The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(15)

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.