The Dark Hours (16 page)

“On my way. But are you allowed to invite a guest?”

“One of us can. One guest allowed a night. I traded with a guy to get tonight ’cause I hoped you’d like firehouse chili. But grilled cheese is just as good.”

“All right, cool. See you in a bit. One last question …”

“Sure.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Oh, it’s Garrett.”

“Garrett. Cool. I’ll see you soon, Garrett.”

After disconnecting, Ballard created an entry with Single’s full name in her contact list. She hoped it would stay in there for a while. She parked her car behind the police station. Before going over to the firehouse, she ducked into the locker room in the station and put on some light makeup. She was only going to a firehouse for a grilled cheese dinner, but she wanted to make an impression.

The dinner was fun, with Single introducing Ballard to his colleagues and her receiving a round of applause. And the grilled cheese was not bad, but the food and fun were cut short when EMT Single and his rescue team were called out on a traffic accident at Highland and Hollywood, one of the busiest intersections in the city. They raced off to the scene, and Ballard carried the second half of her grilled cheese sandwich on a napkin around the wall that separated the firehouse from the police station. She finished eating in the station while sitting in on the mid-watch roll call. Mid-watch rolled out at eight — Ballard’s usual start time — and it was small squad, making roll calls less crowded and more informal. No one objected to her finishing her sandwich.

After, she went directly down the second-floor hallway to the GED squad room to look for Sergeant Davenport. He was sitting where she had last seen him three nights earlier. If he wasn’t in different clothes, she might have thought he had never moved. She pulled the file he had given her out of her briefcase and dropped it on his desk. She pointed at the file.

“LP-three,” she said. “I need to talk to her. For real this time.” Davenport took his legs off the upside-down trash can where they had been propped up and sat up straight.

“Ballard, you know I can’t just hand out the name of a CI,” he said.

“I do know,” Ballard said. “You have to go through the captain. Or you could go see the CI and I could tag along. Either way is fine with me but this is now a premeditated murder case that’s connected to another premeditated murder case and I need to find out what she knows. So how do you want to play that?”

“First of all, I told you, I’m not saying it’s — ”

“A woman, yeah, I know. Let’s just say I guessed. Are you going to help or hinder this investigation?”

“If you would stop cutting me off and just listen, you would learn that LP-three is no longer active — hasn’t been active in years — and is not going to be interested in talking to reminders of her dirty history.”

“Okay, then. I’ll call the captain at home.”

Ballard turned toward the door.

“Ballard, come on,” Davenport said. “Why do you always have to be such a bi — ”

Ballard turned back to him.

“What?” she said. “Such a bitch? If you call wanting to solve a homicide being a bitch, then fine, I’m a bitch. But there are still people in this department who want to get off their asses and knock on doors. I’m one of them.”

Davenport’s temples grew pink with either rage or embarrassment. As a Sergeant II he was one rank above her Detective II, but though he was in street clothes, he was not a detective, and that difference knocked down his rank advantage. Ballard could say what she wanted to say to him without consequence.

“Okay, look,” Davenport said. “It’s going to take me a while to reach her and talk her into it. I’ll do that and let you know.”

“I want to meet tonight,” Ballard said. “This is a homicide. And by the way, you just revealed again that she’s a woman.”

“It was pretty much out of the bag, wouldn’t you say, Ballard?”

“I have to run over to Hollywood Pres for a few minutes and then I expect to hear from you that we have a meet set up.”

“Fine, you do that.”

“I’ll call you when I’m clear.”

Ballard checked out a rover and drove her city car over to the hospital, where she badged her way to the front of the line at the ER. She was checked out and cleared by a doctor and then, back in the car, called Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds at home and gave him the news.

“That’s good, Ballard,” he said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I told you I was,” Ballard said.

“Yeah, well, we had to make it official,” he said. “Those paramedics are a bunch of yahoos. If my mother was the one thrown down the stairs, I’d want a doctor looking at her, you know what I mean?”

Ballard didn’t know which part of that to object to or whether it was even worth it. But the part about her being thrown down the stairs could have later consequences in terms of how Robinson-Reynolds viewed her and her capabilities.

“I don’t know what you were told, L-T, but I wasn’t thrown down the stairs,” she said. “I was going up the stairs when the so-called victim came running at me. I grabbed him and we both went down.”

“Semantics, Ballard,” Robinson-Reynolds said. “So, you’re ready to go back to work?”

