The Waiting

51

Her hair still wet from a morning surf at Trancas, Ballard entered the unit at Ahmanson, Starbucks cup in her hand. She expected to see Colleen Hatteras in place at the raft, but instead she saw Maddie Bosch.

“Maddie, what are you doing here?” she said. “It’s Friday. You have a shift tonight.”

Maddie looked up from her screen.

“I know, but I had to come in,” she said. “We already got results from the FFI and it’s a match. No qualifiers, no percentages. It’s a confirmed match. The woman in Thawyer’s photos is Elizabeth Short.”

Ballard put her cup and computer bag on her desk and walked around to Maddie’s station.

“Show me what you’ve got,” she said.

Maddie pushed her screen back so Ballard, who was standing, had a good angle on it. There was a document on the screen with letterhead from the Film Forensics Institute. It was addressed to Officer Madeline Bosch. It stated that Cameriere ear analysis between the photos submitted confirmed a match. It was the same woman in each photo. The letter said that two technicians, Paul Buckley and James Camp, conducted independent analyses of the photos and came to the same conclusion and that both techs were qualified experts who would be available to testify in court about their findings.

“Okay, this is good,” Ballard said.

“Who do we submit to?” Maddie asked. “Plovc, or do we go right to the DA with it?”

“We start with Carol. We need to stay in our lane. If it goes across the street to the DA again, she has to take it over.”

“Okay.”

“Send that to me and I’ll send it and follow with a call. I want it in front of them today.”

Ballard looked around to check the raft once more. There was no one else in yet, not even Hatteras.

“You haven’t seen Colleen, have you?” she asked.

“Not since yesterday,” Maddie said. “You need me to do something?”

“No, it’s just that she’s usually here.”

“She’s probably at home sulking because you’re so mean to her.”

“Really? You think I’m mean to her?”

Maddie smiled. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “She just gets too in-your-face, you know what I mean?”

“Of course I do,” Ballard said. “That’s why I’m so mean to her.”

Maddie laughed and then got serious.

“Will you let me know how Plovc or anybody in the DA’s office responds to the ear match?”

“As soon as I know something.”

“I might go, then. I have to do some stuff and I want to work out before I go in.”

“Then get out of here. And thank you for sticking with this. We’ll see what happens.”

“They’d better sign off on it. We fucking solved it.”

“We did. You did. But we’ll see whether they can see the light. I’ll call when I know.”

“Thanks.”

Ballard headed to her desk. She opened her email to retrieve the FFI letter Maddie had just sent. She then composed a new message addressed to Carol Plovc.

Maddie came by her desk on her way out.

“I forgot to tell you,” she said. “I was talking to my dad last night and he said Captain Gandle called him up out of the blue.”

“Really?” Ballard said. “Why?”

“I think to see what he thought of me volunteering for the unit. But then Gandle asked about you.”

“Me? Why?”

“I guess to see if you were doing okay with, you know, the pressures of the job. Anyway, he said to tell you that Gandle called but that everything is fine.”

“Well, okay, I guess. Thanks.”

“So, I’m heading out.”

“Okay. As soon as I hear something I’ll call you.”

Ballard watched her go. She knew what Harry’s real message was: He had backed Ballard’s story when Gandle called. Her only disappointment was that the captain had called Bosch to check the story out, which meant she had not entirely convinced him earlier. At least the whole badge caper was behind her now and she could concentrate on the cases in front of her.

She finished the email to Carol Plovc explaining the new analysis. She sent it with the letter from FFI attached.

Ballard had another reason for urgently wanting to officially clear the Black Dahlia case. She knew that if they cleared L.A.’s greatest mystery, the credit would rightly go to Maddie Bosch and that would make it politically difficult, if not impossible, for Gandle to have her cut from the Open-Unsolved Unit. Ballard wanted it done through official channels, with Captain Gandle agreeing to rescind his order and keep her on. She also knew that if the DA’s office failed to sign off on the clearance again, there were other ways to keep Maddie on the team.

Ballard took her mug upstairs to get a second cup of coffee. When she returned, she again expected to see Hatteras at her screen, but the raft was empty. She stepped down the aisle next to the archives and looked into each row of shelved murder books. No Colleen.

As much as Hatteras’s nearly constant presence in the office annoyed her, Ballard realized that the room didn’t feel quite the same without her. Ballard had explicitly told Colleen to take time off, and now that she had, Ballard had to acknowledge that she sort of missed her relentless hovering and questioning. She sat down, put her coffee to the side, and sent an email to Hatteras asking if she had determined whether Andrew Bennett had any open houses in Laguna Beach over the weekend. She ended the message with a suggestion that they could both ride down and get a look at him, and maybe they’d get lucky and surreptitiously capture a DNA sample as well. As she wrote it, she wasn’t sure if the offer was merely to bait Hatteras into responding or a real offer to take her into the field.

