“Yeah, it’s good,” Ballard said. “What do you think?”
“I think we made a mistake,” he said. “We should have told Feltzer you wanted a promotion to captain too. He gave us everything we wanted! In fact, I checked on your van and they said you can pick it up tomorrow. They’re finished with it.”
She hadn’t known he was going to do that. His taking that initiative suggested to Ballard that things were maybe going to get awkward with Towson.
“Thank you very much, Dean,” she said. “For all of it. You really turned this around.”
“Wasn’t me,” he said. “You made this about the easiest case I’ve ever handled.”
“Well, good. And by the way, I gave your card to Trent’s victim—the one who brought me into the case. I told her she should go after the equity in that house and to call you.”
“Well, I’m much obliged. And you know, Renée, this is now a closed matter, as far as my involvement. That means it would not be a conflict if we were to stay in touch—you know, socially.”
There it was. The awkward overture. It was routine to get hit on by men in the department as well as the larger field of the justice system. That was how she and Compton had hooked up—a shared experience leading to something more. She had been feeling Towson’s interest growing since the interview at his town house Sunday morning. The problem was, she did not return his interest, especially after the ordeal she had just been through.
“I think I want to keep this on a professional level, Dean,” she said. “I may need your legal services in the future and I like how you handled this—a lot.”
She hoped that puffing him up on a professional level would allow the personal rejection to go down easier.
“Well, of course,” he said. “Whatever you need, Renée. I’m here for you. But think about it. We could always have both.”
“Thank you, Dean,” she said.
After ending the call, Ballard went back to the photos, studying once again the shots of Trent’s body and the room on the bottom floor of the upside-down house. Seeing the body and the blood allowed her to go back to it and go over it in her mind’s eye. She relived the steps she took, the escape from her bindings, and then the attack. She cupped her right hand around her left wrist. It was the one she had first freed, and it had suffered the deepest laceration from the zip tie. The photos made her feel the pain again. But it was earned. It was sacrifice. She could not articulate it even to herself, but going through it again in her head and not second-guessing anything was therapeutic. It was needed.
She almost didn’t hear her name being called from the other side of the squad room. She looked up and saw Danitra Lewis waving a clipboard at her from just outside McAdams’s office. Lewis was the division’s records and property clerk. Ballard knew that at the end of each day, Lewis dropped off evidence logs in the lieutenant’s in-box so that he would be apprised of the comings and goings on different cases.
Ballard got up and went over to see what she wanted.
“What’s up, Danitra?”
“What’s up is I need a disposition on the property you got in my locker. You can’t just leave it there forever.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying you’ve got that bag sittin’ in one of my boxes since last week.”
“The one going to Chastain at RHD? He was supposed to take it Friday.”
“Well, like I’m saying, it’s still in that locker, and it’s got a hold for you on it, not him. I need you to come get it. I need the space.”
Ballard was confused. The evidence bag contained the belongings of Cynthia Haddel, the waitress gunned down in the Dancers massacre. Ballard knew that she was an ancillary victim but it didn’t make a lot of sense to her that Chastain had not taken the property bag early Friday morning when he had been at the station. She had told him about it. But even if Chastain hadn’t taken the bag because his hands were full with the witness Zander Speights, it should have been transported by courier Monday morning to Property Division downtown and held for him there.
That was the procedure. But Lewis was saying that none of that had happened. That the bag was on hold for her.
“I don’t know what’s going on with that, but I’ll go check it in a few minutes,” Ballard said.
Lewis thanked her and left the squad room.
Ballard went back to the desk she was using, stacked the photos and the search warrant return together, and put them back into the interoffice mailer so that they would not be lying around on display. She then locked the envelope in her file cabinet and headed back to the property room.
Lewis was gone and the room was empty. Ballard opened the locker in which she had put the brown paper bag that contained Cynthia Haddel’s personal effects. She took the bag out and carried it over to the counter. The first thing she noticed was that the bag was double taped. A second layer of red evidence tape had been applied over the first, meaning the bag had been opened and resealed since Ballard had placed it in the locker early Friday morning. She assumed that Chastain had done this. She next checked the property transfer label and saw that this, too, was new. Handwritten instructions on the label said to hold the property for Detective Ballard at Hollywood Division. Ballard recognized the handwriting as Chastain’s.
Ballard grabbed a box cutter off the counter, cut through the tape, and opened the bag. From it she pulled the plastic evidence bags she had placed inside the paper bag the morning after Haddel’s murder. She noticed that one of these was also double taped. It had been opened and resealed.
Without breaking the new seal on the bag, she spread it out on the counter so she could see its contents through the plastic. There was an inventory list inside and she was able to check everything against it, from Haddel’s phone to her tip apron to the cigarette box containing the vial of Molly.
Based on what Rogers Carr had said about Chastain now being the focus of the investigation, Ballard wondered what Chastain had been up to. Was there something in the bag that he wanted to keep hidden from RHD? Was it something on Haddel’s phone? Or had he taken something?
There was no easy answer. Ballard grabbed the top corners of the bag and flipped it over on the counter so that she could examine its contents from the other side. Right away she noticed a business card that hadn’t been there before slipped down into the cellophane wrap of the cigarette box. It was Chastain’s LAPD business card.
Ballard went over to a latex glove dispenser on the wall and grabbed a pair. She snapped the gloves on and went back to the evidence bag. She cut the seal and reached in for the cigarettes. She removed the box and examined it closely before slipping the business card out. There was a name written on the side of the card, not visible when it had been behind the cigarette box cellophane.
Eric Higgs
VMD