Since Hollywood was busiest during PM watch, which roughly ran from three p.m. to midnight, there were two lieutenants assigned to supervise the shift. Mason was one of the two and Hannah Chavez was the other. Ballard did not know Mason that well, because her limited experience with PM watch had been with Chavez. She decided that the straight-on approach would be best.
She found him in the break room, with deployment calendars spread out on a table. He was a bookish-looking administrator with glasses and black hair parted sharply on the left side. His uniform looked crisp and new.
“Lieutenant?” Ballard said.
He looked up, annoyed with the interruption, but then his scowl disappeared when he saw Ballard.
“Ballard, you’re in early,” he said. “Thanks for responding.”
Ballard shook her head.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yeah, I put a message in your box,” Mason said. “You get it?”
“No, but what’s up? I was actually going to ask you something.”
“I need you to do a welfare check.”
“During graveyard?”
“I know it’s unusual, but there’s something hinky going on with this one. Comes from the tenth floor. A missing guy, hasn’t responded to phone calls or social media in a week. We’ve gone by a few times today and his roommate says he’s out every time. Not much we can do, but I figure if you knock on the door in the middle of the night, the guy’s going to be home or not. And if not, then we go to the next step.”
The reference to the tenth floor meant the OCP — Office of the Chief of Police — on the tenth floor of the Police Administration Building.
“So, who’s the guy?” Ballard asked.
“I Googled him,” Mason said. “Looks like his father’s friends with the mayor. A high-dollar donor. So we can’t let it drop. If he’s still not home tonight, send a report to Captain Whittle and he’ll report to the OCP about it. And we’ll be done with it or not.”
“Okay. You have the name and address?”
“It’s all in your box. And I’ll put it on the activity report for your lieutenant.”
“Got it.”
“Now, you wanted to see me about something?”
He pointed to the chair across the table from him and Ballard sat down.
“I’m working a cold case from ’09,” she said. “Teenage runaway working the streets was found dumped in an alley off Cahuenga. Her name was Daisy Clayton.”
Mason thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“Not ringing any bells,” he said.
“I wasn’t expecting it to,” Ballard said. “But I asked around. Back then you were the division liaison for the GRASP program.”
“Jesus, don’t remind me. What a nightmare that was.”
“Well, I know the department dumped the program when the new chief came in, but what I’m wondering about is what happened to all the Hollywood crime data.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m trying to get a handle on this girl’s murder and I thought it would be good if I could get a look at everything that was happening in the division that night or that week. As you can tell, we don’t have a lot, so I’m grasping at straws a bit.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Just a figure of speech. So do you know where all the data went when the GRASP program ended?”
“Yeah, it went down the digital toilet. It was purged when the new administration wanted to go another way.”
Ballard frowned and nodded. It was a dead end.
“Officially, at least,” Mason said.
Ballard looked at him. What was he saying?
“I was the guy who had to collate and send all the data downtown. There was a guy we called the ‘GRASP guru.’ He wasn’t a sworn officer. He was this computer genius from USC who came up with the whole thing and sold it to the chief. All the data went to him and he did all the modeling.”
Ballard started to get excited. She knew that guys like the one Mason was describing were proprietary about their work and accomplishments. The order may have come down to end the program and spike the data, but there was a chance the civilian whose baby it was had kept records of the program.
“Do you remember his name?” she asked.
“Yeah, I should. I worked with him every day for two years,” Mason said. “Professor Scott Calder. Don’t know if he’s still there but at the time he was on sabbatical from the Computer Science school.”
“Thanks, L-T. I’ll find him.”
“Hope it helps. Don’t forget about that welfare check.”
“I’m going to my box now.”
Ballard got up but then sat back down and looked at Mason. She was going to risk turning what could be the start of a solid relationship with a supervisor into something fraught.
“Something else?” Mason asked.
“Yes, L-T,” Ballard began. “Last night I was working during PMs and busted a guy on a burglary. I was working solo and I called for backup. It never came. The guy made a move on me and I put him down but he wouldn’t have had the chance if I’d had the backup.”
“I was the one who took your call when you used the private line to ask where the troops were.”
“I thought so. Did you find out what happened?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t. I got caught up in some stuff. All I know was there was no call on the board. There must have been a fuckup between the com center and the watch office. We never were copied. I heard no backup call go out.”
Ballard looked at him for a long moment.
“So you’re saying the problem wasn’t at Hollywood Station. It was at the com center.”
“Near as I can tell.”
Mason sat silently. He did not offer to follow up. He wasn’t going to rock any boats. It was clear that it was Ballard’s decision whether to pursue it.
“Okay, thanks, Lieutenant,” she said.
Ballard got up and left the room.
26
Ballard used her password to enter the department database and then began a search of the man who signed “Eagle” to his photo at the Moonlight Mission. The database contained a moniker file, which carried thousands of nicknames and aliases amassed from crime reports, arrest records, and field interviews.
“Eagle” turned out to be a popular moniker. She got 241 initial hits. She was then able to chop this down to sixty-eight by limiting her search to white males thirty-plus years old. She had the nine-year-old photo she had borrowed from the mission to guide her. The man depicted looked to be mid- to late twenties and that would put him over thirty now. She refined the search further by eliminating possibles who were over forty.
She was left with sixteen names and set to work pulling up reports and photos of the men. She quickly eliminated men who looked nothing like the man in the photo provided by John the Baptist. She hit pay dirt with the eleventh man she looked at. His name was Dennis Eagleton and he was thirty-seven years old. Mug shots from multiple arrests between 2008 and 2013 matched the face of the man in the photo from the mission.
She pulled up and started printing all reports in the database regarding Eagleton. He had a record of numerous arrests for drugs and loitering and only one incident of violence, an aggravated assault charge in 2010 that was knocked down to simple battery. Ballard even found a digitized field interview report written by Tim Farmer in 2014 — his last full year on the job. The summary section included Farmer’s unique take on the Hollywood streets and this particular denizen.
This is not the first nor the last time we will cross paths with “Eagle.”
A deep, cancerous river of hate and violence courses through his blood.
I can feel it, see it.