At her borrowed desk, Ballard transferred the info on Bonner from her photo to her computer screen. Bonner lived in Simi Valley — at least that was where his pension checks were sent — which was a cop haven outside L.A. in Ventura County. It was close enough that he could have lived there while he was with the LAPD. Many cops did. It also put him close to the San Fernando Valley, where the nexus of the four dentists was centered at Crown Labs Incorporated.
Ballard got up and walked back to the watch office, where Lieutenant Rivera was at his desk, holding a cupcake. There was a tray of cupcakes on a counter nearby. As Ballard approached, he pointed at the tray with the cupcake in his hand.
“Citizen appreciation,” he said. “Help yourself.”
“These days you should have those checked by the lab first,” Ballard said. “Senna glycoside, you know?”
“What the hell is that?”
“A laxative. The active ingredient in Ex-Lax.”
Rivera stared down at the chocolate-frosted cake in his hand, visions of cupcake eaters lining up at the restroom likely playing in his head. He had already peeled off the paper baking cup. Hesitantly, he put it down on a napkin on his desk.
“Thanks a lot, Ballard,” he said.
“Just watching out for you, L-T,” she said. “Want me to call the lab?”
“Why are you here, Ballard? It’s all quiet on the western front.”
“I know. I wanted to ask you about Christopher Bonner.”
“Bonner? What about him?”
“You know him?”
“Of course. He worked here.”
“He supposedly worked here as a detective.”
“Yeah, he had your job.”
“What?”
“Worked the late show right up until the day he pulled the pin.”
Ballard was shocked by the coincidence but it helped explain why his name was unfamiliar to her. Midnight-shift detectives usually turned their cases over to dayside detectives. As a result, they weren’t formally listed as leads on many cases. This could also help explain why Bosch didn’t recognize the name.
“So, you must have known him pretty well then,” she said.
“Yeah, I guess,” Rivera said. “Just like you, he worked for me.”
Ballard didn’t bother correcting him about who she actually reported to.
“You said ‘the day he pulled the pin,’” she said. “Did something happen with him that made him quit?”
“I don’t know, Ballard,” Rivera said. “He just quit. Maybe he got fed up with all the shit out there. I don’t need to tell you what you see out there on the night shift.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Why are you asking about Chris?”
“Oh, his name came up in the homicide from Thursday night. He knew the family from back in the day. I was just curious about him, is all.”
Ballard hoped her answer would satisfy Rivera without suspicion. As a distraction, she bent down over the tray of cupcakes, holding her hair back so it didn’t flop onto the icing.
“You know,” she said. “I think these look all right. Mind if I take one?”
“Knock yourself out,” Rivera said.
She picked one with vanilla cake and icing.
“Thanks,” she said. “Hard to hide something in vanilla.”
She headed to the door.
“I’m around if you need me,” she said.
“I’ll call you,” Rivera said.
When she got back to the detective bureau, she dumped the cupcake in the trash can under the desk she was borrowing. She then pulled her phone and called Bosch, hoping he had not already gone to bed.
“You find him?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said. “And get this — he had my job here at Hollywood.”
“What do you mean? Late-show detective?”
“That’s right. He retired two years before I got here, and I think he might have been here when you were.”
“I must be losing it. I don’t remember that name.”
“You probably never came across him. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Is he still local?”
“Simi Valley.”
“Well, that puts him in our frame of reference. Looks like he’s the money man. Is he also the man with the P-twenty-two?”
“We’re not there yet.”
“How are you going to work it?”
“Not much I can do with it till tomorrow. But I can go through records, see if there’s anything that connects the dots.”
“Good idea.”
“Yeah, so let me do that, you get some sleep, and I’ll let you know if I get anything in the morning after shift. By then I’ll also probably know if I still have the case.”
“Happy hunting.”
This was the homicide detective’s sign-off. It was a show of respect, and Ballard thought there was no one in the entire department whose respect she would take over Harry Bosch’s.
Before going to work on the department database, she pulled her phone, checked her email, and learned that a woman named Daisy from Wags and Walks had responded to her request to meet the Chihuahua mix named Pinto. The message was that Pinto was still available for adoption and would be happy to meet Ballard.
Ballard, not knowing what the day ahead would bring, responded with a request to see the dog on Tuesday. Since Tuesday was one of Ballard’s regular days off, she said in the email that Daisy could name the time of the appointment and she would make it work. She added that she was very excited to meet Pinto.
Ballard put the phone aside and used the desk terminal to enter the department database. She started with the biggest net that she could throw: all cases with Bonner’s name and serial number in the reports.
The department was digitized going back to the mid ’90s, so Bonner’s entire career was covered. The search engine took more than a minute to come back with over 14,000 hits. Ballard thought that was actually low considering that Bonner had put in twenty years. She guessed that by the time she hit her twenty years, she would have more than double that number of engagements in the database.
Checking through that many reports, even those easily dismissed, could take days. Ballard needed to cut it down to hours — at least initially. She pulled up her chrono on her laptop and checked the date of the intel report that Javier Raffa had bought his way out of the Las Palmas gang. It was dated October 25, 2006, meaning that Bonner was already associated in some way with shot caller Humberto Viera at that time. Ballard resubmitted her search for reports with Bonner’s name on them, chopping the net down to three years on either side of the date of the report.
This time the search took less time and the computer coughed up 5,403 hits. She then cut this down to 3,544 by searching only two years on either side of the 2006 marker.
Ballard looked up at the clock and saw that it was nearly three. Her shift ended at six but she was going to wait until Robinson-Reynolds came in to work, and that would be between seven and eight, and more likely later than earlier. After that, she planned to meet with Matt Neumayer, head of the Sex Assault team, whether or not Lisa Moore was back from her sojourn in Santa Barbara.
Ballard decided that if she got lucky and there were no callouts, and if she kept herself from going computer blind, she could get through all the reports by the time of her meetings the next morning.
She set to work with a quick protocol for reviewing the reports. She would scan only the front sheet, which contained the name of the victim, suspect — if there was one — and type of crime or callout. This would allow her to quickly move past trivial reports of minor crimes and citizen interactions. If something intrigued her, she would open the full report to read further, looking for connections to Humberto Viera or anyone else whose name had come up so far in the Raffa investigation.