Michael Connelly - The Late Show

“So Chastain is the booth shooter. He kills a mob guy and then the mob hits him back. That’s the working theory? Well, I don’t buy it. Why would Kenny do it?”

“That’s why we’re doing the deep dive. And actually, that’s why I called you.”

“Forget it. I’m not going to help you pin this on Chastain.”

“Listen to me, we’re not going to pin this on anyone. If it’s not there, it’s not there, but we have to look.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Four years ago you two were partners.”

“Yes.”

“He was in financial trouble then. Did he talk to you about it?”

The news was surprising to Ballard.

“He never said a word. What kind of trouble and how do you know?”

“Deep dive, remember? I pulled his credit history. He missed nine payments on the house and was in foreclosure. He was going to lose the house and then, all of a sudden, it all went away. The bank was paid off and he got solvent — like overnight. Any idea how?”

“I told you I didn’t even know about the problem. He never told me. Have you talked to Shelby? Maybe somebody in the family helped them out.”

“Not yet. We want to know more before we go to her. That’s not going to be pretty.”

Ballard was silent. She couldn’t remember a time when Chastain seemed to be under any sort of pressure from outside the job, financially or otherwise. He was always steady-going.

She thought of something Carr hadn’t covered.

“What about Metro?” she asked.

“Metro?” Carr said. “What do you mean?”

“The kid. The witness. Matthew Robison.”

“Oh, him. He calls himself Metro? We still haven’t found him. And frankly, we’re not expecting to.”

“But how does he fit into the theory?”

“Well, we know he called Chastain on Friday about five and Chastain went to find him. We think he thought Robison was a threat.”

“So he takes out Robison, hides or buries the body somewhere, and then goes home. Only there’s a mob hit man waiting there and he pops Chastain in the head before he can even get out of the car.”

“And takes his gun.”

“Right, and takes his gun.”

They were both silent for a long time after that. Until Ballard addressed the elephant in the room.

“Olivas is still steering all of this?”

“He’s in charge. But don’t go down that road, Renée. The ballistics are the ballistics. That’s not something you can steer. And the financials are what they are as well.”

“But why take the gun? The shooter in the garage. Why did he take the thing that would prove or disprove all of this? Without having that gun for comparison, this is all circumstantial. It’s theory.”

“There could be a hundred reasons why the gun was taken. And speaking of circumstantial, there is one other thing.”

“What?”

“We checked with Internal Affairs on Chastain, and there wasn’t an open file on him. But they had a string file, where they put the anonymous stuff that comes in. It runs from complaints about ‘some cop was rude to me’ to ‘some cop keeps coming into my store and taking orange juice without paying’ — ticky-tacky stuff like that.”

“Okay.”

“Well, like I said, they had no open file on Chastain, but there were two anonymous reports in the string file about an unnamed cop getting into card games and then not being able to cover his losses.”

“What card games?”

“Didn’t say, but you know if a guy wants to get into a high-stakes game in this town, then he can find a game. If you move in that world.”

Ballard shook her head, even though she knew Carr could not see this. She looked around to make sure her conversation wasn’t being heard. The squad room was almost empty now, as most detectives began to shut things down by four every day. Still, she leaned into the shelter of her cubicle and spoke quietly to Carr.

“I’m still not buying it,” she said. “You guys have nothing but a missing gun, and like you said, there could be a hundred reasons why it’s gone. It’s like you’re more interested in pinning this on Chastain than in finding out who killed him.”

“There you go with that word again,” Carr said. “We aren’t ‘pinning’ anything on anybody. And you know what, I really don’t understand you, Renée. Everybody knows that two years ago Chastain hung you out to dry, you lost the upward trajectory of your career and ended up working the late show. And here you are, defending him in a situation where there is clearly a lot of smoke. I mean, a lot of smoke.”

“Well, that’s the thing, right? A lot of smoke. Back when I worked downtown, before I supposedly ‘lost my upward trajectory,’ we needed more than smoke. We needed a lot more.”

“If there is fire, we’re going to find it.”

“Good luck with that, Carr. I’ll talk to you later.”

Ballard disconnected and sat frozen at the desk. She had started the theory that the Dancers shooter was a cop. Now that theory was a monster and had Chastain in its sights.

She wondered how long it would be before Carr found out that the backup gun on her ankle was a Ruger 380.

Ballard calmed herself. The Ruger on her ankle was on the department’s short list of approved backups. She and probably a thousand other cops owned one.

She then started overthinking it, wondering if Carr already knew she had one and the purpose of the phone call was to see if she’d bring it up voluntarily. Her keeping quiet may have landed her on the suspect list.

“They are really thinking a cop did the Dancers thing?”

Ballard swiveled in her chair and saw a detective named Rick Tigert sitting at the desk directly behind hers. She had not realized that he could have overheard her half of the conversation with Carr.

“Look, don’t repeat that anywhere, Rick,” she said quickly. “I thought you had left.”

“I won’t, but if it’s true, the department’s going to be dragged through the shit once again,” Tigert said.

“Yeah, well, some things can’t be helped. Look, I don’t know if it’s true, but just keep it to yourself.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

Ballard turned back to her temporary desk and started opening the interoffice envelope that she had found in her mail slot. The previous recipient had his name crossed out on the address line, just above Ballard’s name. It said Feltzer/ FID. The envelope contained copies of the search warrant return executed at Thomas Trent’s house the day before. Feltzer had made good on his coerced promise to share. The return was the document submitted to the court that had authorized the warrant. The law required law enforcement to report back to the judge so that there was an outside authority standing vigilant against unlawful search and seizure. The returns were usually very detailed about every item taken during a search. Feltzer had also supplemented this with a stack of crime scene photos of each item seized in the place where it was found.

Ballard tried to put the Chastain matter out of her mind for the time being by jumping back onto the Trent case. She studied the list of items taken from the house on Wrightwood. Most were common items that served a purpose in a household or workshop but could take on sinister qualities when in the possession of a suspected serial sex offender. Things like duct tape, zip ties, pliers, a ski mask. The zinger was the collection of brass knuckles from a drawer in a bedside table in the master bedroom. There was no further description of them, so Ballard immediately flipped to the photos and found the shot of four pairs of brass knuckles in the drawer. Each set was of unique design and materials, but all carried the same words on the impact plates. GOOD and EVIL . Ballard assumed that one of the sets was the weapon that Ramona Ramone had been tortured with.