Ballard typed in one more search of the LAPD’s data archive, asking for all cases in the last five years involving an arrest for possession of brass knuckles, felony or misdemeanor.
She got fourteen hits on separate cases, which she thought was surprisingly high given that the weapon had so rarely come up in cases she had worked or had even known about in her ten years as a detective.
Ballard checked the wall clock and started the task of pulling up expanded records on the cases to see if anything in the summary reports remotely connected in MO to her case. She was quickly able to move through most of the cases because they involved gang arrests in South Los Angeles, where it appeared to Ballard that brass knuckles were employed in lieu of firearms by gangbangers who probably didn’t know they were illegal.
There were other arrests involving pimps and mob enforcers for possession of metal knuckles, with their intended use of the weapons being obvious. And then Ballard came across a three-year-old case that immediately held her attention.
A man named Thomas Trent had been arrested for possession of brass knuckles by the Valley Bureau vice unit. The case had not come up on Ballard’s previous key-word search because none of the other words in her combinations was in play. Trent had been charged with the brass knuckles offense only, nothing else.
And yet it was a vice case. That contradiction was what had initially caught Ballard’s eye. When she pulled up the digital case file, she learned that Trent, thirty-nine at the time, had been arrested during a sting operation at a motel on Sepulveda Boulevard. The summary report said he had knocked on the door of a room at the Tallyho Lodge near Sherman Way, where the vice unit had been sending men who had connected online with an officer posing as an underage Latino male available for submissive role play. Trent had made no appointment at the motel and the vice officers could not connect him to any of the men who had taken part in the online conversations.
They believed he had probably been one of the online suitors but they did not have evidence of that and could not charge him with solicitation of a minor. But they also did not need to pursue linking him to the online sting once they found brass knuckles in his pockets. He was arrested for felony possession of a dangerous weapon and booked into the Van Nuys jail.
The summary report listed the undercover officer who arrested Trent by serial number only. Ballard sent the report to the bureau’s printer, then picked up the desk phone and called the department’s personnel unit. She quickly had a name to go with the serial number of the vice officer. He was Jorge Fernandez and he was still assigned to the Valley Bureau’s vice squad. Ballard called the Valley vice unit and was told that Fernandez was off duty. She left her cell number and a message for him to call her back, no matter what time.
She next took a deeper dive into online records and pulled up an abstract on Trent’s case. She learned that following his arrest, Trent negotiated an agreement with the District Attorney’s Office in which he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon, paid a five-hundred-dollar fine, and was placed on three years’ probation. The plea was part of a pretrial intervention program that would allow Trent to have his record cleaned if he completed probation without another arrest.
On the court records, Trent’s home address was listed on Wrightwood Drive in Studio City. Ballard plugged the address into Google and found a map showing that Wrightwood dropped off of Mulholland Drive on the northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. She clicked on the street-view feature and saw what looked like a contemporary ranch house with a double-wide garage. But she knew from the map that the house was on the mountain and that it was most likely that the structure stretched one or two levels down the slope from the street. It was a very typical design of many of the homes in the hills. The top floor contained the common areas — kitchen, dining room, living room, and so on — while the lower levels contained the bedrooms. There would be stairs, or in some cases an elevator, that led down to the lower floors.
Ballard realized that someone unfamiliar with these mountainside designs could view the houses as odd because the bedrooms were on the bottom floors. In that way, Trent’s home might be considered an upside-down house.
That realization dumped a jolt of adrenaline into Ballard’s blood. She leaned closer to the computer screen to study Trent’s booking photo and arrest report. The personal details on the report said Trent was a car salesman who worked at an Acura dealership on Van Nuys Boulevard. The first question that struck her at that point was how a car salesman afforded a home in the hills, where price tags easily started in the seven figures.
She switched over to a different search site that handled public records and put in Trent’s name and date of birth. Soon she was looking at records of a marriage dissolution that occurred seven months after his arrest. Beatrice Trent had claimed irreconcilable differences in her divorce petition and it appeared that Trent did not contest the filing. The three-year marriage was dissolved.
There was also a record of a lawsuit from 2011 in which Trent was the plaintiff in a personal injury claim against a company called Island Air and its insurer. The record showed only the filing — for injuries sustained in a helicopter crash in Long Beach — but not the outcome of the case. Ballard assumed that this meant the case had been settled before trial.
Ballard printed all of these reports and then picked up the desk phone and called the dealership where Trent worked. She asked for him by name and the call was transferred.
A voice said, “This is Tom. How can I help you?”
Ballard hesitated and then disconnected. She looked at the clock and saw it was just past six o’clock and in the guts of rush hour. It would be a miserable crawl from Hollywood up into the Valley.
There was no guarantee that Trent would even still be working by the time she got there, but Ballard decided to give it a shot. She wanted to get a look at him.
10
The Acura dealership where Thomas Trent worked was at the end of a long stretch of competing dealerships that stretched north along Van Nuys Boulevard toward the center of the Valley. It took Ballard almost an hour to get there. She had driven her own van because the city-ride assigned to her and Jenkins screamed COP! with its baby-shit-brown paint, no-frills hubcaps, and grille-and-rearwindow flashers. Her purpose was only to get a look at Trent and get a read on him, not to alert him to the police interest.
She had downloaded the mug shot from Trent’s arrest three years earlier to her phone and she pulled it up on the screen now. Parked at a curb on Van Nuys, she studied it and then scanned the new- and used-car lots for salesmen. There was no match. The interior showroom was still a possibility, but since the sales booths appeared to be lined along the rear wall, she had no angle on their occupants. She called the dealership’s main number and asked for Trent again, just to make sure he hadn’t left for the day. He once again answered in the same way, but this time Ballard didn’t disconnect.
“This is Tom, how can I help you?”
There was a salesman’s confidence in his voice.
“I wanted to come in and look at an RDX but with this traffic I may be a while getting there,” Ballard said.
She had read the name of the model off the windshield of an SUV that sat on a pedestal near the lot’s entrance.
“No worries!” Trent exclaimed. “I’m here till we shut her down tonight. What’s your name, hon?”
“Stella.”
“Well, Stella, are you looking to buy or lease?”
“Purchase.”
“Well, you’re in luck. We have a one percent financing deal going on this month. You bringing in a trade for me?”