“You want me to leave and come back?” Ballard asked. “How long?”
“Give me at least a couple hours,” Stanfield said. “If I get through it quicker, I’ll call.”
Ballard stood up.
“Okay, but remember,” she said. “Keep this under the table. Don’t tell anyone what case it is or what you’re doing. And if you get a match, tell only me.”
Stanfield put the magnifying glass down on the lab table and looked at her.
“Are you trying to scare me?” she asked.
“No, but I want you to be cautious. If you get a name and it’s the name I’m thinking it will be, then you’ll understand what I’m saying.”
Ballard didn’t want to share her investigative theory with Stanfield prior to the work. She didn’t want to infect her conclusions with any preconceived ideas of who the print would match.
“Holy shit,” Stanfield said. “Well, thanks a lot, Renée. You know I really liked working here.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Ballard said. “Just see what you get and I’ll be back.”
40
Ballard used the time to walk over to the print shed that was located behind Piper Tech. Knowing how citizens were often treated when they attempted to pick up their impounded and printed vehicles, she half expected a delay in the paperwork from FID releasing her van. But it was ready to go. She wasn’t wrong about her expectations about its condition, however.
The first clue was the driver’s door handle, which was still dusted with black fingerprint powder. She opened the door and found the driver’s compartment bombed with powder as well. She knew from crime scene experience that the black powder could ruin clothes and be impossible to get out with home car-washing. She went back to the garage’s office and angrily demanded that the van be returned in drivable condition. This resulted in a stare-down with the garage manager, but he changed his demeanor when Ballard produced her badge. He dispatched two of his garage greasers with a high-powered vacuum, a roll of paper towels, and a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner to the van.
Ballard stood by, watched the work, and pointed out every spot they missed. After an hour she thought about calling Polly Stanfield but she knew that would only annoy her. She decided to check in at Hollywood Detectives instead and called Lieutenant McAdams’s direct line.
“Ballard, what are you doing awake?” he asked. “I have you back on the schedule tonight.”
“I’ll be there, L-T, don’t worry,” she said. “Just checking in. What’s happening in the Six?”
“Only thing I got going is an assist with the feds. They got a takedown team surrounding some fool holed up in the Bat-cave.”
That was a reference to a cave up in Bronson Canyon that had been used during the filming of the 1960s Batman television show.
“What do they want him for?”
“A double-bagger in Texas. Killed two armored-car guards a couple years ago and lammed it over here.”
“What are we doing?”
“Crowd and traffic control.”
Ballard knew it was the guy she had spooked with Compton. She wondered if she would escape with no blowback from the feds if they successfully brought him down at the Bat-cave. Just then, she got a call-waiting buzz on her phone. She checked and saw it was Stanfield.
“Hey L-T, I have a call coming in. I gotta go.”
“Okay, Ballard, go.”
She disconnected and switched over.
“Polly?”
“I got a hit on that thumb. It’s a cop. What did you get me into, Renée?”
41
Ballard stepped out of an interrogation room at the Metropolitan Detention Center, crossed the wide hallway, and entered the control center. She looked at the monitor for the interrogation room. Lieutenant Olivas sat in the chair facing the overhead camera, his arms pulled into a locked position behind his back. He knew she was looking at him and had his head tilted back. He scowled at the camera.
Ballard raised her phone and took a photo of the monitor. She then texted the shot to Rogers Carr with a message.
I need help. He won’t talk to me.
As she expected, it didn’t take long for Carr to respond.
WTF?!!! Where are you?
Her reply was terse. She wasn’t interested in a text debate. She needed Carr to come to the jail.
MDC. You coming? I want to flip him.
There was no response. Minutes dragged by and she knew Carr was debating with himself whether to come over, whether to risk his career and the enmity of the department by getting involved in the attempted takedown of a prized lieutenant. Ballard tried one more time to coax him.
I have the evidence.
Another minute went by. It felt like an hour. Then Carr returned.
On my way.
Ballard realized she had been holding her breath. She released it in relief and turning to the two officers monitoring the screens told them that Carr was on his way.
She was still in the control center when Carr was announced and he entered the hallway fifteen minutes later. Ballard stepped out to meet him. His forehead was slick with a film of sweat. That told her that he had covered the three blocks on foot and must have left the PAB without hesitation after their text conversation. He glanced through the square window on the door to interrogation room A and looked at Olivas. He then quickly turned away as though he couldn’t take what he saw. He focused on Ballard and spoke in a low, controlled voice.
“What the fuck, Ballard? How the hell did you get him in here?”
“I lured him out of the PAB. I told him I had someone here who was ready to confess.”