She sent the email, sure it would elicit a quick response. While she waited, she opened a Word document and finally started to write the overdue summary report on the trip to Las Vegas. This took over an hour because of the distraction of phone calls from Masser and Laffont, who were checking in to see what was happening with the Black Dahlia and Pillowcase Rapist cases and asking if she needed them to come in before the weekend started. After updating them, Ballard told them they didn’t have to come in until the usual Monday team meeting.

It was almost noon by the time Ballard sent the report to Captain Gandle. Hatteras had still not called or responded to the email, and Ballard wondered if her feelings were still hurt by the way Ballard had dismissed her the day before.

She decided to extend an olive branch if that was the case and called Colleen’s cell. It immediately went to voicemail. Ballard hesitated but left a message.

“Colleen, it’s Renée. I’m at the office today and just wanted to see if you’re interested in going down to Laguna to get a look at Andrew Bennett. Undercover, of course. If he’s having an open house, we could go there, but even if he’s not, we could still look up one of his listings and make an appointment to see it. So give me a call and we’ll see what we can set up.”

She disconnected, knowing that the word undercover was an enticement Hatteras wouldn’t be able to resist.

Ballard had skipped breakfast to surf and was now famished. She left the office and drove over to the Melody on Sepulveda. She knew one of their hamburgers would power her through the day and well into the night. Since her return to red meat, she went to the Melody often. The place had been around since 1952 and had been through many transformations as the nearby airport expanded and its runways got closer and closer. Now the jets came screaming in directly overhead, but with its good food and drink and live music at night, the Melody had a loyal clientele.

Ballard ate her hamburger at the bar that ran down the center of the room. She kept her phone face up next to her plate so she wouldn’t miss a call from Hatteras while a plane passed overhead.

By the time she finished there still had been no call, and her concern about Hatteras was building. She wondered if she had subconsciously chosen the Melody because it was just on the other side of the airport from El Segundo, where she knew Hatteras lived.

Ballard went out the back door to her car. Once inside she opened her laptop and pulled up the file that contained all the applications submitted by current members of the Open-Unsolved Unit. She plugged the home address Hatteras had put on her form into the car’s GPS.

It took her fifteen minutes to cross the airport on Sepulveda and make it to Mariposa Avenue in El Segundo. She pulled into the driveway of a small ranch house with pale yellow walls and rust-colored shutters. She had never been to Colleen’s home before and there was something intriguing about seeing how one of her unit’s members lived.

There was a double-wide garage with the door up. Colleen’s Prius was in there. The other space was filled with storage boxes, bicycles, and a lawn mower. Ballard could see that the door leading from the garage into the house appeared to be ajar. Her curiosity turned to alarm.

Ballard got out of her car and approached the garage. She pulled her phone and called Colleen once more. She did not hear a ringtone coming from inside the house. The call again went immediately to voicemail.

She entered the garage, and as she approached the door to the house, she called out loudly, “Colleen? It’s Renée. Are you home?”

No answer.

Ballard opened the door all the way. She saw that it led into the kitchen. She called out once again:

“Colleen Hatteras, are you home?”

Ballard entered the house. The kitchen was neat, the counters clear, with only a rinsed plate and fork in the sink. There was a door to Ballard’s left that led to a dining room, and a doorway straight ahead past the refrigerator that led to what looked like a TV room. Ballard went in that direction, scooping her right hand under her jacket and unsnapping the safety strap on her holster. She gripped her gun without pulling it free.

She entered the TV room and found it neat and orderly as well. A flat-screen on the wall was off. On the coffee table, two remotes were lined up next to each other. At the end of the room were doorways on the right and left. Ballard looked through the left opening and saw an empty living room that connected through an archway to the dining room. To the right, the doorway led to a corridor.

“Colleen? It’s Renée.”

No answer. There was a closed door on her left, and on the right were several open doors to what were presumably bedrooms, closets, and bathrooms. She checked the room to her left first, opening the door and finding what had been a bedroom converted to an office.

She entered and saw a large computer screen that matched what Hatteras had at Ahmanson. It was set up on a desk that was part of a built-in shelving and cabinet system entirely covering two walls. Ballard recognized the room even though she had never been to this house. She had seen the workstation in Facebook videos when she was vetting Hatteras’s application to be part of the unit. Colleen had been involved in online sleuthing long before volunteering for the Open-Unsolved Unit. She had even been an integral part of a group that identified a previously unknown serial killer by connecting aspects of murders committed in seven different states. Her work on that case had been the clincher and Ballard had offered Hatteras a position as her volunteer IGG expert.

