“Why, what have you got?” Carr asked.
“The burn on Fabian’s chest,” Ballard said. “There was a theory that he was wearing a wire.”
“What, for Internal Affairs?” he asked.
“For himself. He was looking at five years in the federal pen unless he could come up with something to trade.”
“And you know this how?”
Ballard had a problem here. She didn’t want to give up Towson but they were going to come to him anyway because one of Chastain’s last calls had been to the defense attorney. If they came to him and he mentioned Ballard’s visit, then she would face the wrath of Lieutenant Olivas.
“You have to protect me on this,” she said. “What I know will help you.”
“Shit, Ballard, I don’t know,” Carr said. “Don’t put me in the middle of something where I get jammed up.”
“You said you’re retracing Chastain’s steps, right?”
“Me and others, yeah.”
“Well, somebody drew Fabian’s lawyer. Chastain talked to him Friday. Call whoever drew the assignment and say you’ll take it.”
“Well, first of all, I already drew that assignment. Dean Towson is on my to-do list. But more importantly, how do you know Chastain talked to him, and how do you know about any of this stuff? The burn on the chest, the wire, the lawyer—what have you been doing, Ballard?”
“I was at the crime scene Thursday night. I was there when they found the burn. When Chastain got killed, I made a couple calls. He was my partner and taught me a lot. I owed it to him.”
Carr shook his head, not seeing the validity of her moves.
“Look,” he said. “I’m working the Chastain side of this. I don’t know anything about a burn mark or a wire. But even if Fabian was wired, it doesn’t mean he was taping a cop. He could’ve been taping one of the other mutts in the booth. They were all criminals.”
Ballard shrugged.
“They weren’t high enough value for the feds,” she said. “Talk to Towson. It was a cop.”
Carr frowned. Ballard pushed on.
“Speaking of the other mutts in the booth, how do they connect them?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Carr said. “I’m on Chastain.”
“They weren’t strangers. They were all in Pitchess together five years ago. Same month.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Pitchess is a big place.”
“If someone looked into it, I think they’d find they were in the same dorm. That cuts it down to size.”
Carr stared at her eye to eye.
“Ballard, really, what the fuck have you been doing?”
“My job. I get a lot of downtime on the late show. And I guess you could say I’m like you. Nobody should put a cop down and walk away from it. I had my problems with Kenny but he was my partner for almost five years and he was a closer. I learned a lot with him. But look, I’m outside the case. You’re in. I can feed you whatever I get. You just have to protect me on it.”
“I don’t know. If they find out you’re sniffing around on it, then it comes back to me. I think you just need to steer clear, Ballard. I’ll go with what you just gave me but you need to stand down. That’s the message I was supposed to deliver.”
Ballard stood up.
“Fine. Whatever. Message received. I’ve got other cases to work.”
“Look, don’t go off mad.”
She stepped away from the table and went through the opening in the railing. She came back around to unhook the dog’s leash. She looked at Carr one more time.
“You need me, you know where to find me.”
“Sure.”
She walked off with her dog. It was almost dark now on the beach and the wind off the water was getting cold.
21
Ballard’s first stop was at the critter sitter’s off Abbot Kinney. Sarah was reluctant to take the dog in, even though she was paid extra when Lola spent more than the night at her home.
“She’s getting depressed,” she said. “She misses you all the time.”
Sarah was a longtime resident of Venice who sold sunglasses on the boardwalk. She had offered to help when Ballard rescued Lola from her homeless and abusive owner. That had amounted to a place to stay while Ballard worked the midnight shift, but the schedule had gone out the window in recent days.
“I know,” Ballard said. “It’s not fair but I keep thinking that things will return to normal soon. I just got a bunch of cases all at once.”
“If it keeps up, maybe you should take her up to your grandmother’s to stay,” Sarah suggested. “So she has some continuity with someone.”
“That’s a good idea,” Ballard said. “But I hope soon it will all slow down and go back to normal.”
Ballard drove east toward Hollywood, trying to bury her frustrations from the conversations with both Sarah and Carr. With Carr she was particularly stressed because she had put herself on the line with her revelations and had not gotten a clear signal from him that he would push forward on the case in return. His final message was to stand down, but she didn’t know if that was because he was going to take it from there or if nothing would happen at all.
At the station she put the Chastain investigation aside for the time being and went back to work on the Ramona Ramone case. Her first move was to call Hollywood Presbyterian to check on the victim’s medical status. After a runaround that included several minutes of being on hold, she started to worry that Ramone had taken a bad turn and succumbed to her injuries. But finally Ballard was talking to an evening supervisor, who reported that earlier in the day the patient had been transferred to the Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center in downtown. Ballard asked if the transfer meant that Ramone had come out of the coma, but the supervisor refused to share details of her medical condition, citing privacy laws. Nevertheless, Ballard knew there were laws regulating patient dumping, and she didn’t think that moving a patient in a coma was allowed. This gave her hope that Ramona Ramone might finally be able to take part in the investigation.
Ballard decided that she would go down to County-USC to check on Ramone’s medical status, security, and availability as a witness as soon as possible. But for the moment her focus was still squarely on Thomas Trent, and it was time to get back on the case and keep pushing.