“And then you fucking arrest him? On what evidence?”
He said the last word too loud, almost as a shriek. He brought his hand to his mouth and checked the officers in the control center, then dropped back down to a whisper.
“Listen to me, you are moving too fast,” he said. “Everything I have? It points to Chastain, not Olivas. Not a fucking RHD lieutenant. Do you know what you’re doing here? You are committing career suicide. You need to stop this right now.”
“I can’t,” Ballard said. “I know it wasn’t Chastain. He took measures because he knew it was a cop. That’s why Olivas killed him.”
“What measures? Ballard, what evidence do you have? You are letting your issue with Olivas take this over and—”
“Kenny took evidence from the crime scene at the Dancers. Evidence that it was a cop.”
“What are you talking about? What did he take?”
“A piece of a holster that came loose when the shooter pulled his gun. I was there. I saw him take it. That and the wire—he knew it was a cop.”
Carr looked off for a moment as he composed his thoughts. He then leaned down and in close to Ballard.
“Listen to me. What you saw was Chastain covering his own tracks. He was the shooter and you have fucked this up beyond belief. Now I’m going to go in there and talk to Olivas. And I’m going to try to salvage this and save your job.”
Carr signaled to one of the officers in the control center to unlock the door. He then looked back at Ballard.
“If you’re lucky, you’ll end up riding a bike on the boardwalk,” he said. “But at least you’ll still have a badge.”
“You don’t understand,” Ballard protested. “There’s evidence. I have—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Carr said, cutting her off. “I’m going in.”
The jail officer walked over to a wall unit of small lockers. He opened one and removed the key from its lock.
“Okay, you need to put your weapons in here,” he said. “Sidearm, backup, knife, everything.”
Carr walked over and put one of each into the locker, pulling his holstered sidearm off his belt, then a folding knife from his back pocket. He leaned one hand against the wall so he could raise his right leg, pull up the cuff of his pants, and detach an ankle holster containing his backup. The jail officer closed and locked t
he wall compartment and handed Carr the key. It was on an elastic band that Carr snapped around his wrist. He then looked at Ballard.
“I hope to fuck this doesn’t bring me down with you.”
The officer opened the door to the interrogation room and stepped back to allow Carr in. Carr walked across the threshold and toward the table, where Olivas sat.
Ballard followed Carr, and the jail officer closed the door, locking them in.
Carr started to turn when he realized that Ballard had come in behind him.
“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.
“No problem,” Medore said.
Ballard stood back and observed. She had seen the exacting process done dozens of times before, and her mind shifted to what had happened back at the city jail after Carr had been arrested and Olivas had set assignments for the investigation’s new direction. Ballard was given the ballistic assignment, while three other detectives were assigned to Carr and ordered to take his life down to the studs in an attempt to link him to the men murdered in the booth at the Dancers and to learn the motivation behind the massacre. Olivas gave himself the assignment of apprising command staff of what was happening and of the need to alert the departmen
t’s media managers. It was unlikely that Carr’s arrest would stay under wraps for long, and the department needed to get out in front of the story.
When it was all said and done and people started going separate ways, Olivas told Ballard to hang back for a moment. When they were alone, he put out his hand. The gesture was so unexpected that she shook it without thinking. Then he wouldn’t let go of hers.
“Detective, I want to bury the hatchet,” he said. “This thing shows what kind of investigator you are. You’re smart and you’re fierce. I could use you back on my team, and I could make sure it happens. You’d be back working days, unlimited OT. A lot of good reasons to come back.”
Ballard stood there speechless at first. She was holding the evidence bags containing Carr’s weapons.
“I need to get these to firearms,” she said.
Olivas nodded and finally released her.
“Think about it,” he said. “You’re a good detective, Ballard. And I can turn the other cheek for the good of the department.”
Ballard had turned then to leave the jail. She walked out, thankful that she had held back from swinging the evidence bags and raking Carr’s guns across Olivas’s face.
As she watched Medore at the microscope, she tried to move her thoughts back to the case.
There were still many questions and loose ends. Chief among them was the missing Matthew Robison. Once Ballard learned that it was Carr’s thumbprint on the holster cap, she started running the facts of the case through the new angle of Carr as killer. She saw the connection that had eluded her before. Carr had been part of the Major Crimes task force that had taken down the human-trafficking cabal at the port on Friday morning. She had seen him herself on the five-o’clock news. She realized now that Robison, last seen by his girlfriend on the couch watching TV, could have seen the report and recognized Carr from the night before at the Dancers. He then could have picked up the phone at 5:10 p.m. and called Ken Chastain to tell him.
The Late Show Page 32