From the work yard, Ballard drove by the exact locations of the streetlights noted on the printouts. In each case, the light where the wiring had been cut was in close proximity to the house where one of the sexual assaults had taken place. It left Ballard with no doubt that the Midnight Men had tampered with the lights before the attacks to further cloak their activities in darkness. She also noticed that in both locations the streetlights were different from the glass acorns in the Dell.
She called SID and requested that a print tech come out and process the access plate at the base of the light on Vista, as well as the light up on Deep Dell Terrace. It was a long shot but Ballard knew that long shots never paid off if you didn’t take them. A fingerprint could change the trajectory of the investigation in an instant. She left the Lucerne address off the request because that light had already been repaired and any fingerprint evidence left by the Midnight Men would likely be gone.
She checked her phone and saw that it was almost eight and her lieutenant should be in his office by the time she got back.
Along the way, she took a call from an autopsy coordinator at the County Medical Examiner’s Office. With more than a thousand autopsies conducted a week, the coroner needed a coordinator just to set the schedule and make notifications to investigators and families of the dead. She was informed that the autopsy of Javier Raffa was set for 11 a.m. with deputy medical examiner Dr. Steven Zvader.
Ballard said she would be there.
Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds was behind his desk when Ballard got back to the detective bureau. Ballard knocked on the window next to his open door and he signaled her in.
“Ballard,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d already gone home. How’s the head?”
“I’m good,” Ballard said. “I was just out doing an interview on the Midnight Men thing.”
“You need to fill out an IOD.”
“I’m okay, L-T.”
“Look, you want to get paid for Saturday night when you went home early? Fill out the form.”
Ballard knew that filling out an Injured On Duty form would take the better part of an hour and its only purpose was to serve as a record of injuries in case the officer later took action against the department or sought an early retirement due to injury. The city would not cover or accept any financial or retirement request based on injuries not detailed in the IOD form. It didn’t matter that some injuries became an issue long after they initially occurred. Bosch was an example. He was exposed to radioactive material on a case. Ten years later, when it manifested as a form of leukemia, the city tried to look the other way because he had never filed an IOD form. Luckily, he had good doctors and a good lawyer and came out okay.
“All right,” Ballard said. “I’ll get to it before I leave. I have to hang around for the autopsy on Raffa anyway.”
“Right,” Robinson-Reynolds said. “We should talk about that. Sit down, Ballard.”
Ballard sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk. As she did so, she noticed a small black leather pouch on the corner of the desk. It was blocked from Robinson-Reynolds’s view in his seat because of a vertical file in front of it. He must have missed it when he entered the office earlier, probably reading the overnight note as he entered.
The pouch contained Ballard’s lockpick set. She had put it down on the desk after entering the office the night before to get to the pension book. She had then forgotten it when she left. If the lieutenant found it, he would not be able to trace it back to Ballard but he would know that someone had been in his office over the holiday weekend, and she knew suspicion would likely fall on her. She was trying to think of a way to surreptitiously grab it, when Robinson-Reynolds told her she was off the Raffa case.
“Wait, what?” she asked.
“I talked to West Bureau, and they’re ready to take it off your hands,” Robinson-Reynolds said.
“I don’t want it taken off my hands. I was working it all night and have identified a suspect and want to keep rolling with it.”
“That’s great and I’m sure they will welcome all your good work. But it’s not your job. You’re not a homicide detective. We have been over this before and I goddamn hate it that every time you don’t want to give up a case, you try to make it out as a betrayal. I’m not your enemy, Ballard. There is an established protocol and we must follow it.”
“The autopsy’s in two hours. Who takes that?”
“I’m assuming you do. But then you call this guy and arrange to hand it all off.”
He handed a Post-it Note across the desk to her. It had her name on the top — it was the Post-it she had seen earlier — but now it had another name and a number written under hers: Detective Ross Bettany. Ballard had never heard of him, but he would be the one to take her good work and close the case.
“Tell me about this suspect,” Robinson-Reynolds said.
Ballard knew that if she mentioned that she had linked two murders and that the likely hit man was an ex-LAPD cop, she wouldn’t even get the autopsy. Robinson-Reynolds would skip over her and West Bureau and go straight to the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown. They would grab it like a hawk snatching a sparrow out of the air. She didn’t want that. If she couldn’t be lead, she wanted to give it to Bettany in such a way that she still retained a piece of it. That way, Bettany and his partner would need her and her knowledge to close it.
“We think it was about money,” she said. “As I told you on the phone yesterday, Raffa’s shop was sitting on a valuable piece of land. He had a silent partner and he was trying to break their contract. We think the partner hired a hitter — the go-between who brought them both together in the first place.”
Ballard thought she had walked the tightrope without a net. Nothing she had said was false. She just didn’t tell the whole story.
“ ‘We’?” Robinson-Reynolds asked.
“What?” Ballard said.
“You said, ‘We think it was about money.’ Who’s ‘we’?”
“Oh, sorry, just an expression. I meant ‘we’ as in the LAPD as a whole. We think.”
“You sure?”
“Uh, yeah. Last I checked, the department hasn’t filled my partner’s slot because of the freeze.”
The lieutenant nodded like all of that was true.
“You know a guy named Harry Bosch?” he asked. “Retired LAPD. Worked here at Hollywood for a lot of years, in fact.”
Ballard realized that she had just walked into a mantrap. She went in one door and it had locked behind her. The next door had to be opened from the other side. And Robinson-Reynolds was the guy on the other side.
“Uh, yeah, I know him,” she said carefully. “We’ve crossed paths on things before. Why?”
She wanted to get as much from Robinson-Reynolds as she could before she tried walking across the tightrope again.
“Because I got a report here on my desk that came from GED,” Robinson-Reynolds said. “They had your victim’s memorial service under surveillance so they could see what guys from Las Palmas showed up. Instead, they got photos of you standing with an old guy identified as Harry Bosch and talking to another guy who didn’t look too happy about being talked to.”
Ballard’s mind was racing as she tried to put together an answer.
“Yeah,” she said. “That was Bosch and that was the silent partner I was just talking about. Dennis Hoyle.”
She doubted that Robinson-Reynolds would go for the distraction of Hoyle, but it gave Ballard time to think her way through this confrontation. She knew one thing: Davenport was behind this. He had sent the surveillance photos to the lieutenant. Ballard decided she would find a way to deal with him later.
“And Bosch?” Robinson-Reynolds said. “Why was he there? Why was he with you?”
He held up a surveillance photo, and there was Bosch next to Ballard as they confronted Hoyle at his car. Ballard knew that her only way out was to come clean about the first murder. Bosch’s case. If she gave that to Robinson-Reynolds, she might survive this.