The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(45)

She flashed on the confrontation they’d had in the detective bureau two nights earlier. The one-sided confrontation. Her mind leaped to the idea that she had kicked off some sort of cascade of guilt that had led Chastain to take his own life. Then she remembered that they didn’t send out RACER alerts for cop suicides.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “How was he killed? He didn’t do it himself, did he?”

“No, he was hit,” Jenkins said. “Somebody got him in the garage when he was getting out of his car. The RACER alert says execution-style hit.”

“Oh my god.”

Ballard was beside herself. Chastain had betrayed her, yes, but her mind skipped over all that to the five solid years of their partnership before it. Chastain was a skilled and determined investigator. He had five years in RHD before Ballard came in, and he’d taught her a lot. Now he was gone and soon his badge and name would join his father’s on the memorial to fallen officers outside the PAB.

“Renée, you okay?” Jenkins asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. “But I gotta go. I’m going to go up there.”

“That’s probably not a good idea, Renée.”

“I don’t really care. I’ll talk to you later.”

She disconnected and flipped over to her Uber app to summon a ride back to Hollywood Division.

Chastain had lived with his wife and teenage son up in Chatsworth in the far-northwest corner of the city. It was about as far as you could get from downtown and the PAB and still live within the borders of the city. Most cops escaped the city at the end of their shifts and lived outside its boundaries but Chastain had been ambitious and he always thought it would pay off to tell promotional boards that he had always lived in the city he policed.

Once back at the station, Ballard quickly changed into a fresh suit, then grabbed the plain wrap assigned to the late show and headed north, taking a series of three different freeways to get to Chatsworth. An hour after she had gotten the call from Jenkins, she pulled to the curb behind a long line of police cruisers and plain wraps clogging the cul-de-sac at the end of Trigger Street. Passing by the street sign reminded Ballard that Chastain used to joke about being a cop who lived on Trigger Street.

Now it seemed sadly ironic.

The first thing Ballard noticed as she got out of her car was that there appeared to be no media on the perimeter of the scene. Somehow, no one in the legion of reporters who covered L.A. had tumbled to or been tipped to the story. It was probably because it was a Saturday morning and the local media machinery was getting a late start.

She hung her badge around her neck as she approached the yellow tape at the driveway. Save for the media, she saw all the other routine participants in a crime scene: detectives, patrol officers, and forensic and coroner’s techs. The house was a midcentury ranch house built when Chatsworth was the utter boondocks of the city. The double-wide garage door was open onto the center of activity.

A patrol officer from Devonshire Division was running the clipboard at the yellow tape. Ballard gave her name and badge number and then ducked under as he wrote it down. As she walked up the driveway toward the garage, a detective she had once worked with at RHD stepped out and walked toward her with his hands up to stop her. His name was Corey Steadman, and Ballard had never had a problem with him.

“Renée, wait,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Ballard stopped in front of him.

“He was my partner,” Ballard said. “Why do you think I’m here?”

“The lieutenant will shit a brick if he sees you,” Steadman said. “I can’t let you in.”

“Olivas? Why is his team handling this? Isn’t it a conflict of interest?”

“Because it’s related to the Dancers thing. We’re folding it in.”

Ballard made a move to go around Steadman but he sidestepped quickly and blocked her. He held his hand up again in front of her.

“Renée, I can’t,” he said.

“Okay, then just tell me what happened,” Ballard said. “Why’s he in the garage?”

“We think he got hit last night when he came in. The shooter was either waiting inside or, more likely, waiting outside and came in behind him in the blind spot when he drove in.”

“What time was this?”

“The wife went to bed at eleven. She had gotten a text from Kenny saying he’d be working until at least midnight. She gets up this morning and sees that he never got home. She texts, he doesn’t answer. She takes some trash out to the cans in the garage and finds him. That was about nine.”

“Where was he hit?”

“Sitting in the driver’s seat, one in the left temple. Hopefully he never saw it coming.”

Ballard paused for a moment as feelings of anger and sorrow combined in her chest.

“And Shelby didn’t hear the shot? What about Tyler?”

“Tyler was staying the weekend with a friend from the volleyball team. Shelby didn’t hear anything, we think because there was an improvised suppressor. We’ve got some paper fibers and a liquid residue on the car seat and body. Sticky. We’re thinking orange soda but that’s up to the lab.”

Ballard nodded. She knew that Steadman was talking about the method of taping a plastic liter bottle of soda to the muzzle of a gun. Empty out the liquid and stuff in cotton, paper towels, anything. The setup considerably dampened the sound of the muzzle blast but also expelled some of the material in the bottle.