“Oh, okay. I will.”
“And I hope to see you at one of the mixers down in the courtyard.”
“I haven’t heard about that.”
“First Friday of every month, not including today, of course. Happy hour. It’s BYOB but people share.”
“Okay, good. Maybe I’ll see you there. And nice to meet you.”
“Happy New Year!”
“Same.”
Ballard was still getting used to having neighbors and felt awkward during the meet and greets — especially when it came out that she was a cop. She had spent most of the last four years alternating between a tent on Venice Beach and using her grandmother’s house in Ventura for sleeping. But Covid-19 shut the beaches, while the growing homeless population in Venice made it a place she didn’t want to be. She had rented the apartment, which was only ten minutes from the station. But it meant having neighbors above and below and to the left and right.
Nate headed toward the elevator, while she decided on the stairs so she wouldn’t have to ride with him and make more small talk. Her phone started to buzz and she struggled to pull it from her pocket without dropping the paperwork from Bosch. She saw on the screen that it was Lisa Moore calling.
“Fuck me,” Lisa said by way of hello.
“What’s wrong, Lisa?” Ballard asked.
“We got a case and I’m five minutes from the Miramar with Kevin.”
Ballard interpreted that to mean the Midnight Men had claimed another victim and Moore was almost to the resort in Santa Barbara with her boyfriend, a sergeant at Olympic Division.
“What’s the case?” she asked.
“The victim didn’t call it in till an hour ago,” Moore said. “I thought we were clear.”
“You mean she was raped last night but just reported it now?”
“Exactly. She sat in a bathtub for hours. Look, they took her to the RTC.... Is there any chance you can handle it, Renée? I mean, it will probably take me two-plus hours to get back from here with the traffic and shit.”
“Lisa, we were on call the whole weekend.”
“I know, I know, I just thought that after we talked, I was clear, you know? We’ll turn around. It’s uncool to ask you.”
Ballard turned around and headed back to her car. It was a big ask from Moore, not just because this was technically her case. Ballard knew that any trip to the rape treatment center would leave a mark on her. There weren’t any uplifting stories to come out of the RTC. She opened the door of her Defender and put the kit bag back in.
“I’ll handle it,” she said. “But at some point Dash is going to check in and he might call you. You’re the one from Sex. Not me.”
“I know, I know,” Moore said. “I was thinking I would call him now and say we got the call and one of us will update him after we talk to the victim. If you call him later, that should cover me. And if you need me tomorrow, I’ll come back.”
“Whatever. I just don’t want my ass in a sling for covering for you.”
“It won’t be. You’re the best. I’ll call you later to check in.”
“Right.”
They disconnected. Ballard was annoyed. It wasn’t because of Moore’s lack of work ethic. After a year of pandemic and anti-police sentiment, commitment to the job was sometimes hard to find. The why-should-we-care disease had infected the whole department. What annoyed her was the disruption of her plan to spend the evening at home, ordering in from Little Dom’s, digging into the chronological record on the Albert Lee killing, and looking for connections to the Javier Raffa killing. Now that she had pulled a fresh Midnight Men case, Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds would be sure to turn the Raffa investigation over to West Bureau Homicide first thing in the morning.
“Shit,” she said as she started the Defender.
The RTC was an adjunct to the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. Ballard had been there many times on cases, including the time she herself was examined for evidence of rape. She knew most of the women — it was all women who worked there — on a first-name basis. She entered the unmarked door and found two dayside uniforms she recognized as McGee and Black — both males — standing in the waiting room.
“Hey, guys, I can take it from here,” she said. “How’d the call come in?”
“She called it in,” Black said. “The victim.”
“She thought about it all day and then decided she’d been raped,” McGee said. “Whatever evidence there was went down the bathtub drain.”
Ballard stared at him for a moment, trying to read the sentiment behind such an asshole statement.
“Well, we’ll see about that,” she finally said. “Just so you know, I’m guessing she had no doubt about whether she was raped, okay, McGee? Her hesitation was most likely about making a report to a department and officers who don’t give a shit and don’t view rape as much of a crime.”
McGee’s cheeks started to blotch red with either anger or embarrassment or both.
“Don’t get upset, McGee,” Ballard said. “I didn’t say I was talking about you, did I?”
“Yeah, bullshit,” McGee said.
“Whatever,” Ballard said. “She told you it was two suspects?”
“She did,” Black said. “One got in, then let the other one in.”
“What time was this?” Ballard asked.
“Right about midnight,” Black said. “She said she didn’t stay up to see in the new year. Got home from work around nine-thirty, made some dinner, then took a shower and went to bed.”
“What was the address?” Ballard asked.
“She lives up in the Dell,” Black said.
He pulled a field interview card out of a back pocket and handed it to Ballard.
“Shit,” Ballard said.
“What?” McGee asked.
“I was sitting under the Cahuenga overpass at midnight,” Ballard said. “Right when these guys were up there behind me.”
The Dell was a hillside neighborhood a few blocks north of the overpass where Ballard and Moore had waited out the New Year’s fusillade. Looking at the field information card, she saw that the victim, Cynthia Carpenter, lived up on Deep Dell Terrace. It was almost all the way up the hill to the Mulholland Dam.
Ballard held the card up as if to ask, is this all you’ve got?
“You’ll do the IR today, right?” she asked.
“As soon as we get out of here,” Black said.
Ballard nodded. She needed the incident report as the starting point of the investigation.
“Well, I’ve got it from here,” she said. “You can go back to the six and write it up.”
“And you can go to hell, Ballard,” McGee said.
He didn’t move. Black grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the door.
“Let’s just go, dude,” he said. “Let it go.”
Ballard waited to see how McGee wanted to play it. There was a tense moment of silence and then he turned and followed his partner out to the parking lot.
Ballard took a breath and turned toward the admittance desk. The receiving nurse, Sandra, smiled at her, having heard the exchange.
“You tell ’em, Renée,” she said. “Your victim’s in room three with Martha. I’ll let her know you’ll be in the hallway.”
“Thanks,” Ballard said.
Ballard went behind the desk and down the short hallway, which had doors to four examination rooms. Ballard had been there at times when all four contained victims of sexual assault.
The hallway was pastel blue and a mural of flowers had been added, growing from the baseboard, in an attempt to make things seem more pleasant in a place where horrors were documented. On the wall between rooms 1 and 3 was a billboard with various posted offerings of post-traumatic stress therapy and self-defense classes. Ballard was studying a business card tacked to the board that offered firearms instruction from a retired LAPD officer named Henrik Bastin. She found herself hoping that he got a lot of business out of this place.