The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(56)

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“That night when we left the club. Look, my customer is waiting.”

“Let her look at herself for a couple more minutes. What about Friday? You didn’t see him Friday?”

“No, we’re both off Fridays. That’s why we went out Thursday night.”

“So you don’t know what he was doing Friday? You never called him to tell him about coming to the station and the police taking your phone? You didn’t warn him that we might want to talk to him?”

“No, because he didn’t see anything that night. Neither of us did. And besides, I couldn’t call him, because you and that detective took my phone.”

“So why did he call the police on Friday at five? What did he know?”

“I have no idea why he called or what he knew, and I’m about to lose a sale. I gotta go.”

Speights walked away from Ballard and over to his customer, who was now sitting down and taking off the Nikes. It looked to Ballard like a no-sale. She realized that she was still holding the Converse with the three-inch heel. She checked the underside of the shoe and saw a price tag of $395. She then carefully put it back on its pedestal, leaving it there like a work of art.

Ballard headed out to Venice and sleep after that. She picked up Lola and pitched her tent fifty yards north of the Rose Avenue lifeguard stand. She was so tired that she decided to sleep first and paddle afterward.

Her sleep was repeatedly interrupted by a series of calls to her phone from a 213 number that matched digit for digit the number her grandmother had read off the business card given to her by Rogers Carr. She didn’t answer and he kept calling, popping her out of sleep every thirty or forty minutes. He never left a message. After the third interruption, Ballard put the phone on mute.

After that, she slept a solid three hours, waking with her arm draped around Lola’s neck. She checked her phone and saw that Carr had called two more times and finally, after the last call, had left a message: “Detective Ballard, this is Detective Rogers Carr with Major Crimes. Listen, we need to talk. I’m on the team investigating the murder of fellow officer Ken Chastain. Can you call me back so we can set up a face-to-face?”

He left two numbers: his cell—which Ballard already had—and his landline at the PAB. Ballard was always annoyed by people who prefaced what they said with the word listen.

Listen, we need to talk.

Listen, no we don’t.

She decided not to call him back yet. It was supposedly her day off, and she was losing the light. Through the tent’s zippered slot she checked the water and saw that the afternoon wind had kicked up a light chop. She looked up at the sun and estimated she could get in an hour’s paddle before dusk, when the sharks came out.

Fifteen minutes later Ballard was on the water with a passenger. Lola sat on her haunches, weighting down the front of the board as it nosed through the chop. Ballard paddled north against the wind so she could count on it to be at her back when she was spent and returning to the beach.

She dug deep into the water with long, smooth strokes. As she worked, she let the details of the Dancers case flow through her mind. She tried to delineate what she knew, what she could assume, and what she didn’t know. If she assumed that the fourth man in the booth was a cop, that made it a meeting of individuals with expertise in several areas of vice and law enforcement—gambling, loan-sharking, and drugs. Fabian, the drug dealer, had asked his attorney about delivering a cop to trade for help on his case. That indicated that he knew of a cop who was involved in illegal activities. Perhaps a cop who had taken bribes or had run interference on cases. Perhaps a cop who owed money.

Ballard could see a scenario where a cop who owed money to a bookie would be introduced to a loan shark with perhaps the drug dealer as the go-between. Another scenario she paddled through had the cop already owing the bookie and loan shark and being introduced to the drug dealer to set up a deal that would pay off his debts.

There were many plausible possibilities and she could not narrow anything down without more facts. She changed the direction of the board and shifted her focus to Chastain. His actions indicated that he had been on the same path that Ballard was on now but that he had somehow drawn attention to it, and it had gotten him killed. The question was, how did he get there so fast? He did not have the information Ballard had gotten from Towson, yet something had told him it was a cop who had been in that booth.

She went back to the start, to the callout on the case. She quickly went through her own steps in the investigation, beginning at Hollywood Presbyterian and carrying it through to her dismissal by Olivas at the crime scene. She examined each moment as though it were a film and she was interested in everything in its frame.

Eventually she saw something that didn’t fit. It was that last moment at the crime scene, Olivas in her face, insulting her and telling her to leave. She had looked over his shoulder for a sympathetic eye. First it was to the coroner and then it was to her old partner. But Dr. J. had looked away and Chastain had been busying himself bagging evidence. He never even looked her way.

She now realized that that was the moment. Chastain was bagging something—it had looked like a black button to Ballard—while Olivas had his back turned and was looking at her. Chastain also had his back turned to Dr. J. so she would not have a view of what he was doing either.

Detectives didn’t bag evidence at crime scenes. The criminalists did. On top of that, it had been too early for anyone to be picking up and bagging evidence. The crime scene was fresh, bodies were still in place, and the 3-D crime scene camera had not even been set up. What was Chastain doing? Why was he breaking protocol and removing something from the crime scene before it was properly noted, recorded, and cataloged?