“Ramona, I’m Detective Ballard. I’m assigned to your case. I came by on Monday. Do you remember?”
“Not really.”
The voice was unmistakably male.
“I showed you photos? To see if one was of the man who hurt you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. In fact, it doesn’t really matter now. That’s why I came by. To tell you that the man who hurt you is dead. So you don’t have to be afraid or worry about him anymore. He’s gone.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“Very sure, Ramona.”
“Okay.”
She looked down as though she might be about to cry at the news. Ballard knew Ramona was safe now, but only from one predator. She was leading a life that was sure to bring more. Ballard pulled one of the cards she got from Towson out of her pocket and held it up.
“I wanted to give you this. This is a lawyer I’ve worked with, and I think he’s pretty good.”
“Why do I need a lawyer? What do they say I did?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m not supposed to give out legal advice, but if I was, I would tell you that you should sue the estate of the man who did this to you. I am pretty sure he had a large amount of money invested in his house. I think you should get a lawyer and go after some of that money. He victimized you, and you should collect from his estate before anybody else does.”
“Okay.”
But Ramona did not reach out for the business card. Ballard put it down on the table next to her bed.
“It’s right there when you need it.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“I’m going to leave my own card too. Later on, you will probably have questions. You can give me a call.”
“Okay.”
It was an awkward exit, because with the case concluded by Trent’s death, there was no need for Ballard to spend more time with Ramona. As she left the hospital, Ballard wondered if she would ever see her again. Perhaps, she thought, she had suggested the lawsuit against Trent’s estate because she knew she would be called in to testify about the case.
She wondered if it was a subconscious move to seek the kind of fulfillment that came from taking a case from beginning to end. Trent was dead but Ballard might still be able to take him to trial and get a guilty verdict.
33
Ballard sat in an office with Dr. Carmen Hinojos, the director of the Behavioral Science Unit. The room was decorated in blond wood, cream-colored walls, and pale curtains. The window looked across the roofs of Chinatown toward the spire of City Hall. They sat facing each other in comfortably cushioned chairs that contradicted the uncomfortable situation for Ballard.
“Have you ever killed anyone before?” Hinojos asked.
“No,” Ballard said. “First time.”
“How are you feeling about it today?”
“To be honest, I feel fine about it. If I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me. I have no doubt.”
She immediately regretted starting her answer with “to be honest.” Usually when people said that, they were being anything but honest.
The session continued down avenues of questioning Ballard had fully expected. As with almost every situation an officer faced regarding internal investigations and procedures, she was well versed in what would be asked and how it should best be answered. The union newsletters carried case examples all the time that were analyzed in depth. Ballard knew that the important thing to say and project with Hinojos was that there was no second-guessing of her actions up to and including the killing of Trent. Showing regret or remorse would be wrong moves. The department needed to be assured that if returned to duty, she would not have any hesitation in doing her job, that she would not hesitate if placed in a kill-or-be-killed situation.
Ballard was calm and forthright during the interview and showed discomfort only when Hinojos veered away from questions about the Trent killing to asking about her childhood and the path she took to law enforcement.
Ballard began to feel like she was trapped. She had to reveal herself to a stranger or risk that her return to duty would be delayed by further analysis or treatment. Ballard didn’t want that. She didn’t want to ride the pine. She tried to put a positive spin on things in terms of the good things she had learned from bad experiences. But even she knew that finding the positive in things like her father’s untimely death, her mother’s abandonment of her as a teenager, and the year she spent homeless was a difficult task.
“Maui has the prettiest beaches in the world,” Ballard said at one point. “I surfed every morning before going to school.”
“Yes, but you had no home to go to and a mother who didn’t care,” Hinojos said. “No one should face that at that age.”
“It wasn’t that long. Tutu came for me.”
“Tutu?”
“Hawaiian for grandmother. She brought me back here. To Ventura.”
Hinojos was an older woman with white hair and golden-brown skin. She had been with the department for more than thirty years. On her lap was an open file that contained the psychological report drawn from the examination conducted when Ballard had first applied to the LAPD fifteen years earlier. Much of the history was there. Ballard hadn’t known enough at the time to keep her past to herself.
Ballard had not been back to BSU since that initial exam.
“Dr. Richardson has an interesting workup here,” Hinojos said, referring to the initial examiner. “He says disorder in your young life drew you to law enforcement. A job where you enforce laws and enforce order. What do you think about that?”
“Well,” Ballard said, stalling. “I think we need to have rules. They are what makes society civilized.”
“And Thomas Trent broke the rules, didn’t he?”
“Yes, big-time.”
“If you had the chance to relive the past seventy-two hours and make smarter choices, do you think Thomas Trent would still be alive?”
“I don’t know about smarter choices. I think I made the right choice in the moment. I would prefer answering questions about what did happen and why. Not speculation about what could have happened or what could have been.”
