The Late Show Page 5

  She next pulled up the texting app and checked that. There were two recent communications. One was to Cara.

  Cindy: Guess who just scored a 50 on a round of martinis?

  Cara: You go girl.

  Haddel responded with an emoji showing a happy face. The text before that began with a question from someone who wasn’t on her favorites list.

  DP: How are you fixed?

  Cindy: I think I’m good. Maybe tomorrow.

  DP: Let me know.

  There were no previous messages, indicating it was either a new acquaintance or the earlier exchanges had been deleted. There were several other text conversations on the app but none of the others were active in the hours since Haddel had come to work. Ballard pegged Cara as most likely Haddel’s best friend and DP as her drug supplier. She moved on to the e-mail file and found that the incoming messages were largely generic notifications and spam. Haddel apparently didn’t do much in the way of e-mailing. Haddel’s Twitter feed was as expected. She followed a number of entertainers, primarily in the music business, the Dancers’ own account, the LAPD’s Hollywood Station feed regarding crime alerts, and the former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

  The last app Ballard opened was the phone’s photo archive. It said there were 662 photos. Ballard thumbed through the most recent and saw many photos of Haddel involved in activities with friends, working out, at the beach, and with cast and crew members on sets where she had found work as an actress.

  Ballard’s own phone buzzed and a photo of Jenkins came up on the screen. She answered the call with a question.

  “The bus get there?”

  “Just left. Get me out of here.”

  “On my way.”

  Ballard re-engaged the GPS route to Pasadena so the phone’s screen would remain active and headed back to the Dancers. After she picked up Jenkins, they drove to the La Brea address on Cynthia Haddel’s driver’s license. The first step of the notification process was to go to the victim’s home to see if there might be a husband or other relative sharing the premises.

  It was a recently built apartment building a half block north of Melrose in an area of shops and restaurants popular with the younger crowd. There were ramen noodle and build-your-own-pizza restaurants fronting the first floor, with the building’s entrance in the middle.

  Haddel’s license listed her in unit 4B. Ballard used one of the keys on the ring taken from the locker to gain entrance through a security door to the elevator lobby. She and Jenkins rode to the fourth floor and found 4B at the end of the hallway leading to the back of the building.

  Ballard knocked twice but no one answered. It did not mean there was no other occupant. Ballard knew from experience that someone could still be sleeping inside. She used the second key to open the door. By law they should have had a search warrant but both detectives knew they could cite exigent circumstances if a problem developed later. They had five people dead and no suspects and no motive. They needed to check on the safety of any possible roommates of their victim, no matter how peripheral to the case she might be.

  “LAPD! Anyone home?” Ballard called out as they entered.

  “Police!” Jenkins added. “We’re coming in.”

  Ballard kept her hand on her hip holster as she entered but she did not draw her gun. There was a single light on in the living room, which opened off a short entrance hallway. She visually checked a galley kitchen to the right and then moved toward another hallway leading to the back of the apartment. It led to a bathroom and a single bedroom. The doors to these rooms were open and Ballard quickly hit light switches and scanned them.

  “Clear,” she called out when she confirmed there were no other occupants.

  She stepped back into the living room, where Jenkins was waiting.

  “Looks like she lived alone,” she said.

  “Yep,” Jenkins said. “Doesn’t help us any.”

  Ballard started looking around, paying attention to the personal details of the small apartment: knickknacks, photos on shelves, a stack of bills left on the coffee table.

  “Pretty nice place for a cocktail waitress,” Jenkins said. “The building is less than a year old.”

  “She was slinging dope at the club,” Ballard said. “I found her stash in her locker. There may be more here someplace.”

  “That explains a lot.”

  “Sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

  Ballard moved into the kitchen and saw a variety of photos on the refrigerator. Most of them were like the ones on Cynthia’s phone—outings with friends. Several were of a trip to Hawaii that showed Haddel surfing on a training board and riding on a horseback trail through a volcano crater. Ballard recognized the outline of Haleakalā in the background and knew it was Maui. She had spent many years growing up on the island and the shape of the volcano on the horizon had been part of her daily existence. She knew it the way people in L.A. knew the crooked line of the Hollywood sign.

  There was a photo partially obscured by newer additions to the refrigerator but Ballard saw a woman of about fifty who shared the same jawline as Haddel. She carefully pulled it off and found that it showed Cynthia Haddel between a man and woman at a Thanksgiving table, the cooked turkey on full display. It was most likely a shot of Haddel and her parents, the lines of heredity clear in both their faces.

  Jenkins came into the kitchen and looked at the photo in Ballard’s hand.

  “You want to do it now?” he asked. “Get it over with?”

  “Might as well,” she said.

  “Which way you want to go with it?”

  “I’ll just do it.”

  Jenkins had been referring to the choice they had here. It is a harsh thing to learn by a telephone call that a loved one has been murdered. Ballard could have called the Modesto Police Department and asked them to make the notification in person. But going that way would remove Ballard from the process and she would lose the opportunity to get immediate information about the victim and any possible suspects. More than once in her career when she had made next-of-kin notification, she had come up with credible leads to follow in the investigation. That seemed unlikely with Cynthia Haddel, since she was probably not at the center of motivation for the mass shooting. As Olivas had said, she was collateral damage, a fringe player in what had happened. So it was a valid question from Jenkins, but Ballard knew that she would feel guilty later if she didn’t make the call. She would feel like she had skirted a sacred responsibility of the homicide detective.

