The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(26)

“Elvin Kidd, the Rolling 60s street boss who told his dealers to clear the alley on the day Hilton got killed.”

“How’d you get that?”

“From the snitch Hunter and Talis didn’t get the chance to interview back in 1990.”

“Wait till I’m clear, then we go see him.”

There was a hesitation.

“You shouldn’t go out there without backup,” Bosch said.

“The guy’s like sixty and out of the game,” Ballard said. “Rialto’s two hours and a world away from South L.A. It’s where bangers go when they quit the streets.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll call you when I clear, then we go out. Maybe you should get some sleep until then.”

“Can’t. I’m going to check out the ballistics first thing tomorrow.”

“Then go home, wherever and whatever home is, and sleep.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“I told you about that.”

“I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll stop calling you ‘Dad’ and you stop telling me to ‘get some sleep.’”

“Okay, deal.”

“Have a nice night, Harry.”

“You too. Let me know about the ballistics tomorrow.”

“Will do.”

She disconnected. Bosch started the Jeep and headed home.





BALLARD





14


Ballard sat in on the third-watch roll call but there was no requirement for her skills at the start of her shift. No follow-ups, no interviews, no subpoena deliveries, not even a wellness check. Afterward, she went down to the empty detective bureau, picked a desk, and set up her radio, leaving it on the jazz station Bosch programmed. She settled in for some computer work, and started running deep background checks on Elvin Kidd and Nathan Brazil.

She learned that Kidd owned a home valued at $600,000 and ran a building business called Kidd Construction, specializing in commercial renovation projects. The contractor’s license was in the name of Cynthia Kidd. Ballard guessed this was his wife, whose name was used to get around the fact that he had a criminal record.

It looked to Ballard, at least on the surface of things, that at some point Kidd had broken away from gang life and had chosen the straight life. Kidd Construction was first licensed by the state in 2002, twelve years after the murder of John Hilton.

Ballard pulled up a photo of Kidd’s home on Google Maps and studied it for a few moments. It looked like the ideal picture of suburban life: gray with white trim, two-car garage. The only thing missing was a white picket fence out front. She noticed a pickup in the driveway with an equipment trailer hooked to it. The name of a business was painted on the side of the trailer, but it had been blurred out by Google. Ballard had no doubt that it said KIDD CONSTRUCTION. This made her pull up the address on the contractor’s license and she determined that it was a single-bay storage unit. So maybe Kidd ran his business out of his home and his business wasn’t killing it financially. But he still had the house that had a single mortgage on it, and the pickup truck looked like it was only a year or two old. It wasn’t bad for a guy who had spent two stints in state prison before he was thirty years old. Now sixty-two, he was one of the lucky few who had made it out alive.

Nathan Brazil was another story. Ballard found two bankruptcies on his record and a string of eviction actions taken against him over the prior twenty-five years. She also found a rental application online that listed him as working in the food service industry, which she took to mean he was most likely a waiter, a bartender, or maybe a chef. A reference on the application—which was from 2012—was the general manager of a Tex-Mex restaurant in West Hollywood called Marix. Ballard had dined there frequently when, years earlier, she had lived in the area. It was the place to go for margaritas and fajitas. She wondered if she had ever been served by Brazil, even though she did not recognize him in the driver’s license photo she had pulled up.

The Google Maps photo Ballard found for what she believed was Brazil’s current address was of a ’50s postmodern apartment house on Sweetzer. A single level of apartments over an open parking garage, the place looked worn and long out of style, its facade blemished by tenant-only parking signs slapped on the yellowed plaster.

As she was printing out screenshots of her search, Ballard’s cell phone buzzed. The screen said UNKNOWN CALLER. She took the call.

“This is Max Talis. You left me a message.”

Ballard checked the wall clock and was surprised. She had left the message for Talis four hours earlier. She wasn’t sure if there was a time difference between L.A. and Idaho, but his calling back after midnight seemed strange for a retired man.

“Yes, Detective, thank you for calling me back.”

“Let me guess, this is about Biggie?”

“Biggie? No, it’s not. I—”

“That’s what I get called about most of the time. I only had the case twenty minutes and then the big boys took over. But I still get calls ’cause I’m in the files.”

Ballard assumed he was talking about Biggie Smalls, the rapper whose murder in the ’90s was still officially unsolved but had been the subject of countless media reports, documentaries, and based-on-a-true-story movies. It was one of a long line of L.A. murders that captured the public imagination, when in reality it had been a street killing not that much different from the killing of John Hilton: a man shot to death in the front seat of his car.