The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(61)

Ballard stood up.

“Fine. Whatever. Message received. I’ve got other cases to work.”

“Look, don’t go off mad.”

She stepped away from the table and went through the opening in the railing. She came back around to unhook the dog’s leash. She looked at Carr one more time.

“You need me, you know where to find me.”

“Sure.”

She walked off with her dog. It was almost dark now on the beach and the wind off the water was getting cold.





21

Ballard’s first stop was at the critter sitter’s off Abbot Kinney. Sarah was reluctant to take the dog in, even though she was paid extra when Lola spent more than the night at her home.

“She’s getting depressed,” she said. “She misses you all the time.”

Sarah was a longtime resident of Venice who sold sunglasses on the boardwalk. She had offered to help when Ballard rescued Lola from her homeless and abusive owner. That had amounted to a place to stay while Ballard worked the midnight shift, but the schedule had gone out the window in recent days.

“I know,” Ballard said. “It’s not fair but I keep thinking that things will return to normal soon. I just got a bunch of cases all at once.”

“If it keeps up, maybe you should take her up to your grandmother’s to stay,” Sarah suggested. “So she has some continuity with someone.”

“That’s a good idea,” Ballard said. “But I hope soon it will all slow down and go back to normal.”

Ballard drove east toward Hollywood, trying to bury her frustrations from the conversations with both Sarah and Carr. With Carr she was particularly stressed because she had put herself on the line with her revelations and had not gotten a clear signal from him that he would push forward on the case in return. His final message was to stand down, but she didn’t know if that was because he was going to take it from there or if nothing would happen at all.

At the station she put the Chastain investigation aside for the time being and went back to work on the Ramona Ramone case. Her first move was to call Hollywood Presbyterian to check on the victim’s medical status. After a runaround that included several minutes of being on hold, she started to worry that Ramone had taken a bad turn and succumbed to her injuries. But finally Ballard was talking to an evening supervisor, who reported that earlier in the day the patient had been transferred to the Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center in downtown. Ballard asked if the transfer meant that Ramone had come out of the coma, but the supervisor refused to share details of her medical condition, citing privacy laws. Nevertheless, Ballard knew there were laws regulating patient dumping, and she didn’t think that moving a patient in a coma was allowed. This gave her hope that Ramona Ramone might finally be able to take part in the investigation.

Ballard decided that she would go down to County-USC to check on Ramone’s medical status, security, and availability as a witness as soon as possible. But for the moment her focus was still squarely on Thomas Trent, and it was time to get back on the case and keep pushing.

Ballard still wanted to talk to Trent’s ex-wife. Her ending the marriage following his arrest and her apparent decision not to fight for a share of the house in the hills indicated that this was a woman who just wanted to get away from a bad guy and a bad mistake. Ballard thought his ex-wife might talk about Trent without turning around and tipping him off to the police’s interest in him. There were other precautions that could be taken to guard against this, but overall Ballard felt confident in her decision to go directly to the ex–Mrs. Trent.

Tracing Beatrice Trent on the DMV database, Ballard was able to follow her through three addresses and a name change since the divorce. She was now Beatrice Beaupre, and by going back in time with the search, Ballard learned that that was her name when she received her first California driver’s license two decades earlier. She was now forty-four years old and currently listed on DMV records as living in Canoga Park.

Before leaving the station, she put together a six-pack of mug shots that included the photo taken of Thomas Trent after his arrest for the brass knuckles. She hoped that before the night was through, she would be showing the lineup to Ramona Ramone.

Sunday-evening traffic was a breeze and Ballard got to Canoga Park before nine. It was late to be calling on the unsuspecting Beatrice Beaupre, but not that late. Whether at nine in the morning or evening, Ballard always liked to employ the cold call at the odd hour. It put people back on their heels a bit, made them easier to talk to.

But it was Ballard who was knocked back on her heels when she got to the address on Owensmouth Avenue listed with the DMV as Beaupre’s home address. She was in the middle of a deserted warehouse district where small businesses and manufacturers operated by day but shut down tight at night. She pulled to a stop in front of an aluminum-sided building with a door that was marked only with an address number. There were five other cars and a van parked near the door and a flashing-red strobe located above it. Ballard knew enough about the Valley’s most prosperous industries to figure out that inside the warehouse, there was a porno shoot under way. The flashing light meant do not enter until the scene was completed.

Ballard sat in her car and watched the strobe. It stayed on for the next twelve minutes and she wondered if that meant people inside were having sex for that long. As soon as it went off, she got out and reached the door before it started flashing again. The handle was locked and she knocked. She was ready with her badge when the door opened, and a man wearing a wool beanie looked out.