  Ballard pulled out Haddel’s phone. The GPS program had kept the screen active. She pulled up the contacts list to get the number for home and then called it from her own phone. It rang through to a voice-mail greeting confirming that it was the Haddel family home. Ballard left a message identifying herself and asking for a call back to her cell number, saying it was urgent.

  It was not unusual for people not to answer a blocked call in the middle of the night, but Ballard hoped that her message would bring a quick return call. She stepped over to the refrigerator and looked at the photos once again while waiting. She wondered about Cynthia growing up in Modesto and then journeying south to the big city, where roles with partial nudity were okay and selling dope to Hollywood scenesters supplemented her income.

  After five minutes, there was no call back. Jenkins was pacing and Ballard knew he wanted to keep moving.

  “Call the cops up there?” he asked.

  “No, that could take all night,” Ballard said.

  Then a phone started buzzing, but it wasn’t Ballard’s. Cynthia’s phone showed an incoming call from the home number. Ballard guessed that her parents had gotten the message she just left and had chosen to call their daughter first to see if she was all right.

  “It’s them,” she said to Jenkins.

  She answered the phone.

  “This is Detective Ballard with the Los Angeles Police Department. Who am I speaking with?”

  “No, I called Cindy. What is going on there?�
�

  It was a woman’s voice, already choked with desperation and fear.

  “Mrs. Haddel?”

  “Yes, who is this? Where is Cindy?”

  “Mrs. Haddel, is your husband with you?”

  “Just tell me, is she all right?”

  Ballard looked over at Jenkins. She hated this.

  “Mrs. Haddel,” she said. “I’m very sorry to tell you that your daughter has been killed in a shooting at the club where she worked in Los Angeles.”

  There was a loud scream over the line, followed by another, and then the sound of the phone clattering to the floor.

  “Mrs. Haddel?”

  Ballard turned toward Jenkins and covered the phone.

  “Call Modesto, see if they can send somebody,” she said.

  “Where?” Jenkins asked.

  Then it hit Ballard. She didn’t have an address to go with the phone number. She could now hear moaning and crying on the line, but it was distant from the phone, which was apparently still on the floor somewhere in Modesto.

  Suddenly a gruff male voice was on the line.

  “Who is this?”

  “Mr. Haddel? I am a detective with the LAPD. Is your wife all right?”

  “No, she’s not all right. What is going on? Why do you have our daughter’s phone? What happened?”

  “She’s been shot, Mr. Haddel. I am so sorry to do this by phone. Cynthia has been shot and killed at the club where she worked. I’m calling to—”

  “Oh, Jesus … Jesus Christ. Is this some kind of a joke? You don’t do this to people, you hear me?”

  “It’s not a joke, sir. I am very sorry. Your daughter was hit by a bullet when someone started firing a weapon in the club. She fought hard. They got her to the hospital but they were unable to save her. I am so sorry for your loss.”

  The father didn’t respond. Ballard could hear the mother’s crying growing louder and she knew that the husband had gone to his wife while still clutching the phone. They were now together. Ballard looked at the photo in her hand and pictured the couple holding on to each other as they grappled with the worst news in the world. She herself grappled with how far to push things at the moment, whether to intrude further into their agony with questions that might be meaningless in terms of the investigation.

  And then:

  “This is all because of that bastard boyfriend of hers,” the father said. “He’s the one who should be dead. He put her to work in there.”

  Ballard made a decision.

  “Mr. Haddel, I need to ask you some questions,” she said. “It could be important to the case.”

  6

  Back at Hollywood Station, they divvied up the report writing. Jenkins took the Lantana burglary their shift had started with and Ballard agreed to take the paper on Ramona Ramone and Cynthia Haddel. It was an uneven split but it guaranteed that Jenkins would walk out the door at dawn and be home when his wife woke up.

  It was still called the paperwork but it was all done digitally. Ballard went to work on Haddel first so that she could be sure to get the reports in before Olivas could ask for them. She also had plans to stall the Ramone case. She wanted to keep it for herself, and the longer she took doing the paperwork, the better chance she had of making that happen.

  The two partners did not have assigned desks in the detective bureau but each had a favorite spot at which to work in the vast room that was usually left abandoned at night. These choices were primarily dictated by the comfort of the desk chair and the level of obsolescence of the computer terminal. Ballard preferred a desk in the Burglary-Auto Theft pod, while Jenkins posted himself at the opposite end of the room in the Crimes Against Persons unit. There was a daytime detective who had brought in his own chair from the Relax the Back store and Jenkins treasured it. It was locked by a long bike cable to the desk in the CAPs module, so that anchored him there.

