The Dark Hours (19 page)

Ballard tried one more shot at backgrounding Bonner. The Hollywood Division had always enjoyed the support of a local citizens group called Blue Hollywood. The group supplied equipment, paid for the Christmas party, and staged neighborhood meetings. It also welcomed new transfers and thanked those retiring, often with a story and photo on their website.

Ballard went to
bluehollywood.net
and put Bonner’s name into the search window. She was rewarded with a mention and photo in the monthly “Comings and Goings” column that ran seven years before. It was the formal photo that had been on
the division’s organization chart outside the captain’s office when Bonner had served. Ballard enlarged the photo on her screen and studied it. Bonner had deep-set eyes and a shaved head. His neck was tight against the collar of his uniform. He was not smiling in the photo.

Ballard leaned back and rubbed her eyes. Dawn’s light was just beginning to come in through the casement windows that ran along the top of the walls of the detective bureau.

She had directly connected Bonner and Viera, which lent credence and confirmation to what Darla/Sofia had revealed: Viera had put Javier Raffa in touch with Bonner when Raffa needed a big sum of money. She had also found a visual on Bonner that was consistent with the description she had received from both Darla and Gabriel Raffa.

The next connection that had to be made was between Bonner and the dentists and their factoring operation. The money Bonner had arranged and delivered for Raffa came from somewhere, and most likely not from Bonner’s own bank account. But Ballard had no idea where the late-show detective and the daytime dentists had crossed paths.

She printed out all the reports on the drive-by shooting incident. And while she waited, she put the name Julio Sanz into the search window and learned that he had been murdered in November 2004, just five weeks after the drive-by shooting of Humberto Viera’s house.

Despite her eyes being tired and unable to hold focus on the computer screen, Ballard pulled up the reports on that murder. Sanz had been gunned down in Evergreen Cemetery, where he had gone to visit his father’s grave on the anniversary of his death. He was found sprawled across the grave, shot once in the head execution-style.

The case was never solved.

Ballard leaned back from the screen again and considered this latest piece of information. Five weeks after Humberto Viera’s home got strafed, and five weeks after Viera met Detective Christopher Bonner on that case, the man thought to be behind the drive-by was murdered in an East L.A. cemetery.

Ballard saw no coincidence in that. She was beginning to see the relationships between elements in her investigation. It was all moving in one orbit, circling the killing of Javier Raffa.

Ballard didn’t know how early Robinson-Reynolds would be coming in after the holiday weekend. She decided to use the time waiting to switch gears from the Raffa case to the Midnight Men investigation.

She knew that most city services departments began work at seven. She left the station and drove into East Hollywood, where the Bureau of Street Lighting had a service lot at Santa Monica Boulevard and Virgil Avenue. Its location was marked by a procession of the various types of streetlights found in Los Angeles, all planted on the sidewalk in front of the work-and-storage yard. Over at the county museum, there was an art installation of L.A. streetlights that tourists and art aficionados flocked to for selfies. Here was the real thing. Ballard pulled into the yard and parked in front of the office. She knew she needed to be cautious here. It was not outside the bounds of possibility that one or both Midnight Men worked for the BSL. It might explain their familiarity with the various neighborhoods of Hollywood, and their knowing which wire to cut to disable the light outside Cindy Carpenter’s house without cutting the line that fed power to all the lights on the street. Ballard had seen a tangle of wires behind the access panel but only one had been cut.

As she got out, she looked around the work yard and into the open bays of a garage. She assumed that most of the BSL trucks were already out in the field by now, but there were two trucks parked in the repair bays. They were white but they were not vans, and each carried a city seal on the driver’s-side door with bureau of street lighting printed beneath it. Jack Kersey had not mentioned the city seal in his description of the van he had seen up on Deep Dell Terrace.

Ballard stepped into the office, showed her badge, and asked to see a supervisor. She was ushered in to see a man named Carl Schaeffer, who had a cubbyhole office where the time cards and time clock were in his sight and a work schedule dominated the wall behind his desk. His title was yard supervisor. Ballard closed the door and took a good look at Schaeffer. He was in his fifties and far outside the age range the victims had estimated for the Midnight Men.

“I need to confirm some information related to streetlight repairs,” Ballard said.

“We cover Alvarado to Westwood and the ten north to Mulholland,” Schaeffer said. “If that’s where you’re looking, then I’m your guy. How can I help?”

“I’m looking for repair records for Deep Dell Terrace for … let’s go back the last two months.”

“Okay, that one I know without looking because we’re sending a truck up there today.”

“What’s going on up there?”

“Sounds like we have a tampering situation. A homeowner says two of our guys cut power to the post, but we didn’t have any guys up there. Sounds like it was vandalism.”

“When was this?”

“Happened December thirtieth according to the homeowner.”

“Can you cancel the service up there today?”