Closed cabinet doors lined the lower sections of the built-in, with shelving above. The shelves were stocked with books, manuals, DVDs, framed photos of her daughters, and other family keepsakes and knickknacks. On a third wall next to the only window was a framed poster of a Matt Damon movie called Hereafter. The fourth wall was dominated by the closed louvered doors of a closet.

Ballard stepped over to the built-in workstation and saw an outline of dust delineating the space where a desktop computer had been.

She turned to the closet. Ballard was now on high alert and looked at the embedded finger pulls of the sliding doors. She wanted to open the closet but was thinking about fingerprints. She turned back to the desk and took a pencil out of a clay mug obviously made by a child. Sloppily painted on it was World’s Best Mom. She turned to the closet again, pushed the pencil between two of the louvered slats, and slid the door open.

The body of Colleen Hatteras was slumped on the floor of the closet. An electric cord connected to a computer mouse was tied tightly around her neck. Her eyes were open and bulging. She was wearing a long sleep shirt with a faded design on it. There was lividity discoloration on her legs, and Ballard could tell she had been dead for hours.

Ballard dropped to her knees.

“Colleen, no, no, no,” she whispered.

Ballard tried to compose herself. She knew she needed to clear the rest of the house. She stood up, pulled her weapon free, left the room, and proceeded quickly down the hallway door by door until she confirmed the house was empty and that whoever had killed Colleen was gone.

In the hall, Ballard holstered her weapon, pulled her phone, and called the LAPD comm center; she identified herself and requested that a homicide team from West Bureau meet her at the address in El Segundo. She then disconnected and opened her text app. There was a text chain she used for sending messages to everyone on the Open-Unsolved team at once. She typed out an urgent message to all of them.

She put away the phone, took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, and reentered the home office. Keeping her back to the closet, she started looking for anything that might tell her what had drawn death to Colleen Hatteras’s door.

52

The two detectives from West Bureau assigned to the murder of Colleen Hatteras were Charlotte Goring and Winston Dubose. Ballard knew Goring slightly from a loosely affiliated group of the department’s female homicide cops that met irregularly at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood, usually when one had just had a major misogynistic encounter with the patriarchy and needed a therapeutic sharing session or legal advice. Ballard and Goring had both been in that spot and shared but had never worked a case together. The fact was that Ballard had no idea whether Goring or Dubose, whom she didn’t know at all, were good at their jobs.

Ballard sat in her Defender outside the house while the detectives took their first survey of the crime scene with the criminalists and the coroner’s investigators. As she waited, she took calls from every member of her unit, all of them stunned by the news and asking questions Ballard could not yet answer. Who killed Colleen and why? Most of them said they wanted to come to the scene, but Ballard dissuaded them, saying it would only complicate things. She did tell each to expect a call from the investigators, who would likely be looking for any possible reason for Colleen’s murder and would surely want to question her colleagues.

The last to call was Maddie Bosch, and after that conversation, Ballard was left to wait with dark thoughts crashing in on her about her own possible culpability. Hatteras had been a volunteer who gave her all to the unit. Had Ballard not trained her well enough? Had Colleen made a mistake that Ballard missed and that had cost her her life? Had Ballard, through her own actions, somehow caused this?

Ballard knew that the death of a volunteer in Open-Unsolved guaranteed an internal review of the entire unit and the department’s decision two years earlier to follow the law enforcement trend of using non-cop volunteers in cold-case squads. The conclusion would obviously be that it had been a mistake. Ballard knew that the whole operation could be shut down because of this. But those thoughts were secondary to the pitiful image of Colleen slumped in the closet. She could not get it out of her head.

Her phone buzzed and she saw that the call was from Captain Gandle.

“Captain.”

“Renée, I just got your message. I’m in the car and I’m coming out.”

“Uh, okay.”

“West Bureau is handling it for now, but I want to be there. This is going to be a shitshow. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Have you talked to the detectives yet?”

“Just briefly when they arrived. They’re in the house. They told me to wait in my car.”

“Good. That’s good. I informed the chief’s adjutant. I haven’t heard back. But this is going to be a shitshow. I guarantee that.”

“Yes, you said that.”

“Any idea what she was doing?”

Ballard hesitated for a moment. The question raised the dark thoughts again.

“Well, yeah,” Ballard said. “She was working for me.”

“I know that, Ballard,” Gandle said. “But what exactly was she working on?”

“She was on the Pillowcase Rapist case. We all were. I told you. We’re looking at four different persons of interest. But none of them knew it except maybe the guy in Vegas, and he wouldn’t have done this. Not after we were just there.”

“Could it have been something else? Something that had nothing to do with your unit or its cases?”

“Anything is possible at the moment, I guess. But I don’t know what else it could be.”

“You told me when you wanted her for the unit that she was already working cases on the internet.”

“She was, yes.”

“Well, maybe it was one of those.”

