“Yeah, Ballard.”
“You have any idea how time-consuming it is to do a computer-to-computer verification? And this guy worked in a car dealership where he had access to computers on every fricking desk. We had him on the knuckles and we booked it as a felony. That was it. We had other fish to fry.”
Ballard nodded to herself. She knew how the system worked. There were too many cases, too many variables, too many legal rules. They got Trent on a felony and that was one more dirtbag off the street. It was time to move on and get the next one.
“Okay, thanks for the call back,” she said. “This helps. Do me a favor—if anybody in the unit remembers what was on the knuckles or anybody happened to take pictures, let me know. It could help the case.”
“You got it, Ballard.”
Ballard pulled into the gated entrance to the station’s rear parking lot and held her ID out the window to the electronic reader. The steel wall rolled away and she entered and started cruising the lot, looking for a spot to park. The lot was often more crowded at night because there were fewer cars in the field.
She entered the station through the back door and saw two drunks cuffed to the lockup bench. Both had vomited on the floor between their feet. Ballard was carrying her suit. She went down the rear hallway and upstairs to the locker room to change.
The detective bureau was deserted as usual when she got there. Because she had no assigned desk, she had to check the receptionist’s desk to see if there were any messages for her. There was one pink slip: a call had come in at four p.m. from an 888 area code. The name scribbled on the caller line looked like Nerf Cohen, a name she didn’t recognize. Ballard took it back to her regular workstation and sat down.
Before checking out the message, she opened the photo archive on her cell phone and swiped back through her pictures until she came to the close-up shots she had taken of the bruising on Ramona Ramone’s torso. She used her thumb and finger to enlarge each photograph to look for any indications of a pattern in the bruising that she had deduced had come from brass knuckles. She wasn’t sure if it was the power of suggestion coming from Fernandez’s information, but she now thought she could see what she had not noticed before in the hospital. She thought she saw distinctive patterns in the bruises on the right and left sides of the torso. Not enough to make out words but she believed she could see the letter C or O on the left side and either an N or a V on the right side. She realized that the markings she was looking at, if they were words, would likely appear backward in bruising if they read the right way on the attacker’s fists.
Still, the bruising patterns were significant. What Ballard was looking at wasn’t scientific or remotely conclusive but it was a little piece of the puzzle that seemed to fit with Trent, and therefore it gave her a nice jolt of momentum. She decided it was time to start committing her investigative moves—the legal ones, at least—to a digital record. She checked the clock over the television screens on the far wall and saw that it was an hour till the late show roll call. She could get a lot done in that time. She went to work, starting an Investigator’s Chronology, even though it would not be the first document in the file. She knew from long experience that the chrono was the written centerpiece of a case.
She was a half hour into her work when her phone buzzed with a call from a blocked number. She answered.
“This is Ballard.”
“Good and evil.”
She recognized the voice of Jorge Fernandez. Her voice jumped up a notch with excitement.
“That was on the knuckles?”
“Yep. I asked the guys and somebody remembered. Good and evil, the constant battle within man. You get it?”
“I get it.”
“Does it help?”
“I think so. Can you give me the name of the officer who remembered? I might need it.”
“That would be Dapper Dave Allmand. We call him that ’cause he’s got a certain sartorial style. This is vice but he thinks it’s a fucking fashion show.”
“Got it. And thanks, Fernandez. I owe you one.”
“Happy hunting, Ballard.”
After disconnecting, Ballard pulled up the photos of Ramona Ramone’s bruises on her phone again. Now she could see it: the double O in GOOD and the V in EVIL. They read the same backward or forward.
Ballard knew that it was highly unlikely that Trent would have gotten back the brass knuckles he had been arrested with. After three years, they would have been destroyed by the property unit. But if the weapons were part of a paraphilia—in this case, a sadomasochistic fantasy—it was not a stretch to believe he would go back to wherever he got the original set and buy a duplicate pair.
The adrenaline jolt Ballard had felt earlier now turned into a locomotive charging through her veins. To her mind, Trent was no longer just a person of interest. The train had gone by that stop. She believed he was her man, and there was nothing quite like that moment of knowing. It was the Holy Grail of detective work. It had nothing to do with evidence or legal procedure or probable cause. It was just knowing it in your gut. Nothing in her life beat it. It had been a long time coming to her on the late show but now she felt it and she knew deep down it was the reason she would never quit, no matter where they put her or what they said about her.
12
Ballard went upstairs to the roll-call room early. It was always a good time to socialize, hear station gossip, and pick up street intel. There were already seven uniformed officers seated, including Smith and Taylor, when she walked in. Two of the others were a female team Ballard knew well from crossing paths in the locker room. As would be expected, the conversation under way was about the quintuple murder of the night before. One of the officers was saying that RHD had put a tight seal on internal news about the case, not even releasing the names of the victims as of twenty-four hours after the crime.
“You were inside, Renée,” said Herrera, one of the women. “What’s the scoop on the victims? Who were they?”
Ballard shrugged.
“No scoop,” she said. “I just handled one of the peripheral victims, the cocktail waitress. They didn’t bring me into the inner circle. I saw three dead guys in a booth but I don’t know who they were.”
“I guess they weren’t going to bring you in with Olivas in charge,” Herrera said.
It was a reminder that in a police station, there were few secrets. Within a month of her transfer to Hollywood, everyone in the station knew about her losing her complaint against Olivas, even though personnel matters were supposed to be kept secret by law.
Ballard tried to change the subject.
“So coming in, I saw FSD was inside there tonight,” she said. “They miss something last night?”
“I heard they never left,” Smith said. “They’ve been at it almost twenty-four hours.”