Ballard dropped to her knees.
“Colleen, no, no, no,” she whispered.
Ballard tried to compose herself. She knew she needed to clear the rest of the house. She stood up, pulled her weapon free, left the room, and proceeded quickly down the hallway door by door until she confirmed the house was empty and that whoever had killed Colleen was gone.
In the hall, Ballard holstered her weapon, pulled her phone, and called the LAPD comm center; she identified herself and requested that a homicide team from West Bureau meet her at the address in El Segundo. She then disconnected and opened her text app. There was a text chain she used for sending messages to everyone on the Open-Unsolved team at once. She typed out an urgent message to all of them.
I am sorry to tell you this by text but Colleen has been murdered.
Take all measures to secure yourself and family.
She put away the phone, took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, and reentered the home office. Keeping her back to the closet, she started looking for anything that might tell her what had drawn death to Colleen Hatteras’s door.
52
The two detectives from West Bureau assigned to the murder of Colleen Hatteras were Charlotte Goring and Winston Dubose. Ballard knew Goring slightly from a loosely affiliated group of the department’s female homicide cops that met irregularly at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood, usually when one had just had a major misogynistic encounter with the patriarchy and needed a therapeutic sharing session or legal advice. Ballard and Goring had both been in that spot and shared but had never worked a case together. The fact was that Ballard had no idea whether Goring or Dubose, whom she didn’t know at all, were good at their jobs.
Ballard sat in her Defender outside the house while the detectives took their first survey of the crime scene with the criminalists and the coroner’s investigators. As she waited, she took calls from every member of her unit, all of them stunned by the news and asking questions Ballard could not yet answer. Who killed Colleen and why? Most of them said they wanted to come to the scene, but Ballard dissuaded them, saying it would only complicate things. She did tell each to expect a call from the investigators, who would likely be looking for any possible reason for Colleen’s murder and would surely want to question her colleagues.
The last to call was Maddie Bosch, and after that conversation, Ballard was left to wait with dark thoughts crashing in on her about her own possible culpability. Hatteras had been a volunteer who gave her all to the unit. Had Ballard not trained her well enough? Had Colleen made a mistake that Ballard missed and that had cost her her life? Had Ballard, through her own actions, somehow caused this?
Ballard knew that the death of a volunteer in Open-Unsolved guaranteed an internal review of the entire unit and the department’s decision two years earlier to follow the law enforcement trend of using non-cop volunteers in cold-case squads. The conclusion would obviously be that it had been a mistake. Ballard knew that the whole operation could be shut down because of this. But those thoughts were secondary to the pitiful image of Colleen slumped in the closet. She could not get it out of her head.
Her phone buzzed and she saw that the call was from Captain Gandle.
“Captain.”
“Renée, I just got your message. I’m in the car and I’m coming out.”
“Uh, okay.”
“West Bureau is handling it for now, but I want to be there. This is going to be a shitshow. You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to the detectives yet?”
“Just briefly when they arrived. They’re in the house. They told me to wait in my car.”
“Good. That’s good. I informed the chief’s adjutant. I haven’t heard back. But this is going to be a shitshow. I guarantee that.”
“Yes, you said that.”
“Any idea what she was doing?”
Ballard hesitated for a moment. The question raised the dark thoughts again.
“Well, yeah,” Ballard said. “She was working for me.”
“I know that, Ballard,” Gandle said. “But what exactly was she working on?”
“She was on the Pillowcase Rapist case. We all were. I told you. We’re looking at four different persons of interest. But none of them knew it except maybe the guy in Vegas, and he wouldn’t have done this. Not after we were just there.”
“Could it have been something else? Something that had nothing to do with your unit or its cases?”
“Anything is possible at the moment, I guess. But I don’t know what else it could be.”
“You told me when you wanted her for the unit that she was already working cases on the internet.”
“She was, yes.”
“Well, maybe it was one of those.”
Ballard could see the company line on this forming: Hatteras was killed because of some misstep she had made before she volunteered for the LAPD. That would put the department in the clear.
“I doubt it,” Ballard said. “She tripped a wire somewhere while she was working for me.”
“We don’t know that,” Gandle said. “Not for sure.”
Ballard saw Goring come through the open door of the house and stride toward the Defender.
“Uh, Captain, I think I have to go,” Ballard said. “Detective Goring is heading toward me. I think she’ll want to question me now.”
“Okay, I’ll let you go,” Gandle said. “I’m still an hour out. The traffic sucks.”
“I’ll tell the detectives you’re coming.”
“Roger that.”
Ballard disconnected and watched Goring cross in front of the car and open the passenger door. The automatic step deployed and she climbed in.
“Renée, how are you doing?”
“Uh, not good. A woman I’ve worked with closely for the past two years is in there dead. Murdered.”
“Yeah, not good. I’m going to tape this conversation, okay?”
“Sure.”
Goring put her cell phone on the center console’s storage compartment. She opened a recording app and pressed the red button. She gave the date and time and named those in the car and then got down to it.
“Let’s start with Colleen. Tell me who she was.”
“She’s a — she was a divorced mother of two girls who are both away at college. I’m not sure where. About three or four years ago, after her kids were in high school, she took some online courses in IGG — do you know what that is?”
“The genetic-tracing stuff.”
“Yes, investigative genetic genealogy. She took classes and then started basically being a citizen sleuth online. Her thing was helping to identify unnamed victims of murder. Mostly women. There’s a whole network out there of people — mostly women — who are proficient at this. She became part of this network and that’s when I became aware of her. I was putting together an all-volunteer cold-case team and I started floating around online looking at some of these people. I reached out to her when I learned she was local. She came in, I vetted her, then gave her the job. She did some really good work for us. Right up to the end.”
Goring had taken a notebook out and was jotting a couple of things down, even though she was still recording everything said.
“Okay,” she said. “What do you mean, ‘right up to the end’? What was she working on?”
“We were all working a case,” Ballard said. “You probably are too young to have been in the department at the time, but do you remember the Pillowcase Rapist?”
“Oh, yeah, I was going to Pierce College in the Valley when that was going on. He did a bunch of rapes and then just disappeared, right?”