  Ballard was a quick writer. She had a degree in journalism from the University of Hawaii and while she had not lasted long as a reporter, the training and experience had given her skills that helped immeasurably with this side of police work. She reacted well to deadline pressure and she could clearly conceptualize her crime reports and case summaries before writing them. She wrote short, clear sentences that gave momentum to the narrative of the investigation. This skill also paid dividends when Ballard was called into court to testify about her investigations. Juries liked her because she was a good storyteller.

  It was in a courtroom that the direction of Ballard’s life had changed dramatically fifteen years earlier. Her first job out of the University of Hawaii had been as one of a phalanx of crime reporters for the Los Angeles Times. She was assigned to a cubbyhole office in the Van Nuys courthouse, from which she covered criminal cases as well as the six LAPD divisions that comprised the north end of the city. One particular case had caught her attention: the murder of a fourteen-year-old runaway who had been snatched off the beach one night in Venice. She had been taken to a drug house in Van Nuys, where she was repeatedly raped over several days, and then eventually strangled and dropped in a construction site trash hauler.

  The police made a case and took two men to trial for the murder. Ballard covered the preliminary hearing of the case against the accused. The lead detective testified about the investigation and in doing so recounted the many tortures and indignities the victim endured before her eventual death. The detective started crying on the stand. It wasn’t a show. There was no jury, just a judge to decide whether the case should go to trial. But the detective cried, and in that moment Ballard realized she didn’t want to just write about crime and investigations anymore. The next day she applied to enter the LAPD training academy. She wanted to be a detective.

  It was 4:28 a.m. when Ballard began to write. Though Cynthia Haddel would need to be formally identified by the Coroner’s Office, there was little doubt that she was the victim. Ballard put her name on the reports and listed her address on La Brea. She first wrote the death report that listed Haddel as a victim of a homicide by gunshot wound and included the basic details of the crime. She then wrote a chronology, a step-by-step accounting of the moves she and Jenkins had made once they received the call from Lieutenant Munroe while at Hollywood Presbyterian.

  After the chrono was completed, she used it as an outline for her Officer’s Statement, which was a more detailed summary of where the case had taken her and Jenkins through the night. After that, she moved on to documenting and filing the property she had collected from the hospital and the employee locker at the Dancers.

  Before starting the process, she counted how many individual pieces she would be filing and then called the forensics lab and spoke to the duty officer, Winchester.

  “Have they started booking evidence from the four on the floor in Hollywood?” she asked. “I need a DR number.”

  Every piece of booked evidence required its own Division of Records number.

  “That place is a mess,” Winchester said. “They’re still on scene and will probably be collecting all night and into the day. I don’t expect they’ll start booking evidence till noon. It’s up to five now, by the way. Five on the floor.”

  “I know. Okay, I’ll get my own numbers. Thanks, Winchester.”

  She got up and made her way over to Jenkins.

  “I’m going to buy DRs out of the manual. You need any?”

  “Yeah, get me one.”

  “Be right back.”

  She took the rear hallway to the property room. She knew there would be no clerk on duty. There never was at this hour. The property room was left as empty as the detective bureau at night. But there was a Division of Records ledger on the counter and it contained an up-to-date listing of DR numbers for booking property and evidence. Everything went to the FSD—the Forensic Sciences Division—for analysis as potential evidence. Since the lab could not provide a sequence of numbers for the RHD case, the property that Ballard and Jenkins had collected in their cases would be booked under Hollywood
Division numbers instead and shipped to the FSD for sorting.

  Ballard grabbed a scratch pad from the counter and wrote down a number from the ledger for Jenkins and then a seven-number sequence for herself. The numbers all started with the year and the 06 designation for Hollywood Division. As she walked back down the empty hallway to the detective bureau, she heard a sudden echo of laughter from the watch office, which was in the opposite direction. Among the chortles, she identified the infectious sound of Lieutenant Munroe’s laugh and smiled to herself. Cops were not humorless people. Even in the depths of the midnight shift on a night of massive violence they could always find something to laugh about.

  She gave Jenkins his DR number but didn’t bother to ask how far along he was. She could see he was typing with two fingers and still on an incident report. He was slow to the point of frustration. Ballard usually volunteered to do all the paperwork so she didn’t have to wait for him to finish.

  Back at her borrowed desk, Ballard gloved up and went to work. It took her thirty minutes to process everything. This included the contents of the locker, the key the victim wore around her neck, and the money she had been carrying in her wallet and tip apron. It had to be counted out and documented. For her own protection Ballard called Jenkins over so he could witness the money count and she took cell-phone photos of each evidence bag after sealing it.

  She took all of the plastic bags and placed them in one large brown paper sack that she marked with the DR number and sealed with red evidence tape. She then carried it back down the hallway to the property room and placed it in one of the lockers, where it would remain until someone working the case in RHD picked it up or it was carried by courier to the lab for forensic analysis.

  When Ballard returned to the bureau, she saw that it was 6:11 on the clock over the television screens. Her shift was supposed to end at seven a.m. and overtime was only a slim possibility because it was the middle of the month’s deployment period and money in the OT bucket was probably already gone. She didn’t want overtime, however. She just wanted to push the Ramona Ramone case into her next shift.