Ballard could see the company line on this forming: Hatteras was killed because of some misstep she had made before she volunteered for the LAPD. That would put the department in the clear.

“I doubt it,” Ballard said. “She tripped a wire somewhere while she was working for me.”

“We don’t know that,” Gandle said. “Not for sure.”

Ballard saw Goring come through the open door of the house and stride toward the Defender.

“Uh, Captain, I think I have to go,” Ballard said. “Detective Goring is heading toward me. I think she’ll want to question me now.”

“Okay, I’ll let you go,” Gandle said. “I’m still an hour out. The traffic sucks.”

“I’ll tell the detectives you’re coming.”

“Roger that.”

Ballard disconnected and watched Goring cross in front of the car and open the passenger door. The automatic step deployed and she climbed in.

“Renée, how are you doing?”

“Uh, not good. A woman I’ve worked with closely for the past two years is in there dead. Murdered.”

“Yeah, not good. I’m going to tape this conversation, okay?”

“Sure.”

Goring put her cell phone on the center console’s storage compartment. She opened a recording app and pressed the red button. She gave the date and time and named those in the car and then got down to it.

“Let’s start with Colleen. Tell me who she was.”

“She’s a — she was a divorced mother of two girls who are both away at college. I’m not sure where. About three or four years ago, after her kids were in high school, she took some online courses in IGG — do you know what that is?”

“The genetic-tracing stuff.”

“Yes, investigative genetic genealogy. She took classes and then started basically being a citizen sleuth online. Her thing was helping to identify unnamed victims of murder. Mostly women. There’s a whole network out there of people — mostly women — who are proficient at this. She became part of this network and that’s when I became aware of her. I was putting together an all-volunteer cold-case team and I started floating around online looking at some of these people. I reached out to her when I learned she was local. She came in, I vetted her, then gave her the job. She did some really good work for us. Right up to the end.”

Goring had taken a notebook out and was jotting a couple of things down, even though she was still recording everything said.

“Okay,” she said. “What do you mean, ‘right up to the end’? What was she working on?”

“We were all working a case,” Ballard said. “You probably are too young to have been in the department at the time, but do you remember the Pillowcase Rapist?”

“Oh, yeah, I was going to Pierce College in the Valley when that was going on. He did a bunch of rapes and then just disappeared, right?”

“Yeah. The last one was a rape and murder. We were on that because we had gotten a solid genetic lead. Our focus was on four men who were all high-school classmates in Pasadena. Class of ’99.”

Ballard watched Goring’s eyes sharpen.

“These four men,” she said. “Did they know you were looking at them?”

“It’s possible,” Ballard said. “We interviewed one in Vegas on Wednesday and he let us take a DNA swab. I felt we threw enough of a scare into him to convince him not to give the others a heads-up.”

Goring made a hmm sound that Ballard took as questioning her actions.

“He voluntarily gave us the swab,” Ballard said. “He wouldn’t have done that if he was the guy. I don’t see where he’d have any interest in warning the others, even if he knew that one was probably the suspect we were looking for.”

Ballard didn’t like her own tone of protest and defensiveness.

“You never know,” Goring said. “You said ‘we.’ Did Hatteras go with you over there?”

“Oh, no, that was Maddie Bosch — the other sworn officer in the unit. I wouldn’t have taken Colleen on something like that. She worked exclusively in the office, though she was not happy about it.”

“In what way?”

“She... wanted to go into the field and follow through on some of the leads she came up with through IGG. I told her many times that that wasn’t what I’d brought her into the unit to do.”

“And how did she take that?”

Ballard’s phone buzzed and she saw that the call was from Carol Plovc. She sent the call to voicemail.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “To answer your question, Colleen was frustrated by not being able to go into the field. I told her more than once that she would need more training if she was ever going to go out on an investigation.”

Goring waited for further explanation but that was all Ballard offered.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Let’s go back to what put these four guys on your radar. You said it was a genetic link?”

Ballard spent the next ten minutes explaining the genetic connection between a man arrested recently for domestic violence and the rampage of the Pillowcase Rapist. She told Goring about the 1999 prom at the Huntington, Mallory Richardson’s vulnerable position in a hotel room, and the fact that at least four boys and maybe more had access to the room. She said the working theory was that someone used that access to enter the room and have sex with Mallory, leading to the birth of the man who had been arrested twenty-four years later.

Goring just listened and took notes until Ballard was finished.

“So you got a swab from the guy in Vegas — what about the other three suspects?” Goring asked. “Have you had any contact with them?”

“We weren’t really calling them suspects,” Ballard said. “Not yet. More like persons of interest at this point.”

“Okay, but have you made contact with any of them?”

