renée Ballard, LAPD. I’m working a cold case homicide. And there is a time element on this.”

Trainor picked up his phone, punched a button, and swiveled on his chair so his back was to Ballard and she would have difficulty hearing the phone call. It didn’t matter because it was over in twenty seconds and Ballard expected the answer was no as Trainor swiveled toward her.

But she was wrong.

“You can go back,” Trainor said. “He’s in his chambers. He’s got about ten minutes. The missing juror just called from the garage.”

“Not with those elevators,” Ballard said.

Trainor opened a half door in the cubicle that allowed Ballard access to the rear door of the courtroom. She walked through a file room and then into a hallway. She had been in judicial chambers on other cases before and knew that this hallway led to a line of offices assigned to the criminal-court judges. She didn’t know whether to go right or left until she heard a voice say, “Back here.”

It was to the left. She found an open door and saw Judge Billy Thornton standing next to a desk, pulling on his black robe for court.

“Come in,” he said.

Ballard entered. His chambers were just like the others she had been in. A desk area and a sitting area surrounded on three sides by shelves containing legal volumes in leather bindings. She assumed it was all for show, since everything was on databases now.

“A cold case, huh?” Thornton said. “How old?”

Ballard spoke as she opened her backpack and pulled out the file.

“Nineteen-ninety,” she said. “We have a suspect and want to stimulate a wire, get him talking about the case.”

She handed the file to Thornton, who took it behind his desk and sat down. He read through the pages without taking them out of the folder.

“My clerk said there is a time element?” he said.

Ballard wasn’t expecting that.

“Uh, well, he’s a gang member and we’ve talked to some others in the gang about the case,” she said, improvising all the way. “It could get back to him before we have a chance to go in and stir things up, get him talking on the phone.”

Thornton continued reading. Ballard noticed a black-and-white photo of a jazz musician framed on the wall next to the coatrack, where a judge’s spare robe hung. Thornton spoke as he appeared to be reading the third page of the document.

“I take wiretap requests very seriously,” he said. “It’s the ultimate intrusion, listening to somebody’s private conversations.”

Ballard wasn’t sure if she was supposed to respond. She thought maybe Thornton was speaking rhetorically. She answered anyway in a nervous voice.

“We do, too,” she said. “We think this is our best chance of clearing the case — that if prompted, he’ll check in with his gang associates and admissions of culpability might be made.”

She was quoting the document Thornton was reading. He nodded while keeping his eyes down.

“And you want text messaging on the cell phone,” he said.

“Yes, sir, we do,” Ballard said.

When he got to the sixth page she saw him shake his head once and she began to think he was going to reject the application.

“You say this guy was high up in the gang,” Thornton said. “Even back at the time of the killing he was high up. You think he did the actual killing?”

“Uh, we do, yes,” Ballard said. “He was in a position to order it done, but because of the possible embarrassment of the situation, we think he did it himself.”

She hoped the judge wouldn’t ask who “we” constituted, since she was working the case alone at this point. Bosch was out of the department, so he didn’t count.

He got to the last page of text, where Ballard knew she was grabbing at straws in support of probable cause.

“This sketchbook mentioned here,” the judge said. “Do you have that with you?”

“Yes, sir,” Ballard said.

“Let me take a look at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ballard reached into her backpack, pulled out John Hilton’s prison sketchbook, and handed it across the desk to Thornton.

“The sketch referred to in the warrant is marked with the Post-it,” she said.

She had marked only one drawing because the second drawing was not as clearly recognizable as Kidd. Thornton leafed through the book rather than going directly to the marker. When he finally got there, he studied the full-page drawing for a long moment.

“And you say this is Kidd?” he asked.

“Yes, Your Honor. I have photos of him from that time — mug shots — if you want to see them.”

“Yeah, let me take a look.”

Ballard returned to the backpack while the judge continued.

“My concern is that you’re making a subjective conclusion that, first, this drawing is of Kidd and, second, that the drawing implies some sort of prison romance.”

Ballard opened her laptop and pulled up the photos of Kidd taken while he was in Corcoran. She turned the screen to the judge. He leaned in to look closely at the photos.

“You want me to enlarge them?” Ballard asked.

“That’s not necessary,” the judge said. “I concede that that is Mr. Kidd. What about the romantic relationship? You don’t have proof of that, other than to say you can see it in this drawing. Hilton might have just been a good artist.”

“I see it in the drawing,” Ballard said, maintaining her ground. “Plus you have the victim’s roommate confirming that he was gay and that he was fixated on someone. You have the fact that Hilton was murdered in an alley controlled by Kidd at a time when Kidd had cleared out all other gang members. I believe that Hilton was in love with him and what happens in prison stays in prison. Kidd could not have exposure of the relationship undermine his position of authority in the gang. I think it’s there, Your Honor.”

“I decide that, don’t I?” Thornton said.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Well, your theory is there,” Thornton said. “Some of it is supported by probable cause, but as I say, some is assumption, even conjecture.”

Ballard didn’t respond. She felt like a student being chewed out after school by her teacher. She knew she was going down in flames. Thornton was going to say she didn’t have it, to come back when the probable cause was on solid footing. She watched him flip up the last page to the signature line with Olivas’s name on it.

“You’re working for Captain Olivas on this?” he asked.

“He’s in charge of cold cases,” Ballard said.

“And he signed off on this?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ballard suddenly felt ill — sick to her stomach. She realized that her deception had sent her down a bad path. She was lying to a superior-court judge. Her enmity for Olivas had led her to carry her subterfuge to a person she had only respect for. She now regretted ever taking the murder book from Bosch.

“Well,” Thornton said. “I have to assume he knows what he’s doing. I worked cases with him as a prosecutor twenty-five years ago. He knew what he was doing then.”

“Yes, sir,” Ballard said.

“But I’ve heard rumors about him. Call it his management style.”

Ballard said nothing and Thornton must have realized she wasn’t biting on the bait he had thrown into the water. He moved on.

“You’re asking for a seven-day wire here,” he said. “I’m going to give you seventy-two hours. If you don’t have anything by then, I want you off the lines. Shut it down. You understand, Detective?”

“Yes, sir. Seventy-two hours. Thank you.”

Thornton went through the process of signing the order she would give to the service providers on Kidd’s phones. Ballard wanted him to hurry so she could get out of there before he changed his mind. She was staring at the photo of the musician on the wall but not really seeing it as she thought about the next steps she would take.

“You know who that is?” the judge asked.

Ballard came out of the reverie.

“Uh, no,” she said. “I was just wondering.”

“The Brute and the Beautiful — that’s what they called him,” Thornton said. “Ben Webster. He could make you cry when he played the tenor sax. But when he drank he got mean. He got violent. I see that story all the time in my courtroom.”

Ballard just nodded. Thornton handed her the documents.

“Here’s your search warrant,” he said.