She knocked on the open door of the office and McAdams invited her in.
“Long time no see, Ballard,” he said. “I heard you had a fun shift last night.”
“Depends on what you consider fun,” she said. “It was busy, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, I saw on the watch log that before the shit hit the fan at the Dancers, you and Jenkins caught an abduction caper. But I didn’t see any paper on it.”
“Because there isn’t any. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
She summarized the Ramona Ramone case and told McAdams that she had Maxine Rowland’s go-ahead to stick with it for a few days. Technically, Ballard should have started by getting an approval from McAdams, but she knew that as an administrator, McAdams liked to be brought things that were already tied in a bow. It made his job easier. He just had to say yes or no.
McAdams said what Ballard knew he would say.
“Okay, have at it, but don’t let it get in the way of your normal duties,” he said. “If it does, then we have a problem, and I don’t like problems.”
“It won’t happen, L-T,” she said. “I know my priorities.”
Leaving the lieutenant’s office, Ballard saw a small group of remaining detectives gathered in front of the three television screens mounted on the back wall of the bureau. The screens were usually silent but one of the men had raised the sound on the middle screen to hear the report on the Dancers shooting, which kicked off the five-o’clock news hour.
Ballard sauntered over to watch. On the screen was video from a press conference held earlier in the day. The chief of police was at the podium and he was flanked by Olivas and Captain Larry Gandle, commander of the Robbery-Homicide Division. The chief was reassuring the media and the public that the shooting at the Dancers was not an act of domestic terrorism. While the exact motivation for the mass killing was not known, he said, detectives were zeroing in on the circumstances that caused the extreme violence.
When the report shifted back to the news anchor, she reported that the names of the victims had not yet been released by the Coroner’s Office but that sources told channel 9 that three of the victims, all believed to have been the intended targets of the shooter, had criminal records ranging from drug charges to extortion and acts of violence.
The anchor then moved on to the next story, this one about another LAPD press conference, to announce arrests in a human-trafficking investigation at the Port of Los Angeles, where a cargo container that was used to bring in young women abducted from Eastern Europe had been intercepted earlier in the year. There was file video showing the stark interior of the shipping container and aid workers offering water to and wrapping blankets around the victims as they were shepherded to safety. It was then coupled with new video showing a line of men in handcuffs being walked off a jail bus by detectives. But the story wasn’t about Hollywood, and the detective with the remote lost interest. He hit the mute button. No one objected and the group around the screens started to dissipate as everybody moved back to their respective pods or headed out of the station for the weekend.
Once she got back to her desk, Ballard looked through the file Mendez had lent her. There were several arrest reports going back three years, as well as booking photos that showed the progression of Ramona Ramone’s physical changes as she transitioned. There were more than cosmetic changes, like eyebrow shaping. It was clear from the front and side photos that her lips had gotten fuller and she’d had her Adam’s apple shaved.
There were three shake cards clipped to the inside of the file folder. These were 3 x 5 cards with handwritten notes taken while patrol or vice officers stopped Ramone on the stroll to question what she was doing. Officially called field interview or FI cards, they were more often called shake cards because the American Civil Liberties Union had repeatedly complained that the unwarranted interviews of people whom the police were suspicious of were actually shakedowns. The rank and file embraced that description and continued the practice of stopping and interviewing suspicious individuals and writing down details about their description, tattoos, gang affiliation, and hangout locations.
The cards written on Ramona Ramone largely said the same thing and most contained information Ballard already knew. Some of the notes revealed more about the personality of the officer than it did about Ramone. One officer wrote, Holy shit this is a guy!
The one piece of useful information Ballard gleaned from the cards was that Gutierrez/Ramone had no driver’s license and therefore no verifiable home address. The official reports simply stated the address where the arrest was made, most often on Santa Monica Boulevard. But during the field interviews, she had twice given an address on Heliotrope. The third card said, Lives in trailer, moves around the 6. This information was good to have and Ballard was glad she had gone up to see Mendez.
Finished with her review of the file and Ramone’s background, Ballard fired up the computer terminal and went to work, looking for the suspect. Her plan was to start small and go big — to look for local cases that were similar to the attack on Ramone. If she found nothing, then she would widen her computer search to look for similar cases in the state of California, then the country, and then even the world.
Working the department’s computer archives was an art form. Formally, the system was called DCTS — Detective Case Tracking System. One wrong input in the search parameters could easily result in a “no records found” response, even if there was a closely matching case somewhere in the data. Ballard composed a short list of details that she would enter and subtract from until she got a hit.
Transgender
Bite
Brass Knuckles
Bound
Prostitute
Santa Monica Boulevard
She entered them into a search of all cases in the archive and got a quick “no records found.” She eliminated Santa Monica Boulevard, searched again, and got the same response. She continued to search, dropping words as she went and then trying different combinations and adding variations, using “bindings” and “tied up” instead of “bound,” “escort” instead of “prostitute.” But none of the combinations scored a hit in the data.
Frustrated and beginning to feel the effects of less than three hours’ sleep, Ballard got up from her station and started walking down the now empty aisles of the bureau, hoping to get her blood moving. She wanted to avoid a caffeine headache, so she held off on going to the break room for another coffee. She stood for a moment in front of the silent TV screens and watched a man in front of a weather map that showed no sign of inclement weather heading toward L.A.
She knew it was time to widen the search outside the city. With that would come a lot of desk work as she tried to chase down far-off cases that might be connected to hers. It would be a slog and the prospect was daunting. She returned to the desk and put another call in to Hollywood Presbyterian to check on her victim on the off chance she had miraculously come to and could be interviewed.
But there was no change. Ramona Ramone was still in an induced coma.
Ballard hung up the phone and looked at the list of case attributes that had failed to draw a hit from the data bank.
“Key words, my ass,” she said out loud.
She decided to try one more angle.
California was one of only four states that made possession of brass knuckles — or metal knuckles, as they were referred to in the statutes — illegal. Other states had age minimums and laws against using them in the commission of a crime, but in California they were illegal across the board, and violating the law could be charged as a felony.