“Yeah, what do you want?”
Denver stepped in unbidden.
“Hey, Stormy, you got the police out here. They want to see inside the crib on account of Ramona used to live here.”
“Yeah, she ain’t livin’ here now,” Stormy replied. “I’m sleeping.”
“Open the door, sir,” Ballard said loudly.
“You have a warrant or something? I know my rights.”
“We don’t need a warrant. We need you to open the door, or what we’ll do is tow this vehicle with you in it to the police yard, where the door will be forcibly opened and you’ll be arrested for obstructing an investigation. You’ll be in county jail and this prime spot will go to somebody else. Is that what you want, sir?”
Ballard thought she had covered everything. She waited. Herrera stepped away to listen to a call on her shoulder mic. Dyson stayed with Ballard. Thirty seconds went by and then Ballard heard the rattle of the chain inside the door. Stormy Monday was opening up.
Based on the moniker and the prep that he was an angry guy, Ballard was expecting a big man to come out of the trailer, ready for confrontation. Instead, a small man with glasses and a gray beard stepped out with his hands up. Ballard told him to put his hands down and walked him over to Dyson and Herrera, who had returned to the group. Ballard questioned him about the ownership of the RV and its contents. The man, who identified himself as Cecil Beatty, said he had moved in only two days earlier, and that was after the RV had been picked through by others. He said that he didn’t think there were any belongings left that had been Ramona Ramone’s.
Ballard told the patrol officers to watch Beatty while she took a look inside the RV. She put on latex gloves and went up the two steps and in. She swept her light across a small two-room space that was littered with junk and smelled as sour as the Hollywood Station drunk tank on a Sunday morning. Ballard put her mouth and nose into the crook of her elbow as she moved through the debris that littered every surface and the floor. She saw nothing that stood out as possibly belonging to Ramona Ramone. She moved through the first room and into the back room, which essentially consisted of a queen-size bed piled with darkly stained sheets and blankets. She nearly lost it when the sheets suddenly moved and she realized there was someone in the bed.
“Dyson, come here,” Ballard called. “Now!”
Behind her, Ballard heard the officer enter the RV. She kept her light on the face of the woman in the bed. She was bedraggled, her hair in unkempt dreadlocks. There were scabs on her face and neck. A person at the dead end of addiction.
“Take her out of here,” Ballard said.
Dyson moved in, yanked back the sheets, and pulled the woman, who was fully clothed in multiple layers of sweaters and jackets, off the bed. She walked her out and Ballard continued to search.
Seeing nothing that was of value to her investigation, she backed out of the bedroom area. There was a kitchenette section opposite what once was a tiny bathroom but had long since gone unused. The two-burner grill was probably now used mostly to cook spoons of heroin or crystal meth. Ballard started opening the overhead cabinets, half expecting to find rats skittering in the back shadows. Instead, she found a small empty box that had once held a disposable phone. The box looked fairly new, unlike the rest of the junk in the RV.
Ballard stepped out of the RV and over to where Beatty and the woman were standing, heads down, next to the two unies. She held the box up to Beatty.
“Is this yours?” she asked.
Beatty looked at it and then looked away.
“Nope, not mine,” he said. “That was there.”
“Was it Ramona’s?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I never saw it before.”
Ballard assumed that the box had belonged to Ramona. If there was anything on or in the box that revealed a serial or product number, then she had a shot at running down calls made on the phone even though the phone itself was missing and supposedly untraceable. If there were calls that linked Ramona to Trent, then that evidence would be usable at trial, and the whole roust, and her breathing in the putrid air of the RV, would not be for naught.
“Okay, thank you for your cooperation,” she said.
She gave Herrera and Dyson the nod to release the two inhabitants of the RV and they immediately scurried back inside. She then turned to Denver and signaled him over for a private discussion.
“Thank you for your help on this, Denver. I appreciate it.”
“No problem. That’s my job here.”
“When we first talked about Ramona, you said she had been gone a week.”
“Yeah, we have a rule. Nobody squats in another guy’s spot unless they haven’t been around for four days. ’Cause you know, people get arrested, and that can take you out for seventy-two hours. So we wait four days before a spot is up for grabs.”
“So you’re sure she was gone four days before Stormy moved in two days ago?”
“I’m sure. Yeah.”
Ballard nodded. It was an indication that Ramona might have been held captive by her attacker for as long as five days of pain and torture before being dumped in the parking lot the previous night and left for dead. It was a grim thought to consider.
Ballard thanked Denver again and this time she shook his hand. She wasn’t sure if he noticed that she still had the latex gloves on.
Back at the Hollywood Station by 1:30 a.m., Ballard wandered through the watch office before heading back to the D bureau. Munroe was at his desk and another officer was at the report-writing desk at the far end of the room.
“Anything happening?” she asked.
“Quiet,” Munroe said. “After last night, I’ll take it.”
“The crims are still at the Dancers?”
“I wouldn’t know. The forensic unit doesn’t answer to me.”
“Well, maybe since it’s so slow, I’ll go over and see if they need some help.”
“Not ours, Ballard. You need to stay here just in case.”
“Just in case of what?”
“In case we need you.”
Ballard had no intention of going by the Dancers. She had just wanted to see how Munroe would react, and his agitation and quick response confirmed that he had gotten word to keep Ballard and possibly all Hollywood Division personnel away from that crime scene.
Munroe tried to change the subject.
“How’s your victim?” he asked.
“Hanging in there,” Ballard said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Looks like she’s going to make it. I’m worried the suspect might get wind and try to finish the job.”
“What, he’s going to sneak into the hospital? Smother the vic with a pillow?”
“I don’t know, maybe. There hasn’t been any press on the case but—”
“You’ve watched The Godfather too many times. If this is about me putting somebody on this whore’s door, it’s not going to happen, Ballard. Not from my end. I’ve got no people for that. I’m not going to leave myself short on the street to have a guy twiddling his thumbs or making time at the nurses’ station. You can shoot a request down to Metro Division, but if you ask me, they’ll evaluate this and take a pass too.”
“Okay. Got it.”
When she returned to her borrowed desk in the detective bureau, Ballard put down the phone box she had collected from the RV and was prepared to spend the rest of her shift attempting to trace the phone it had once contained. But then she saw the pink message slip she had picked up earlier. She sat down and lifted the desk phone. Calling the number in the middle of the night did not give her pause. It was a toll-free number, which meant it most likely connected to a business. It would be either open or closed, so she would not be waking anybody up in the middle of the night.