“I’ve been working. I never stopped.”

“Okay, okay, my bad. So, why don’t you just tell me what you’ve been doing, since you never stopped working. Where are we on the cases?”

Ballard took a moment to think.

“On the Raffa case — the homicide — I’m setting up a meeting
with a gang snitch that I hope gives us a line on a money man with a motive to kill Raffa.”

“What’s the motive? He owed him money? That’s never a good motive. Why kill the guy who owes you money? Then he can’t pay you.”

“That’s not the motive. Raffa took money — twenty-five thousand — from this money man back in the day to buy his way out of Las Palmas. That got him a silent partner. With Raffa now dead, the silent partner gets the business, the insurance policy, if there is one, and, most important, the land the repair shop sits on. That’s where the money and the motive is.”

“Got it, Ballard. That’s good. Real good. But you know this is probably all going to West Bureau when they come up for air.”

“I know, Lieutenant, but do you want me to just babysit it or hand them a case to be made? I mean, this reflects on you, doesn’t it?”

Robinson-Reynolds was silent but it didn’t take him long to connect those dots.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I don’t want you sitting on it. I want it worked until we have to hand it off. Did they do an autopsy?”

“Not yet,” Ballard said. “Right now I’m lead investigator, so they’ll call when they’re ready to go. Probably tomorrow sometime.”

“Okay. And on this snitch, you going to take backup?”

“Rick Davenport in Gangs is setting it up. He’ll be there.”

“Okay, what about the Midnight Men and the new case?”

“We have all three victims filling out Lambkin surveys and tomorrow I expect the whole sex crimes team will start cross-referencing and seeing where that gets us. We’re now looking at victim acquisition differently, based on the new case.”

We.
Ballard was annoyed with herself for continuing to cover for Lisa Moore.

“Okay,” Robinson-Reynolds said. “I’ll get into it with Neumayer tomorrow morning.”

Matthew Neumayer was the detective in charge of the division’s three-person sex crimes unit and Lisa Moore’s immediate supervisor.

“Then I guess I’ll get back to it,” Ballard said.

“Sure,” Robinson-Reynolds said. “I’ll be in early tomorrow, maybe catch you before you clock out.”

Ballard disconnected and immediately called Davenport.

“Ballard.”

“So, are we going to do this tonight or not?”

“Don’t get so pissy. We’re going to do it. I will get her and bring her to meet you. What time? She doesn’t want you anywhere near where she lives.”

Ballard felt a charge go through her. She was going to get to LP3.

“How about in an hour?”

“An hour’s good.”

“Where?”

“The beach lot at the end of Sunset.”

Ballard knew it well from her many mornings surfing there after work. But it was a trek to get all the way out there.

“I’m on duty and that pulls me forty minutes out of the division. If I get a call, I’m fucked.”

“Do you want to talk to her or not? Her life’s over there now and she’s not coming back to Hollywood.”

Ballard felt she had no choice.

“Okay, one hour. I’ll be there.”

“And Ballard, no names. Don’t even ask her.”

“Fine.”

She knew she could get the name later if she needed to for court reasons. Then the powers that be would come down on Davenport and make him give her up. Right now, Ballard was only interested in whether LP3 could get her closer to the man with the Walther P-22.

After ending the call with Davenport, she drove back to the station and informed the watch lieutenant that she would be off radar and out of the division for the next two hours. It was Rivera on duty for the last night of the holiday weekend and he didn’t seem to care much as long as Ballard had a rover with her, in case, as he said, all hell broke loose.

Afterward, she went to the squad room to print out a photo of Javier Raffa, put fresh batteries in her mini-recorder, and grab a fully charged rover out of the dock before heading back out to the car.

Traffic on Sunset dropped off quickly once she made it through the Strip and into Beverly Hills. Even with all the clubs and restaurants closed down for nearly a year, the crawl of people cruising slowed things down. Ballard felt the temperature drop as she drove west. It was a clear and crisp night. She knew she’d have to put on the down jacket she kept in the trunk for long nights at crime scenes. The wind off the Pacific would chill the parking lot where she was going to meet the informant, and she didn’t know if they would talk in the open or be in a car.

