The cards written on Ramona Ramone largely said the same thing and most contained information Ballard already knew. Some of the notes revealed more about the personality of the officer than it did about Ramone. One officer wrote, Holy shit this is a guy!
The one piece of useful information Ballard gleaned from the cards was that Gutierrez/Ramone had no driver’s license and therefore no verifiable home address. The official reports simply stated the address where the arrest was made, most often on Santa Monica Boulevard. But during the field interviews, she had twice given an address on Heliotrope. The third card said, Lives in trailer, moves around the 6. This information was good to have and Ballard was glad she had gone up to see Mendez.
Finished with her review of the file and Ramone’s background, Ballard fired up the computer terminal and went to work, looking for the suspect. Her plan was to start small and go big—to look for local cases that were similar to the attack on Ramone. If she found nothing, then she would widen her computer search to look for similar cases in the state of California, then the country, and then even the world.
Working the department’s computer archives was an art form. Formally, the system was called DCTS—Detective Case Tracking System. One wrong input in the search parameters could easily result in a “no records found” response, even if there was a closely matching case somewhere in the data. Ballard composed a short list of details that she would enter and subtract from until she got a hit.
Transgender
Bite
Brass Knuckles
Bound
Prostitute
Santa Monica Boulevard
She entered them into a search of all cases in the archive and got a quick “no records found.” She eliminated Santa Monica Boulevard, searched again, and got the same response. She continued to search, dropping words as she went and then trying different combinations and adding variations, using “bindings” and “tied up” instead of “bound,” “escort” instead of “prostitute.” But none of the combinations scored a hit in the data.
Frustrated and beginning to feel the effects of less than three hours’ sleep, Ballard got up from her station and started walking down the now empty aisles of the bureau, hoping to get her blood moving. She wanted to avoid a caffeine headache, so she held off on going to the break room for another coffee. She stood for a moment in front of the silent TV screens and watched a man in front of a weather map that showed no sign of inclement weather heading toward L.A.
She knew it was time to widen the search outside the city. With that would come a lot of desk work as she tried to chase down far-off cases that might be connected to hers. It would be a slog and the prospect was daunting. She returned to the desk and put another call in to Hollywood Presbyterian to check on her victim on the off chance she had miraculously come to and could be interviewed.
But there was no change. Ramona Ramone was still in an induced coma.
Ballard hung up the phone and looked at the list of case attributes that had failed to draw a hit from the data bank.
“Key words, my ass,” she said out loud.
She decided to try one more angle.
California was one of only four states that made possession of brass knuckles—or metal knuckles, as they were referred to in the statutes—illegal. Other states had age minimums and laws against using them in the commission of a crime, but in California they were illegal across the board, and violating the law could be charged as a felony.
Ballard typed in one more search of the LAPD’s data archive, asking for all cases in the last five years involving an arrest for possession of brass knuckles, felony or misdemeanor.
She got fourteen hits on separate cases, which she thought was surprisingly high given that the weapon had so rarely come up in cases she had worked or had even known about in her ten years as a detective.
Ballard checked the wall clock and started the task of pulling up expanded records on the cases to see if anything in the summary reports remotely connected in MO to her case. She was quickly able to move through most of the cases because they involved gang arrests in South Los Angeles, where it appeared to Ballard that brass knuckles were employed in lieu of firearms by gangbangers who probably didn’t know they were illegal.
There were other arrests involving pimps and mob enforcers for possession of metal knuckles, with their intended use of the weapons being obvious. And then Ballard came across a three-year-old case that immediately held her attention.
A man named Thomas Trent had been arrested for possession of brass knuckles by the Valley Bureau vice unit. The case had not come up on Ballard’s previous key-word search because none of the other words in her combinations was in play. Trent had been charged with the brass knuckles offense only, nothing else.
And yet it was a vice case. That contradiction was what had initially caught Ballard’s eye. When she pulled up the digital case file, she learned that Trent, thirty-nine at the time, had been arrested during a sting operation at a motel on Sepulveda Boulevard. The summary report said he had knocked on the door of a room at the Tallyho Lodge near Sherman Way, where the vice unit had been sending men who had connected online with an officer posing as an underage Latino male available for submissive role play. Trent had made no appointment at the motel and the vice officers could not connect him to any of the men who had taken part in the online conversations.
They believed he had probably been one of the online suitors but they did not have evidence of that and could not charge him with solicitation of a minor. But they also did not need to pursue linking him to the online sting once they found brass knuckles in his pockets. He was arrested for felony possession of a dangerous weapon and booked into the Van Nuys jail.
The summary report listed the undercover officer who arrested Trent by serial number only. Ballard sent the report to the bureau’s printer, then picked up the desk phone and called the department’s personnel unit. She quickly had a name to go with the serial number of the vice officer. He was Jorge Fernandez and he was still assigned to the Valley Bureau’s vice squad. Ballard called the Valley vice unit and was told that Fernandez was off duty. She left her cell number and a message for him to call her back, no matter what time.