“So no regrets, then?”
“Sure, I have regrets but not for what you probably think.”
“Try me. What regrets?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I had no choice. It was him or me. In that situation I have zero regrets, and if faced with the same circumstances, I would do what I did again. But I do wish he were still alive so I could arrest him and we could take him to trial and he would rot in prison for what he did.”
“You believe that by being stabbed and losing his life he got off easy.”
Ballard thought for a moment and then nodded.
“Yeah, I do.”
Hinojos closed the file.
“Okay, Detective Ballard, thank you for your candor,” she said.
“Wait, that’s it?” Ballard asked.
“That’s it.”
“Well, do I get the RTD?”
“That will be forthcoming, but I am going to suggest that you take some time off to recuperate mentally. You have been through a trauma, and there are unanswered questions about what happened to you when you were drugged. Your mind is bruised as well as your body. Like the body, the mind needs time to heal. It needs time to settle from this.”
“I appreciate that, Doctor. I really do. But I have active cases. I need to wrap them up and then I can take time off.”
Hinojos smiled in a tired sort of way, as if she had heard what Ballard said a thousand times before.
“I guess all cops come in here and say the same thing,” Ballard said.
“I can’t blame them,” Hinojos said. “They are worried about losing their jobs and identities, not worried about the consequence both have on them. What would you do if you were not a police officer?”
Ballard thought for a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t
thought about it.”
Hinojos nodded.
“I’ve done this a long time,” she said. “I’ve seen long careers and careers cut short. The difference is in how you handle the darkness.”
“The darkness?” Ballard said. “I work the late show. There is nothing but—”
“I’m talking about the darkness within. You have a job, Detective, that takes you into the bleakest side of the human soul. Into the darkness of people like Trent. To me it’s like the laws of physics—for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. If you go into darkness, the darkness goes into you. You then have to decide what to do with it. How to keep yourself safe from it. How to keep it from hollowing you out.”
She paused there and Ballard knew not to speak.
“Find something that protects you, Detective Ballard.”
Hinojos got up from her chair then and the session was over. She walked Ballard to the room’s door. Ballard nodded a good-bye.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Stay safe, Detective Ballard.”
34
Ballard was twenty minutes late getting to Men’s Central Jail, but Compton was there, waiting for her. They signed in and Ballard stowed her backup gun in a locker before they were placed in an interview room to wait while Christopher Nettles was located and brought to them.
“How are we going to do this?” Ballard asked.
“Let me do the talking,” Compton said. “He knows I’m the one with the power. I filed on him with the gun. That’s our currency.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
While they waited, Compton reached over and lifted Ballard’s hands and somberly studied the bandages on her wrists.
“I know, it looks like I tried to end it all,” she said. “I’ll only need the bandages for a week.”
“The bastard,” Compton said. “I’m just glad you put him down.”
Ballard told Compton the short version of what had happened with Trent and how an illegal leak to the Times had bent the story against her. Compton shook his head. Ballard decided not to tell him about how the rough sex they had had Saturday morning had hindered the ability of the RTC nurse to determine if she had been raped. That discussion could keep for another time.
The conversation as it was ended when the door opened and Nettles was escorted in by two jail deputies. He immediately objected to the presence of Ballard, claiming that she had mistreated him during his arrest.
“Sit down and shut up,” Compton said sternly. “You don’t get to decide things like that.”
The deputies put him in a chair and locked one of his wrists to a steel ring at the center of the table.
“So what do you want?” Nettles said.
Compton waited until the deputies stepped out.
“Do you have any idea about your situation, Christopher?” he asked. “You’re going up in front of a judge tomorrow. Has a lawyer been by to talk to you?”
“Not yet,” Nettles said.
He flicked his cuffed hand in a gesture that suggested he wasn’t worried.
“Well, the reason you haven’t seen a lawyer is that a lawyer isn’t going to be able to help you,” Compton said. “Your parole has been revoked and you’re going back up to Corcoran, and there isn’t a damn thing a lawyer can do about it.”
“I only had a bullet left,” Nettles said. “I can do that, no sweat off my balls.”
He looked at Ballard as he said it. Ballard knew that a bullet was a year in the pen.
“And what? You think the D.A.’s going to just let all those burglaries slide?” Compton asked.
“What I hear people saying in here is that all the D.A.’ll do is stack ’em right next to my current situation, and I won’t do an extra day on account of overcrowding,” Nettles said. “How ’bout that?”
“Then how about the felon with a gun charge I just added to your résumé? That’s five years stacked on top of the bullet. You can do that, no sweat off your balls?”
“The fuck you talking about, man?”
“I’m talking about a plus-five.”
“That’s bullshit!”
Nettles shook the handcuff violently. He pointed his free hand at Ballard.
