The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(50)

“Let me take a look at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ballard reached into her backpack, pulled out John Hilton’s prison sketchbook, and handed it across the desk to Thornton.

“The sketch referred to in the warrant is marked with the Post-it,” she said.

She had marked only one drawing because the second drawing was not as clearly recognizable as Kidd. Thornton leafed through the book rather than going directly to the marker. When he finally got there, he studied the full-page drawing for a long moment.

“And you say this is Kidd?” he asked.

“Yes, Your Honor. I have photos of him from that time—mug shots—if you want to see them.”

“Yeah, let me take a look.”

Ballard returned to the backpack while the judge continued.

“My concern is that you’re making a subjective conclusion that, first, this drawing is of Kidd and, second, that the drawing implies some sort of prison romance.”

Ballard opened her laptop and pulled up the photos of Kidd taken while he was in Corcoran. She turned the screen to the judge. He leaned in to look closely at the photos.

“You want me to enlarge them?” Ballard asked.

“That’s not necessary,” the judge said. “I concede that that is Mr. Kidd. What about the romantic relationship? You don’t have proof of that, other than to say you can see it in this drawing. Hilton might have just been a good artist.”

“I see it in the drawing,” Ballard said, maintaining her ground. “Plus you have the victim’s roommate confirming that he was gay and that he was fixated on someone. You have the fact that Hilton was murdered in an alley controlled by Kidd at a time when Kidd had cleared out all other gang members. I believe that Hilton was in love with him and what happens in prison stays in prison. Kidd could not have exposure of the relationship undermine his position of authority in the gang. I think it’s there, Your Honor.”

“I decide that, don’t I?” Thornton said.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Well, your theory is there,” Thornton said. “Some of it is supported by probable cause, but as I say, some is assumption, even conjecture.”

Ballard didn’t respond. She felt like a student being chewed out after school by her teacher. She knew she was going down in flames. Thornton was going to say she didn’t have it, to come back when the probable cause was on solid footing. She watched him flip up the last page to the signature line with Olivas’s name on it.

“You’re working for Captain Olivas on this?” he asked.

“He’s in charge of cold cases,” Ballard said.

“And he signed off on this?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ballard suddenly felt ill—sick to her stomach. She realized that her deception had sent her down a bad path. She was lying to a superior-court judge. Her enmity for Olivas had led her to carry her subterfuge to a person she had only respect for. She now regretted ever taking the murder book from Bosch.

“Well,” Thornton said. “I have to assume he knows what he’s doing. I worked cases with him as a prosecutor twenty-five years ago. He knew what he was doing then.”

“Yes, sir,” Ballard said.

“But I’ve heard rumors about him. Call it his management style.”

Ballard said nothing and Thornton must have realized she wasn’t biting on the bait he had thrown into the water. He moved on.

“You’re asking for a seven-day wire here,” he said. “I’m going to give you seventy-two hours. If you don’t have anything by then, I want you off the lines. Shut it down. You understand, Detective?”

“Yes, sir. Seventy-two hours. Thank you.”

Thornton went through the process of signing the order she would give to the service providers on Kidd’s phones. Ballard wanted him to hurry so she could get out of there before he changed his mind. She was staring at the photo of the musician on the wall but not really seeing it as she thought about the next steps she would take.

“You know who that is?” the judge asked.

Ballard came out of the reverie.

“Uh, no,” she said. “I was just wondering.”

“The Brute and the Beautiful—that’s what they called him,” Thornton said. “Ben Webster. He could make you cry when he played the tenor sax. But when he drank he got mean. He got violent. I see that story all the time in my courtroom.”

Ballard just nodded. Thornton handed her the documents.

“Here’s your search warrant,” he said.





BOSCH





26


Bosch sat at his dining room table with copies of documents from the Walter Montgomery case broken into six stacks in front of him. In the stacks were all the records of the LAPD investigation of the judge’s murder that Mickey Haller had received in discovery prior to trial. Knowing what he did about homicide detectives, prosecutors, and the rules of discovery, Bosch was pretty sure he didn’t have everything that had been accumulated during the investigation. But he had enough to at least begin his own.

And Bosch was also sure that he was the only one investigating the matter. Jerry Gustafson, the lead detective, had made it clear when the murder charge against Jeffrey Herstadt was dismissed that he felt the murderer had been set free. To take a new look at his investigation would be to disavow his prior conclusion. The sins of pride and self-righteousness left justice for Judge Montgomery swaying in the wind.