The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(48)

The third victim, Gino Santangelo, was a forty-three-yearold white man and the only one of the three with a record of violence. He had been charged with assault three times over a fifteen-year period. One case involved a firearm in which he shot but did not kill the victim and the other two times the charges included a GBI—great bodily injury—add-on by the D.A.’s Office. In each of the cases, Santangelo pleaded guilty to lesser charges and received lesser penalties. His first conviction involved the use of the firearm, and that cost him three years in a state prison. After that, he apparently got smart and dropped the use of a gun from his repertoire because it would add years to the penalty spectrum. In subsequent arrests, he used his hands and feet to assault the victims and was allowed to plead out to lesser charges, like battery and disturbing the peace, leading to sentences of under a year in the county jail. Ballard’s read on Santangelo, without having the details of each case in front of her, was that he was an enforcer for the mob. She keyed on the third case, in which he was charged with assault with GBI. It was pleaded down to misdemeanor battery. For a case to drop like that, Ballard knew there had to be a witness or victim issue. Santangelo had a history of violence but the victim, or maybe a witness, was afraid or refused to testify. The result was a thirty-day sentence reduced to a week in the county jail.

There was much Ballard could deduce by reading between the lines of the case extracts, but she did not have access to detailed case summaries that put the crimes and the individuals in context. For that, she would need to pull actual files, and that wasn’t going to happen on a Saturday night. She did look at booking photos of the three men, which allowed her to recall their positions in the booth where they were murdered.

Cordell Abbott was easy to place because he was the only black victim. Ballard remembered seeing his body to the immediate left of the open space in the booth. That put Abbott right next to the shooter.

Gordon Fabian’s side-view mug shot showed a man with a gray ponytail, and that easily put him in the seat across from the shooter. He was the victim who had fallen halfway out of the booth, the end of his ponytail dipping into his own blood like a paintbrush.

And that put Gino Santangelo in the middle.

Ballard leaned back in her desk chair and thought about what she knew and what she could assume. Four men slide into a booth. Did they just randomly take their positions, or was there a choreography based on the relationships between the men? There was a bookie, an enforcer, a drug dealer, and, for lack of better information, a shooter.

Added to this was a question about shooting sequence. Ballard did not have access to the crime and property reports, but if she had to name one person in the booth besides the shooter who was armed, she would go with Santangelo. He had previously been convicted of a gun crime, and even though he appeared to shrug off the use of firearms in his strong-arm tactics, it was unlikely that he would stop carrying. His record showed him to be a career criminal and the gun would be one of the tools of the trade.

This led to the next question. The split-second selfie video provided by the witness Alexander Speights clearly showed the shooter firing first on Fabian, the drug dealer. Why would he do that if he had knowledge of who Santangelo was and that he was most likely armed?

Ballard drew several conclusions from her admittedly incomplete information. The first was that the men in the booth didn’t all know each other. It was likely that the shooter knew Abbott, the bookie, if he knew any of the men, because he sat next to him. And she figured he fired first on the drug dealer because of malice or momentum. Malice if he held the drug dealer accountable for whatever went wrong during the meeting. Momentum if he simply chose to shoot the other men in a one-two-three pattern. It would have been the fastest and safest way to shoot, provided he didn’t know that Santangelo was armed.

Ballard knew her assumptions got her nowhere. There were myriad other possibilities and factors at work. The shooter might have checked the others for weapons before joining the meeting, and the seating arrangement could have been dictated simply by the separate arrivals of the men. There was no way of knowing anything for sure and her final conclusion was that she was just spinning her wheels on a case that was not hers and that she had been clearly ordered to stay away from.

But still, she couldn’t drop it. It pulled at her because of Chastain. And she now considered a move that would surely get her fired if discovered by the department.

Ballard and Chastain had been partners for nearly five years before the falling-out over her complaint about Olivas. During that time they worked closely on high-priority and often dangerous investigations. It drew them close and in many ways their partnership was like a marriage, although there was never any crossing or even blurring of the professional line. But still, they shared all things work-related, and Ballard even knew Chastain’s password into the department’s computer system. She had sat next to him too many times while he logged in not to notice and remember it. It was true that the department required detectives to change their passwords every month, but investigators were creatures of habit and most simply updated the last three digits of a steady password, using the month and year.

She believed it was unlikely that he had switched his main password after the dissolution of their partnership. Ballard had not changed her own, because it was easy to remember—her father’s name spelled backward—and she didn’t want to be bothered memorizing a combination of letters and numbers that might have no significance to her. She knew that Chastain’s password was the date of his marriage followed by his and his wife’s initials and the current month and year.