It was said that anyone who wanted to know Los Angeles needed to drive Sunset Boulevard from Beginning to Beach. It was the route by which a traveler would come to know everything that is L.A.: its culture and glories as well as its many fissures and failings. Starting in downtown, where several blocks were renamed Cesar E. Chavez Avenue thirty years ago to honor the union and civil rights leader, the route took its travelers through
Chinatown, Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Los Feliz before turning west and traversing Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and the Palisades, then finally hitting the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, its four lanes moved through poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods, by homeless camps and mansions, passing iconic institutions of entertainment and education, cult food and cult religion. It was the street of a hundred cities and yet it was all one city.

Thinking about it made Ballard think of Bosch. She pulled her phone and called him, putting it on speaker.

“I’m going to meet LP-three.”

“Now? By yourself?”

“No, my GED contact, Davenport, will be there. He set it up. He’s getting her and bringing her to the meet.”

“Where?”

“Sunset Beach. The parking lot.”

“That’s kind of weird.”

“I wasn’t too happy about it myself. She’s out of the gang life and lives out there. I had no choice, according to Davenport.”

“And this is going down now?”

“In about forty-five minutes. I’m on my way there.”

“Okay, look, if something goes wrong, send up a flare or something. You won’t see me, but I’ll be there.”

“What? Harry, nothing’s going to go wrong. Davenport will be there. And this CI is a square Jane now. Just stay at home and I’ll call you after. Besides, you just got the shot yesterday, so you should lie low till you’re sure there are no side effects.”

“I’m fine, and you’re forgetting something. The only way those murder books could have disappeared out of two different divisions is if somebody inside the department took them. I’m not trying to frag Davenport, but he was at Hollywood when I was there and I didn’t like the guy. I’m not saying he’s dirty, but
he was lazy and he liked to talk. And we don’t know who he’s been talking to about this.”

Ballard didn’t respond at first as she thought about Bosch’s concerns.

“Well, I can confirm he’s lazy but I thought that was more of a recent thing,” she said. “His personal answer to defunding. But I don’t think there’s going to be a problem. I told my lieutenant what I’m doing and the watch L-T, because I’m going so far out of the division. I’m not going to stop you from coming, Harry — we can even meet and talk after. But I think it’s going to be fine.”

“I hope you’re right, but I’ll be there. And I should leave now.”

They disconnected and Ballard thought about Bosch’s words the rest of the way as she followed the curving lanes of Sunset Boulevard.

After the last curve, Sunset dropped down to the beach, and Ballard saw a vast parking lot next to a closed tourist restaurant. There was only one car in the lot and it did not have the boxy lines of a city ride. Ballard had forgotten that Davenport likely drove undercover wheels for his gang work. While she waited for the traffic light to change, she called him.

“You there yet?”

“We’re here waiting and you’re late.”

“What car are you driving? I’m about to pull in.”

“It will be obvious, Ballard. We’re the only car in the lot. Just get in here.”

He disconnected. Ballard looked at the glowing red light in the traffic signal. She acknowledged to herself that Bosch had spooked her. She checked the gas station on the corner and the supermarket parking lot beyond it and didn’t see Bosch’s old Cherokee. There was no way he could have gotten here from his house so quickly.

The light changed to green and she crossed into the parking lot. The arm was up on the ticket dispenser because it was after hours. She drove toward the car parked in the middle of the lot at an angle that put her headlights through the driver’s-side window. As she got close, she recognized Davenport behind the
wheel. She then made a looping turn and saw his passenger was in the front seat. She pulled her car up alongside so they could speak window to window and dropped the transmission into park. Before she killed the engine she took out her mini-recorder, turned it on, and started recording. She slid it into the side air-conditioning vent, where it would not be seen by the informant but would catch every word. She then held the rover up and called in her location to the com center so there would be a record of her last location should anything go wrong.

She lowered her window and killed the engine.

The woman sitting three feet away in Davenport’s undercover ride was Latina and maybe forty years old. She had heavy eye makeup, long brown hair, and a high collar on her blouse that Ballard thought probably hid tattoos or the scars left by their removal.

Davenport leaned forward so he could see around his passenger to Ballard.

“What’s with the cloak-and-dagger, Ballard? And you called this in? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Robinson-Reynolds told me to.”

“You shouldn’t even have told him about this.”

“I had to. You pull me forty minutes out of the division and I had to tell someone. He told me to tell coms when I — ”

“Yeah, well, he’s a fuckhead. You’ve got twenty minutes, Ballard. Ask your questions.”

Ballard looked at the woman. She seemed put out by the shouting coming from Davenport beside her.