“Well, one is dead. Colleen found that out. He was killed in a car accident a couple years ago. But the coroner’s office took blood at the time and still had it because of a court case that came out of the incident. I picked up a sample and the lab now has it for DNA analysis. We think the third guy has been living in Hawaii since before the rapes stopped here. And the fourth—”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, I talked to him yesterday,” Ballard said. “I deked him on a phone call and he told me he moved to Hawaii in 2003. The last Pillowcase rape and murder was in late 2005.”

“‘Deked’? What’s that mean?”

“Decoyed. The twenty-fifth reunion of their class at St. Vincent’s is coming up. I told the guy in Hawaii that I was a reporter for the paper in Pasadena doing a where-are-they-now story on the class. He bought it and I did the interview. He was very detailed about his history since St. Vincent’s. Went to chef school up in wine country and moved to Hawaii right after for a job.”

“And you believed him?”

“Well, we haven’t independently confirmed anything yet, but yeah, my feeling is that he was telling the truth. I hit him up out of the blue, and for him to provide the details he did... I’m thinking he couldn’t have made it up on the spot.”

“And the fourth guy?”

“We haven’t approached him yet. He sells houses down in Laguna Beach. The last thing I told Colleen to do was see if he had any open houses this weekend. I thought we’d go down and take a look at him, maybe get a chance to collect some DNA.”

“When you say ‘we,’ are you talking about you and Officer Bosch again?”

“Uh, no, I actually did throw that out to Colleen. Wait, no. I mean, I did make her the offer when I left a phone message today, but I don’t think she ever got it.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I saw the body. I saw the lividity. I think she was dead long before I left that message.”

Goring nodded and then looked at the notes she had written. Through the windshield, Ballard saw the two investigators from the coroner’s office squeeze through the front door, carrying the body bag containing Colleen Hatteras. Ballard looked down at the steering wheel.

“I’m going to need the names of these four persons of interest,” Goring said. “And any reports you’ve written up.”

“Sure,” Ballard said. “I don’t have a lot. Today was supposed to be my paperwork day. I did write up a summary of the Vegas trip I can give you.”

“I’ll take it. Let me ask you a question. When you deked the guy in Hawaii, was Hatteras there?”

Ballard hesitated before answering.

“Uh, she was there for part of it,” she said. “But she left while I was in the middle of it.”

Goring wrote a note. Ballard watched the morgue men put the body bag in the back of their van.

“Okay,” Goring said. “Just a couple more things. What made you come here today to check on her?”

“I thought it was unusual that she hadn’t come to the unit this morning,” Ballard said. “Her husband left her back in September, and with her kids in college, she didn’t have much to do. She was at the squad at least three days a week, more often four or five days a week. So I emailed and left phone messages, and when she didn’t respond, I started thinking something might be wrong. Nothing like this but that maybe she was upset with me or something. I ate lunch by the airport — at the Melody — and just thought I would drop by. I wasn’t expecting anything, but then I pulled in and saw the garage was up and the door to the house was open.”

“That set off the Spidey senses.”

“You could say so, yeah.”

“Did you see anything in the house that could help us?”

“Not really. It looked like her computer was taken. It shouldn’t have had anything from work on it. People in the unit use department computers. It’s a rule.”

“The killer might not have known that.”

“True.”

“There’s a dust pattern on the desk that indicates there was also a backup hard drive taken.”

“I didn’t see her phone anywhere, and when I called it, it didn’t ring in the house.”

“It’s gone. We’re already working on getting her records. But that’ll take some time.”

Ballard nodded as a thought came to her that she didn’t want to share with Goring. “So,” she said. “What else can I tell you?”

“Her ex, did she ever talk about him?” Goring asked. “Should we jump on that angle?”

“She didn’t talk about the divorce much. She wasn’t blindsided by it, I know that. And she never said anything about being in fear of him. He left her the house and he pays for the kids’ college and all of that. For what it was, it seemed amicable.”

“Do you know if she had a gun?”

“A gun? No. I mean, I didn’t know about one. Why do you ask?”

“Just trying to determine whether she might have been shot with her own gun. We’ll check ATF—”

“Wait, she was shot? I didn’t see that.”

“Once behind the left ear. Point-blank. There wasn’t a lot of blood, and her hair covered the wound.”

“I saw the mouse cord around her neck.”

“We’re thinking that could have been some kind of control or coercive thing used before the killing. We did find the casing. It was in her hair. A nine-mil Federal Premium. The criminalist in there says the firing-pin stamp looks like a Glock’s. We’ll get that confirmed by the gun unit.”

Ballard just nodded. She was consumed by thoughts of Colleen’s last moments. She had been tortured, and Ballard had to wonder what she had told her killer.

“I think that’s it for now,” Goring said. “I’m sure we’ll have more later. Are you going back to the office?”

“As soon as I’m cleared, yeah. My captain is supposedly coming here.”

“Who’s that, Gandle? He thinks RHD is taking this?”

