The Night Fire Page 2

  “What?”

  “The guys from arson are here. They—”

  “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

  She turned back to the woman and her daughter.

  “Thank you,” she said. “And remember, you can call me anytime.”

  As Ballard headed back toward the body and the men from arson, she couldn’t help remembering again that line about tumbleweeds. Written on a field interview card by an officer Ballard later learned had seen too much of the depressing and dark hours of Hollywood and taken his own life.

  4

  The men from arson were named Nuccio and Spellman. Following LAFD protocol, they were wearing blue coveralls with the LAFD badge on the chest pocket and the word ARSON across the back. Nuccio was the senior investigator and he said he would be lead. Both men shook Ballard’s hand before Nuccio announced that they would take the investigation from there. Ballard explained that a cursory sweep of the homeless encampment had produced no witnesses, while a walk up and down Cole Avenue had found no cameras with an angle on the fatal fire. She also mentioned that the coroner’s office was rolling a unit to the scene and a criminalist from the LAPD lab was en route as well.

  Nuccio seemed uninterested. He handed Ballard a business card with his e-mail address on it and asked that she forward the death report she would write up when she got back to Hollywood Station.

  “That’s it?” Ballard asked. “That’s all you need?”

  She knew that LAFD arson experts had law enforcement and detective training and were expected to conduct a thorough investigation of any fire involving a death. She also knew they were competitive with the LAPD in the way a little brother might be with his older sibling. The arson guys didn’t like being in the LAPD’s shadow.

  “That’s it,” Nuccio said. “You send me your report and I’ll have your e-mail. I’ll let you know how it all shakes out.”

  “You’ll have it by dawn,” Ballard said. “You want to keep the uniforms here while you work?”

  “Sure. One or two of them would be nice. Just have them watch our backs.”

  Ballard walked away and over to Rollins and his partner, Randolph, who were waiting by their car for instructions. She told them to stand by and keep the scene secure while the investigation proceeded.

  Ballard used her cell to call the Hollywood Division watch office and report that she was about to leave the scene. The lieutenant was named Washington. He was a new transfer from Wilshire Division. Though he had previously worked Watch Three, as the midnight shift was officially called, he was still getting used to things at Hollywood Division. Most divisions went quiet after midnight but Hollywood rarely did. That was why they called it the Late Show.

  “LAFD has no need for me here, L-T,” Ballard said.

  “What’s it look like?” Washington asked.

  “Like the guy kicked over his kerosene heater while he was sleeping. But we’ve got no wits or cameras in the area. Not that we found, and I’m not thinking the arson guys are going to look too hard beyond that.”

  Washington was silent for a few moments while he came to a decision.

  “All right, then come back to the house and write it up,” he finally said. “They want it all by themselves, they can have it.”

  “Roger that,” Ballard said. “I’m heading in.”

  She disconnected and walked over to Rollins and Randolph, telling them she was leaving the scene and that they should call her at the station if anything new came up.

  The station was only five minutes away at four in the morning. The rear parking lot was quiet as Ballard headed to the back door. She used her key card to enter and took the long way to the detective bureau so that she could go through the watch office and check in with Washington. He was only in his second deployment period and still learning and feeling his way. Ballard had been purposely wandering through the watch office two or three times a shift to make herself familiar to Washington. Technically her boss was Terry McAdams, the division’s detective lieutenant, but she almost never saw him because he worked days. In reality, Washington was her boots-on-the-ground boss and she wanted to solidly establish the relationship.

  Washington was behind his desk looking at his deployment screen, which showed the GPS locations of every police unit in the division. He was tall, African-American, with a shaved head.

  “How’s it going?” Ballard asked.

  “All quiet on the western front,” Washington said.

  His eyes were squinted and holding on a particular point on the screen. Ballard pivoted around the side of his desk so she could see it too.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’ve got three units at Seward and Santa Monica,” Washington said. “I’ve got no call there.”

  Ballard pointed. The division was divided into thirty-five geographic zones called reporting districts and these were in turn covered by seven basic car areas. At any given time there was a patrol in each car area, with other cars belonging to supervisors like Sergeant Dvorek, who had division-wide patrol responsibilities.

  “You’ve got three basic car areas that are contiguous there,” she said. “And that’s where an all-night mariscos truck parks. They can all code seven there without leaving their zones.”

  “Got it,” Washington said. “Thanks, Ballard. Good to know.”

  “No problem. I’m going to go brew a fresh pot in the break room. You want a cup?”

  “Ballard, I might not know about that mariscos truck out there, but I know about you. You don’t need to be fetching coffee for me. I can get my own.”

  Ballard was surprised by the answer and immediately wanted to ask what exactly Washington knew about her. But she didn’t.

  “Got it,” she said instead.

  She walked back down the main hall and then hooked a left down the hallway that led to the detective bureau. As expected, the squad room was deserted. Ballard checked the wall clock and saw that she had over two hours until the end of her shift. That gave her plenty of time to write up the report on the fire death. She headed to the cubicle she used in the back corner. It was a spot that gave her a full view of the room and anybody who came in.

