“And that’s why you guys down here get the big bucks, right?” Ballard said. “You get to figure it out.”
Olivas was finished with the introductory pleasantries.
“Like I said, what have you got, Ballard?”
Now his tone was slipping. Condescension and dislike were taking over. Ballard put the evidence bag on the table.
“I’ve got this for starters,” she said. “An empty fifth of Tito’s vodka.”
“And how does that fit into this?” Olivas asked.
Ballard pointed to Nuccio.
“Inspector Nuccio told me yesterday that the victim’s blood-alcohol content was measured at three-six at the coroner’s. That takes a lot of alcohol. I spoke to some of the homeless men who knew the victim and they said that on Monday night Banks was drinking a fifth of Tito’s that he wasn’t sharing. They said somebody — ‘a guardian angel’ — gave it to him. I recovered the bottle from another homeless man who camps on the same sidewalk and collects bottles and cans for recycling. Chain of custody is for shit but he felt pretty sure he picked up the bottle after Banks chugged the vodka. I figure you might want to take it to latent prints. If you get prints from Banks, it confirms the story. But you might also get the prints of the ‘guardian angel,’ and that’s somebody you want to talk to. That is, if somebody helped get him drunk so they could light him on fire.”
Olivas digested that for a few moments before responding.
“Did anybody see this ‘guardian angel’?” he asked. “Are we talking man, woman, what?”
“Not the guys I talked to,” Ballard said. “But I went down the street to Mako’s and they have video of a woman in a Mercedes pulling up and buying a bottle of Tito’s about four hours before Banks got burned. That may just be a coincidence but I’ll leave that to you guys to figure out.”
Olivas looked at his men.
“It’s thin,” he said. “The whole thing is thin. You men take the bottle and anything else Ballard has. We need to pick up the heater and do our own testing on that. We’re going to withhold determination of death until we know what’s what. Ballard, you can go. You’re off duty now anyway, right?”
“I am,” Ballard said. “And I’m out of here. You guys let me know if you need me to go back to the scene for anything tonight.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Olivas said. “We’ll handle it from here.”
“I just need you to sign off on a summary report on the recovery of the bottle,” Ballard said. “So there’s a record of chain of custody and no confusion down the line should the bottle of Tito’s be significant.”
“And to make sure you get the credit,” Olivas said.
It was not a question and Ballard was pleased with how Olivas took it.
“We all want proper credit for what we do, don’t we?” she said.
“Whatever,” Olivas said. “You write it up and I’ll sign it.”
Ballard unzipped her backpack and removed a file containing two copies of a two-page document. The front page was taken up by a detailed summary of the bottle’s origin and the second was the signing page bearing only Olivas’s name and rank below a signature line. She placed the documents on the table.
“One for you and one for me,” she said.
Olivas signed both documents. Ballard took one and left the other on the table. She put her copy back in its folder and returned it to her backpack.
Ballard threw a mock salute at Olivas, then turned and left the room. On her way out of RHD, she tried to calm herself and control her emotions. It was difficult. Olivas would always be able to get to her. She knew that. He had taken something from her, as other men had in the past. But the others had paid in one way or another: come-uppance... revenge... justice — whatever the term. But not Olivas. Not so far. At best he had been left with a temporary blemish on his reputation that was gone soon enough. Ballard knew she could outwit and out-investigate him all she wanted, but he would still always have that unnameable thing he had taken from her.
25
After leaving RHD, Ballard went down the hall to the Special Assault Section again. This time Amy Dodd was not in her cubicle, but the station next to it still seemed to be unused. Ballard sat down and logged into the department’s computer. She blew out a deep breath and tried to relax now that she was away from her tormentor. She was actually finished for the day, but anxiety was seizing her because of Olivas and what seeing him brought up in her. She had just given up one case and wanted to get back to the other. To keep things moving forward.
She opened her notebook next to the computer and found the page where she had written down the intel she had gathered on Elvin Kidd. She had both the cell number and the landline associated with his business. Connecting to Nexis/Lexis, she ran a search on the numbers and got the service providers, a requirement for a wiretap search warrant. Once she had that, she opened a template for a search warrant application requesting approval of audio surveillance on both phone numbers.
Seeking a wiretap approval was a complicated and difficult process because listening in on personal phone calls starkly conflicted with Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. The probable cause for such an intrusion had to be complete, airtight, and desperate. Complete and airtight because the writer had to lay out in the probable cause statement that the threshold of criminal activity by the target of the surveillance had been easily passed. Desperate because the investigator must also make a convincing argument for the wiretap being the only alternative for advancing the case against the intended target. A wiretap was supposed to be a last-resort measure, and so required a detective to get the written approval of the department. It had to be signed off on by a high-ranking supervisor — like a captain or higher.
It took Ballard an hour to write a seven-page probable cause document that was half boilerplate legalese and half an outline of the case against Kidd. It leaned heavily on information from an LAPD-certified informant named Dennard Dorsey and stated that the wiretap was a last-resort measure because the case was twenty-nine years old and witnesses had died, had faded memories, or could not be located. The document did not mention that Dorsey had not been an active informant in more than a decade or that Kidd had not been active in the Rolling 60s Crips gang for even longer.
As Ballard was proofing the statement on the screen, Amy Dodd arrived at her cubicle.
“Well, this is getting to be a regular thing,” she said.
Ballard looked up at her. Dodd looked tired, as though she’d worked a long night on a case. Ballard once again was hit with concern.
“Just in time,” she said. “What’s the printer code for this unit?”
Dodd said she had to look it up. She sat down at her desk, logged in, then read the unit’s printer ID off her screen. Ballard sent the probable cause document to be printed.
“So what’s up?” Dodd said from the other side of the partition. “You moving in over there?”
“Writing a search warrant,” Ballard said. “I have to take it over to Judge Thornton before he starts court.”
“Wiretap?”
“Yeah. Two lines.”
Judge Billy Thornton was the Superior Court’s wiretap judge, meaning all search warrants for phone surveillance went through him for approval. He also ran a very busy courtroom that usually convened by ten each morning.
Following instructions from Dodd, Ballard went to a break area at the rear of the squad room to fish her document out of the printer. She then came back to her borrowed desk and pulled from her back-pack the same file folder she had produced during the War Room meeting with Olivas. She attached the signature page from the chain-of-custody document to the back of the search warrant application and was ready to go.