“He didn’t say so.”

“Good, because that’s been settled. It would be a conflict of interest, since your unit falls under RHD. My LT says it’s ours to keep.”

“No argument from me.”

“Good. We’ll want to take a look at the victim’s workspace and get into her computer there.”

“You may need the tech unit to get into it. It’s password-protected.”

“Not a problem.”

“When are you coming?”

“As soon as we’re done here, we’ll head over. One of us, at least.”

“I’ll make sure it’s undisturbed. Am I clear now?”

“You’re clear. Let me give you my card in case you think of anything else.” She picked up her phone, pulled a card from its case, and handed it to Ballard.

“Thanks,” Ballard said. “When Captain Gandle shows up, tell him I went back to Ahmanson to protect possible evidence.”

Goring turned off the recording app.

“Will do,” she said. “And Renée, you look like you’re carrying this on yourself. It’s not on you. Okay?”

“We’ll see,” Ballard said. “But thanks for saying that.”

“You know, I haven’t seen you the past few sessions at the Beanery.”

“Oh, yeah, well, been kind of busy. But I’ll be back.”

“Good. Us girls need to stick together.”

“You got that right.”

Goring opened her door and got out. Ballard watched her go back up the front walk and through the open door of the house.

She pulled her phone and called Anders Persson.

“Renée? Please tell me they’ve made an arrest.”

“No, not yet. They’re just starting. What are you doing right now, Anders?”

“Now? Not much. I mean, I can’t believe this, you know? She called me last night and told me you were angry about the password.”

“Never mind that now. You know Colleen’s cell number, right?”

“Sure, but—”

“I want you to see if you can get into her account. I want to know what calls she received and what calls she made in the last forty-eight hours.”

“Uh... isn’t that the kind of thing you—”

“I know I told you no hacking, but we both know you didn’t listen. And this is different, Anders. This is Colleen. Her phone is missing and it will take the investigators on the case a week to get a search warrant and get the carrier to come across with the account records. I don’t want to waste that much time. Can you do it?”

“Uh, sure, I can do that, but... you know...”

“If you don’t want to do it, just tell me, Anders. You and Colleen were close. I thought you’d want to help get whoever the sick fuck is who did this.”

“No, I do. I do. I can do this. I’m on it. No worries.”

“Okay, Anders, thanks. Talk only to me about it and don’t leave a trail. You got that? No trail.”

“Got it.”

She disconnected and started the engine. She knew she was crossing a line with the request to Persson. She had a feeling there were going to be other lines to cross as well. But she told herself essentially the same thing she had just told Anders: This was Colleen. One of us. And we will cross every line we have to.

53

The unbreakable rule that command staff had put in place during the formation of the volunteer cold-case squad was that the volunteers could not take murder books, police reports, or any official documentation or evidence home or even out of the Open-Unsolved Unit. To make sure this rule was not violated through digital means, the volunteers were all furnished with desktop computers at their stations. All work was to be performed on the in-house, password-protected computers, which would be randomly monitored and audited by the department’s tech unit to confirm that the rule had not been broken. This had all come about because the command staff was concerned that volunteers on the squad might have ulterior motives behind their volunteerism. For example, they might be secret screenwriters or television producers looking for content to pitch at the next studio meeting. Content was king in Hollywood, and its purveyors went to great lengths to get what nobody else had.

Though Ballard had not uncovered such a scheme in vetting any of her volunteers, the rule was one reason Colleen Hatteras had spent so much time in the office at Ahmanson. Her work for the unit was entirely online. She could not transfer her IGG work from her office desktop to her home computer without the risk of being discovered and dismissed from the unit she so loved. So she spent many more hours than any other volunteer at her station in the office.

Still in a fog of confusion, grief, and guilt, Ballard entered the empty Open-Unsolved Unit and went directly to Colleen’s workstation and desktop. Six months earlier Hatteras had taken a week off to drive one of her daughters to school. While she was gone, Ballard had needed to print out a genealogical tree that was part of a charging package she was submitting to Carol Plovc at the DA’s office. The only way to get the document was to get into Hatteras’s computer. Ballard had called Hatteras, who had revealed her password without hesitation: the names of her two daughters spelled backward.

Ballard now had to hope that Hatteras had not changed it upon her return or in the months since. She opened the password portal on her desktop and typed in eiggaMeitaK, hoping she remembered it correctly.

The password went through and Ballard was in.

The last thing Colleen had said to Ballard before leaving the office yesterday was that she would finish an email, send it, then go. Ballard wanted to know what that email had been and if there were any other messages to or from her that could have a bearing on her murder.

