The Night Fire Read online

  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.

  “I’m out of here,” she announced. “You ever want to get together after work, I’m here, Amy. At least until the late show starts.”

  “Thanks,” Dodd said, seeming to pick up on Ballard’s worry. “I might take you up on that.”

  Ballard took the elevator down and then crossed the front plaza toward her car. She checked the windshield and saw no ticket. She decided to double down on her luck and leave the car there. The courthouse was only a block away on Temple; if she was fast and Judge Thornton had not convened court, she could be back to the car in less than a half hour. She quickened her pace.

  Judge Billy Thornton was a well-regarded mainstay in the local criminal justice system. He had served both as a public defender and as a deputy district attorney in his early years, before being elected to the bench and holding the position in Department 107 of the Los Angeles Superior Court for more than a quarter century. He had a folksy manner in the courtroom that concealed a sharp legal mind—one reason the presiding judge assigned wiretap search warrants to him. His full name was Clarence William Thornton but he preferred Billy, and his bailiff called it out every time he entered the courtroom: “The Honorable Billy Thornton presiding.”

  Thanks to the inordinately long wait for an elevator in the fifty-year-old courthouse, Ballard did not get to Department 107 until ten minutes before ten a.m., and she saw that court was about to convene. A man in blue county jail scrubs was at the defense table with his suited attorney sitting next to him. A prosecutor Ballard recognized but could not remember by name was at the other table. They appeared ready to go and the only party missing was the judge on the bench. Ballard pulled back her jacket so the badge on her belt could be seen by the courtroom deputy and went through the gate. She moved around the attorney tables and went to the clerk’s station to the right of the judge’s bench. A man with a fraying shirt collar looked up at her. The nameplate on his desk said ADAM TRAINOR.

  “Hi,” Ballard whispered, feigning breathlessness so Trainor would think she had run up the nine flights of steps and take pity. “Is there any chance I can get in to see the judge about a wiretap warrant before he starts court?”

  “Oh, boy, we’re just waiting on the last juror to get here before starting,” Trainor said. “You might have to come back at the lunch break.”

  “Can you please just ask him? The warrant’s only seven pages and most of it’s boilerplate stuff he’s read a million times. It won’t take him long.”

  “Let me see. What’s your name and department?”

  “Renée Ballard, LAPD. I’m working a cold case homicide. And there is a time element on this.”

  Trainor picked up his phone, punched a button, and swiveled on his chair so his back was to Ballard and she would have difficulty hearing the phone call. It didn’t matter because it was over in twenty seconds and Ballard expected the answer was no as Trainor swiveled toward her.

  But she was wrong.

  “You can go back,” Trainor said. “He’s in his chambers. He’s got about ten minutes. The missing juror just called from the garage.”

  “Not with those elevators,” Ballard said.

  Trainor opened a half door in the cubicle that allowed Ballard access to the rear door of the courtroom. She walked through a file room and then into a hallway. She had been in judicial chambers on other cases before and knew that this hallway led to a line of offices assigned to the criminal-court judges. She didn’t know whether to go right or left until she heard a voice say, “Back here.”

  It was to the left. She found an open door and saw Judge Billy Thornton standing next to a desk, pulling on his black robe for court.

  “Come in,” he said.

  Ballard entered. His chambers were just like the others she had been in. A desk area and a sitting area surrounded on three sides by shelves containing legal volumes in leather bindings. She assumed it was all for show, since everything was on databases now.

  “A cold case, huh?” Thornton said. “How old?”

  Ballard spoke as she opened her backpack and pulled out the file.

  “Nineteen-ninety,” she said. “We have a suspect and want to stimulate a wire, get him talking about the case.”

  She handed the file to Thornton, who took it behind his desk and sat down. He read through the pages without taking them out of the folder.

  “My clerk said there is a time element?” he said.

  Ballard wasn’t expecting that.

  “Uh, well, he’s a gang member and we’ve talked to some others in the gang about the case,” she said, improvising all the way. “It could get back to him before we have a chance to go in and stir things up, get him talking on the phone.”

  Thornton continued reading. Ballard noticed a black-and-white photo of a jazz musician framed on the wall next to the coatrack, where a judge’s spare robe hung. Thornton spoke as he appeared to be reading the third page of the document.

