Ballard took her mug upstairs to get a second cup of coffee. When she returned, she again expected to see Hatteras at her screen, but the raft was empty. She stepped down the aisle next to the archives and looked into each row of shelved murder books. No Colleen.
As much as Hatteras’s nearly constant presence in the office annoyed her, Ballard realized that the room didn’t feel quite the same without her. Ballard had explicitly told Colleen to take time off, and now that she had, Ballard had to acknowledge that she sort of missed her relentless hovering and questioning. She sat down, put her coffee to the side, and sent an email to Hatteras asking if she had determined whether Andrew Bennett had any open houses in Laguna Beach over the weekend. She ended the message with a suggestion that they could both ride down and get a look at him, and maybe they’d get lucky and surreptitiously capture a DNA sample as well. As she wrote it, she wasn’t sure if the offer was merely to bait Hatteras into responding or a real offer to take her into the field.
She sent the email, sure it would elicit a quick response. While she waited, she opened a Word document and finally started to write the overdue summary report on the trip to Las Vegas. This took over an hour because of the distraction of phone calls from Masser and Laffont, who were checking in to see what was happening with the Black Dahlia and Pillowcase Rapist cases and asking if she needed them to come in before the weekend started. After updating them, Ballard told them they didn’t have to come in until the usual Monday team meeting.
It was almost noon by the time Ballard sent the report to Captain Gandle. Hatteras had still not called or responded to the email, and Ballard wondered if her feelings were still hurt by the way Ballard had dismissed her the day before.
She decided to extend an olive branch if that was the case and called Colleen’s cell. It immediately went to voicemail. Ballard hesitated but left a message.
“Colleen, it’s Renée. I’m at the office today and just wanted to see if you’re interested in going down to Laguna to get a look at Andrew Bennett. Undercover, of course. If he’s having an open house, we could go there, but even if he’s not, we could still look up one of his listings and make an appointment to see it. So give me a call and we’ll see what we can set up.”
She disconnected, knowing that the word undercover was an enticement Hatteras wouldn’t be able to resist.
Ballard had skipped breakfast to surf and was now famished. She left the office and drove over to the Melody on Sepulveda. She knew one of their hamburgers would power her through the day and well into the night. Since her return to red meat, she went to the Melody often. The place had been around since 1952 and had been through many transformations as the nearby airport expanded and its runways got closer and closer. Now the jets came screaming in directly overhead, but with its good food and drink and live music at night, the Melody had a loyal clientele.
Ballard ate her hamburger at the bar that ran down the center of the room. She kept her phone face up next to her plate so she wouldn’t miss a call from Hatteras while a plane passed overhead.
By the time she finished there still had been no call, and her concern about Hatteras was building. She wondered if she had subconsciously chosen the Melody because it was just on the other side of the airport from El Segundo, where she knew Hatteras lived.
Ballard went out the back door to her car. Once inside she opened her laptop and pulled up the file that contained all the applications submitted by current members of the Open-Unsolved Unit. She plugged the home address Hatteras had put on her form into the car’s GPS.
It took her fifteen minutes to cross the airport on Sepulveda and make it to Mariposa Avenue in El Segundo. She pulled into the driveway of a small ranch house with pale yellow walls and rust-colored shutters. She had never been to Colleen’s home before and there was something intriguing about seeing how one of her unit’s members lived.
There was a double-wide garage with the door up. Colleen’s Prius was in there. The other space was filled with storage boxes, bicycles, and a lawn mower. Ballard could see that the door leading from the garage into the house appeared to be ajar. Her curiosity turned to alarm.
Ballard got out of her car and approached the garage. She pulled her phone and called Colleen once more. She did not hear a ringtone coming from inside the house. The call again went immediately to voicemail.
She entered the garage, and as she approached the door to the house, she called out loudly, “Colleen? It’s Renée. Are you home?”
No answer.
Ballard opened the door all the way. She saw that it led into the kitchen. She called out once again:
“Colleen Hatteras, are you home?”
Ballard entered the house. The kitchen was neat, the counters clear, with only a rinsed plate and fork in the sink. There was a door to Ballard’s left that led to a dining room, and a doorway straight ahead past the refrigerator that led to what looked like a TV room. Ballard went in that direction, scooping her right hand under her jacket and unsnapping the safety strap on her holster. She gripped her gun without pulling it free.
She entered the TV room and found it neat and orderly as well. A flat-screen on the wall was off. On the coffee table, two remotes were lined up next to each other. At the end of the room were doorways on the right and left. Ballard looked through the left opening and saw an empty living room that connected through an archway to the dining room. To the right, the doorway led to a corridor.
“Colleen? It’s Renée.”
No answer. There was a closed door on her left, and on the right were several open doors to what were presumably bedrooms, closets, and bathrooms. She checked the room to her left first, opening the door and finding what had been a bedroom converted to an office.
She entered and saw a large computer screen that matched what Hatteras had at Ahmanson. It was set up on a desk that was part of a built-in shelving and cabinet system entirely covering two walls. Ballard recognized the room even though she had never been to this house. She had seen the workstation in Facebook videos when she was vetting Hatteras’s application to be part of the unit. Colleen had been involved in online sleuthing long before volunteering for the Open-Unsolved Unit. She had even been an integral part of a group that identified a previously unknown serial killer by connecting aspects of murders committed in seven different states. Her work on that case had been the clincher and Ballard had offered Hatteras a position as her volunteer IGG expert.
Closed cabinet doors lined the lower sections of the built-in, with shelving above. The shelves were stocked with books, manuals, DVDs, framed photos of her daughters, and other family keepsakes and knickknacks. On a third wall next to the only window was a framed poster of a Matt Damon movie called Hereafter. The fourth wall was dominated by the closed louvered doors of a closet.
Ballard stepped over to the built-in workstation and saw an outline of dust delineating the space where a desktop computer had been.
She turned to the closet. Ballard was now on high alert and looked at the embedded finger pulls of the sliding doors. She wanted to open the closet but was thinking about fingerprints. She turned back to the desk and took a pencil out of a clay mug obviously made by a child. Sloppily painted on it was World’s Best Mom. She turned to the closet again, pushed the pencil between two of the louvered slats, and slid the door open.
The body of Colleen Hatteras was slumped on the floor of the closet. An electric cord connected to a computer mouse was tied tightly around her neck. Her eyes were open and bulging. She was wearing a long sleep shirt with a faded design on it. There was lividity discoloration on her legs, and Ballard could tell she had been dead for hours.