“Uh, sure I can. How come?”

“I’m going to have the post and access plate processed for fingerprints. There was a crime committed in the area and the suspects may have cut the light ahead of time.”

“What kind of crime? Was it a murder?”

“No.”

Schaeffer waited for Ballard to say more but she didn’t. He got the message.

“But you think somebody cut the light so no one could see them?”

“Possibly. Do you have any records of other work orders for Deep Dell?”

“No. I can go back and look but I would remember anything recent. They got a guy lives up there — whenever they lose a light, we hear from him, and this one on Deep Dell Terrace was the first time I’ve heard from him in about a year.”

“Jack Kersey?”

“Sounds like he calls you folks, too.”

“I ran into him up there.”

“He’s a character. Keeps us on our toes, I’ll tell you that.”

“I can tell.”

“What else can I do for you, Detective?”

“I have two other streets I want to check to see if you’ve had repair orders there recently.”

She did not give him the dates or exact addresses of the first two sexual assaults. She just asked if there had been any repairs to streetlights in the last three months in the 600 block of Lucerne Boulevard or the 1300 block of Vista Street. For these Schaeffer could not answer from memory. He punched the addresses into his computer and then sent two pages to his printer.

“The answer is yes,” he said. “I’m printing it out for you.
We got calls on both streets. On Lucerne we got the complaint December second and repaired it the fourth. On Vista it came in on the twenty-eighth and we were shorthanded because everybody wants that week off. Repairs on Vista are going out today as well.”

“I want you to stop that repair too,” Ballard said.

“Not a problem.”

“Thank you. I have a couple more questions. On the Lucerne repair, did you get a report on what the problem was there?”

“Yeah, it’s on the printout. That was vandalism — wires cut at the base.”

“Multiple wires?”

Schaeffer checked his computer screen.

“We had to replace the whole circuit there,” he said. “The feed line and the loop.”

That was the street where the first rape occurred. Ballard considered that the Midnight Men had cut two wires there because they didn’t know which was the feed. By the time of the Deep Dell attack they had learned.

“So they actually disabled several lights at once?” she asked.

“Exactly,” Schaeffer said. “And we got complaints from multiple residents.”

By learning to cut just one light — the one nearest the intended victim’s house — the Midnight Men were improving their MO and less likely to draw immediate attention to their nefarious efforts.

“Okay,” Ballard said. “I noticed that most of your trucks are out in the field, but there are two in the bays. Do you use white vans for service calls?”

“Vans? No. We use flatbeds, so when we have to replace a post or a whole light assembly, we can take what we need on the work truck. You can’t put a fourteen-foot streetlight in a van,
and that’s what we’re most often doing — replacing the whole assembly. People like hitting them with their cars.”

He smiled at his own attempt at humor.

“Got it,” Ballard said. “And your flatbeds are clearly marked as city vehicles? With the city seal and department name?”

“Always,” Schaeffer said.

“No vans?”

“Not a one. Do you want to tell me what’s going on? Is somebody doing some shit and saying he’s with us?”

“I wish I could tell you, Mr. Schaeffer — you’ve been very helpful. But I can’t, and I need you to keep this confidential. Don’t talk about it with anyone.”

“What am I going to tell? I don’t know what’s going on.”

Ballard reached into her pocket for a business card. It had her cell number on it.

“One last thing,” she said. “I need to know about any reported light outages in the Hollywood area for the next two weeks. I don’t care if it’s a weekend or not, I need you to call me as soon as a report comes in that there’s a streetlight out. I don’t need to know about car accidents. Just lights that are burned out, malfunctioning, vandalized, whatever. Can you do that?”

“Of course, not a problem,” Schaeffer said.

“Thank you, sir. When this is all over, I’ll be able to tell you more about it.”

“Whatever it is, I hope you catch the bastard. Especially if he’s the one out there cutting our wires.”

He handed her the printouts with the details of the first two streetlight outages. Ballard thanked him again and left. As she returned to her car, she acknowledged to herself that it was more likely than not that the next report of a vandalized streetlight in Hollywood would come in after it was too late and the next attack had already occurred.

From the work yard, Ballard drove by the exact locations of the streetlights noted on the printouts. In each case, the light where the wiring had been cut was in close proximity to the house where one of the sexual assaults had taken place. It left Ballard with no doubt that the Midnight Men had tampered with the lights before the attacks to further cloak their activities in darkness. She also noticed that in both locations the streetlights were different from the glass acorns in the Dell.

She called SID and requested that a print tech come out and process the access plate at the base of the light on Vista, as well as the light up on Deep Dell Terrace. It was a long shot but Ballard knew that long shots never paid off if you didn’t take them. A fingerprint could change the trajectory of the investigation in an instant. She left the Lucerne address off the request because that light had already been repaired and any fingerprint evidence left by the Midnight Men would likely be gone.

