The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(101)

“Okay, okay, let me get the number. I have to look it up on this phone so I won’t hear you if you say anything.”

“Just hurry, Mr. Stilwell.”

Ballard couldn’t contain herself while waiting. She got up and started pacing one of the aisles in the detective bureau while Stilwell got the number out of his phone. Finally, he started to call it out as he read it off his phone screen. Ballard raced back to her workstation and wrote the number down. She disconnected the call with Stilwell just as he brought the phone back to his mouth and said, “Got it?”

She dialed the number and a man answered after only one ring.

“Professor Higgs?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Ballard. I’m a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.”

There was a long moment before he responded.

“You worked with Ken Chastain, didn’t you?”

Ballard felt a bolt of pure energy go through her chest.

“Yes, I did.”

“I thought you might call. He told me that if anything happened to him, I could trust you.”





38

It was a brutal drive in heavy traffic down to Irvine in Orange County. Professor Higgs had agreed to come back to the school and meet Ballard at his lab. Along the way, she thought about the lead she was chasing. Ken Chastain had very clearly left it for her to find. He knew he was on dangerous ground and he had a backup plan that would kick in if something happened to him. Ballard was that plan. By redirecting the Haddel property back to her, Chastain guaranteed that she would get it after the weekend and would find the clue leading to Professor Higgs.

When she finally got to UC Irvine, she had to call Higgs twice on his cell to get directions to the Natural Sciences Building, where he was on the fourth floor.

The building seemed empty as Ballard entered, and she found Higgs alone in his lab. He was tall and gangly and younger than Ballard had expected. He greeted her warmly and seemed relieved of some weight or concern.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m so damn busy I don’t have time to read a newspaper or watch TV. I didn’t know what happened until yesterday, when I called the number he gave me and his wife told me. It’s an awful thing and I hope to god this had nothing to do with it.”

He gestured toward the back of the lab, where there was a steel pressure tank about the size of a washer-and-dryer stack.

“I’m here to try to find that out,” Ballard said. “You spoke to his wife?”

“Yes, she answered the phone,” Higgs said. “She told me what had happened and I was completely stunned.”

It meant that Chastain had given Higgs his home number, not his office line or his cell number. This was significant to Ballard because it was another indication—along with his actions at the crime scene and his handling of the Haddel evidence—that Chastain was trying to keep at least some of his moves on the Dancers case below the surface and untraceable through normal measures.

“Is there a place where we could sit down and talk?” Ballard asked.

“Sure, I’ve got an office,” Higgs said. “Follow me.”

Higgs led the way through a series of interconnecting labs within the general lab and into a small and cluttered office big enough for a desk and single visitor’s chair. They sat down and Ballard asked him to tell the story of his interaction with Chastain from the start.

“You mean, go back to the first case?” he asked.

“I guess so,” Ballard said. “What was the first case?”

“Well, the first time I ever spoke to Detective Chastain was when he called me up about two years ago. He said he had read about VMD in the Journal of Forensic Sciences or some other journal—I can’t remember which one—and he wanted to know if the process could raise fingerprints on a basketball.”

Higgs’s story was already ringing true for Ballard. She knew from her years as Chastain’s partner that he prided himself on staying up on advances and techniques in forensics, interrogation, and legal protocol. Some of the other detectives even nicknamed him “The Scholar” because of his extracurricular reading. It would not have been unusual for Chastain to pick up the phone and call a scientist directly when he had a question about evidence.

“Did he say what the case was?” Ballard asked.

“Yeah, it was a shooting on a playground,” Higgs said. “A kid got into an argument during a one-on-one game, and the other kid grabbed a gun out of his backpack at the side of the court and shot him. So Detective Chastain thought the shooter had to have left prints on the ball because he had been playing with it, you know? But the police lab said they couldn’t do it because the ball was rubber and had a dimpled and porous surface. He asked me to give it a try.”

“And what happened?”

“I like a challenge. I told him to bring it down here, and we tried but we couldn’t pull anything up that was usable. I mean, we got some ridges here and there but nothing that he could take back and put through the latent print archives.”

“So, then what?”

“Well, that was sort of it. Until he called me last week and asked if he could send me something he wanted to try to get a print off of.”

“What was it?”

“He called it a thumb button.”