There was much Ballard could deduce by reading between the lines of the case extracts, but she did not have access to detailed case summaries that put the crimes and the individuals in context. For that, she would need to pull actual files, and that wasn’t going to happen on a Saturday night. She did look at booking photos of the three men, which allowed her to recall their positions in the booth where they were murdered.
Cordell Abbott was easy to place because he was the only black victim. Ballard remembered seeing his body to the immediate left of the open space in the booth. That put Abbott right next to the shooter.
Gordon Fabian’s side-view mug shot showed a man with a gray ponytail, and that easily put him in the seat across from the shooter. He was the victim who had fallen halfway out of the booth, the end of his ponytail dipping into his own blood like a paintbrush.
And that put Gino Santangelo in the middle.
Ballard leaned back in her desk chair and thought about what she knew and what she could assume. Four men slide into a booth. Did they just randomly take their positions, or was there a choreography based on the relationships between the men? There was a bookie, an enforcer, a drug dealer, and, for lack of better information, a shooter.
Added to this was a question about shooting sequence. Ballard did not have access to the crime and property reports, but if she had to name one person in the booth besides the shooter who was armed, she would go with Santangelo. He had previously been convicted of a gun crime, and even though he appeared to shrug off the use of firearms in his strong-arm tactics, it was unlikely that he would stop carrying. His record showed him to be a career criminal and the gun would be one of the tools of the trade.
This led to the next question. The split-second selfie video provided by the witness Alexander Speights clearly showed the shooter firing first on Fabian, the drug dealer. Why would he do that if he had knowledge of who Santangelo was and that he was most likely armed?
Ballard drew several conclusions from her admittedly incomplete information. The first was that the men in the booth didn’t all know each other. It was likely that the shooter knew Abbott, the bookie, if he knew any of the men, because he sat next to him. And she figured he fired first on the drug dealer because of malice or momentum. Malice if he held the drug dealer accountable for whatever went wrong during the meeting. Momentum if he simply chose to shoot the other men in a one-two-three pattern. It would have been the fastest and safest way to shoot, provided he didn’t know that Santangelo was armed.
Ballard knew her assumptions got her nowhere. There were myriad other possibilities and factors at work. The shooter might have checked the others for weapons before joining the meeting, and the seating arrangement could have been dictated simply by the separate arrivals of the men. There was no way of knowing anything for sure and her final conclusion was that she was just spinning her wheels on a case that was not hers and that she had been clearly ordered to stay away from.
But still, she couldn’t drop it. It pulled at her because of Chastain. And she now considered a move that would surely get her fired if discovered by the department.
Ballard and Chastain had been partners for nearly five years before the falling-out over her complaint about Olivas. During that time they worked closely on high-priority and often dangerous investigations. It drew them close and in many ways their partnership was like a marriage, although there was never any crossing or even blurring of the professional line. But still, they shared all things work-related, and Ballard even knew Chastain’s password into the department’s computer system. She had sat next to him too many times while he logged in not to notice and remember it. It was true that the department required detectives to change their passwords every month, but investigators were creatures of habit and most simply updated the last three digits of a steady password, using the month and year.
She believed it was unlikely that he had switched his main password after the dissolution of their partnership. Ballard had not changed her own, because it was easy to remember — her father’s name spelled backward — and she didn’t want to be bothered memorizing a combination of letters and numbers that might have no significance to her. She knew that Chastain’s password was the date of his marriage followed by his and his wife’s initials and the current month and year.
Ballard doubted Chastain’s account would already have been deleted following his death. In a bureaucracy like the LAPD, it might take months before the digital access unit wiped the system of his user access. But she knew that if she logged in as Chastain now, the breach could be traced back to the exact computer used. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t technically Ballard’s computer or desk. She would become the primary suspect and it would result in her dismissal from the force, if not criminal prosecution for hacking.
She logged her own user account off the computer and pulled up the entry prompt. She drummed her fingers on the desk for a few moments, waiting for an inner voice to caution her against taking the next step. But it never came. She typed in Chastain’s user name and password, then waited.
She was in. She was now able to follow her old partner’s ghost in the system and she quickly used his approved access to open files on the Dancers case. She opened numerous crime scene and evidence reports, as well as witness summaries and the chronological logs kept by the investigators on the case. Ballard scanned the reports to identify what they were and then sent them to the detective bureau’s printer for a more thorough review later. She felt like she had broken into someone’s house and needed to get out before being discovered.
Fifteen minutes later, she logged out and was clear. She went to the printer room and pulled out a sheaf of copies nearly two inches thick.
For the next hour, she took her time and reviewed the documents. Most of it was routine paperwork but some of the reports offered a fuller glimpse of the crime and the parts individuals played. Most notable were the fuller background reports on the three victims in the booth. The bio on Santangelo stated that he was a known loan shark and debt collector connected with an organized-crime family based in Las Vegas. Additionally, the crime scene report noted that a.45 caliber handgun was indeed found tucked into the waistband of his suit pants. The gun was traced back to a 2013 home burglary in Summerland, Nevada.
One document that was surprising for its lack of content was the video survey report. It stated that a review of footage from cameras at the entrance of the Dancers as well as from nearby businesses on Sunset Boulevard and the vicinity revealed no images of the suspected shooter or his vehicle. The video unit could not provide even the barest minimum description of a getaway vehicle or direction of travel — east or west — the killer had taken. To Ballard it was almost as if the shooter knew there were no cameras or had chosen the location of the meeting based on the video cracks he could slip through.
Disappointed, Ballard moved on and finished with the investigative chronologies. There were five detectives assigned full-time to the case, plus Lieutenant Olivas. This produced three chronos from the two pairs of detectives and Chastain, the task force whip. There was no chronological report yet from Olivas.