“How much does something like that cost?” Ballard asked.
“Can’t remember. It might be in the file.”
Cordero returned from the cabinets and handed a file to Davenport instead of Ballard. He in turned handed it to Ballard.
“Knock yourself out,” he said.
“Can I take this?” Ballard asked.
“As long as you bring it back.”
“Roger that.”
Ballard took the file, got up, and walked out. She had the feeling that several of the men were watching as she left the room. She was not popular in the office after a year of cajoling and then demanding intel and help in her investigations from people bent on doing as little as possible.
She went down the stairs and into the detective bureau, where she saw Lisa Moore at her desk. She was typing on her computer.
“You’re back,” Ballard said.
“No thanks to you,” Moore said. “You left me with those people and that kid cop.”
“Rodriguez? He probably has five years on the job. He worked Rampart before coming here.”
“Doesn’t matter. He looks like a kid.”
“Did you get anything good from the wife and daughters?”
“No, but I’m writing it up. Where is this going anyway?”
“I’m going to keep it for a bit. Send whatever you’ve got to me.”
“Not to West Bureau?”
“They’re running all teams on a double murder. So I’ll work this until they’re ready to take it.”
“And Dash is okay with that?”
“I talked to him. It’s not a problem.”
“What do you have there?”
She pointed to the file Ballard was carrying.
“And old Gang file on Raffa,” Ballard said. “Davenport said he hasn’t been active in years, that he bought his way out when he started a family.”
“Aw, isn’t that sweet,” Moore said.
The sarcasm was clear in her voice. Ballard had long realized that Moore had lost her empathy. Working sex cases full-time probably did that. Losing empathy for victims was a self-protective measure, but Ballard hoped it never happened to her. Police work could easily hollow you out. But she believed that losing one’s empathy was losing one’s soul.
“Send me your reports when you’re ready to file,” Ballard said.
“Will do,” Moore said.
“And nothing on the Midnight Men, right?”
“Not yet. Maybe they’re lying low tonight.”
“It’s still early. On Thanksgiving we didn’t get the callout till dawn.”
“Wonderful. Can’t wait till dawn.”
The sarcasm again. Ballard ignored it and grabbed an empty desk nearby. Because she worked the late show, she didn’t have an assigned spot. She was expected to borrow a desk in the room whenever she needed one. She looked at a few of the knickknacks on the one shelf in the cubicle where she sat and quickly realized it was the workstation of a dayside Crimes Against Persons detective named Tom Newsome. He loved baseball, and there were several souvenir balls on little pedestals on the shelf. They had been signed by Dodgers players past and present. The gem of the collection was in a small plastic cube to protect it. It wasn’t signed by a player. Instead the signature was from the man who had called Dodgers games on radio and TV for more than fifty years. Vin Scully was revered as the voice of the city because he transcended baseball. Even Ballard knew who he was, and she thought that Newsome was risking the ball getting stolen, even in a police station.
Opening the file in front of her, Ballard was greeted by a booking photo of Javier Raffa as a young man. He had died at age thirty-eight, and the photo was from a 2003 arrest for receiving stolen property. She read the details on the arrest report the photo was clipped to. It said Raffa had been pulled over in a 1977 Ford pickup truck with several used auto parts in the bed. One of these parts — a trans-axle — still had the manufacturing serial number embossed on it, and it was traced to a Mercedes G-wagon reported stolen in the San Fernando Valley the month before.
According to the records in the file, Raffa’s lawyer, listed as Roger Mills, negotiated a disposition that got the twenty-one-year-old Javier probation and community service in exchange for a guilty plea. The case was then expunged from Raffa’s record when he completed probation and 120 hours of community service without issue. The file noted that his community service included painting over gang graffiti on freeway overpasses throughout the city.
It was the one and only arrest record in the file, although there were several field interview cards paper-clipped together there. These were all dated before the arrest and went back to when Raffa was sixteen years old. Most of these came out of basic gang rousts — patrol breaking up parties or Hollywood Boulevard cruise lines. Officers taking down names and associates, tattoos, and other descriptors to be fed into Gang Intel files and databases. As the son of a body shop owner, Raffa was always driving classic and restored cars or low riders that were also described on the shake cards.
From early on in the cards Raffa had the nickname El Chopo ascribed to him. It was an obvious riff on the moniker of one of the biggest cartel kingpins, known as El Chapo, which meant Shorty in Spanish. One note that caught Ballard’s eye and was repeated on the four cards written and filed between 2000 and 2003 was the description of a tattoo on the right side of Raffa’s neck. It depicted a white billiard ball with an orange stripe and the number 13 — a reference to Las Palmas 13 and its association with and deference to la eMe, the prison gang also known as the Mexican Mafia. The 13 was a reference to M, the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.
Ballard thought about the discoloration she had seen on Raffa’s neck. She realized it was laser scarring from when he’d had the tattoo removed.
There was a photocopy of an intel report in the file dated October 25, 2006, that was a bullet-point recounting of multiple nuggets of unsubstantiated bits of gossip and information from a confidential informant identified as LP3. Ballard assumed that the informant was a Las Palmas insider. She scanned through the separate entries and found the one about Raffa.
Javier Raffa (El Chopo) DOB 02/14/82 — said to have paid Humberto Viera $25K cash tribute for no-strings separation from the gang.
Ballard had never heard of someone buying their way out of a gang. She had always known of the blood in, blood out, till death do us part rule of gang law. She picked up the desk phone. Newsome had taped a station phone directory to it. She called the extension next to GED and asked for Sergeant Davenport. While she waited for him to come on the line, she picked one of the baseballs off its pedestal and tried to make out the signature scribbled on it. She knew little about baseball or Dodgers players past and present. To her, the first name of the signature looked like Mookie but she thought she had to have that wrong.
Davenport came on the line.
“It’s Ballard. Got a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Humberto Viera of Las Palmas, is he still around?”
Davenport chuckled.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘around,’ ” he said. “He’s been up in Pelican Bay for at least eight, ten years. And he isn’t coming back.”
“Your case?” Ballard asked.