The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(47)

17

Ballard picked up Lola with profuse apologies to Sarah and went to the beach. At first she just sat cross-legged on the sand with her dog and watched the sun drop toward the horizon. She decided not to paddle. She knew that sharks cruised the shoreline at dusk, looking for food.

She thought about the time Chastain had told her the real story of his father, of how he had been an Internal Affairs hack who was pulled out of a car and murdered by a mob during an explosion of racial tensions that he had helped touch off through his own actions. Chastain didn’t know the truth until after he became a cop and earned the juice it took to pull the sealed records on his father’s death. He confided in Ballard that the thing that had made him so proud growing up had ultimately made him deeply and privately humiliated as a man with a badge. It had fired his ambition to climb through the ranks and redeem his father and himself in some way.

The only problem was, he had trampled over Ballard on the climb.

“Renée?”

Ballard looked up. Aaron the lifeguard stood there.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine, yeah,” she said.

She wiped tears off her cheeks.

“Somebody who totally fucked me over died today,” she said.

“Then why are you sad?” he asked. “I mean, fuck him. If it was a him.”

“I don’t know. I guess because it means what he did can never be changed. His death makes it permanent.”

“I think I get that.”

“It’s complicated.”

He was wearing a red nylon jacket with the word rescue on it. The temperature was dropping with the sun, which was just about to dip into the ocean. The sky was turning neon pink.

“You’re not going to try to sleep out here tonight, are you?” Aaron asked. “Night patrol is out here in force on a Saturday night.”

“No,” Ballard said. “I’m going in to work. Just wanted to see the sunset.”

Aaron said good night and moved on down the beach toward the lifeguard tower, where he was posted until dark. Ballard watched the sun sink into the black water and then got up. She once again bought takeout for herself and Lola on the boardwalk and ate sitting on a nearby bench. She could not generate much enthusiasm for food and ended up giving half her order of black beans, yellow rice, and plantains to a homeless man she knew named Nate. He was a street artist who until January had done decent business selling portraits of the former president. He reported to Ballard that images of the new president went unsold because his kind of people didn’t come to Venice Beach.

She returned Lola to Sarah’s house with more apologies to both dog and sitter, and then headed east back into the city and the cases. She got to Hollywood Station three hours before her shift was scheduled to start. In the locker room, after changing into her suit, she pulled the black elastic mourning band from behind her badge and stretched it across the front of the shield.

Once she was in the detective bureau, she set up in her usual spot and went right to work on the computer, starting with opening the Los Angeles Times website. She knew she could use the department’s own data network—most investigations resulted in basic information being put online for internal access—but that would leave a signature trail. She wanted the names of the three men murdered in the booth at the Dancers and believed the city’s main media standard-bearer would have acquired them by now, nearly forty-eight hours since the massacre.

She was correct and quickly found a story that credited the Medical Examiner’s Office with releasing the names of the dead after next-of-kin notifications and autopsies had been completed. The story identified Cynthia Haddel and Marcus Wilbanks as the Dancers employees killed by the unknown gunman, and Cordell Abbott, Gordon Fabian, and Gino Santangelo as the three customers who were murdered in the booth where they sat.

Names in hand, Ballard proceeded to background the three men in the booth by signing into the crime index and DMV computers. This, too, would leave a trail of her searches but these would not be as easily detected as her simply using her department access to open the online files of the case. Going that way could leave a flag, immediately alerting the case investigators of her activities.

She went through the three names one by one and built data profiles of each. As had been reported the night before on the television news, all three men had criminal records. What raised Ballard’s intrigue level was that they appeared to come from different parts of the criminal underworld, and that made their meeting in that booth unusual.

Cordell Abbott was a thirty-nine-yearold black man who had four convictions on his record for gambling offenses. In each of these cases, he was accused of banking illegal games. In layman’s terms, he was a bookie. He took bets on sports ranging from horse races to Dodgers games. It appeared that, despite four convictions, he had never served time in a state prison. At most, his crimes cost him county jail time measured in weeks and months, not years.

Similarly, Gordon Fabian had escaped prison time, despite a long history of convictions for various drug-related crimes. Fabian was white and, at fifty-two years old, the oldest victim of the massacre. Ballard counted nineteen arrests on his record dating back to the 1980s. These all related to the personal use or small-time sale of drugs. He received probation and time-served sentences in most cases. In some others, charges were dropped. However, at the time of his murder, Fabian had finally made it to the big leagues and was awaiting an upcoming trial in federal court for possession of a kilo of cocaine. He was out on bail but facing a long prison sentence if convicted.