“I thought you—”
Ballard grabbed Carr by the right arm and, in a move taught to her at the academy and long practiced since, yanked it behind his back while throwing her left shoulder into him. Carr pitched forward across the empty chair and table. At the same moment, Olivas rose from his chair, revealing that his hands were not cuffed, and slammed Carr chest-down on the table.
Olivas put his full weight down on Carr as Ballard pulled the handcuffs off her belt and worked them around Carr’s wrists.
“Good,” she yelled.
Olivas then dragged Carr completely across the table and flung him onto the seat where he had just been. He grabbed him with two hands by the jacket collar and pulled him up into a sitting position. He then hiked a thumb over his shoulder toward the upper corner of the room.
“Smile for the camera, Carr,” he said.
“What the fuck is this?” Carr demanded.
“Had to separate you from your weapons,” Ballard said.
Everything seemed to dawn on Carr. He shook his head.
“I get it, I get it,” he said. “But you’ve got it wrong. You can’t do this.”
“Yeah, we can,” Olivas said. “We have a warrant for your weapons.”
“He had a hip holster on today,” Ballard said.
Olivas nodded.
“Of course he did,” he said. “His shoulder rig was falling apart without that screw cap he lost.”
“Listen to me,” Carr said. “I don’t know what you people think you have, but you’ve got no probable cause. You are totally—”
“What we have is your thumbprint on that cap from your rig,” Olivas said. “How’s that end up at the crime scene when you were nowhere near that crime scene?”
“Bullshit,” Carr said. “You don’t have shit.”
“We have enough to run ballistics on your guns,” Olivas said. “We match them up and we’ll have a six-pack to run across the street to the D.A.”
“And it will be adios, motherfucker, to you,” Ballard added.
“Funny how being a cop worked against you,” Olivas said. “Most guys would get rid of the weapons. Hard to do that when they’re registered with the job. Tough to go in to the boss and say you lost both your guns. So my bet is that you kept them and thought you were going to skate.”
Carr looked stunned by the turnabout of events. Olivas leaned down, put his palms on the table, and recited the Miranda warning. He asked Carr if he understood his rights, and the detective ignored the question.
“This is wrong,” Carr said. “This is fucked up.”
“You killed Chastain,” Ballard said. “You killed them all.”
She had stepped close to the table, her body tense. Olivas put his arm out as if to block her from launching herself at Carr.
“You knew you had lost that button off your holster,” she said. “You had access to the task force room and you checked the evidence report. It wasn’t on there and that’s when you knew somebody was working it off book, somebody who knew it was a cop.”
“You’re crazy, Ballard,” Carr said. “And soon the whole world will know.”
“How’d you know it was Kenny?” she asked. “Because he was the lieutenant’s golden boy, the only one who’d risk going off book on this? Or didn’t it matter? Was Chastain just the fall guy because you found out he carried a ninety-two F and owed money? You just figured you could pin the whole thing on him?”
Carr didn’t answer.
“We’re going to find out,” Ballard said. “I’m going to find out.”
She stepped back and watched as a cold and instant reality seemed to fall on Carr, covering him like a thick black blanket. Ballard could read it in his face as he went from confidence to crisis, from thinking he had a shot at talking his way out of the room to visions of never seeing daylight again.
“I want a lawyer,” he said.
“I’m sure you do,” Ballard said.
42
For the second time in the day Ballard was walking evidence through analysis. She didn’t need a go-to in the firearms and ballistics unit. It was a case involving the murder of an LAPD officer, which automatically moved it to the front of any line. And to be sure, Olivas had called ahead and put his considerable weight behind the need for urgency. A ballistics expert named C. P. Medore would be waiting for her upon arrival.
The cold truth that Ballard was carrying with her, along with the guns seized from Carr, was that the D.A.’s package they had used to batter Carr with was not as strong as they had boasted. Since the VMD processing was a rarely used forensic procedure and it was handled in this case wholly outside of the police lab, it would be open to heavy attack by any defense attorney worth his weight in objections. Detective, are you telling this jury that this critical examination of evidence was carried out by college students in a chemistry lab? Are you expecting us to believe that this so-called evidence was literally stolen from the crime scene and then FedExed to this college lab?
What was additionally troublesome was the chain-of-evidence issue. The key piece of evidence with the suspect’s fingerprint was spirited away from the crime scene without documentation. Chastain was now dead, and Ballard was the sole witness who could place the holster button at the scene. Her own personal history with the department and her credibility would come under withering assault as well.
The bottom line was that they needed more. If either of the guns taken from Carr was matched to the Dancers shooting or the Chastain hit, then that case would be as solid as the Santa Monica Mountains and Carr would be crushed under its weight.
The cases were fraught with sentencing enhancements known as special circumstances: murder of a law enforcement officer; home invasion; lying in wait. Any one of these could put Carr on death row, and all three would practically guarantee it. While the state of California hadn’t executed an inmate in a decade and there was no indication that things would change in the future, it was still known to both cops and convicts alike that a death sentence was a ticket to insanity when the years of isolation—one hour per week out of the solo cell—began to take their toll. Facing that, Carr might be willing to plead out to get a deal that took death row off the table. He’d then have to admit his crimes and their motivations. He’d have to tell all.
Medore was there and waiting with another tech at the entrance to the gun unit. Each man took one of the separately packaged weapons from Ballard. Their first stop was the tank room, where they fired shots from the guns into the water, thus producing spent and undamaged bullets suitable for comparison to the slugs removed from the victims in the two cases. They then entered the ballistics lab and set up at a comparison microscope and went to work.
“Can you do the Ruger first?” Ballard asked.
She wanted the answer on the Chastain murder as soon as possible.