“I was part of it, yeah. Got him on a couple of one-eight-sevens of White Fence guys. We flipped the getaway driver, and that was it for Humberto. Bye-bye on him.”
“Okay. Anyone else I could talk to about Javier Raffa buying his way out of the gang?”
“Hmm. I don’t think so. That goes pretty far back, as far as I remember. I mean, there are always OGs around, but they’re original gangsters because they toe the line. But for the most part, these gangs turn over membership every eight or ten years. Nobody’s going to talk to you about Raffa.”
“What about LP-three?”
There was a pause before Davenport answered. And it was clear that earlier, when he had claimed not to remember the snitch, he was lying.
“What do you think you’ll get out of her?”
“So it’s a woman?”
“I didn’t say that. What do you think you’ll get out of him?”
“I don’t know. I’m looking for a reason somebody put a bullet in Javier Raffa’s head.”
“Well, LP-three is long gone. That’s a dead end.”
“You’re sure now?”
“I’m sure.”
“Thanks, Sergeant. I’ll catch you later.”
Ballard put the phone in its cradle. It was clear to her from Davenport’s gaffe that LP3 was a woman and possibly still active as an informant. Otherwise he would not have been so clumsy in trying to cover up his slip of the tongue. Ballard didn’t know what it meant in terms of her case, considering that Raffa had apparently separated from the gang fourteen years earlier. But it was good to know that if the case turned toward the gang, the GED had an insider who could provide insight and information.
“What was that about?” Moore asked.
She was sitting across the aisle from Ballard.
“Gang Enforcement,” Ballard said. “They don’t want me talking to their Las Palmas CI.”
“Figures,” Moore said.
Ballard wasn’t sure what that meant but didn’t respond. She knew Moore was one and done on the late show. Her involvement in the case would end when the sun came up and her shift was over, the tactical alert was ended, and all officers returned to their normal schedules. Moore would be back on dayside, but Ballard would be left alone to work in the dark hours.
It was exactly the way she wanted it.
7
Ballard began putting together the murder book on the Raffa case. This effort started with the tedious job of writing out the incident report, which described the killing and identified the victim but also included many mundane details such as time of the initial call, names of responding patrol officers, ambient temperature, next-of-kin notification, and other details that were important in documenting but not solving the case. She then wrote summaries of the witness interviews she had conducted and collected from Lisa Moore, though Moore’s reports were short and perfunctory. A summary of the interview with Raffa’s youngest daughter had only one line: “This girl knows nothing and can contribute nothing to the investigation.”
All of this was put into a three-ring binder. Lastly, Ballard started a case chrono that recorded her movements by time and included mention of her discussion with Davenport. She then made copies of the documents in the GED file and put them in the binder as well. She got all of this done by 5 a.m. and then got up and approached Moore, who was looking at email on her phone. Their shift ended in an hour but that didn’t matter to Ballard.
“I’m going to go downtown to see what Forensics collected,” Ballard said. “You want to stay or go?”
“I think I’ll stay,” Moore said. “There’s no way you’ll be back by six.”
“Right. Then do you mind taking the GED file back up to Davenport?”
“Sure, I’ll take it. But why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Running with the case. It’s a homicide. You’re just going to turn it over to West Bureau as soon as everybody wakes up over there.”
“Maybe. But maybe they’ll let me work it.”
“You’re giving the rest of us a bad name, Renée.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just stay in your lane. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt, right?”
Ballard shrugged.
“You didn’t say that about me jumping on the Midnight Men case,” she said.
“That’s rape,” Moore said. “You’re talking about a homicide case.”
“I don’t see the difference. There’s a victim and there’s a case.” “Well, put it this way: West Bureau will see a difference. They’re not going to be nice about you trying to take away one of theirs.”
“We’ll see. I’m going. Let me know if our two assholes hit again.”
“Oh, I will. And you do the same.”
Ballard went back to her borrowed desk, closed her laptop, and collected her things. She pulled up her mask for the walk down the back hallway to the exit. There was a prisoner lockdown bench there and she wanted the extra protection. There was no telling what the arrested bring into the station.
After leaving the station, she took the 101 toward downtown, driving through the pre-dawn grays toward the towers that always seemed lit at any hour of darkness. Traffic had generally been cut in half during the pandemic, but the city at this hour was dead, and Ballard made it to the 10 east interchange in less than fifteen minutes. From there it was only another five minutes before the exit to the Cal State L.A. campus. The Forensic Science Center, the five-story lab shared by the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, was at the south end of the vast campus.
The building seemed just as quiet as the streets. Ballard took the elevator up to the third floor, where the crime scene techs worked. She buzzed her way in and was met by a criminalist named Anthony Manzano, who had been out at the Javier Raffa crime scene.
“Ballard,” he said. “I was wondering who I was going to hear from.”
“It’s me for now,” Ballard said. “West Bureau is running with a double and it’s all hands on deck there.”
“You don’t have to tell me. Everybody but me is working it. Come on back.”
“Must be a hairy case.”
“More like a TV case and they don’t want to look bad.”
Ballard had been curious about why no media had turned up at the Gower Gulch case. She had thought that the initial theory, that someone was killed by a falling bullet, would be catnip to the media, but so far, there had been no inquiries that she was aware of.
Manzano led her through the lab to his workstation. She saw three other criminalists at work in other pods and assumed they were on the West Bureau case.
“What’s the case out there?” she asked casually.
“Elderly couple robbed and murdered,” Manzano said.
After a pause he delivered the kicker.
“They were set on fire,” he said. “While alive.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ballard said.
She shook her head but immediately thought, yes, the media would be all over that case, and the department would throw several bodies on it to give the appearance of leaving no stone unturned. That meant she stood a good chance of being able to keep the Raffa case if she could get the approval of Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds.