The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(44)

“I know that you go to RHD. RHD never comes to you. I’ll see you there.”

She disconnected the call. She wasn’t sure she would go to the meeting—it was her goal in life to never be in the same room with Olivas again—but she needed Nuccio to think she was coming. That would rattle him and it would rattle Olivas when he was told. That’s what Ballard wanted.





23


Ballard spent the first hour after roll call trying to get a line on Edison Banks Jr. He had no criminal record and his driver’s license had expired three years earlier and not been renewed. Ballard pulled up the DMV photo and estimated it was taken seven years earlier, when the license was issued. It showed a blond-haired surfer type with thin lips and green eyes. Ballard printed it even though she knew that it would probably be useless in terms of showing it to people who might have known Banks in recent years.

Next, she started working the phone, calling shelters, soup kitchens, and homeless outreach centers in the Hollywood area. There weren’t many of them and not all of them operated twenty-four hours. She was looking for any sort of connection to Banks that she could have in her back pocket if she crashed the RHD meeting in the morning. She didn’t expect to be allowed to stay on the case—that was a given with Olivas the captain in charge—but if she could come up with information that kick-started the investigation or gave it a direction, then her actions on the night of the body’s discovery might not be judged so harshly. She knew that Olivas would take any opportunity to second-guess her decisions, and she was vulnerable to criticism on this one: she had passed off what might have been determined to be a homicide to the LAFD arson squad, and that shouldn’t have happened. She should have been the one to inform RHD, not the Fire Department.

At the end of an hour she had nothing. Banks had apparently steered clear of places where names and photos are taken in exchange for a bed, a hot meal, or a bar of soap. Or he was using an alias. Either way, he had successfully stayed off the grid. It clearly suggested that Banks had been hiding his trail and didn’t want his family to find him.

She grabbed the DMV photo off the printer and a rover from the charging station before heading down the hallway to the watch office. She told Lieutenant Washington that she was going out to conduct a second-level canvass of the area, now that the death had been ruled suspicious.

“Arson deaths go to RHD,” Washington said.

“I know,” Ballard replied. “There’s a meet tomorrow at eight. I just want to finish my report and pass it on. There’s a few people out there we missed the other night and now’s the time to get them. They scatter at sunup.”

Washington asked if she wanted backup and she declined. The presence of uniformed officers would not be conducive to getting information from the denizens of the Hollywood night.

She first cruised around the city park and slowly along Cole to check things out. She saw no activity, except for a few inhabitants of the encampment who were still awake and sitting on the curb or on folding chairs and smoking and drinking by themselves.

At the north end of the park, Ballard saw a group of men sitting under a streetlight. She parked her car across the street from them in front of a prop house and used the rover to call her location in to the watch office. It was a routine practice.

As she got out, she slipped off her suit jacket so the badge on her belt would be readily recognized when she approached the men. Crossing the street, she counted four men sitting together in a small clearing between two tents and a blue tarp lean-to attached to the park’s perimeter fence. One of the men spoke up in a raspy whiskey-and cigarette-cured voice before she got to them.

“Why, that’s the prettiest po-lice officer I think I ever seen.”

The other men laughed and Ballard could tell they weren’t feeling any pain at the moment.

“Evening, fellas,” she said. “Thanks for the compliment. What’s going on tonight?”

“Nothin’,” Raspy said.

“We’s just havin’ an Irish wake for Eddie,” said another, who was wearing a black beret.

A third man raised a short dog bottle of vodka to toast the fallen. “So, you guys knew Edison,” Ballard said. “Yup,” said the fourth man.

He appeared to Ballard to be barely twenty years old, his cheeks hardly holding a stubble.

“Were you guys here the other night?” she asked.

“Yeah, but we didn’t see nothing till it was all over,” said Beret.

“How about before?” Ballard asked. “Did you see Eddie earlier in the night? Was he around?”

“He was around,” Raspy said. “Had himself a fiver and he wouldn’t share none of it.”

“What’s a fiver?”

“A whole fifth of the good stuff.”

Ballard nodded. Judging by the one man’s short dog, she assumed scraping enough change on corners and from passersby to buy a fifth was a rare thing.

“How’d he get the fiver?” she asked.

“He, um, had a guardian angel,” said The Kid.

“Someone bought it for him? Did you see who?”

“Nah, just somebody. It’s what he said. Said somebody gave him the big boy for nothin’. Didn’t have to suck a cock or anything.”

“You remember what it was he was drinking?”