She checked her phone and saw that it was almost eight and her lieutenant should be in his office by the time she got back.

Along the way, she took a call from an autopsy coordinator at the County Medical Examiner’s Office. With more than a thousand autopsies conducted a week, the coroner needed a coordinator just to set the schedule and make notifications to investigators and families of the dead. She was informed that the autopsy of Javier Raffa was set for 11 a.m. with deputy medical examiner Dr. Steven Zvader.

Ballard said she would be there.

Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds was behind his desk when Ballard got back to the detective bureau. Ballard knocked on the window next to his open door and he signaled her in.

“Ballard,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d already gone home. How’s the head?”

“I’m good,” Ballard said. “I was just out doing an interview on the Midnight Men thing.”

“You need to fill out an IOD.”

“I’m okay, L-T.”

“Look, you want to get paid for Saturday night when you went home early? Fill out the form.”

Ballard knew that filling out an Injured On Duty form would take the better part of an hour and its only purpose was to serve as a record of injuries in case the officer later took action against the department or sought an early retirement due to injury. The city would not cover or accept any financial or retirement request based on injuries not detailed in the IOD form. It didn’t matter that some injuries became an issue long after they initially occurred. Bosch was an example. He was exposed to radioactive material on a case. Ten years later, when it manifested as a form of leukemia, the city tried to look the other way because he had never filed an IOD form. Luckily, he had good doctors and a good lawyer and came out okay.

“All right,” Ballard said. “I’ll get to it before I leave. I have to hang around for the autopsy on Raffa anyway.”

“Right,” Robinson-Reynolds said. “We should talk about that. Sit down, Ballard.”

Ballard sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk. As she did so, she noticed a small black leather pouch on the corner of the desk. It was blocked from Robinson-Reynolds’s view in his seat because of a vertical file in front of it. He must have missed it when he entered the office earlier, probably reading the overnight note as he entered.

The pouch contained Ballard’s lockpick set. She had put it down on the desk after entering the office the night before to get to the pension book. She had then forgotten it when she left. If the lieutenant found it, he would not be able to trace it back to
Ballard but he would know that someone had been in his office over the holiday weekend, and she knew suspicion would likely fall on her. She was trying to think of a way to surreptitiously grab it, when Robinson-Reynolds told her she was off the Raffa case.

“Wait, what?” she asked.

“I talked to West Bureau, and they’re ready to take it off your hands,” Robinson-Reynolds said.

“I don’t want it taken off my hands. I was working it all night and have identified a suspect and want to keep rolling with it.”

“That’s great and I’m sure they will welcome all your good work. But it’s not your job. You’re not a homicide detective. We have been over this before and I goddamn hate it that every time you don’t want to give up a case, you try to make it out as a betrayal. I’m not your enemy, Ballard. There is an established protocol and we must follow it.”

“The autopsy’s in two hours. Who takes that?”

“I’m assuming you do. But then you call this guy and arrange to hand it all off.”

He handed a Post-it Note across the desk to her. It had her name on the top — it was the Post-it she had seen earlier — but now it had another name and a number written under hers: Detective Ross Bettany. Ballard had never heard of him, but he would be the one to take her good work and close the case.

“Tell me about this suspect,” Robinson-Reynolds said.

Ballard knew that if she mentioned that she had linked two murders and that the likely hit man was an ex-LAPD cop, she wouldn’t even get the autopsy. Robinson-Reynolds would skip over her and West Bureau and go straight to the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown. They would grab it like a hawk snatching a sparrow out of the air. She didn’t want that. If she couldn’t be lead, she wanted to give it to Bettany in such a way
that she still retained a piece of it. That way, Bettany and his partner would need her and her knowledge to close it.

“We think it was about money,” she said. “As I told you on the phone yesterday, Raffa’s shop was sitting on a valuable piece of land. He had a silent partner and he was trying to break their contract. We think the partner hired a hitter — the go-between who brought them both together in the first place.”

Ballard thought she had walked the tightrope without a net. Nothing she had said was false. She just didn’t tell the whole story.

“ ‘We’?” Robinson-Reynolds asked.

“What?” Ballard said.

“You said, ‘We think it was about money.’ Who’s ‘we’?”

“Oh, sorry, just an expression. I meant ‘we’ as in the LAPD as a whole. We think.”

“You sure?”

“Uh, yeah. Last I checked, the department hasn’t filled my partner’s slot because of the freeze.”

The lieutenant nodded like all of that was true.

“You know a guy named Harry Bosch?” he asked. “Retired LAPD. Worked here at Hollywood for a lot of years, in fact.”

Ballard realized that she had just walked into a mantrap. She went in one door and it had locked behind her. The next door had to be opened from the other side. And Robinson-Reynolds was the guy on the other side.