“Once. Until you tried to co-opt him with your lies. Don’t think for one minute you can make up for it now.”
Ballard held her hands wide and looked around like she was asking who could possibly hear them where they stood on the driveway.
“Why are you lying? There’s nobody else here. Don’t tell me you’ve told it to yourself so often, you actually believe it.”
“Ballard, you—”
“We both know exactly what happened. You made it clear on more than one occasion that my trajectory in the department relied upon you and that I had to put out or I’d get pushed out. Then at the Christmas party I get pushed up against a wall and you try to put your tongue down my throat. You think lying to my face about it will help convince me it didn’t happen?”
Olivas seemed taken aback by the intensity of her voice.
“Just leave. Or I’ll have you escorted off the property.”
“What about Shelby?”
“What about her?”
“Did you just leave her alone in there? She needs somebody to be with her.”
“You? Not in a million fucking years.”
“We were tight. I was her husband’s partner and she trusted me not to sleep with him. I could be of use to you here.”
Olivas seemed to take a moment to consider the option.
“We take care of our own here, and you’re not one of us. Show some integrity, Ballard. Show some respect. You have thirty seconds before I ask the patrol officers to remove you from the property.”
With that, Olivas turned and headed back toward the open garage. Ballard looked past him and saw that several of the people in the garage had been surreptitiously watching their confrontation. She could also see her ex-partner’s take-home plain wrap parked in the right-side bay. The trunk was open and she wondered if that was for processing or to help shield the view of his body slumped in the driver’s seat.
Chastain had betrayed their partnership in the worst way a partner could. It was unacceptable and unforgivable but Ballard understood it, considering Chastain’s ambitions. Still, she always thought there would be a personal reckoning and that he would eventually do the right thing, that he would back her and tell the world what he saw Olivas do. Now there would never be a chance for that. Ballard felt the loss for both Chastain and herself.
She turned and headed down the driveway to the street. She passed a black SUV pulling up that she knew was carrying the chief of police. Her eyes were stinging with tears before she made it to her car.
17
Ballard picked up Lola with profuse apologies to Sarah and went to the beach. At first she just sat cross-legged on the sand with her dog and watched the sun drop toward the horizon. She decided not to paddle. She knew that sharks cruised the shoreline at dusk, looking for food.
She thought about the time Chastain had told her the real story of his father, of how he had been an Internal Affairs hack who was pulled out of a car and murdered by a mob during an explosion of racial tensions that he had helped touch off through his own actions. Chastain didn’t know the truth until after he became a cop and earned the juice it took to pull the sealed records on his father’s death. He confided in Ballard that the thing that had made him so proud growing up had ultimately made him deeply and privately humiliated as a man with a badge. It had fired his ambition to climb through the ranks and redeem his father and himself in some way.
The only problem was, he had trampled over Ballard on the climb.
“Renée?”
Ballard looked up. Aaron the lifeguard stood there.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine, yeah,” she said.
She wiped tears off her cheeks.
“Somebody who totally fucked me over died today,” she said.
“Then why are you sad?” he asked. “I mean, fuck him. If it was a him.”
“I don’t know. I guess because it means what he did can never be changed. His death makes it permanent.”
“I think I get that.”
“It’s complicated.”
He was wearing a red nylon jacket with the word RESCUE on it. The temperature was dropping with the sun, which was just about to dip into the ocean. The sky was turning neon pink.
“You’re not going to try to sleep out here tonight, are you?” Aaron asked. “Night patrol is out here in force on a Saturday night.”
“No,” Ballard said. “I’m going in to work. Just wanted to see the sunset.”
Aaron said good night and moved on down the beach toward the lifeguard tower, where he was posted until dark. Ballard watched the sun sink into the black water and then got up. She once again bought takeout for herself and Lola on the boardwalk and ate sitting on a nearby bench. She could not generate much enthusiasm for food and ended up giving half her order of black beans, yellow rice, and plantains to a homeless man she knew named Nate. He was a street artist who until January had done decent business selling portraits of the former president. He reported to Ballard that images of the new president went unsold because his kind of people didn’t come to Venice Beach.
She returned Lola to Sarah’s house with more apologies to both dog and sitter, and then headed east back into the city and the cases. She got to Hollywood Station three hours before her shift was scheduled to start. In the locker room, after changing into her suit, she pulled the black elastic mourning band from behind her badge and stretched it across the front of the shield.
Once she was in the detective bureau, she set up in her usual spot and went right to work on the computer, starting with opening the Los Angeles Times website. She knew she could use the department’s own data network—most investigations resulted in basic information being put online for internal access—but that would leave a signature trail. She wanted the names of the three men murdered in the booth at the Dancers and believed the city’s main media standard-bearer would have acquired them by now, nearly forty-eight hours since the massacre.
She was correct and quickly found a story that credited the Medical Examiner’s Office with releasing the names of the dead after next-of-kin notifications and autopsies had been completed. The story identified Cynthia Haddel and Marcus Wilbanks as the Dancers employees killed by the unknown gunman, and Cordell Abbott, Gordon Fabian, and Gino Santangelo as the three customers who were murdered in the booth where they sat.
Names in hand, Ballard proceeded to background the three men in the booth by signing into the crime index and DMV computers. This, too, would leave a trail of her searches but these would not be as easily detected as her simply using her department access to open the online files of the case. Going that way could leave a flag, immediately alerting the case investigators of her activities.