“Hopefully Darcy comes through with something,” Ballard said.
She continued reviewing the boards and the cases with her crew, eventually coming to the last board, which listed the cases that were most active in terms of pending arrests, prosecutions, or closures. The last case on the list belonged to Masser.
It involved the murder of a clerk at a Hollywood convenience store in 1997. A man in a ski mask entered the store, told the clerk to put all the cash in the register on the counter, and fired a shot into her chest, killing her instantly. The man then jumped into a waiting car and escaped. According to various witnesses from inside and outside the store, the getaway driver was a white woman with long black hair. The car was described as a maroon sedan, and one witness provided the first two digits of its license plate.
There was a video camera inside the store, and a review of the tape revealed that the gun was fired while the suspect was gathering the cash the clerk had put on the counter. It appeared to be an accidental discharge that shocked even the gunman; he turned and ran out of the store, leaving half the cash behind.
The license plate digits and car description eventually led investigators through motor vehicle records to a man named Donald Russell, who owned a maroon Honda Accord with a license plate beginning with those two digits. Russell was unemployed and had a history of drug-related arrests. He lived with his wife, who also had a record of drug arrests. She, however, had short blond hair. Both were questioned but denied involvement in the robbery and killing. They provided an alibi that the investigators could neither prove nor disprove. The detectives took the case to the district attorney’s office but prosecutors declined to file charges, saying there was not enough evidence to convince a jury and bring home a guilty verdict. But no further evidence was developed, and the case went cold — until Paul Masser of the Open-Unsolved Unit pulled the murder book off a shelf in the cold-case archive.
Masser reviewed the case and quickly learned that it didn’t have the traditional kind of evidence that could jump-start a cold case. There were no fingerprints or DNA from the crime scene. The bullet had been collected from the fallen clerk’s body, but it did not lend itself to modern ballistic technology because it had flattened when it hit the victim’s spine, which made it useless for comparison with bullets in NIBIN, the national ballistics database. And no weapon had ever been recovered to compare the bullet to.
Masser located the suspects, still living in Los Angeles, and learned two things that could prove useful a quarter century after the killing. The first was that the couple were no longer a couple; they had divorced five years after the murder. The second, which he discovered through social media, was that the now ex-wife, Maxine Russell, was a recovering addict who had recently celebrated twenty years of sobriety, according to her Facebook page.
Masser, drawing on his experience as a prosecutor, knew that the couple’s divorce meant that statutory spousal privilege was no longer in play. The rule held that a wife or husband could not testify against a spouse without that spouse’s approval. But the protection was limited to the years of the marriage, which meant there was an opportunity to pit the ex-wife against her former husband. Masser, drawing on his experience with an addicted family member in recovery, also knew that most rehab programs encouraged participants to keep journals as part of their steps toward sobriety.
With information gathered in the original investigation, Masser drew up a search warrant for the apartment where Maxine Russell now lived and convinced a judge to sign it. The warrant included all journals and documents written by the suspect as well as family photos that showed Maxine with long dark hair. On a shelf in the living room, Masser found several journals Maxine had kept over the years of her sobriety. One entry described the robbery gone wrong and another expressed Maxine’s guilt at having been involved in the taking of a life, even though she claimed it had been an accident. Additionally, a photo album found in a closet contained photos of Maxine going back to when she was a child. In many, she had long dark hair.
Maxine had been arrested two weeks ago and was still in jail, unable to afford a bond on bail set at two million dollars. The department low-keyed the arrest and it had so far escaped media attention. It was now time for Masser to move forward with the second part of the case strategy.
“I’m going to meet with John this afternoon,” Masser told the group. “We’re going to go to Maxine’s lawyer and see if she wants to deal. After two weeks, she is probably getting the idea that incarceration is not how she wants to spend the rest of her life.”
John was John Lewin, the deputy DA assigned to prosecute cases from the Open-Unsolved Unit. In the news coverage that solved cold cases often brought, the local media had dubbed him “the King of Cold Cases.”
“Has she called her ex-husband from the jail?” Ballard asked.
“Not on the recorded lines,” Masser said. “I doubt he knows she’s been arrested.”
“What’s John going to offer her?” Laffont asked.
“I don’t know where he’ll start but he told me he’ll go to full immunity,” Masser said, “if she delivers the ex.”
“And you think she’ll go for it?” Laffont said.
“Yeah, I do,” Masser said. “I tried to pull the divorce file but it’s sealed. But twice since the divorce, she’s asked for a restraining order against him. It doesn’t look like she has a whole lot of love for him anymore. She’s going to flip.”
“Hope so,” Ballard said. “Let me know when you know.”
“Roger that,” Masser said.
“Okay, then, that’s it,” Ballard said. “Sorry I was late and I appreciate everybody sticking around. Let’s dig down and make cases.”
Ballard always ended the weekly meeting with the same message, taken from a Muse song she loved: “Dig Down.” The words were on a sign on the wall of her pod. It was her code when it came to both life and cases.
4
Back at her desk, Ballard pulled up one of the crime reports she had reviewed earlier. This one was for a car burglary that had occurred at the Topanga break a few months ago. What drew her back to it was the officer’s note in the summary that there had been a fruit vendor in the parking lot where the theft occurred. The vendor said he had seen nothing, but the officer had taken down his name and phone number for follow-up. Ballard copied the information about the fruit vendor and the victim of the theft into a small notebook. The victim was named Seth Dawson. He reported that in addition to his brand-new iPhone 15, a Breitling watch worth three thousand dollars, a gift from his father, had been taken. Those two items pushed the crime beyond petty theft and well into felony territory.
As she was putting the notebook back in her jacket pocket, Colleen poked her head up over the partition wall again.
“Did you forget something today?” she asked.
Ballard immediately thought about the staff meeting and wondered what she had possibly missed covering. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Like what?”
Colleen lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Like your badge, for example.”
Ballard dropped her hand to her right hip as if to feel for the badge on her belt.
“Shit, you’re right,” she said. “It’s in my car under the seat. I’ll get it when I go out. Thanks for noticing, Colleen.”