“Glad you could make it,” she said.
Prada spoke impatiently before either officer could respond.
“Are we finished now?” he asked. “I’d like to get some sleep. I have appointments tomorrow.”
“Not quite,” Ballard said. “I have to fill out full reports this time. Can I see your driver’s license or passport, please?”
“Is that really necessary?”
“Yes, sir, it is. I’m sure you want to keep cooperating. It’s the quickest way to get us out of here.”
Prada disappeared back down the short hallway toward his bedroom. Ballard nodded to Herrera to follow and watch.
Ballard assessed the living room again. It had been carefully composed but something didn’t seem right. She realized that the area rug was too small for the space and the furniture and that its abstract design of overlapping gray, black, and brown squares clashed with the striped pattern of the upholstery. She checked the adjacent dining room and noticed for the first time that there was no rug under the square table with stainless steel legs.
“What are you thinking here?” Dyson whispered.
“Something’s not right,” Ballard whispered back.
Prada and Herrera returned to the living room and Herrera handed Ballard a driver’s license.
“I want you to know that my lawyer has filed the paperwork to officially change my name,” Prada said. “I was not lying. I’m a DJ and I need a better name.”
Ballard looked at the license. It had been issued in New Jersey, and the photo matched Prada but the name on it was Tyler Tyldus. Ballard put the flashlight down on the coffee table next to a small sculpture of a woman’s torso. She pulled a small notebook and pen from her pocket and wrote down the information from the license.
“What’s wrong with Tyler Tyldus?” she asked as she wrote.
“No imagination,” Prada said.
Ballard checked the date of birth and saw that he had been lying about his age as well. The documents left for her had him at twenty-six years old. The DL said he was twenty-two.
“What are your appointments tomorrow, Mr. Prada?” she asked.
“Personal business,” Prada said. “Nothing that concerns the police.”
Ballard nodded. She finished writing and handed the license to Prada. She then handed him one of her business cards.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” she said. “If you hear from Mr. Cady, please call me at that number and ask Mr. Cady to call me as well.”
“Of course,” Prada said, his voice friendlier now that he saw the end of the intrusion in sight.
“You can go back to sleep now,” Ballard said.
“Thank you,” Prada said.
As she waited for Herrera and Dyson to head to the door, Ballard looked down at the area rug. It was too small for the space it was in. She also saw what first looked like an imperfection in the design, a place where the material had knotted in manufacture. But then she realized it was just an indentation. The rug had been switched from the dining room so recently that the depression left by one of the legs of the table remained apparent.
Prada followed them to the door and closed it behind them. Ballard heard him turn a deadbolt.
The three women were silent until they got in the elevator and closed the door.
“So?” Dyson said.
Ballard was still holding her notebook. She tore the page out with the info on Tyler Tyldus and handed it to Herrera.
“Run that name and see what comes up,” she said. “I’m going to call a judge. I want to see what’s under that rug in there.”
“Couldn’t you just look?” Herrera asked. “Exigent circumstances.”
Ballard shook her head. Using exigent circumstances was a tricky thing and you didn’t want it to come back and bite you on a case.
“EC refers to the missing man and possible danger to him,” Ballard said. “You don’t look under a rug for a missing man. You look under a rug for evidence. I’m going to call a judge, and that way there are no issues down the road.”
“Is there a car we should be looking for?” Herrera asked.
“Patrol supposedly looked at it on the first welfare check,” Ballard said. “Opened the trunk too. It’s in the garage underneath. But I’ll include it in the warrant and we’ll check it again.”
“You think you have enough for a warrant?” Dyson asked.
Ballard shrugged.
“If I don’t, I left my flashlight up there,” she said. “I’ll go back and wake him up.
27
Superior Court Judge Carolyn Wickwire was Ballard’s go-to. She wasn’t always the night-call judge but she liked Ballard and had given her a cell number, telling her she could always call day or night. Wickwire had been a cop, then a prosecutor, and was now a judge in a long career inside the justice system. Ballard guessed that she had persevered through her own share of misogyny and discrimination every step of the way. Though Ballard had never mentioned the obstacles she herself had encountered and overcome, some were known in the law enforcement community, and she believed Judge Wickwire was aware of them and empathized. There was a kinship there and Ballard wasn’t above using it if it helped move things along on a case. She called Wickwire from the building’s entry vestibule and woke her up.
“Judge Wickwire, I’m sorry to wake you. It’s Detective Ballard, LAPD.”
“Oh, Renée, it’s been a while. Are you all right?”
“Yes, it has, and I’m fine. But I need to get a telephonic search warrant approved.”
“Okay, okay. Just hold on a minute. Let me get my glasses and wake up a bit.”
Ballard was put on hold. While she waited, Herrera came over, having just run Prada’s name through the MDT terminal in her patrol car.
“Can you talk?”
“While I’m on hold. Anything?”
“Just some TVs back in New Jersey and New York. Nothing serious.”
Traffic violations. Ballard knew they would not help her get a search warrant approval from the judge.
“Okay,” she said. “I still need you to stick around if I get this. Can you find out if there’s an on-site manager?”
“Roger that,” Herrera said.
She headed off just as Wickwire came back on the line.
“Now, what do we have here, Renée?”
“This is a missing persons case but I think there’s foul play involved and need to get into the missing man’s condominium and the common areas of the building. It’s complicated because a person of interest in the disappearance is the missing man’s roommate.”
“Are they a couple or just roommates?”
“Just roommates. Separate bedrooms.”
“Okay. Tell me what you got.”
Ballard recounted her investigation, putting the facts in an order that would intrigue the judge and build toward a conclusion of probable cause. She said Jacob Cady had now been missing for forty-eight hours and was not responding to any communication, ranging from his cell phone to his business website. She told the judge that the man living in Cady’s condo had given a false name but left out Prada’s explanation that he was in the process of legally changing it. She said Prada had expressed a reluctance to cooperate, leaving out that he had been awakened by her at one a.m.
Lastly, she mentioned the rug and her suspicion that it had been moved to cover up something.
When she was finished, Wickwire was silent as she digested Ballard’s verbal probable cause statement. Finally, she spoke.
“Renée, I don’t think you have it,” she said. “You have some interesting facts and suspicions but no evidence of foul play here.”
“Well, I’m trying to get that, Judge,” Ballard said. “I want to find out why the rug was moved.”
“But you have the cart before the horse here. You know I like to help you when I can, but this is too thin.”