Michael Connelly: The Late Show

She had stepped close to the table, her body tense. Olivas put his arm out as if to block her from launching herself at Carr.

“You knew you had lost that button off your holster,” she said. “You had access to the task force room and you checked the evidence report. It wasn’t on there and that’s when you knew somebody was working it off book, somebody who knew it was a cop.”

“You’re crazy, Ballard,” Carr said. “And soon the whole world will know.”

“How’d you know it was Kenny?” she asked. “Because he was the lieutenant’s golden boy, the only one who’d risk going off book on this? Or didn’t it matter? Was Chastain just the fall guy because you found out he carried a ninety-two F and owed money? You just figured you could pin the whole thing on him?”

Carr didn’t answer.

“We’re going to find out,” Ballard said. “ I’m going to find out.”

She stepped back and watched as a cold and instant reality seemed to fall on Carr, covering him like a thick black blanket. Ballard could read it in his face as he went from confidence to crisis, from thinking he had a shot at talking his way out of the room to visions of never seeing daylight again.

“I want a lawyer,” he said.

“I’m sure you do,” Ballard said.

For the second time in the day Ballard was walking evidence through analysis. She didn’t need a go-to in the firearms and ballistics unit. It was a case involving the murder of an LAPD officer, which automatically moved it to the front of any line. And to be sure, Olivas had called ahead and put his considerable weight behind the need for urgency. A ballistics expert named C. P. Medore would be waiting for her upon arrival.

The cold truth that Ballard was carrying with her, along with the guns seized from Carr, was that the D.A.’s package they had used to batter Carr with was not as strong as they had boasted. Since the VMD processing was a rarely used forensic procedure and it was handled in this case wholly outside of the police lab, it would be open to heavy attack by any defense attorney worth his weight in objections. Detective, are you telling this jury that this critical examination of evidence was carried out by college students in a chemistry lab? Are you expecting us to believe that this so-called evidence was literally stolen from the crime scene and then FedExed to this college lab?

What was additionally troublesome was the chain-of-evidence issue. The key piece of evidence with the suspect’s fingerprint was spirited away from the crime scene without documentation. Chastain was now dead, and Ballard was the sole witness who could place the holster button at the scene. Her own personal history with the department and her credibility would come under withering assault as well.

The bottom line was that they needed more. If either of the guns taken from Carr was matched to the Dancers shooting or the Chastain hit, then that case would be as solid as the Santa Monica Mountains and Carr would be crushed under its weight.

The cases were fraught with sentencing enhancements known as special circumstances: murder of a law enforcement officer; home invasion; lying in wait. Any one of these could put Carr on death row, and all three would practically guarantee it. While the state of California hadn’t executed an inmate in a decade and there was no indication that things would change in the future, it was still known to both cops and convicts alike that a death sentence was a ticket to insanity when the years of isolation — one hour per week out of the solo cell — began to take their toll. Facing that, Carr might be willing to plead out to get a deal that took death row off the table. He’d then have to admit his crimes and their motivations. He’d have to tell all.

Medore was there and waiting with another tech at the entrance to the gun unit. Each man took one of the separately packaged weapons from Ballard. Their first stop was the tank room, where they fired shots from the guns into the water, thus producing spent and undamaged bullets suitable for comparison to the slugs removed from the victims in the two cases. They then entered the ballistics lab and set up at a comparison microscope and went to work.

“Can you do the Ruger first?” Ballard asked.

She wanted the answer on the Chastain murder as soon as possible.

“No problem,” Medore said.

Ballard stood back and observed. She had seen the exacting process done dozens of times before, and her mind shifted to what had happened back at the city jail after Carr had been arrested and Olivas had set assignments for the investigation’s new direction. Ballard was given the ballistic assignment, while three other detectives were assigned to Carr and ordered to take his life down to the studs in an attempt to link him to the men murdered in the booth at the Dancers and to learn the motivation behind the massacre. Olivas gave himself the assignment of apprising command staff of what was happening and of the need to alert the department’s media managers. It was unlikely that Carr’s arrest would stay under wraps for long, and the department needed to get out in front of the story.

When it was all said and done and people started going separate ways, Olivas told Ballard to hang back for a moment. When they were alone, he put out his hand. The gesture was so unexpected that she shook it without thinking. Then he wouldn’t let go of hers.

“Detective, I want to bury the hatchet,” he said. “This thing shows what kind of investigator you are. You’re smart and you’re fierce. I could use you back on my team, and I could make sure it happens. You’d be back working days, unlimited OT. A lot of good reasons to come back.”

Ballard stood there speechless at first. She was holding the evidence bags containing Carr’s weapons.

“I need to get these to firearms,” she said.

Olivas nodded and finally released her.

“Think about it,” he said. “You’re a good detective, Ballard. And I can turn the other cheek for the good of the department.”

Ballard had turned then to leave the jail. She walked out, thankful that she had held back from swinging the evidence bags and raking Carr’s guns across Olivas’s face.

As she watched Medore at the microscope, she tried to move her thoughts back to the case.

There were still many questions and loose ends. Chief among them was the missing Matthew Robison. Once Ballard learned that it was Carr’s thumbprint on the holster cap, she started running the facts of the case through the new angle of Carr as killer. She saw the connection that had eluded her before. Carr had been part of the Major Crimes task force that had taken down the human-trafficking cabal at the port on Friday morning. She had seen him herself on the five-o’clock news. She realized now that Robison, last seen by his girlfriend on the couch watching TV, could have seen the report and recognized Carr from the night before at the Dancers. He then could have picked up the phone at 5:10 p.m. and called Ken Chastain to tell him.

It was that call that set several things in motion. Chastain now had further confirmation that the Dancers shooter was a cop. He had to go out and wrangle Robison to lock down his information and make sure he was safe. The question was, who got to Robison first, Chastain or Carr?

As a Major Crimes detective, Carr had routine access to RHD computers as well as to the division’s war room. If he was back-reading the Dancers case reports as they were coming in Friday, he could have picked up on Robison and been suspicious of Chastain’s dismissal of him as a witness. In trying to cover the fact that Robison had apparently gotten a good look at the shooter, Chastain had labeled him as DSS — didn’t see shit. The effort may have had a completely opposite effect in that Carr might have thought Chastain was trying to camouflage a solid witness. Carr was the shooter, so he knew that the chances were good that someone in the club had gotten a look at him. He very likely would have been checking witness reports to see if that was so.