  “I take wiretap requests very seriously,” he said. “It’s the ultimate intrusion, listening to somebody’s private conversations.”

  Ballard wasn’t sure if she was supposed to respond. She thought maybe Thornton was speaking rhetorically. She answered anyway in a nervous voice.

  “We do,
too,” she said. “We think this is our best chance of clearing the case—that if prompted, he’ll check in with his gang associates and admissions of culpability might be made.”

  She was quoting the document Thornton was reading. He nodded while keeping his eyes down.

  “And you want text messaging on the cell phone,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, we do,” Ballard said.

  When he got to the sixth page she saw him shake his head once and she began to think he was going to reject the application.

  “You say this guy was high up in the gang,” Thornton said. “Even back at the time of the killing he was high up. You think he did the actual killing?”

  “Uh, we do, yes,” Ballard said. “He was in a position to order it done, but because of the possible embarrassment of the situation, we think he did it himself.”

  She hoped the judge wouldn’t ask who “we” constituted, since she was working the case alone at this point. Bosch was out of the department, so he didn’t count.

  He got to the last page of text, where Ballard knew she was grabbing at straws in support of probable cause.

  “This sketchbook mentioned here,” the judge said. “Do you have that with you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ballard said.

  “Let me take a look at it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ballard reached into her backpack, pulled out John Hilton’s prison sketchbook, and handed it across the desk to Thornton.

  “The sketch referred to in the warrant is marked with the Post-it,” she said.

  She had marked only one drawing because the second drawing was not as clearly recognizable as Kidd. Thornton leafed through the book rather than going directly to the marker. When he finally got there, he studied the full-page drawing for a long moment.

  “And you say this is Kidd?” he asked.

  “Yes, Your Honor. I have photos of him from that time—mug shots—if you want to see them.”

  “Yeah, let me take a look.”

  Ballard returned to the backpack while the judge continued.

  “My concern is that you’re making a subjective conclusion that, first, this drawing is of Kidd and, second, that the drawing implies some sort of prison romance.”

  Ballard opened her laptop and pulled up the photos of Kidd taken while he was in Corcoran. She turned the screen to the judge. He leaned in to look closely at the photos.

  “You want me to enlarge them?” Ballard asked.

  “That’s not necessary,” the judge said. “I concede that that is Mr. Kidd. What about the romantic relationship? You don’t have proof of that, other than to say you can see it in this drawing. Hilton might have just been a good artist.”

  “I see it in the drawing,” Ballard said, maintaining her ground. “Plus you have the victim’s roommate confirming that he was gay and that he was fixated on someone. You have the fact that Hilton was murdered in an alley controlled by Kidd at a time when Kidd had cleared out all other gang members. I believe that Hilton was in love with him and what happens in prison stays in prison. Kidd could not have exposure of the relationship undermine his position of authority in the gang. I think it’s there, Your Honor.”

  “I decide that, don’t I?” Thornton said.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Well, your theory is there,” Thornton said. “Some of it is supported by probable cause, but as I say, some is assumption, even conjecture.”

  Ballard didn’t respond. She felt like a student being chewed out after school by her teacher. She knew she was going down in flames. Thornton was going to say she didn’t have it, to come back when the probable cause was on solid footing. She watched him flip up the last page to the signature line with Olivas’s name on it.

  “You’re working for Captain Olivas on this?” he asked.

  “He’s in charge of cold cases,” Ballard said.

  “And he signed off on this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ballard suddenly felt ill—sick to her stomach. She realized that her deception had sent her down a bad path. She was lying to a superior-court judge. Her enmity for Olivas had led her to carry her subterfuge to a person she had only respect for. She now regretted ever taking the murder book from Bosch.

  “Well,” Thornton said. “I have to assume he knows what he’s doing. I worked cases with him as a prosecutor twenty-five years ago. He knew what he was doing then.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ballard said.

  “But I’ve heard rumors about him. Call it his management style.”

  Ballard said nothing and Thornton must have realized she wasn’t biting on the bait he had thrown into the water. He moved on.

  “You’re asking for a seven-day wire here,” he said. “I’m going to give you seventy-two hours. If you don’t have anything by then, I want you off the lines. Shut it down. You understand, Detective?”

  “Yes, sir. Seventy-two hours. Thank you.”