  She had left her laptop open on the desk when she got the callout on the tent fire. She stood in front of the desk for a few moments before sitting down. Someone had changed the setting on the small radio she usually set up at her station. It had been changed from the KNX 1070 news station she usually had playing to KJAZ 88.1. Someone had also moved her computer to the side, and a faded blue binder—a murder book—had been left front and center on the desk. She flipped it open and there was a Post-it on the table of contents.

  Don’t say I never gave you anything.

  B

  PS: Jazz is better for you than news.

  Ballard took the Post-it off because it was covering the name of the victim.

  John Hilton—DOB 1/17/66–DOD 8/3/90

  She didn’t need the table of contents to find the photo section of the book. She flipped several sections of reports over on the three steel loops and found the photos secured in plastic sleeves. The photos showed the body of the young man slumped across the front seat of a car, a bullet hole behind his right ear.

  She studied the photos for a moment and then closed the binder. She pulled her phone, looked up a number, and called it, checking her watch as she waited. A man answered quickly and did not sound to Ballard as if he had been pulled from the depths of sleep.

  “It’s Ballard,” she said. “You were in here at the station tonight?”

  “Uh, yeah, I dropped by about an hour ago,” Bosch said. “You weren’t there.”

  “I was on a call. So where’d this murder book come from?”

  “I guess you could say it’s been missing in action. I went to a funeral yesterday—my first partner in homicide way back when. The guy who mentored me. He passed on and I went to the funeral, and then afterward at his house, his wife—his widow—gave me the book. She wanted me to retu
rn it. So that’s what I did. I returned it to you.”

  Ballard flipped the binder open again and read the basic case information above the table of contents.

  “George Hunter was your partner?” she asked.

  “No,” Bosch said. “My partner was John Jack Thompson. This wasn’t his case originally.”

  “It wasn’t his case, but when he retired he stole the murder book.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’d say he stole it.”

  “Then what would you say?”

  “I’d say he took over the investigation of a case nobody was working. Read the chrono, you’ll see it was gathering dust. The original case detective probably retired and nobody was doing anything with it.”

  “When did Thompson retire?”

  “January 2000.”

  “Shit, and he had it all this time? Almost twenty years.”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “That’s really bullshit.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to defend John Jack, but the case probably got more attention from him than it ever would’ve in the Open-Unsolved Unit. They mainly just work DNA cases over there and there’s no DNA in this one. It would have been passed over and left to gather dust if John Jack hadn’t taken it with him.”

  “So you know there’s no DNA? And you checked the chrono?”

  “Yeah. I read through it. I started when I got home from the funeral, then took it to you as soon as I finished.”

  “And why did you bring it here?”

  “Because we had a deal, remember? We’d work cases together.”

  “So you want to work this together?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’ve got some stuff going on. Medical stuff. And I don’t know how much—”

  “What medical stuff?”

  “I just got a new knee and, you know, I have rehab and there might be a complication. So I’m not sure how much I can be involved.”

  “You’re dumping this case on me. You changed my radio station and dumped the case on me.”

  “No, I want to help and I will help. John Jack mentored me. He taught me the rule, you know?”

  “What rule?”

  “To take every case personally.”

  “What?”

  “Take every case personally and you get angry. It builds a fire. It gives you the edge you need to go the distance every time out.”

  Ballard thought about that. She understood what he was saying but knew it was a dangerous way to live and work.

  “He said ‘every case’?” she asked.

  “‘Every case,’” Bosch said.

  “So you just read this cover to cover?”

  “Yes. Took me about six hours. I had a few interruptions. I need to walk and work my knee.”

  “What’s the part in it that made it personal for John Jack?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see it. But I know he found a way to make every case personal. If you find that, you might be able to close it out.”

  “If I find it?”

  “Okay, if we find it. But like I said, I already looked.”

  Ballard flipped the sections over until she once again came to the photos held in plastic sleeves.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “This feels like a long shot. If George Hunter couldn’t clear it and then John Jack Thompson couldn’t clear it, what makes you think we can?”

  “Because you have that thing,” Bosch said. “That fire. We can do this and bring that boy some justice.”

  “Don’t start with the ‘justice’ thing. Don’t bullshit me, Bosch.”

  “Okay, I won’t. But will you at least read the chrono and look through the book before deciding? If you do that and don’t want to continue, that’s fine. Turn the book in or give it back to me. I’ll work it alone. When I get the time.”

  Ballard didn’t answer at first. She had to think. She knew that the proper procedure would be to turn the murder book in to the Open-Unsolved Unit, explain how it had been found after Thompson’s death, and leave it at that. But as Bosch had said, that move would probably result in the case being put on a shelf to gather dust.

  She looked at the photos again. It appeared to her on initial read that it was a drug rip-off. The victim pulls up, offers the cash, gets a bullet instead of a balloon of heroin or whatever his drug of choice was.