“This is because of you, bitch!” he yelled.
“Don’t blame me for your crimes,” Ballard threw back at him. “Blame yourself.”
Ballard kept her hands on her lap and below the table. She was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, but she didn’t want to risk Nettles seeing the bandages around her wrists and asking questions.
“Look, Christopher, why do you think we’re here?” Compton said. “You think we get off on giving you the bad news?”
“Probably,” Nettles said. “She does.”
“Actually, you’re wrong,” Compton said. “We’re not here to bring bad news. We’re the light at the end of your tunnel. We came to help you help yourself.”
Nettles settled down. He knew there was a deal to be made now. He looked suspiciously at Compton.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want to know about the guns,” Compton said. “I want to know where you stole them from. I want addresses, details. You give me that, and we start subtracting from the total. You see?”
Ballard appreciated that Compton was not directly asking about the Glock. It was better not to reveal their specific intention to Nettles. The ex-con might then attempt to manipulate the interview.
“I don’t know, man,” Nettles whined. “How am I supposed to remember addresses?”
“Think,” Compton said. “You must have some idea what houses you hit. Start with the gun you were carrying. The Glock model seventeen. You must’ve liked it, because you didn’t pawn it. Where’d that come from?”
Nettles leaned forward and put the elbow of his free arm down on the table. He used his free hand to work his jaw like The Thinker as he considered the question.
“Well first of all, all three of those guns came from the same house,” he finally said. “I just don’t remember the fucking address. Don’t you people get burglary reports for these things?”
Compton ignored the question.
“What about the street?” he asked. “Do you remember the street name?”
“No, I don’t remember any street name,” Nettles said.
Ballard had connected six of the credit cards found in Nettles’s room at the Siesta Village with burglary reports where no firearms were reported as taken. This meant those victims had either lied about the guns or there was at least one burglary committed by Nettles that was not reported—most likely because a murder weapon had been stolen. The six known cases had all been located on streets a few blocks from the Siesta Village, creating a pattern extending north, east, and west from the motel.
There was no freeway or other impediment to accessing the neighborhood south of the motel, and yet none of the known burglaries had occurred there. This told Ballard that the house they were looking for might be south.
“Did you ever hit any houses south of the motel where you were staying?” Ballard asked.
“South?” Nettles responded. “Uh, yeah, I hit south.”
Compton threw her a look. She wasn’t supposed to ask the questions. But she continued the line of inquiry.
“Okay, how many times did you go south?”
“Once or twice. The houses that way weren’t as nice. People had junk.”
“When did you hit down there?”
“When I first started.”
“Okay, according to the motel, you had been there nine days before your arrest. So in the first couple days, you went south?”
“I guess so.”
“How long have you had the guns?”
“It was one of the first ones.”
“From south of the motel?”
“Yeah, I guess. I think it was the second. Yeah, the second. The guy thought he was real fucking clever hiding the guns behind the books on his shelves, but I always knock the books off the shelves.
Right to the floor. People hide all kinds of good shit behind the books. That’s how I found the guns.”
Ballard took out her phone and went to the GPS app. She pulled up a map centered on Santa Monica Boulevard and Wilton Place, where the Siesta Village motel was located. She started reading off the names of streets to the south. Saint Andrews, Western, Ridgewood, Romaine—Nettles kept shaking his head until she came to Sierra Vista.
“Wait,” he said. “Sierra Vista. That sounds familiar. I think that’s it.”
“What did the house look like?” Ballard asked.
“I don’t know, it looked like a house.”
“Did it have a garage?”
“Yeah, a garage in the back. Separate.”
“One floor, two floors?”
“One. I don’t fuck around with two-story jobs.”
“Okay, was it brick, wood structure, what?”
“Not brick.”
“How’d you get in?”
“I went in the backyard, and popped a slider by the pool.”
“Okay, so there was a pool.”
“Yeah, next to the garage.”
“So there was a gate, then? Like a fence around the pool?”
“The whole backyard. It was locked and I climbed over.”
“Was it a wall or a fence?”
“Fence.”
“What color was the fence?”
“It was like gray. Stained gray.”
“How’d you know nobody was home?”
“I was parked on the street and I saw the guy leave.”
“In a car?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of car? What color?”
“It was a Camaro. Yellow. I remember the car. Cool car. I wanted that car.”
“How’d you know the place was empty? Just because the guy drove off didn’t mean the house wasn’t full with a wife and kids.”
“I know, I always knock on the front door. I have a work shirt with my name on the pocket. I act like I’m a gas inspector looking for a leak. If somebody answers, I just go through the motions and go to the next one.”
“So, what did the front door look like?” she asked.
“Uh, it was yellow,” Nettles said. “Yeah, yellow. I remember because it was like the car. The dude liked yellow.”
The Late Show Page 28