Once in Hatteras’s email account, Ballard pulled up the Sent folder and saw that the last message sent from Colleen’s office desktop was to Colleen’s personal email account. Ballard opened the message and found an almost word-for-word transcript of the beginning of Ballard’s phone conversation with Victor Best in Hawaii. Ballard realized that when she had heard typing during the phone call, it was Colleen typing what she was hearing from Ballard’s pod.

Ballard leaned back in the chair and thought about this, then almost immediately leaned forward again and checked both the incoming and outgoing emails on the account. She knew it would not be long before Goring and Dubose arrived.

Nothing else in the email account drew Ballard’s suspicion or caught her interest. She then moved to the files Hatteras had kept on her desktop. Most of these were labeled with the names of victims that were on the unit’s active list of investigations. Most contained genetic family trees that she had been filling out over time as members of families responded to her attempts to contact them. She opened the file folder titled Pillowcase24 and saw nothing in it that she didn’t already know. There was a file within this file titled PoI, which Ballard took to mean “persons of interest.” She opened it and found a list of the four St. Vincent’s alums — Best, Bennett, Weeks, and Van Ness — the unit had been tracking.

Hatteras had added details on the four men as information came in. Birth dates, addresses, phone numbers, social media accounts, marital and employment status — everything she and the other members of the team had gathered, here in one neat file. She had included the photo of Andrew Bennett standing in front of the SOLD sign. Ballard stared at Bennett’s eyes, and it suddenly became clear to her what Colleen Hatteras had done that might have gotten her killed.

Her cell phone buzzed and she saw it was Carol Plovc again. She had forgotten to return the call.

“Sorry, Carol, I was going to call you back.”

“I’m leaving early today and I just wanted to make sure you heard that O’Fallon declined again.”

“What the fuck?”

“I know, I know. I would have signed off on this but he won’t. He called the ear identification you got junk science.”

“He’s junk science. This is just political bullshit.”

“I’m not disagreeing.”

“So is there anything else we can do?”

“Outside of finding a signed confession from Thawyer in his files, probably not.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Please tell Officer Bosch I’m sorry. I think you guys have it nailed. But my hands are tied.”

“I understand.”

Plovc’s voice dropped down to a whisper: “You know there’s a recall effort starting, right?” she said.

“Yeah, I heard,” Ballard said.

“Well, if it works and we get a new DA, you bring this to me again.”

“But when will that be, in a year? Elyse Ford’s sister is in her eighties. She’s waited all her life to know who took her sister. And now thanks to the politics of this town, she may die waiting.”

“I’m sorry. I hope you or Officer Bosch can tell her that it might not be officially closed, but that you consider the case solved.”

Ballard was silent as she remembered that it was Hatteras who had been dealing directly with the Ford family. She looked at a photo pinned to the workstation’s privacy wall. It was Colleen and her two teenage daughters sitting at a table behind a birthday cake with lit candles. Ballard knew those girls had just gotten or were about to get news that would permanently alter their lives.

“All right, well, I’m in the middle of something here, Carol,” she said. “Thanks for fighting the good fight on this.”

“Anytime,” Plovc said. “I’m here when you need me.”

They disconnected. Ballard reached over and unpinned the photo of Colleen and her daughters. She got up and went to her workstation, pinned the snapshot to her own privacy wall, and stared at it for a long moment.

She knew she needed to call Maddie Bosch and tell her the bad news about the Thawyer case, but that could wait. She opened the email Hatteras had sent her with the details from Andrew Bennett’s DMV record. She typed his Laguna Hills address into her phone’s GPS and saw that the estimated drive time was ninety-three minutes. If she waited until rush hour, that number would balloon and possibly even double.

She wanted to get on the road but had to wait. She wondered if Goring and Dubose had been held up at the crime scene by Captain Gandle. Though she had put Persson on Hatteras’s phone records only an hour before, she called him.

“Anders, you got anything yet?”

“I just got the call records, yes.”

“Good, give me the last calls. Give me the time and length.”

“The last two were to her daughters. Do you want them?”

“How do you know they were calls to the daughters?”

“They are on her family plan.”

“Got it. What time did she make those calls, and how long was she on?”

“She called the first number at seven last night and it was only one minute. She probably left a message. Then the last call was one minute later, and she talked for nine minutes.”

Ballard wrote the information down on a fresh page in her notebook.

“What was the call before that?” she asked.

“That was to me,” he said. “She said you were mad about the password. I am very—”

“We can skip that one for now. Go to the one before that.”

Persson gave her a number with a 714 area code and told her the call lasted twenty-nine minutes.

“When was the call made?”

“It began at four thirty-three and lasted until five oh-two.”

Ballard wrote it all down, then flipped back to her previous notes. She found the page where she had written down the information Hatteras gave her about Andrew Bennett. The number Persson had just given her matched the number Bennett listed below his bio on the real estate website.

“Does it say whether this was an outgoing or incoming call?” she asked.

“Outgoing,” Persson said. “These are all outgoing calls.”