  Thornton went through the process of signing the order she would give to the service providers on Kidd’s phones. Ballard wanted him to hurry so she could get out of there before he changed his mind. She was staring at the photo of the musician on the wall but not really seeing it as she thought about the next steps she would take.

  “You know who that is?” the judge asked.

  Ballard came out of the reverie.

  “Uh, no,” she said. “I was just wondering.”

  “The Brute and the Beautiful—that’s what they called him,” Thornton said. “Ben Webster. He could make you cry when he played the tenor sax. But when he drank he got mean. He got violent. I see that story all the time in my courtroom.”

  Ballard just nodded. Thornton handed her the documents.

  “Here’s your search warrant,” he said.

  BOSCH

  26

  Bosch sat at his dining room table with copies of documents from the Walter Montgomery case broken into six stacks in front of him. In the stacks were all the records of the LAPD investigation of the judge’s murder that Mickey Haller had received in discovery prior to trial. Knowing what he did about homicide detectives, prosecutors, and the rules of discovery, Bosch was pretty sure he didn’t have everything that had been accumulated during the investigation. But he had enough to at least begin his own.

  And Bosch was also sure that he was the only one investigating the matter. Jerry Gustafson, the lead detective, had made it clear when the murder charge against Jeffrey Herstadt was dismissed that he felt the murderer had been set free. To take a new look at his investigation would be to disavow his prior conclusion. The sins of pride and self-righteousness left justice for Judge Montgomery swaying in the wind.

  That bothered Bosch to no end.

  The six stacks in front of him represented the five tracks of investigation being carried out by Gustafson and his partner, Orlando Reyes, up until they got the DNA hit on Herstadt from the judge’s fingernail scrapings. That stopped investigation of anyone other than Herstadt. This was a form of tunnel vision that Bosch had seen before and had probably been guilty of himself when he had been on LAPD homicide duty. With the advent of forensic DNA, he had repeatedly seen science take over investigations. DNA was the panacea. A match turned an investigation into a one-way street, a prosecution into a slam dunk. Gustafson and Reyes dropped all non-Herstadt avenues of investigation once they believed they had their man.

  The sixth stack of documents included the case chrono and other ancillary reports on the murder, including the autopsy report and statements from witnesses who were in the park where the deadly attack occurred. The docs in the sixth stack were germane to all five of the other paths of investigation. Bosch had already separated out the documents regarding the Herstadt path and put them aside.

  There were also several disks containing video from cameras in the area, including three that were focused on the park. Bosch was aware of these from the Herstadt trial but reviewed them in their entirety first. None of the cameras in the park had caught the actual
murder because it had occurred in a blind spot—behind a small building that housed the elevators that carried people to and from the underground parking complex. Other disks turned over in discovery included video from cameras inside the two elevators and the five-floor garage, but these showed no suspects or even elevator riders at the time of the killing.

  The park cameras were useful for one thing: they pinpointed the time of the murder. Judge Montgomery was seen walking down steps from Grand Street, where he had just had breakfast. He was trailing twenty feet behind a blond woman, who also was heading toward the courthouse, with what appeared to be a name tag clipped to her blouse. The woman walked behind the elevator building and Montgomery followed. A few seconds later the woman emerged and continued toward the courthouse. But Montgomery never came into camera view again. His attacker had been waiting in the blind. He was stabbed and then the attacker was believed to have used the elevator blind to slip into a stairwell next to the elevators and escape. There were no cameras in the stairwell, and the cameras in the five-floor garage below were either poorly placed, missing, or broken and awaiting replacement. The killer could have easily slipped through the camera net.

  By manipulating the video, Gustafson and Reyes had been able to identify the name tag on the woman who had been walking ahead of Montgomery as a juror badge. On the afternoon of the murder, Reyes went to the jury-pool room at the courthouse and found her waiting to be called. He took her to the courthouse cafeteria and interviewed her. She was Laurie Lee Wells, a thirty-three-year-old actress from Sherman Oaks. But her statement, which Bosch read, provided no clues to the murder. She had been wearing Bluetooth earbuds and listening to music on her walk from the parking structure to the courthouse. She did not hear anything occur behind her when she passed by the elevators. The detectives dismissed her value as a witness.

  Bosch’s starting point was the other tracks of the investigation that Gustafson and Reyes had been on prior to getting the DNA hit on Herstadt. He needed to see if they had been on the right path before the DNA led them astray.