“Shit,” Ballard whispered.
She knew she didn’t have a lot of time before the patrol officers doubled back to check on her. She swept the flashlight across the room one more time and then moved down the deck to get a better angle on a partially opened door inside the house at the far side of the room. Through the opening she could see a hallway and part of a staircase going up to the next level of the house. She noticed a rectangular shape on the floor in the small alcove next to the stairs. She thought it might be a trapdoor leading to the foundation of the structure.
She walked out to the edge of the deck and pointed the light down over the railing. The beam shone on a lower platform on which the house’s air conditioner unit sat. Ballard realized that there must be access to the equipment from beneath the house.
“Find anything?”
Ballard turned quickly from the railing. One of the patrol officers had come down the steps—the older, senior officer with four hash marks on his sleeve. His name was Sasso. He raised his light and pointed it at her.
Ballard raised her hand to block the glare.
“Do you mind?” she said.
He lowered the flashlight.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No, nothing,” she said. “The gate up top was open, so I thought maybe somebody came down here. But it doesn’t look like anybody’s even living here.”
She flashed her beam on the glass doors, revealing the room that contained only the chair and table. Sasso directed his light through the door as well, then looked back at Ballard. His face was in shadow now.
“So you were just in the neighborhood?” he asked.
“I had a meeting down in the Valley and was heading over the hill,” Ballard said. “I work the late show and was going in early. You heard about the club shooting last night on Sunset? I wanted to see what they were putting out in roll call about it.”
“And you cross over on Wrightwood to get to Hollywood?”
There was a clear note of suspicion in his voice. Sasso had twenty years in, according to his sleeves. He had probably been party to more than a few radio calls staged by detectives to create reason to case a house. It was called ghosting.
“Things were moving slow on Laurel Canyon, so I hopped over to Vineland and it brought me up here,” she said. “I was going to shoot over to Outpost and take that down.”
Sasso nodded, but Ballard suspected he wasn’t buying it.
“We’re going to clear,” he said. “We’re stacking legit calls and need to get to them.”
It was his way of chastising her for wasting their time.
“Sure,” she said. “I’m out of here too.”
“I’ll call off the bird,” he said.
Sasso headed back up the stairs. Ballard took one more glimpse over the deck rail before following him. She pointed her light down and saw no exterior access to the platform holding the air conditioning unit below. She was sure that access came from both inside and underneath the house.
At the top she pulled the gate closed and put the trash cans back into place as she had first seen them. She then walked back down the street to her van. The patrol car behind her made a three-point turn and went down the hill. Ballard heard the sound of the helicopter tailing away into the night. She considered returning to Trent’s house to make an attempt to get down to the utility platform, but Sasso’s suspicions gave her pause. He and his partner might double back to see if she had lingered in the neighborhood.
She started the van and headed up to Mulholland. Just as she had told Sasso, she took it to Outpost, passing intermittent vistas of the lighted city below, and then dropped down into Hollywood. She was on Sunset a few blocks from Wilcox when her phone buzzed. It was the return call from Jorge Fernandez of the Valley Bureau vice unit. Ballard thanked him for calling back and briefly described the case she was working with an assault victim she was unable to speak to.
“So how can I help you?” Fernandez asked.
Ballard noticed as she passed the Dancers that an FSD van was parked out front, and through the open front doors she could see bright lights inside—the kind used at crime scenes. She wondered what could be going on there twenty hours after the crime.
“Hey, Ballard, you there?” Fernandez prompted.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” she said. “So I have this guy. I wouldn’t call him a suspect yet. Let’s say he’s more on the level of a person of interest.”
“Okay, and what’s it got to do with me?”
“You arrested him three years ago on a vice sting up on Sepulveda Boulevard.”
“I’ve arrested a lot of people up there. What’s his name?”
Ballard turned down Wilcox toward the station.
“Thomas Trent,” she said.
There was a pause before Fernandez responded.
“Nothing,” he said. “Rings no bells.”
Ballard gave him the date of the arrest, said it was at the Tallyho and that Trent was the guy who had brass knuckles in his pockets.
“Oh, yeah, that guy,” Fernandez said. “I remember the brass knuckles. They had words on them.”
“What words?” Ballard asked. “What do you mean?”
“Shit, I can’t remember. But each one had a word on it so that it would leave a mark or a bruise that said the word.”
“There wasn’t a description in the arrest report. It just said brass knuckles.”
“I’m thinking …”
“Were you with a partner? You think he would know? It could be important.”
“It was a task force. The whole unit was out there. I can ask around, see who remembers.”
“Well, tell me about the arrest if you can. This guy brought brass knuckles to a motel room where he thought there would be an underage prostitute, and he ends up on probation. How does that happen?”
“Good lawyer, I guess.”
“Seriously? You can’t give me anything else?”
“Well, we were setting up in the room because we had one of these creeps coming at ten, but then there’s a knock on the door at nine and it’s your guy—Brass Knuckles. We were like, what the fuck is this? So we jammed him and found the brass knuckles in the pocket of his jacket. I remember he had an excuse—he said he was like a used-car salesman or something and went on test-drives with sketchy people and needed something to protect himself.”
“Brass knuckles?”
“I’m only telling you what he said.”
“Okay, okay—what happened next?”
“Well, it was a wobbler. We thought he was probably our ten-o’clock guy but we couldn’t connect him to the script we had running, so we—”
“What script?”
“That’s what we called the conversations we were working on the Internet. So we didn’t have intent. We called our filing D.A. and told him what we had and how we weren’t sure he was the one from the script. The D.A. said to arrest him for the knuckles and if we connected him later, we could add it on. So we booked him as instructed and that was it.”
“Was there ever any further work on connecting him to the script?”
“Look—it’s Ballard, right?”