Hatteras had called Bennett and they had talked for almost half an hour.

“Okay, previous to that?” Ballard said. “Any other calls yesterday?”

“She made a call yesterday morning at nine twenty,” Persson said. “That was to me too.”

“And what was that about?”

Ballard heard the door on the other side of the murder archive shelves open and then a pair of shoes walking on the linoleum.

“One of us called the other every day,” Persson said. “You know, just to check in and see what was going on. She called me yest—”

“Uh, Anders, I have to go,” Ballard interrupted. “I’ll call you back if I need to, but for now you can stand down on that.”

“Do you want me to send this to you?”

Ballard saw Goring come out of the aisle that ran along the murder library.

“No, that’s fine,” Ballard said. “I’ll be in touch.”

She disconnected the call and greeted Goring. “Where’s your partner?”

“I left him in the neighborhood. He was knocking on doors and collecting video.”

Ballard nodded. The collecting of video from neighborhood Ring cameras and the like was often more important than finding witnesses. Cameras didn’t have memory issues and biases.

“Did you get anything good yet?” Ballard asked.

“The guy came into the neighborhood on foot,” Goring said. “Head down, wearing a hoodie. So far, no angles that would give us an ID. He was good. That sound like any of your persons of interest?”

“Sounds like it could be anyone. He broke in? What time?”

“We’re piecing together video — that’s why Winston is still out there and I need to get back. But we have the guy entering the house at twelve thirty a.m. and leaving just before one. He was quick and it looked like he had a tool that opened the door.”

“What kind of tool?”

“You know what a fireman’s friend is?”

“Hmm, no.”

“You can google it. It’s like a T-shaped blade that slides into a doorjamb and pops the lock. Supposedly a guy on the LAFD invented it for getting into burning houses — hence the name.”

“Wow.”

“When the killer left, he had her computer and the extra hard drive under his arm.” Goring looked at the desks on the raft. “Which spot was the victim’s?”

Hearing Colleen referred to as “the victim” hit Ballard like a punch to the heart. She stood up and walked Goring over to Hatteras’s workstation.

“This is hers,” she said. “Was.”

Goring sat down and tapped the space bar on the keyboard. The screen lit up, and the password portal appeared.

“You think anybody on the squad would know her password?” she asked.

“Probably not,” Ballard said. “But I could check.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll take it down to the tech unit.”

“The guy there who set these up for us is named Chuck Pell.”

“Okay, I’ll take it to him.”

Goring tried the file drawer that was built into the workstation. It was locked. “How about a key for this?” she asked.

“I have one.”

Ballard went to her desk and opened the middle drawer. There was a ring of keys that opened the file drawers of every station on the raft. They were marked by number. She handed the ring to Goring.

“Number nine,” she said.

Ballard watched Goring open the file drawer, wishing she had thought to check it out earlier. The drawer contained several files with the names of victims written on the tabs. Ballard bent down so she could read some of them.

“Those look like closed cases,” Ballard said. “I think when we closed a case, she printed out all the IGG stuff and put it in a file. The active stuff was on the computer. She’d been working on what she called heritage patterns for several active cases.”

“‘Heritage patterns’?”

“Like a genetic family tree.”

“Got it.”

Goring closed the file drawer.

“I should get back over there,” she said. “I’m going to take the computer and drop it by the tech shop.”

“Fine by me,” Ballard said. “At some point I’ll need to get that stuff back. We have another guy on the squad who can continue Colleen’s work.”

“I’ll return it to you as soon as we’re finished with it.” Goring reached under the desk to unplug the CPU and detach it from Colleen’s oversize monitor.

Persson would inherit that screen, Ballard thought, unless she found another IGG specialist to take Colleen’s place. That thought led to another.

“Have you told Colleen’s daughters?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Goring said. “Too busy running with the case.”

Ballard nodded. “You want me to make the notification?” she asked. “I met them once when she brought them here.”

“There is nothing I would like better than to take a pass on that job,” Goring said. “But I need to interview them, see when they last talked and all of that. So I’ll do it.”

“They should know soon.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get to them today.”

Ballard nodded.

Goring successfully detached the CPU and slid it out from beneath the workstation. She lifted it, testing its weight.

“You want me to get a dolly to roll it out to your car?” Ballard asked.

“No, I’m strong,” Goring said.

She hefted the computer so she could get her hands under it and turned toward the aisle.

“In more ways than one,” she added.

Ballard took it as a reference to experiences that had led her to the Beanery meetings.

“Remember, if you think of anything, give me a call,” Goring said.

“Will do,” Ballard said.

Goring headed to the exit. She seemed to slow her walk and focus on the murder-book archive as she passed.

“All these cases,” she said. “Waiting to be solved.”

Ballard just nodded and watched her go.