The Dark Hours (Harry Bosch #23)(91)

The case, according to sources, is an example of the choices investigators face in pursuing serial offenders. A suspect’s routine can lead to capture, but drawing public attention to a crime spree can result in identifiable patterns changing, making the culprits more difficult to apprehend.

In this case, three women were sexually assaulted and tortured by men who broke into their homes in the middle of the night, prompting investigators to label them the “Midnight Men.” On Wednesday, officers in the Media Relations Unit remained mute on the case, while Lieutenant Derek Robinson-Reynolds, supervisor of Hollywood Division detectives, refused to explain or defend his decision to keep the investigation quiet. The Times has filed a formal request for police reports related to the crimes.

One of the victims said she was upset and angry to learn that the police knew of the rapists before she was assaulted on Christmas Eve. Her name is not being used because of the Times’s policy not to identify victims of sex crimes.

“I feel like maybe if I knew these guys were out there, I could have taken precautions and not been a victim,” the woman said tearfully. “I feel like first I got raped by these men and then again by the police department.”

The victim described a harrowing four hours that began after she was awakened in her bed by two men wearing masks, who blindfolded her and took turns assaulting her. The victim said she believed that the two men were going to kill her when the brutal attack was over.

“It was horrible,” she said. “I keep reliving it. It is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

Now she wonders if her ordeal could have been prevented if the police department had informed the public of the Midnight Men.

“Maybe they would have stopped or maybe they would have just moved on if they knew the police were onto them,” the victim said.

USC crime sociologist Todd Pennington told the Times that the Midnight Men case underlines the difficult choices faced by law enforcement.

“There is no good answer here,” he said. “If you keep the investigation under wraps, you stand a much better chance of making an arrest. But if you keep quiet and don’t make that arrest quickly, the public remains in danger. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. In this case, the decision backfired and there were additional victims.”

Pennington said serial offenders rarely stop committing crimes unless stopped by police.

“You have to realize that even if the police had gone public with their investigation, it is unlikely that these two men would have stopped their crimes,” he said. “Instead, they would have changed their patterns. But most likely there would still have been additional victims. And that’s the dilemma we face in deciding whether to go public. It’s a no-win situation for the police.”



Ballard’s face had grown hot while she read the article. Two paragraphs in, she knew that the department would likely peg her as the anonymous source for the story, since the only named villain was the man who had sought her suspension. She also knew this would not be the end of it. The Times was the paper of record and, as such, set the example for most of the other media in the city. There was no doubt that every local news broadcast would jump on this story, and the department would be under the magnifying glass once again.

She read the article one more time and this time took heart in what it didn’t reveal. It made no mention of the attacks all occurring on holidays, and it did not reveal the pattern of streetlight tampering. The source of the story had been careful about what information about the case got out to the public.

Ballard was confident that she knew who the source was. She picked up her phone and called Lisa Moore. With each ring she grew angrier, so that when the call finally went to voice mail, she was ready to fire with both barrels.

“Lisa, I know it was you. I’ll probably get blamed but I know it was you. You jeopardized an entire investigation just to spite Robinson-Reynolds for putting you on nights. And I know you calculated that I would get the blame for this. So fuck you, Lisa.”

She disconnected, almost immediately regretting the message she had left.





39


The story played for two days on the TV, radio, and Internet news, largely fueled by a hastily called press conference at the PAB in which an official department spokesman downplayed the Times report, saying that evidentiary connections between the crimes were tenuous, but the fact that each case involved two perpetrators seemed to connect the cases. Luckily for the department, the Capitol insurrection clogged airtime and newspaper space, and the story disappeared in the undertow of the larger story. Ballard never heard from Robinson-Reynolds, though his silence seemed to confirm his belief that she was the initial leak. Ballard also never heard back from Lisa Moore, even to deny the accusation she had left in her message.

Another story that didn’t get any traction was the arrest of a well-respected dentist in a murder conspiracy. Ballard was now an outsider on the case but she gathered from a call to Ross Bettany that the investigation was moving slowly. While the arrest of Jason Abbott was put out to the media, the involvement of Dennis Hoyle as a cooperating witness and ex-cop Christopher Bonner as a hit man had been successfully kept quiet. Ballard knew it wouldn’t stay quiet forever, especially when court hearings started, but the department had always operated according to the unspoken policy of spreading out the hits to its reputation whenever it possibly could.