“Okay, what’s your name?” Ballard asked.

“No names!” Davenport yelled. “Jesus Christ, Ballard, I told you. No. Names.”

“Okay, okay, what do you want me to call you?” Ballard
asked. “I want this to be a conversation and I’d like to have a name for the person I’m talking to.”

“How about Jane Doe?” Davenport yelled.

He pronounced the
J
like an
H
.

“Okay, never mind,” Ballard said. “Let’s start with what your association was with Las Palmas Thirteen.”

“My fiancé — at least the man I thought was my fiancé — was a leader at the time I was with him,” the woman said. “A shot caller.”

“And you were an informant at that time?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Why?”

The woman spoke without hesitation or trace of an accent. She spoke matter-of-factly about the potentially deadly double life she had led.

“He started fucking around on me. Stepping out with other girls. Gang whores. And nobody does that to me.”

“So you didn’t leave him. You became an informant.”

“That’s right. And I was paid too. My information was good.”

She glanced back at Davenport as if to get confirmation. Davenport said nothing. Ballard had to guess that the fiancé she was talking about was Humberto Viera, who Davenport said went away to Pelican Bay and was never coming back. Ballard was talking to the living embodiment of the scorned-woman warning. Hell hath no fury.

“Fifteen minutes,” Davenport helpfully called out.

“You told your LAPD handler about fourteen years ago that Javier Raffa bought his way out of Las Palmas,” Ballard said. “He paid twenty-five thousand dollars to Humberto Viera. Do you remember that?”

“I do,” the woman said.

“How did you come up with that piece of intel at the time?”

“I saw the money. I saw him deliver it.”

Her seeing the transaction seemed to further confirm that Viera was her fiancé and that his sentence to Pelican Bay was in part due to her vengeance.

“How did that deal come about?” Ballard asked. “Did Raffa just make the offer?”

“It was negotiated,” the informant said. “Raffa wanted out and knew there was only one way — in a box. But my man was greedy. He always thought about himself before the gang. And before me. He told Raffa he could pay his way out. He set the price and helped Raffa get it.”

“Chopping cars?”

“No, Raffa was already doing that. That was his job. He was even called El Chopo by them. Like a joke.”

“So then, where did he get the money?”

“He had to get a loan.”

“Where do you get a loan to get out of a gang?”

“There was a man. People knew him. A
banquero callejero.
He went to him.”

“A street banker.”

“Yes, he got the money from him. The
banquero
knew people to get it from. People who wanted to make a loan.”

“Do you remember his name or who he was?”

“I heard he was a cop.”

Davenport flung his door open and came around the front end of the car to Ballard’s window.

“What are you doing?” Ballard said.

His arm came at her and she ducked back. He reached in and pulled her key out of her car’s ignition.

“That’s it,” he said. “No more.”

“What are you talking about, Davenport?” she said. “This is an investigation.”

“And I didn’t sign up to drag no cop into this. Not on my fucking watch.”

“Give me my key.”

Davenport was already moving around his car again, back to his open door.

“I’ll bring it back after I get her where you can’t fucking find her.”

“Davenport, give me the key. I will fucking one-twenty-eight you on this if you — ”

“Fuck you, Ballard. I’ll one-twenty-eight you right back. We’ll see who they believe. You are one beef from the fucking door.”

He jumped back in the car and slammed the door. Ballard focused on the woman.

“Who was the cop?” Ballard asked.

“Don’t you fucking answer,” Davenport yelled.

He looked down at his left, and the passenger window started going up.

“Who was it?” Ballard asked again.

Davenport started the car. The informant just stared at Ballard as her window closed. The car took off, racing across the parking lot to the exit.

“Goddammit!” Ballard yelled. “Shit!”

Then her phone started to buzz and she saw Bosch’s name on the screen.

“Harry!”

“What just happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Where are you? Can you see them?”

“You mean the other car? Yeah, he just blew the light and started up the PCH toward Malibu.”

“Can you follow him? He grabbed my key and I’m stuck. He’s taking her home and I need to know who she is and where she lives.”

“I’m on it.”

Ballard heard the phone clunk into the center console as Bosch fired up his car and took off. Ballard jumped out of her car and scanned the businesses and parking lots along Pacific Coast Highway. She saw the squared-off Jeep Cherokee coming out of the supermarket lot onto the PCH and heading through the light at Sunset and toward Malibu.

“Get ’im, Harry,” she said out loud.