  “There’s one thing,” Bosch said.

  “What’s that?” Ballard asked.

  “The bullet. If it’s still in evidence. You need to run it through NIBIN, see what comes up. That database wasn’t around back in 1990.”

  “Still, what’s that, a one-in-ten shot? No pun intended.”

  She knew that the national database held the unique ballistic details of bullets and cartridge casings found at crime scenes, but it was far from a complete archive. Data on a bullet had to be entered for that bullet to become part of any comparison process, and most police departments, including the LAPD, were behind in the entering process. Still, the bullet archive had been around since the start of the century and the data grew larger every year.

  “It’s better than no shot,” Bosch said.

  Ballard didn’t reply. She looked at the murder book and ran a fingernail up the side of the thick sheaf of documents it contained, creating a ripping sound.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “I’ll read it.”

  “Good,” Bosch said. “Let me know what you think.”

  BOSCH

  5

  Bosch quietly slipped into the back row of the Department 106 courtroom, drawing the attention of the judge only, who made a slight nod in recognition. It had been years, but Bosch had had several cases before Judge Paul Falcone in the past. He had also woken the judge up on more than one occasion while seeking approval for a search warrant in the middle of the night.

  Bosch saw his half brother, Mickey Haller, at the lectern located to the side of the defense and prosecution tables. He was questioning his own witness. Bosch knew this because he had been tracking the case online and in the newspaper and this day was the start of the defense’s seemingly impossible case. Haller was defending a man accused of murdering a superior-court judge named Walter Montgomery in a city park less than a block from the courthouse that now held the trial. The defendant, Jeffrey Herstadt, not only was linked to the crime by DNA evidence but had helpfully confessed to the murder on video as well.

  “Doctor, let me get this straight,” Haller said to the witness seated to the left of the judge. “Are you saying that Jeffrey’s mental issues put him in a state of paranoia where he feared physical harm might come to him if he did not confess to this crime?”

  The man in the witness box was in his sixties and had white hair and a full beard that was oddly darker. Bosch had missed his swearing-in and did not know his name. His physical appearance and professorial manner conjured the name Freud in Harry’s mind.

  “That is what you get with schizoaffective disorder,” Freud responded. “You have all the symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations, as well as of mood disorders like mania, depression, and paranoia. The latter leads to the psyche taking on protective measures such as the nodding and agreement you see in the video of the confession.”

  “So, when Jeffrey was nodding and agreeing with Detective Gustafson throughout that interview, he was what—just trying to avoid being hurt?” Haller asked.

  Bosch noticed his repeated use of the defendant’s first name, a move calculated to humanize him in front of the jury.

  “Exactly,” Freud said. “He wanted to survive the interview unscathed. Detective Gustafson was an authority figure who held Jeffrey’s well-being in his hands. Jeffrey knew this and I could see his fear on the video. In his mind he was in danger and he just wanted to survive it.”

  “Which would lead him to say whatever Detective Gustafson wanted him to say?” Haller asked, though it was more statement than question.

  “That is corr
ect,” Freud responded. “It started small with questions of seemingly no consequence: ‘Were you familiar with the park?’ ‘Were you in the park?’ And then of course it moved to questions of a more serious nature: ‘Did you kill Judge Montgomery?’ Jeffrey was down the path at that point and he willingly said, ‘Yes, I did it.’ But it is not what could be classified as a voluntary confession. Because of the situation, the confession was not freely, voluntarily, nor intelligently given. It was coerced.”

  Haller let that hang in the air for a few moments while he pretended to check the notes on his legal pad. He then went off in a different direction.

  “Doctor, what is catatonic schizophrenia?” he asked.

  “It is a subtype of schizophrenia in which the affected person can appear during stressful situations to go into seizure or what is called negativism or rigidity,” Freud said. “This is marked by resistance to instructions or attempts to be physically moved.”

  “When does this happen, Doctor?”

  “During periods of high stress.”

  “Is that what you see at the end of the interview with Detective Gustafson?”

  “Yes, it is my professional opinion that he went into seizure unbeknownst at first to the detective.”

  Haller asked Judge Falcone if he could replay this part of the taped interview conducted with Herstadt. Bosch had already seen the tape in its entirety because it had become public record after the prosecution introduced it in court and it was subsequently posted on the Internet.

  Haller played the part beginning at the twenty-minute mark, where Herstadt seemed to shut down physically and mentally. He sat frozen, catatonic, staring down at the table. He didn’t respond to multiple questions from Gustafson, and the detective soon realized that something was wrong.

  Gustafson called EMTs, who arrived quickly. They checked Herstadt’s pulse, blood pressure, and blood-oxygen levels and determined he was in seizure. He was transported to the County–USC Medical Center, where he was treated and held in the jail ward. The interview was never continued. Gustafson already had what he needed: Herstadt on video, saying, “I did it.” The confession was backed a week later when Herstadt’s DNA was matched to genetic material scraped from under one of Judge Montgomery’s fingernails.