“Mr. Robison, this is Detective Ballard with the LAPD. I am following up on the phone conversation you had Friday with Detective Chastain. Could you give me a call back as soon as possible?”
She was leaving her number on the message when she saw on one of the TV screens video footage from outside Ken Chastain’s house. The media had finally been alerted to the story. The sound was down on the screen but on the video Ballard saw the chief of police addressing several reporters while Olivas stood just behind him and to his left. The chief looked ashen, as though he knew that whatever had started in that booth at the Dancers had now reached deep into his department and done irreparable damage.
Ballard didn’t need to hear his statement to know it.
The last set of documents Ballard looked through were Chastain’s own rough notes on the autopsies. He had transferred them to a digital file in preparation for writing reports to be submitted to the overall case file. He was dead before he got the chance to accomplish that.
Because the case was of highest priority—high enough to draw Dr. J., the coroner herself, out to the crime scene—the examinations of the bodies were conducted late Friday morning at the Medical Examiner’s Office, with Dr. J. supervising several deputy coroners assigned to each of the bodies. While there was little doubt as to cause of death of the victims, recovery of bullets from the bodies was an important step in the investigation and thus gave the individual cases priority status. Usually autopsies weren’t even scheduled for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. These were conducted less than twelve hours after the deaths.
Dr. J. conducted the Fabian autopsy herself. The actual autopsy report would take several days to produce but in the meantime Chastain took notes as the attending investigator. It was in those notes that Ballard came across a sentence and a question that turned her thoughts on the case in a new direction.
According to Chastain’s notes, Dr. J. had labeled a wound on Fabian’s chest as a first-degree burn that had occurred at the time of death but was not caused by a firearm. Chastain had added a second notation to this conclusion: “Battery burn?”
Ballard froze as she remembered seeing Chastain, Dr. J., and Lieutenant Olivas gathered around Fabian’s body at the crime scene and studying his chest.
Now she knew why. Fabian had a burn on his chest that may have come from a battery.
Ballard quickly moved back to the property report on Fabian and saw nothing listed as recovered with the body that could explain the burn. Whatever was burning him at the time of the shooting was taken from the scene—apparently by the shooter.
It all tumbled together for Ballard. She believed that Fabian was wearing a listening device. He was wired at the Dancers meeting, and the battery of the device had started to burn him. It was a well-known hazard in undercover work. Compact listening devices overheat and oils and sweat from the body can create an arcing connection with the battery. Professional UCs take measures to insulate themselves from what they call bug burn, wrapping the devices in rubber sheathing to place the devices away from the body’s sweat glands.
There was nothing in the background material on Fabian that Ballard had reviewed that showed he had ever worked as an undercover operative. But there was a burn on his chest that indicated otherwise in the Dancers massacre.
Ballard believed that Chastain was onto something and it might have been what got him killed.
18
Ballard waited until nine a.m. Sunday to knock on Dean Towson’s door. She had just come from breakfast at the Du-par’s in Studio City after a relatively slow night on the late shift. She’d had only two callouts, first to sign off on a suicide, and second to aid in the search for a missing old man with Alzheimer’s. He was found in a neighbor’s carport before she even got to the call location.
It had taken all of her will and patience to hold back from attempting to make contact with Towson in the middle of the night. The more she considered Ken Chastain’s autopsy notes, the more she believed that Towson might hold a key to solving the mystery of what had happened in the booth at the Dancers.
But she managed to exercise restraint and used the time between the callouts to take a deeper dive into all law enforcement databases available in a search for details about the three men murdered in the booth at the Dancers. The effort paid off just before dawn. By collating the criminal histories of the three men along with their incarceration locations she was able to find the crossing point—the place where all three of them could have previously met and interacted. Five years earlier, all three men from the booth were housed at the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic.
Pitchess was part of Los Angeles County’s vast jail system. Decades earlier it was a minimum-security drunk farm, where hapless miscreants dried out and served their sentences for drunk driving and public intoxication. Now it was the biggest facility in the county system and operated under heavy security. Almost eight thousand male inmates were housed there while awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than a year. In May 2012, Santangelo was in Pitchess in the middle of a ninety-day sentence for battery while Fabian was there for a thirty-day stint for a drug-possession rap and Abbott was finishing a six-month term for an illegal gaming conviction. As far as Ballard could determine, the three men had overlapped at Pitchess for three weeks.
Ballard knew Pitchess was a big place. She had been there numerous times to conduct interviews with inmates. But she knew there were ways of cutting down the population pool that would have included the three men from the booth. Gangs were segregated according to race and affiliation, and the dorms dedicated to gangs at Pitchess accounted for half of the facility’s capacity. Ballard had found no record of any of the three booth men having street gang affiliation.